Gram Parsons BBQ

On our final morning in the Mojave, I walked a mile or so up to the park headquarters, rather indelicately entrenched in what was once the southern tip of the Mara Oasis, looking for information about the demise of one of rock'n'roll's legendary bad boys, Gram Parsons. As I was talking to the park historian, the sky darkened, the wind whipped up, thunderclaps rattled the windows, and finally the rain came down to wild cheers inside the ranger station. The rangers took turns prancing around outside in the downpour. "It's been a year since we've seen rain like this," one of them shouted.

Even an Oregonian like me, who had come to the desert to trade our eight months of rain for a week of steady sun, could appreciate that this storm was a beautiful thing, indeed. The desert pulsed to life almost immediately at the first hint of the rain squalls. Even the small, reddish barrel cactuses seemed to perk up. And the smell of the Mojave after a drenching rain is an unforgettable pleasure, a scent flush with the pungent odor of creosote bush, mesquite, and sand verbena.

As the skies lightened up, the ranger pulled out a topo map and pointed to the spot I wanted to visit: Cap Rock.

I'm of mixed views on Gram Parsons, the former member of the Byrds, founder of the Flying Burrito Brothers, and originator of California country-rock. I like much of his music. He had a sweet, doom-ridden voice and he wrote some great songs, the beautiful Hickory Wind, for example. He re-introduced the steel guitar to rock, and gave new life to old tunes by the Louvin Brothers and Hank Williams. On the other hand, he was a trust-fund rocker with a sprawling sense of entitlement who deliberately shattered his considerable talent and spawned a genre of seventies soft rock that haunts the FM airwaves to this day, from the humorless perfection of the Eagles to the formulaic crap of Pure Prairie League and Poco.

Parsons was born in Waycross, Georgia. His mother, Avis Snively, came from money. The Snivelys owned one of the largest orange groves in Florida and the Snively property in Winter Haven was turned into the Cypress Gardens theme park, a big pre-Disney attraction. His father, "Coon Dog" Connor, was also wealthy, coming from a family of retailers in Tennessee. These were rich but not happy people. By all accounts, both were drunks and battled depression. In 1958, Coon Dog blew his brains out with a .38 revolver. It was the first in a string of tragedies.

Soon thereafter, Gram's mother married a fortune hunter named Bob Parsons and drank herself to death a few years later. The death was attributed to alcohol poisoning. Parsons, who had adopted Gram and his sister Little Avis, moved them to Florida and married the family babysitter a few months later. Gram always suspected that Bob Parsons had a hand in his mother's death.

The Snively money bought Gram a draft deferment and sent him to Harvard, where he discovered hard drugs, developed a deeper sense of his own alienation, avoided any alliance with fellow southerner Al Gore, and perfected his brand of post-rockabilly southern rock.

By 1969, Parsons was in LA, challenging Roger McGuinn for leadership of the Byrds. They collaborated on one masterpiece of country rock, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, before Parsons split with fellow Byrd Chris Hillman to form the Flying Burrito Brothers.

While in Southern California, Parsons became good friends with Rolling Stone's guitarist Keith Richards. Evidently, Parsons turned the Stones on to country music (for better or worse) and he and Richards would often escape up to the Mojave to listen to Chet Atkins records, sample a vast menu of drugs, and scan the desert skies for UFOs.

Before going on tour in the summer of 1973, Parsons and a few friends went up to the small town of Joshua Tree, where they stayed in the Joshua Tree Motel, a nice but modest establishment on Highway 62. Parsons (who, for the curious, stayed in room number 8, which contains a plaque commemorating the event) went on a three-day binge of Jack Daniels, morphine, and heroin. On the night of September 19, he overdosed, choked on his own vomit, and died. His body was ultimately taken to LAX, where it was scheduled to be flown to New Orleans for burial.

Like most junkies, Parsons tended to brood on his own death. And he repeatedly told his friend and road manager Phil Kaufman that when he died he didn't want to be buried in the ground: "You take me out to the desert in Joshua Tree and burn me. I want to go out in a cloud of smoke." What follows is a screwball escapade that could have made a great Preston Sturges film.

Kaufman, one of the more outlandish characters in the LA rock scene, took it upon himself to fulfill Parsons' final wish. He borrowed an old hearse, dummied up some paperwork, and went to LAX, where he conned the people working for Continental Airlines' mortuary services into turning over Parsons' coffin. Kaufman and his pal Michael Martin were so drunk at the time that they ran the hearse into a wall as they left the airport.

On the drive to Joshua Tree, Kaufman and Martin stopped at a gas station to buy more beer and a couple of gallons of high test gasoline. "I didn't want him to ping," Kaufman later wrote in his madcap autobiography Road Warrior.

The two ended up at Cap Rock, a bizarrely eroded dome of granite near Ryan Mountain. Kaufman says they stopped there because he was too drunk to drive any further. They unloaded the coffin and hauled it to a small alcove at the base of the rock monolith. Then Kaufman noticed head lights approaching and told Martin that it must be the cops. They quickly poured the gasoline over Parsons' corpse, lit it on fire, then sped away across open desert.

