by Chris Price
But tell me this. What possible benefit could there be in memorising, start to finish, the lyrics of 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia' by Charlie Daniels? Two possible explanations sprang to mind. The first is that he'd figured it would make a good party piece for an audience of one in his pants at a Nashville motel should the opportunity ever arise. Possibly he wasn't planning on that audience being me, but he saw his chance and he went for it. Or maybe – and this was my strong suspicion – he liked country music more than he was letting on and he'd just given himself away in the most spectacular fashion.
In September 1979, before MTV, before The Tube and not long after my bedtime was extended to half past seven, there were but two weekly rituals in our house. The first was a regular Saturday night cowering as Tom Baker did battle with the terrifying contents of a far-flung interplanetary props cupboard, and the second was Top of the Pops. Nowadays, of course, Top of the Pops is a byword for everything that is predictable and lacklustre in music telly, but in 1979 when programming only started in the mid-afternoon and concluded barely seven hours later with the national anthem, 'The Pops' wasn't just 'The Tops', it was 'The Nuts'.
For a young lad from Marlow Bottom, the added excitement came from a weekly row with my sister as to which was the best record in the chart that week. We each chose a song at the start of the show, sat down, crossed our fingers and hoped that our song was highest. If it was, you officially had the better music taste, and a weekend of crowing and smug condescension was yours.
One such Thursday in September 1979, my sister and I sat alert on the sofa and observed that very ritual. My sister had chosen 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by Buggles with its showy video featuring musical genius Trevor Horn in spectacles best described as 'wanker glasses'. I, meanwhile, had plumped for a curious hoedown of a tune by a man who looked like the missing sibling of Jesse Duke and Colonel Sanders, and whose bearded band fashioned a curious fire-and-brimstone tale of soul-selling in the style of the Muppets' house band The Electric Mayhem Orchestra.
The numbers got smaller and the hits got bigger until we got to number fourteen, when my behatted heroes appeared on the screen. Gutted. Worse still, as the show went on Buggles still didn't appear. Eventually, at 7.26 p.m. the inevitable announcement came: Buggles was the nation's favourite, pick of the pops, top of the heap, the UK's official number one. This was a disaster. My music taste was fourteen points worse than my sister's, my weekend ruined. I'd like to say I retired to my room in the manner of Shawshank's Andy Dufresne and lay back with the sound of Charlie Daniels in my ears, but I suspect I probably just pinched my sister on the leg and ran up to my room to draw on the walls.
The words of 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia' stayed with me though, and throughout that autumn whenever it came on the radio I ran to the speakers and strived to learn its bizarre narrative by heart. The song tells the story of the Devil running low on souls. So he heads to Georgia where he challenges Johnny, a gifted local fiddle-playing lad, to a musical duel. If Johnny plays the best he gets a gold fiddle. If Ol' Horny wins, he gets the boy's soul. If I had only applied myself to school as much as I did to learning those lyrics, my report might have been a little different that year ('a little better, still too many animal noises').
I replicated every inflection and twang of Charlie Daniels' vocal until I could recite the entire thing. Bloody annoying for my family of course, and – as I discovered when an almost chemical memory burst out of me – bloody annoying for Chris too. Because at that moment I sang him the entire song. Hadn't done it for almost three decades but, like a TV ad you watched too often, I could remember the whole thing. It was like speaking in tongues. Weird seventies country and western tongues.
Chris understood this to mean 'Yes, Joe would like to see the Charlie Daniels Band.' He understood correctly.
'Safe to say you're a fan then?' I hollered, chickening out of taking him to task on the country music thing. This was not the time to be bringing up so thorny an issue as the one that had very nearly seen us end the drive in separate cars.
'Hwftwntly.'
'Come again?'
A mouthful of toothpaste landed in the sink. 'Definitely.'
'And there's a kind of symmetry to the "deal with the devil" thing, isn't there?'
'So there is. Maybe it's a sign.'
'Shall we go to Charleston then?'
