An angel with bad habits

Gram Parsons was the unlikeliest candidate for rock stardom. He was born Ingram Cecil Connor III, and the name he shed in his teens gave some indication of his inherited wealth and privilege. He grew up in Waycross, Georgia, in a family environment where excess seems to have been the norm. His father was nicknamed 'Coondog' and lived a life of extremes, hunting with the local rednecks, throwing extravagant parties for his gentrified friends and driving fast cars along the back roads.

Parsons' mother Avis was glamorous and haughty to the point of arrogance. 'She participated in a conversation,' said an acquaintance, 'when she thought it was worth listening to.' Parsons inherited both his father's wild streak and his mother's arrogance, but when he wasn't wasted on cocaine, heroin and hard liquor, he possessed an effortless Southern charm that was almost courtly. Keith Richards said of him: 'It's not often you can lie around on a bed with a guy doing cold turkey, in tandem, and still get along.'

Like many impressionable young men who came into Richards's orbit, Parsons lived fast, died young and left behind a myth that has grown in his absence. He also left behind at least three classic albums bearing his distinctive imprint: Sweetheart of the Rodeo by the Byrds; The Gilded Palace of Sin by the Flying Burrito Brothers; and his second, and final, solo album, Grievous Angel, a valedictory confirmation of his singular talent as a singer-songwriter and pioneer.

On those albums, he created the template for both country rock and the contemporary genre that has come to be known as Americana. Without him, the trajectory of American rock music would have been very different and at least two of the greatest groups of all time, the Byrds and the Rolling Stones, would have developed in radically different ways.

Yet in his own lifetime, Parsons's pioneering music went almost unnoticed by the mainstream, being too country for the rock audience and too rock for the country purists. His heroes were the likes of Merle Haggard and Hank Williams and his singing voice, though technically flawed, was perfectly suited to the elucidation of heartbreak and desire, the constants of country music. Rolling Stone magazine once called him 'the most convincing singer of sad songs that I've ever heard'.

That sadness, like the charm, had its beginnings in Waycross. I once asked the great music writer Stanley Booth, who grew up in the same area, what life was like there. He paused for a long time, than said: 'It's a Manichaean universe. That's what Northerners don't understand about the South. People live with God on one shoulder and Satan on the other. You can hear that struggle in the music of Jerry Lee Lewis and the young Elvis Presley. And you can hear it in Gram Parsons's music. It determined his whole life.'

That life is laid out in all its messy, wayward splendour in David N Meyer's exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting, biography. It is a tale worthy of Tennessee Williams in its Southern Gothic intensity. Parsons fled one aristocracy for another, pitching up in Los Angeles where he hung out with California's hippest rock stars and most notorious groupies and bonded with Keith Richards, much to the chagrin of an insecure Mick Jagger.

Parsons pursued Richards to Nellcôte, the rented mansion in the south of France where the Stones struggled to finish Exile on Main Street, their timetable dictated by the guitarist's spiralling heroin habit. Later, Parsons hired Elvis's Las Vegas backing band to play on his masterpiece Grievous Angel, appalling them on the first recording session by crashing out halfway through a song. Then, a few weeks after the album was finished, he somehow managed to score heroin in the Californian desert and died in Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn, which has since become a shrine for fans - as has nearby Cap Rock, where his road manager Phil Kaufman famously burned his body, having stolen it from Los Angeles airport where it was in transit back to the South.

About 10 years ago, I spent an evening in Nashville with Kaufman, whose business card describes his occupation as 'Road Mangler' and who once did time with Charles Manson. He drank a succession of triple tequilas and spoke of his exploits with the glee of the eternal adolescent. He is, as Meyer notes, not the kind of guy you would want managing your life, being, like many roadies, more reckless and debauched even than his more famous charges.

He may, as he has often stated, have been fulfilling a pact he made with Gram Parsons when he drove his body into the high desert, but the grotesque nature of his drunken, drug-fuelled escapade remains blindingly obvious to everyone but him. Still unrepentant, still excessive, Kaufman does not emerge from Meyer's book with much dignity. Then again, neither does Gram Parsons, who never quite transcended the contradictions of his upbringing.

The songs endure, though, and the sad sway of that cracked and faltering voice. After reading Twenty Thousand Roads, you may, like me, feel the need to reacquaint yourself with the great song from which its title is taken, the windswept ode to freedom and regret that is 'Return of the Grievous Angel'. Best to remember Gram Parsons this way, a young man, not yet 27, carried by the power of his singular vision, singing his bittersweet version of the blues and, in the process, reimagining American rock music.