Disgraceland

by Jake Brennan

  Just as he had arrived there, Gram Parsons was being transported out of Altamont by chopper—a very different kind of chopper, but a chopper nonetheless. This one was filled with Rolling Stones, rock star hangers-on, groupies, and the promise of a brighter, more decadent, and thankfully wildly distracting future. As the chopper made its descent into San Francisco, Gram could see the road laying out in front of him, and finally his head stopped aching.

  Altamont was one road, one distraction. Nellcôte was another road, another type of distraction entirely. Keith’s rented mansion/makeshift recording studio along the French Riviera was a parade of darkness and debauchery, where the Rolling Stones were endeavoring to squeeze genre-bending music out of the cracks of the musty mansion’s foundation. Gram watched as Keith stepped on the newest batch of Corsican-delivered heroin. Keith was shabby but surgical in his approach; hovering over his rented mansion’s dining room table shirtless, wearing nothing but low-slung, striped corduroys, Keith carefully doled out the appropriate balance of quinine and then talcum powder and added it to the pile of pink Thai heroin.

  After the Corsicans dropped off the first kilo, Gram suggested cutting the incredibly strong batch with laundry detergent. Unexperienced in most things in life compared to Keith Richards, Gram Parsons was overruled. This incredibly lethal heroin needed to be tempered, but he didn’t want to turn it into a batch of street skag. Last year, while in the States, Keith had heard of a drug dealer in Harlem who had been flying in nearly pure heroin from Vietnam and distributing it at 12 percent potency compared to the usual 5 percent potency of most street dope. His trick was cutting the smack with quinine and mannite; nonintoxicating medication as opposed to cutting it like most dealers did with rat poison or, as Gram had suggested, with laundry detergent.

  If they were going to make this kilo last a month, before the Corsicans zipped in again—up the French Riviera on their speedboats—then Keith and Gram needed to cut the smack properly. Quinine, yes. Talcum powder, maybe. Laundry detergent, definitely not.

  Gram felt the sting of dejection but shrugged it off. He needed a fix. Getting a hair across his ass about it wasn’t going to help matters. Satisfied that the heroin was properly calibrated, Keith dipped his switchblade into the pile, scooped out a sizable bump, turned to Gram, who was standing at his side nearly salivating. In a voice that was part laughter, part two-pack-a-day cough, he said, “Have at it, boy.”

  Gram delicately brought his nose to the blade, looked up to Keith dutifully, and with gratitude pressed his right thumb to his right nostril, vacuuming up the powder in one quick snort. The heroin shot through him like a comet. Hard, fast, and without regard for anything in its path. Gram stumbled a bit, groped about with his hands, rested them on the dining room table’s surface, and hung his heavy head to his chest. His long, dark hair swung delicately as he tried steadying himself. He then gently slumped back into the chair behind him and nodded off. Keith laughed to himself, thinking, Lightweight, as he went back to work.

  Gram awoke to the sounds of Keith and his bandmates messing with a slow blues from the studio in the cellar. Mick laid it on thick with the vocal:

  Honey, I’ve been lying

  Honey, I’ve been jiving

  Honey, I’ve been signifying.

  The tune quickly devolved. It was obvious that Keith had lost interest in whatever Diddley-esque hoodoo Mick was attempting to conjure.

  Then Gram heard the newly familiar chords to Keith’s latest masterpiece, “All Down the Line,” burbling up from the basement into a blast of swampy sonic magnificence.

  G—C—D—G. Keith carved out the riff with his Tele.

  Charlie and Bill pulled the rhythm into form. Mick Taylor skidded across the top of it all with his loose slide while Jagger channeled Big Mama Thornton through his skinny English frame.

  Yeah hear the women sighing, all down the line

  Oh, hear the children crying, all down the line.

  Keith then pushed the tune to the IV chord. Mick hit the chorus. He couldn’t contain himself. He muscled over to Mick and sang out into Jagger’s handheld mic alongside him. The two of them a shambolic mess of spontaneous rock ’n’ roll brilliance; their voices saturated with junk and ambition, respectively:

  Well you can’t say yes, and you can’t say no

  Just be right there when the whistle blows.