'Absolutely. We've got a few days to kill, haven't we? Now that we're not going to New Orleans.' New Orleans, where Gram's remains were buried – or what remained of his remains following the Joshua Tree flambéing – had been dropped from the itinerary. After Wichita, bang in the centre of the lower forty-eight states, we had originally planned to dogleg south through Oklahoma and Texas into Louisiana, picking our way along the Gulf of Mexico into Georgia and finally Florida. But when the Cash Cabin visit became a serious possibility, we had re-routed east through Nashville. Even for a journey tracing one man's life from grave to cradle, two graves was possibly overdoing it.
'OK. Great idea,' I said.
And that's exactly how it happened. It was Joe's idea to go to Charleston. To see the Charlie Daniels Band.
But before we went to Charleston so that Joe could see the Charlie Daniels Band, we had a lunch date. Our unexpected detour through Nashville had presented the opportunity of rendezvousing with a very singular septuagenarian by the name of Mr Mangler.
Phil 'Road Mangler' Kaufman – Gram's road manager, best friend and unequivocally the 'go-to guy' if you ever need a dead country-rock musician barbecued – is a man who very nearly defies description. I hesitate to use the phrase 'larger than life', generally reserved these days for wearers of wacky ties, to describe a man who has lived a life more eventful, more packed with mirth, melodrama and misadventure than a Don Simpson high-concept action movie. Phil Kaufman has more skeletons in his closet than most so-called larger-than-life characters have ties in theirs. So no, that won't do. He's a seventy-one-year-old rogue with a mischievous grandfatherly charm, but 'loveable rogue' doesn't do him justice either; it speaks of schoolboy scrapes and Oliver Twist, and there is nothing schoolboy about the scrapes this gentleman has had to extricate himself from. His life story reads like a Hunter S. Thompson novel or Hollywood film script. His life story is a Hollywood film script.
Kaufman's first career was, by his own admission, a profession not wisely chosen. Twice he smuggled large quantities of marijuana into the US from Mexico, and twice he got caught. His next move, facing the near certainty of five to twenty years in prison, was to jump bail and head to Europe under an assumed identity, borrowing the splendidly apt name of his friend Harold True, and keeping a low profile by appearing in a number of films shot in Spain. Following another of his cross-border shopping trips, this time to Morocco, he headed north, pausing long enough in Paris to get caught up in student riots before winding up in a Swedish prison on the biggest drug smuggling charge ever seen in the country at that time. He passed the days either attempting to escape or reading – and then consuming – some very mind-blowing letters from LSD guru Dick Alpert.
Later extradited back to the US, he did time in nine separate prisons, notably Springfield (where he delivered contraband to Vito 'Don Vito' Genovese) and Terminal Island, where he met and accidentally kick-started the music career of one Charles Manson. Phil Kaufman, as you're probably starting to work out for yourself, is a man with a tendency to fall in with the wrong crowd.
Have you ever opened the newspaper, scanned a report naming the savage murderesses of a Hollywood film actress under instructions from a charismatic cult leader, and thought 'Goodness, I've had sex with every one of those women?' No? Nor, so far as I can recall, have I. Phil Kaufman has. Having met the soon-to-be-released Manson – an aspiring musician – in prison, Phil put him in touch with some Beach Boys contacts in LA and unknowingly fell in with just about the wrongest crowd on the planet.
Once released from prison himself, he found Manson's hippie harem to be a uniquely satisfying wa
y of reacquainting himself with the pleasures of life on the outside. Which is how he came to be on first-name terms with Charlie and his peace-and-love-commune-turned-racist-murderous-cult the Manson Family, bagging that most dubious of honours, the production credit on Manson's failed solo album Lie, into the bargain. (To this day Kaufman's least prized possession is the copyright in all of Manson's recorded music.) The La Bianca couple, inexplicably and brutally murdered by the Manson Family the day after the Sharon Tate killings, lived next door to a house where the Family had attended a party the previous year – the home of none other than one Harold True.