They didn't drive very far before Kaufman passed out. When they awoke the next morning they found themselves stuck in the sand. They had to hike to a gas station and get a tow truck to pull them out. Their adventures weren't over. Just outside LA, the hearse got into a multi-car pile up. When a California Highway Patrol officer ordered Kaufman and Martin out of the hearse, empty beer bottles fell to the pavement, and the officer put them in handcuffs. As the cop interviewed the other drivers, Martin slipped out of his cuffs, started the hearse, and the two escaped.

At first the cops tried to blame the corpse theft and pyre on a satanic cult. But a few weeks later Kaufman turned himself in. He and Martin were fined $1,000. To raise the money, Kaufman threw a party. He called it the Koffin Kaper Koncert.

The spot where Kaufman ignited Parsons' coffin has become an informal memorial. There's a large stone at the spot with the words "Safe at Home" (title of a Parsons' song) painted on it in red letter. People leave things at the site: syringes, plastic flowers, CDs, St. Christopher medallions...Others have scrawled scraps of Parsons' lyrics on the face of Cap Rock itself.

I wanted to get a photo of the Gram Parsons BBQ pit from a small shelf in the rock above. There was only one way up. It involved a scramble over a scree pile, then a bit of free-climbing up a fissure in the granite. As I neared the ledge, I stuck my hand in a slot in the rock. Them I heard a kind of hollow buzzing, steady and insistent. I froze. I'd heard that sound before, though not quite so distinctly.

I looked down and saw about six inches from my hand a neatly coiled, blonde rattlesnake with the telltale slashes beside each eye, its erect tail chattering away like a drum groove laid down by Elvin Jones.

This was not your ordinary rattlesnake. No. This was Crotalus Scututalus, the Mojave rattler, a snake with a reputation for a foul temper and a deadly bite. Indeed, the herpetologists describe the Mojave's venom, rather cagily under the circumstances, as "unique." Uniquely poisonous. The Mojave's venom contains a strange brew of more than 100 distinct neurotoxins, a concoction so complex even the mad scientists at Monsanto can't duplicate it.

This all makes ecological sense. The Mojave is a harsh environment. The opportunities to nab a meal of delicious Kangaroo rat don't present themselves that often. The venom (an offensive, not a defensive weapon) increases the likelihood of a strike resulting in a kill.

Time slowed down. And I began to calculate the odds, like some backcountry rookie. A phrase flickered across my mind: You're more likely to be struck dead by lightening than to be bitten by a rattlesnake. It was strangely comforting. But only for a moment. Surely, those odds were calculated for the population of the country at large. Most people never see a rattlesnake. What were the odds of someone in my circumstance? Eyeball to eyeball with C. Scututalus, with me the intruder in his small patch of dust?

Those are precisely the kinds of percentages they don't give you, probably with good reason. It turns out the snake/lightening analogy is false, a bit of well-intentioned pro-rattler propaganda designed to keep the roughnecks from slaughtering any more snakes than they already do.

In fact, rattlesnakes inflict more than 8,000 bites on humans in the US every year. That's a respectable number by any standard. The snake scientists say that 75 to 80 percent of rattler bites are considered "illegitimate"--an odd bureaucratic descriptor for a boneheaded move on the part of a human. Illegitimate touching of a pit viper.

One of the park rangers had told me that the last person to die of a snakebite in Joshua Tree was an English teacher who had led a field trip to the park with his students. Someone discovered a Mojave rattler lounging under a picnic table at the Jumbo Rocks campground. The teacher decided to use the snake as a prop (was he a fan of Harry Crews' strange novel A Feast of Snakes?), picked it up by the tail, and began to discourse on the pacifist nature of the snake, when the rattler, quite properly, bit him in the stomach.

Of course, I too was a damn English major. And I had just made an illegitimate, boneheaded move. Used to scrambling over boulders and rockpiles in the rattler-free Oregon Cascades, where at worst you're likely to be scolded by a pika, I hadn't bothered to look where I was sticking my hand. It was all up to Mister Scututalus, now.

But the little Mojave didn't strike. He no doubt figured it wasn't worth wasting his precious payload of venom on this bonehead, who could just as easily kill himself by slipping off the slick granite and smashing his skull on the makeshift cenotaph for a long-forgotten rocker. And for that I'm grateful.

We left Cap Rock and drove off into the desert evening, chasing those distant storms, behind a van bizarrely adorned with two whitewater kayaks (a true Banham moment), my foot tapping the floorboard to the beat of that most urbane of all bluesmen, Memphis Slim:

You may own half the city, even diamonds and pearls. You may own an airplane, baby, and fly all over this world. But I don't care how great you are, don't care what you are worth--'Cause when it all ends up you got to go back to Mother Earth. Yeah, Mother Earth is waitin', and that's a debt you got to pay.

Right you are, Slim. But not today.