  Before jumping back into the riff, Keith let out a short, ecstatic “Yeah!”

  Gram heard it all unfold from upstairs. He brimmed with jealousy. The basement—while the Stones were recording—was strictly off-limits unless you were contributing to the music in a meaningful way. And, well-meaning as he was, there was nothing meaningful about Gram’s contribution to the Rolling Stones’ recordings while exiled from British taxmen on the French Riviera in Keith Richards’s rented mansion during the summer of 1971. Unless of course, you count being Keith Richards’s junkie pilot fish as particularly meaningful to the long lasting greatness of what would become the Stones’ masterpiece, Exile on Main Street.

  No, during working hours—midnight-ish to whenever Keith passed out—Gram was relegated to the upstairs with the women and the rest of the junkie hangers-on.

  It sucked.

  Gram wanted more. He thought he had made progress with Keith. Progress toward what, he couldn’t really say, but progress nonetheless. He and Keith would get high and sit around talking country music until the sun came up, trading songs.

  “Have you heard this Jimmie Rodgers tune?”

  “What about this Buck Owens record? I love Buck. Poor bloke is always the wronged man.”

  “What about the devil, in the weeds deep in those Louvin Brothers lyrics? Heavy.”

  Gram knew Keith liked him. Keith wanted him around, but he also knew Mick hated him. Hated the contention that someone else, someone like Gram Parsons, was going to teach him, Mick Jagger, about country music. Mick wrote “Dead Flowers” after all. Fuck you very much, Mr. Parsons.

  Mick’s distaste for him was obvious, but so what? Okay, so Gram wasn’t going to join the Rolling Stones, still, maybe Keith would make good on his idea to have him produce Gram’s solo record? Keith seemed into it but wouldn’t commit.

  Gram played it cool. He’d grab time with Keith when he could. And when he couldn’t he’d keep working on that song he’d been messing with. He grabbed Keith’s acoustic and headed upstairs for some quiet. Picking up the Gibson, he put words to the pain roiling within:

  Time can pass and time can heal

  But it don’t ever pass the way I feel

  You went away a long time ago

  And why you left I never knew.

  In those rare lucid moments at Villa Nellcôte, when not totally high on smack or fall-down drunk, Gram would keep his demons down by working on songs for his next musical project: a solo album. Gram wanted to do things his way. And do them unencumbered by the creative restrictions of bandmates. He had a vision. A vision of America through the lens of his own cosmic experiences and aspirations—Cosmic American Music—and he would bring it to life through a unique and unprecedented melding of the American country, soul, and gospel music he’d grown up in the South listening to, all expressed through the prism of pain he’d been enduring since his father’s suicide. He kept writing.

  But even songwriting had its hang-ups. No matter how he cut it, Gram kept running headfirst into his own despair. His own sadness. His unprocessed grief. It reared its beastly head everywhere. Writing songs in his head, up on the second floor of Keith’s rented mansion was no exception.

  When he couldn’t write, he’d shoot heroin. When he couldn’t shoot heroin, he’d write. Life was one long race to outrun the beast raging inside him. Daring him to look around the corner of his consciousness. To confront the pain inside him. For Gram Parsons, there was no peace.

  Gram buoyed back and forth between complete inebriation and half-assed attempts at songwriting, all while marveling at the work ethic of Keith and his bandmates, who, no
matter what drugs or drink were swimming through their systems, no matter what the situation or the environment, always seemed to rise to the creative challenge. Their approach to their craft—making the greatest rock ’n’ roll music the world had ever heard, being the greatest rock ’n’ roll band the world had ever seen, and doing it all without a playbook—was inspiring to Gram. And also totally intimidating.

  For rock musicians in the early ’70s—not just for Gram Parsons and the Rolling Stones, but for Eric Clapton, the Band, the Eagles, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Elton John—the race was on to see who could crack the code to American roots music. A music with a fascinatingly rich stew of influences—Delta blues, country, soul, gospel, R&B. This mixture had produced the first generation of rock ’n’ rollers that the Stones and their contemporaries had all grown up on and who had influenced them to start making music in the first place, artists like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, and others. How could this endlessly fascinating music, American music, be reimagined into something entirely new for today’s generation of rock ’n’ roll fans? That was the question.

