‘Cosmic Music’ Fills Desert Air, Sounding Note of Needless Loss

They keep a special journal at the Joshua Tree Inn for guests who stay in Room 8. To flip through the hand-written entries is to follow a paper trail of reflections and emotions that have been inspired over the years by this little box of a room in the middle of the high desert. It can make for strange and sometimes painful reading.

There are references to a phantom hovering in the shower steam, to familiar guitar licks bouncing off the cinder-block walls, that sort of thing. Most of these guests, it would seem, knew what they were getting into when they booked Room 8, and in the journal a few admit to feeling a bit morbid, ghoulish.

“Sleeping in a dead man’s room,” one passage begins, “is a bit creepy.”

Some of the writing can be quite personal--wrenching confessionals and heartfelt pledges to walk out of Room 8 forever changed by the experience: “Tears are running down my cheeks, and I don’t know if the words will come to say what I feel before I stop feeling it. . . .”

There are poems, and sketches of high desert landscapes, and song lyrics, many, many song lyrics--all of them from numbers sung by Gram Parsons, a promising musician who, on a September night in 1973, overloaded on morphine and tequila, passed out in Room 8 and never woke up again, dead at the age of 26.

I first heard about Parsons a year or two after his death. Friends of mine who worked for the Associated Press bureau in Los Angeles would talk about a bizarre story they had covered. It involved an overdosed musician and a faithful pair of roadies who, keeping a promise, hijacked the corpse at the airport, drove it deep into the desert at Joshua Tree, and set it ablaze.

A ranger, as I recall the telling, came along and stomped out the last of the fire, and a manhunt was on for two body-snatchers--one of whom may or may not have been wearing a “Gilded Palace of Sin” concert tour jacket.

The story, naturally enough, made me curious to hear some of Parsons’ music. And that, as the song goes, was all it took. I was hooked.

Parsons, it seemed, sang from a different place. It wasn’t country. It wasn’t rock. It wasn’t blues. He called it, early on, “cosmic American music,” but what was that supposed to mean?

He sang of being out with the “truckers and the kickers and cowboy angels” and of the temptations of “sin city,” a.k.a. Los Angeles, and of “a dream, much too real, to be leaned against too long.”

More than his lyrics, though, it was Parsons’ voice that sold the deal. It would falter and break and go flat, but still sound perfect. As a musician friend once put it, he couldn’t sing, but he sure could sing.

For a long time, though, being a fan of Gram Parsons meant constantly trying to explain him to people who never heard of him.

He had sung with the Byrds, helped form the Flying Burrito Brothers and teamed up with then little-known Emmylou Harris on his solo albums. He had run with Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones and, most importantly, influenced a long list of musicians with his pioneer fusing of rock, country and other forms. Still, his songs rarely were played on the radio, and his records didn’t sell.

It was Harris who once suggested that Parsons’ artistic success and commercial failure were not unrelated.

“He cut straight through the middle with no compromises,” she told an interviewer. “He was never afraid to write from the heart, and perhaps that’s why he was never really accepted. It’s like the light was too strong and bright, and people just had to turn away--because it was all too painful. It could rip you up.”

Well, things change. A Wall Street Journal critic, reviewing a new Parsons anthology, “Sacred Hearts & Fallen Angels,” observed earlier this month that the singer “has turned out to be exponentially more popular and influential in death than in life.”

Now it seems as if every year or so another new compilation of Parsons material is released--lost recordings, outtakes from studio sessions, tributes by other artists. There are annual “Gram Fests” held in Joshua Tree and San Francisco.

A manager at the Joshua Tree Inn--in Parsons’ time, a roadside motel, but now a well-maintained bed and breakfast--said hardly a week will pass without someone requesting to spend a night in Room 8. Many leave behind guitar picks wedged into a picture frame.

And out at Cap Rock in Joshua Tree National Park, near the spot where his corpse was set ablaze, there is a makeshift monument to the singer. “Gram Safe at Home,” a reference to an early album title, has been painted on a small concrete slab. Desert flowers are scattered about, and someone has left behind a string of love beads. There’s been some talk of turning this into an official park monument, but frankly it seems just fine the way it is.

I went out for a look the other day. I climbed up the rock and took a seat on a ledge, soaking in the terribly beautiful landscape that Parsons was said to have loved.

The longer I sat there, the quieter the desert became. There was a sadness to it. On this day, anyway, the absolute stillness seemed to me to be the sound of needless loss. In that quiet was the sound of applause never heard, of songs never written or sung.