Mortician Caitlyn Doughty, in the video above, calls Gram Parsons "the most iconic corpse," like, in America... ever. That's how weird this story is. The story of life just after his death is one of the craziest stories in music history. Or any history. Wild horses couldn't pull me away from this blog post. The spot for today's blog post is the rock overhang you can see her showing at 13:50 in this video. It's on the side of Cap Rock, in Joshua Tree National Park, northeast of Palm Springs, California. I found this same spot in 2000, not knowing anything about this story. This video above does a great job of telling the story of the post death high jinks surrounding Gram's body, I highly recommend watching the whole 20 minute video when you get a chance. I'm now not only a fan of Gram Parsons, but of Caitlyn and her Ask a Mortician channel, as well.
The story of this particular spot, an overhanging area on the side of a big rock outcrop, starts in the 1990's for me. In 1992, I got a job on the stage crew of the hit TV show American Gladiators. I'm in black, squatting, behind Larry the Ref, at :25 in that clip, and on the far left at 1:34 as he comes down off the wall. I worked right down on the floor for the six or seven summer weeks we taped all the shows for that season, with the Gladiators and contenders themselves. I was a spotter, and we practiced the games against them over the first few days, then hooked them into climbing harnesses, boosted them up on the pugil stick towers, and stuff like that, along with helping the grips and riggers change the huge sets for the show.
One of the new Gladiators that year was a rhythmic gymnast, dancer, and hardcore rock climber named Salina Bartunek. Of all the Gladiators, Salina, who played Elektra, and Shelly Beattie, who played Siren, were the two I got to know best. Between action on the show, I flipped through the rock climbing magazines Salina had on set, and listened to her stories of climbing several places around the U.S..
Since I had always been afraid of heights, I started climbing on the bottom of the show's climbing wall after work at night. While I never became a great rock climber, going up huge walls at Yosemite or anything, I became a pretty decent at bouldering, which is climbing small, technical, rock walls without ropes, usually only 10-15 feet high. My favorite spots were Stony Point in Chatsworth, and The Beach in Corona Del Mar, where I climbed 35-40 foot walls without ropes sometimes. I was a hardcore BMX freestyler at the time, and bouldering gave me a completely different type of stoke, something I did alone mostly, at a handful of spots around Southern California, through the 90's. There's a simple purity to bouldering, it's just you, a pair of climbing shoes, a chalk bag, and a big hunk of rock, or maybe an urban wall. Nothing else. I loved that.
As I got into more and more into climbing, there was one place I really wanted to make a trip out to, Joshua Tree National Park. While only about an hour and a half drive from L.A. and Orange County, I didn't have a car through much of the 90's, I was living really low budget, working a variety of odd jobs, mostly being a furniture mover. I never made it out to Joshua Tree in the 90's. In 1999, after an injury that made me quit my good paying, Hollywood lighting guy job, I became a taxi driver. I started gaining weight, sitting in a car, 7 days a week. But I did have a car, my cab. So one Monday in the spring of 2000, I decided to take the day off from taxi driving, and just drive out to Joshua Tree.
I rolled out there in my taxi, drove into one of the entrances of the huge park, and pulled up next to one of the huge, weird looking rock formations the park is known for. No one else was there. I grabbed my water bottle, and just wandered around the huge outcrop. I climbed a little ways up on the rocks, just scrambling around, not really climbing. But mostly I just wandered aimlessly, like I've loved doing in wild areas since I was a little kid. I remember seeing a large lizard, about a foot long, a chuckwalla, much bigger than than little fence lizards I'd see in Orange County.
As I completed the loop around that big outcrop, I found an overhanging nook that had a bunch of graffiti on it, and some dried up flowers, a few beer cans, and I think a roach of a joint, or two. It looked like some local party spot at first. Someone had built a little campfire there a time or two. But as I read the graffiti, it was all tributes to a guy who had obviously died, a guy named Gram. I didn't know it at the time, but I randomly stumbled upon the place where country rock star Gram Parsons had been "cremated" by his friends, way back in 1973. The spot I stumbled on that day in 2000 is the exact spot Caitlyn shows in the video above, except there was a bunch of spray painted, marker written, graffiti, and the beer cans and joints.
I left Cap Rock, and drove around, and wandered on foot, around several of the outcrops that day in 2000, but the tribute to the guy named Gram stuck in my mind. I didn't have a computer, but I later went to the library, looked it up on that new thing called Google, and learned the basic story of the death, corpse theft, and "cremation" of country rock star Gram Parsons. Then I listened to some of his music, which is good stuff. I read that he actually wrote the song "Wild Horses," then gave it to friend Keith Richards, of The Rolling Stones. These days the word is they may have co-wrote it, but Keith and Mick Jagger get credit for it officially. Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers recorded the song, but the Rolling Stones made it a hit. Gram's duet of "Love Hurts," with Emmylou Harris, is another great recording of his.
So today's spot in Crazy California 43 blog is that nook, almost a mini-cave, on the side of Cap Rock in Joshua Tree National Park, where Gram Parsons' friend brought his stolen corpse, and lit it on fire, trying to give him a proper (if highly drunken) cremation. It's the site of one of the craziest death stories in rock 'n roll, country, and music history. Gram became part of what is now known as The 27 Club, talented young people who died tragically at age 27, like Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and later Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and several others. Here's one of the only live performance videos of The Flying Burrito Brothers, singing "Christine's Tune," and it shows a little footage of them out at Joshua Tree in the beginning.
In 2003, the crazy story of Gram Parsons' corpse theft and drunken cremation was made into a movie called Grand Theft Parsons, starring Johnny Knoxville* and Christina Applegate. I recommend watching the video above, Caitlyn the mortician does a great job of telling the story, which also includes the room he died in at the small motel in the desert. You can still rent that room today. This spot at Cap Rock in Joshua Tree, that I stumbled upon 21 years ago, is another of the locations with a weird story, which is part of Crazy California history now.
Personally I've always wanted a Viking funeral, the whole burning boat thing, it just sounds cool, even though I'm from German and Dutch stock, not Vikings. But that's not legal. Guess I'll have to think up some other way to to have my friends put the "fun" back in funeral, after I kick off.
* Johnny Knoxville is hilarious. But he's also and idiot. Don't try anything of the stupid shit you've seen him do. Seriously, I know some of you are complete fucking morons, don't try this shit. Really. I mean it.
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