  For the Rolling Stones, this recording at Nellcôte was their opportunity to answer. It was their own, wholly unique and modern interpretation of America. The music the Stones were concocting in Keith’s sweaty basement would shine a light on the underbelly of Americana and show the world the potential of where rock music as a genre could go. Exile on Main Street, the record they emerged with, was a masterpiece. It was official: the race was won, the Rolling Stones were kings, creative rock ’n’ roll royalty, and Gram Parsons was nothing but a sidenote to the history they were writing. He was at best a junkie court jester hoping for a seat in Keith Richards’s royal rock ’n’ roll sidecar.

  Gram needed to get his shit together and dry out or he’d be dead before he was thirty. So he split…for the desert.

  Gram Parsons praying at the altar of Keith Richards…and heroin.

  Joshua Tree National Park is about a 140-mile drive from LA. It’s located in a small desert town filled with entertainment industry burnouts, seekers, angel-dusted LSD heads, and UFO chasers. Gram Parsons was in one way or another, all of these things. After his experience at Nellcôte, Gram found his way to LA and burned his way through the Hollywood rock scene before landing out at Joshua Tree to clean up his act and earnestly start writing songs for what he hoped would become his first solo album.

  Gram loved Joshua Tree, and why wouldn’t he? It’s a place unlike any other on the planet. Its desert is a psychedelics’ acid dream come true with its trippy yucca trees, sun-blistered terrain, and glittering, star-freckled nighttime sky. And the town of Joshua Tree was and still is a low-key hippie outlaw’s paradise. There’s a lawless vibe about it. There aren’t a lot of people, and most of those that live there seem to be trying to avoid some sort of hassle.

  At night, Gram would head out to Joshua Tree National Park and frolic through the desert, high on acid and hoping to spot UFOs and/or God. Both were pursuits he believed in: Gram, the onetime Ivy Leaguer now cosmic country musician, used God to get into Harvard University. His grades weren’t that good in high school, but he wrote an essay on God in his application that blew the board away. His family’s money might have also blown them away.

  During the day in Joshua Tree, Gram would sleep off the LSD and try to write songs from the cozy confines of his room at the Joshua Tree Inn. Not exactly clean living, but at least he wasn’t doing heroin. However, getting fucked-up and tripping balls eventually won out, and Gram’s writing took a back seat. So be it, he thought. Being high kept the pain away. He’d get around to writing and to making his solo record in due time.

  Meanwhile, Exile on Main Street was a smash. Gram was happy for his old friend Keith, but a part of him was pissed off that he wasn’t along for the ride. He couldn’t help but think that all that country music he’d shared with Keith had helped inform the sound of Exile. Now, the record was double platinum, and what did Gram have to show for it other than an increasingly intense heroin addiction?

  But what had Gram even more upset was a new band that was quickly becoming unavoidable on the FM dial. The Eagles featured Gram’s ex-bandmate from the Burrito Brothers, Bernie Leadon, and it represented everything Gram hated about modern rock ’n’ roll, to say nothing of his annoyance at their infusing country into their brand of rock and effectively working his side of the street. The Eagles traded on all of the country and none of the soul influences that Gram had been messing with since he started making music back at Harvard with the International Submarine Band, then through his work with the Byrds and ultimately to his near-perfect first album with the Flying Burrito Brothers. Gram had dedicated his life to fusing country and soul into a new form of rock ’n’ roll, and here was this new band of assholes who—judging from the high-gloss production of their singles—cared little for the actual spirit of this music and only for the success that its most watered-down, trite realization could bring. “Peaceful Easy Feeling”? More like a “plastic dry fuck,” went Gram’s assessment.

  Gram Parsons hated the Eagles.

  Gram knew he could do better. It was time. Time to get out of the desert. Time to put a studio band together. Time to get some songs going and make this damn album and time to deal with his damn demons. To do that, Gram needed to get in touch with his road manager and friend, Phil Kaufman.