Possibly it was this that inspired a change of career. Kaufman, with his unrivalled capacity for picking the unlikeliest of company, became 'executive nanny' to the Rolling Stones in LA. In town in 1968 to record Beggar's Banquet, the Stones were in need of an LA driver/fixer; Kaufman, whose reputation for minding difficult characters preceded him, was the only man for the job. (The title was given to him, like a knighthood, by Mick Jagger because he catered to their noses and kept their needs clean. Sorry – catered to their needs and kept their noses clean.) And so began an illustrious career 'moving people, not equipment'.
On the road with Frank Zappa he inspired the title of a track on Joe's Garage by screaming the eternal question 'Why Does it Hurt When I Pee?' from the tour bus toilet. He once told Ray Charles that his shirt clashed with his trousers. He organised his own benefit concert when he was diagnosed with cancer. In England he lived with a woman for a year before discovering she was a prostitute. And he has your name tattooed on his butt. (This is absolutely true – he really does have 'your name' inked onto his rear.)
So Phil Kaufman has been many things in his life: drug smuggler, convict, record producer, road manager, executive nanny, film producer, stuntman, film extra, short order cook, spot welder, encyclopaedia salesman. But history will not remember him for any of these things. Kaufman will be remembered solely for one drunken, defining moment in September 1973 when, to borrow one of his own well-worn maxims, he put the 'fun' in funeral by stealing and then burning Gram Parsons' body at Cap Rock in the Mojave Desert. And we were about to get a lesson in corpse-burning from him.
We met at Brown's Diner on Blair Boulevard in Hillsboro West End, purveyor of burgers, beer, bravado and grease to Nashville's music crowd. Phil had raved about Brown's in his emails, asserting that no rock and roll road trip would be complete without a visit to Nashville's most famous music and burger joint. And who were we to argue: Phil had been road managing for forty years, so if anyone knew where to get a decent burger, it was probably him.
We arrived to find that the legendary Brown's consisted of two trailers spliced together and propped up on breeze blocks on a raised bank of grass behind a petrol station. With a flat, felt roof, it resembled one of those temporary school classrooms that never get pulled down and after ten years start to sag like a shoebox left in the rain; only the smell of grease and the words 'Bud Light' glowing blue neon in the window diluted the feeling that we were arriving for an afternoon of double maths.
I had learned a little of what to expect of Phil during our first telephone conversation. Back when the trip was planned as a documentary, I had tracked him down to his favourite Nashville haunt and made arrangements with the barman to call back the next day when Phil would be in at his usual time. I called at the allotted hour: 'You'd better make it quick; it's nearly time for my afternoon wank.' I cut to the chase. Would he fly out to Joshua Tree and show us exactly how and where he did the deed? Sure he would. My heart leapt – what a scoop! He named his price. My heart sank. It was several times our meagre budget for the entire programme. When you carve out a living as 'the guy that burned Gram Parsons', I suppose you have to make the opportunities count when they come along.
So the chance of catching up in Nashville for no more than the cost of a burger was not one we were about to pass up. We went in and scanned the room for likely body snatchers. More neon buzzed from the imitation wood panelled walls; lone diners perched on high stools at the bar, bantering under the drone of baseball commentary on TV screens above them. One customer, in a John Deere cap and matching green T-shirt, alternated between mouthfuls of chilli dog and puffs on a cigarette.
We spotted Phil sitting alone at a shelf table running along the window near the 'musician's entrance'. (Brown's has two entrances. One leads to the Emerald Room, where 'ordinary people' enjoy their burgers, while the musicians enter via their own door at the rear.) The trademark moustache, a little greyer than in the photos we'd seen but unmistakably Kaufman, wiggled as he winked and welcomed us over. A red baseball cap with the name of his team – the Nashville Sounds, named for the city's music pedigree – and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the Triumph logo, said 'I'm Phil. I like music, baseball and motorbikes – OK?'