  By 1972, Phil Kaufman was already an outsized character in LA rock ’n’ roll lore. He was a rock star’s fixer. Whatever you needed, he’d procure. Whatever you didn’t need, he’d make disappear. That sort of thing. He’d worked for the Stones, Bob Dylan, and the Band.

  But Kaufman’s mystique amongst LA music industry illuminati came not from his road manager experience but from his days spent with Charles Manson, running girls for petty thefts and sexcapades. Kaufman had once shared a cell with Manson while jailed at Terminal Island on a drug bust. When he bounced, Kaufman needed a place to stay, so he took up with Charlie and his girls. He fell in quick with the Manson family. It was all the sex and acid he could handle. But it proved to be too much, and Phil eventually split. When the Tate-LaBianca murders happened, and Phil watched as Charlie’s girls were paraded across the television in 1971, he remarked to himself that he’d “had sex with every one of those murderesses.”

  He came on professionally at first with Gram as a sort of road manager and minder, but the two quickly established a legit friendship. Phil saw it as his duty to take care of the fragile singer-songwriter. He made sure Gram didn’t take too much smack, didn’t sleep with the wrong women, and made it to the gig or the studio on time.

  When Phil got the call, he hightailed it out to Joshua Tree, grabbed Gram, brought him back to LA, and nestled him into an apartment at the Chateau Marmont. At first, Gram was motivated. Inspired and ready to get down to work. The two made travel arrangements for Gram’s new muse, Emmylou Harris, the beautiful singer with the enchanting voice whom Gram had met on the road. Then they got Barry Tashian, the former singer of the Remains, to fly in from Nashville and immediately begin working on a repertoire for Gram. Barry brought with him a suitcase of songs: “Streets of Baltimore” by Harlan Howard and Tompall Glaser, “I Can’t Dance” by Tom T. Hall, and “Cry One More Time” by Peter Wolf and Seth Justman of the J. Geils Band, a white-hot R&B band from back in Tashian’s home turf in Boston, Massachusetts.

  With these songs, along with the handful of originals he’d been working up, Gram could see his album taking shape.

  But working on original material brought painful emotions to the surface, and Gram quickly fell into the familiar habit of burying the pain with alcohol and heroin. Gram was incoherent for long stretches of time. More of a rambling buffoon than a tender troubadour. Kaufman and Tashian knew that making this record wasn’t going to be easy. They needed to act quick while Gram had some semblance of motivation and before he was completely consumed by his addiction, so naturally they headed to Sin City to f
ind a band.

  The trip to Las Vegas was strictly business. Tashian and Gram had a job to do: convince Elvis Presley’s band to back Gram in the studio for his new record. It was a brilliant idea. While the rest of the rock ’n’ roll world was busy chasing country music up the charts, putting their hair in ponytails, and fitting themselves for snap-buttoned shirts and bolo ties, all the while paying scant attention to the soul and spirit at the heart of country music, Gram decided to hire deeply talented musicians who got this music on a molecular level. And the fact that they were seen at the time as being tragically unhip, backing Elvis as a show band in Vegas, running through a career retrospective of square cheese for beehived housewives and black-framed pencil necks in for the early bird special on junkets from the Midwest, made the move by Gram all the more ingenious. While self-satisfied country rock ’n’ rollers like the Eagles fiddled with learning Chet Atkins and Floyd Cramer riffs on guitar and piano, Gram would have James Burton and Glen D. Hardin playing guitar and piano in his studio band. Two players who could both come out on your porch or step into your parlor and show you how it all went down.

  Hiring Elvis’s band paid off, big time. In addition to having stone-cold killers in the studio, Gram, with so much respect for these musicians, kept himself sober through the work. The result was stunning. The sessions with Elvis’s band produced a masterpiece. The record—GP, as it would come to be called—was Gram Parsons’s vision of Cosmic American Music come to life: a perfect meld of country, soul, and gospel; Southern gothic tradition and irony and inner pain channeled through bent Telecaster strings, R&B chord progressions, and honky tonk piano riffs.