'Phil Kaufman?' I ventured, walking over.
'Guilty as charged. You must be Chris.'
'Yes sir,' I said, shaking his hand. 'Great to meet you. This is Joe.'
Harland stepped forward and shook Phil's hand while I chastised myself for calling him 'sir'.
'Take a seat,' said Phil. 'I'll order burgers. You gotta have a Brown's burger. They're the best in town. Say, where did you boys park?'
'At Harris Teeter across the road,' said Joe. 'Why?'
'Shame. You could have parked out back under the kitchen extractor fan and opened the hood for a free lube job. How do you like Nashville?'
'Love it,' I said. 'Jack Fripp took us to Tootsies last night. Pretty cool place.'
'Man, I love that place. Great for playing elbow tit.'
'What's elbow tit?' I asked.
Phil looked surprised. 'You never played elbow tit?'
'No. What are the rules?'
I really asked Phil Kaufman what the rules of elbow tit are. Joe rescued me, offering up the story about the Gram-related card exchange that inspired our little rock and roll odyssey. Tag-teaming between stories like animated children telling granddad what they got for Christmas, we told him about LA and Laurel Canyon, meeting Polly in Joshua Tree, the 'Wichita Lineman' experience, Jeff Buckley and Elvis in Memphis, selling our souls on the Crossroads, Johnny Cash and the cabin studio.
'So you're commemorating dead rock stars?' said Phil, finally getting a word in.
'More like celebrating them,' I replied. 'We're on our way to Winter Haven for Gram's sixtieth birthday. We're hoping to throw a party. Are you doing anything to celebrate?'
'Celebrate what? He's still dead, ain't he?'
He was right, of course. Polly had thought it was a great idea, what we were doing for Dad. Phil thought it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard.
'Shame we couldn't get it together to fly you out to Joshua Tree,' I said. 'It would have been great to have you as tour guide at Cap Rock.'
'You went out there, did you?'
'We did. Sat under Cap Rock and raised a beer to Gram, right on the spot where you smoked him,' said Joe.
'Under the rock, where all the dedications are?'
'Yep,' we chorused proudly, like boy scouts expecting their Grampire badges.
'I didn't do it there.'
Joe affected a fabulous double take. 'Sorry?'
'We dumped it by the side of the road.'
'You didn't do it under Cap Rock?'
'Near Cap Rock, not under it. The coffin was too heavy, so we just slid it out of the hearse by the side of the road. We were drunk, and we needed somewhere to turn the hearse around.'
'Where did you get the hearse from?' I asked.
'Michael Martin, a friend of Gram's. His girlfriend Dale drove a hearse. She and Margaret were with Gram when he died.'
'Margaret?'
'Margaret Fisher! Jeez, you guys didn't do your research, did you?! You need to read my book. It was Margaret who stuck the ice cubes up his ass to try to revive him.'
'And you chose Cap Rock because it was Gram's favourite place, right?'
'Nope.'
I c
hoked on a French fry. 'Er… oh.'
'In fact I don't think he ever went there.'
I glanced at Joe. 'Ri-ight.'
Cap Rock has always occupied a kind of mythical place in my mind. Every book and magazine article I have ever read about Gram describes him sat on top of a rock in the Mojave Desert, tripping and stargazing with Keith Richards. It's where friends go to get deeper into – or further out of – their minds. It's where one man set another's spirit free. So top of my list of places to be at one with the world isn't Stonehenge or Uluru. It's Cap Rock that holds special significance.
'It's funny,' Phil went on. 'To this day people think Cap Rock has some special significance, like it's a sacred place or something. We were just too drunk to carry on. Gram loved the desert, don't get me wrong, and he wanted to be cremated out there. But Cap Rock didn't mean shit to him.'
I felt like Dorothy Gale. We had followed the yellow brick road, but ended up in the wrong place. I hesitated as I framed my next question, half fearing another disappointing answer, half afraid of causing offence. 'So… Did you open the coffin?'