The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars (35 page)

After a summer spent in France, hanging (many thought needlessly) with The Stones as they recorded
Exile on Main Street,
Gram Parsons returned from his sabbatical to form a stunning studio band, The Fallen Angels, which featured a future star of leftfield country, Emmylou Harris, as well as members of Elvis’s band. But touring a debut record proved impossible: Parsons’s habits were so out of control that live events would quickly disintegrate. A highly regarded second album,
Grievous Angel,
notwithstanding, this was merely the start of Gram Parsons’s descent into oblivion.

At the funeral for his friend the fine guitarist Clarence White
(
July 1973),
Parsons had intimated to Chris Hillman and his road manager Phil Kaufman that he wished to be cremated at Joshua Tree. Said Parsons, ‘I don’t want them doing this to me – I want to go out in a puff of smoke!’ Just a few days later, this almost came prematurely true: his Laurel Canyon home burned down, and he and his second wife, Gretchen, were obliged to move in temporarily with the loose-living Kaufman – much against Gretchen’s wishes. Perhaps traumatized by recent events (the couple had also recently returned from an unhappy cruise with his stepfather), Parsons told Gretchen that he was off once again to his favoured desert national park, this time to clean up his act once and for all. In truth, he had hired rooms at the Joshua Tree Inn for himself and three friends – road valet Michael Martin, Martin’s girlfriend, Dale McElroy, and Parsons’s high-school friend Margaret Fisher – for a session of ‘self-medication’ with alcohol and morphine. Parsons’s decision that heroin should also be on the menu was to have tragic consequences.

Discovering that Parsons had overdosed in Room 8 at the motel, first Fisher then McElroy tried to revive him. By 12.15 am he was taken to the nearby Yucca Valley Hospital, but a quarter of an hour later the celebrated 26-year-old musician was declared dead from ‘drug toxicity’. Wheelchair-bound Bob Parsons attempted to claim the body (possibly to help him secure the Connor family’s estate), but Phil Kaufman had other plans. Remembering Parsons’s wishes, he and fellow roadie Michael Martin hurried to LAX to intercept the body before it could be flown to New Orleans. Brazenly, Kaufman sold his tale to the hangar office (signing the release papers ‘Jeremy Nobody’), and even managed to shake off a police officer, who observed the pair’s bizarre behaviour ruefully but apparently without suspicion. Parsons’s casket was then loaded into the booze-filled hearse they had borrowed. Picking up petrol on the way, they headed back to Joshua Tree; the desert cremation of Parsons’s corpse could apparently be seen for five miles as the pyre burned bright and long.

The papers – almost having ‘lost’ the story of Parsons’s death because of Jim Croce dying the very next day – were suddenly in a lather about this dramatic new twist to the tale. Kaufman and Martin turned themselves in, appearing at West LA Municipal Court on 5 November (which would have been Parsons’s twenty-seventh birthday). Because the theft of a body was not a recognized crime (a corpse being of no intrinsic value), the pair were only fined around $1,300 – an amount they managed to recoup, more or less, from a wake thrown in Gram Parsons’s honour, featuring an early performance by Jonathan Richman. Bob Parsons – who made no money out of the estate and died just a year later – had his stepson’s remains shipped to New Orleans, where a modest service was held at the relatively staid Garden of Memories Cemetery, New Orleans.

See also
‘Sneaky’ Pete Kleinow (
Golden Oldies #41). Sometime Burritos contributor Clyde ‘Skip’ Battin died in 2003, while Chris Ethridge passed on in April 2012.

‘Gram’s extraordinary life and death is something that might be in a movie, but you don’t think of it happening in real life.’

Emmylou Harris

Thursday 20

Jim Croce

(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 10 January 1943)

Having purchased his first guitar from a toy store, Jim Croce grew to become a major star-in-the-making during seventies America’s singer/songwriter boom. It was at Villanova College, Pennsylvania, that Croce became something of a hit, playing for his frat-house buddies – and he would play mostly campus concerts until he was able to cut an album in 1969. This record failed to take off, though, and Croce returned to various jobs, including summer-camp supervisor and welder; the closest he came to a break was writing a couple of commercials for local radio, and the coffee-house circuit continued to be his only real outlet for ‘proper’ songs. A second album,
You Don’t Mess around with Jim
(1972) – recorded after ABC invited him to New York – made a huge difference: peddling a distinctly blue-collar style of blues, he struck gold with a series of hit singles, including the million-selling ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’ (1973).

All seemed set – but unfortunately the singer was barely around long enough to witness, let alone enjoy, his success. After commercial airlines lost his luggage and instruments, Croce thought it wise to hire his own twin-engine Beechcraft (yes, that plane again), in which he felt his belongings would remain safe. After a storming concert in front of 2,000 at Northwestern State University, Louisiana, the craft, carrying Croce and his entourage, attempted to take off from Natchitoches Airport. When pilot Robert Elliot failed to gain sufficient altitude at the end of the runway, the plane hit trees and crashed into the ground. The six aboard – Croce, his friend and lead guitarist Maury Muhleisen, publicist Kenny Cortese, road manager Dennis Rast, comedian George Stevens (who opened the singer’s shows) and the pilot himself – all died in the accident. For his widow and former collaborator, Ingrid Croce, it was a massive burden to bear. Her own career had been curtailed by vocal chord damage, she had also recently lost both parents and in 1975 she was to discover that their son, Adrian – for whom Croce penned the poignant ‘Time in a Bottle’ (1973; a second chart-topper and one of four posthumous hits) – had a severe sight disorder. A woman of immense fortitude, Ingrid Croce won the rights to her husband’s work in 1985 and opened an award-winning music-venue restaurant in his honour, while Adrian (A J) Croce is now a respected musician in his own right.

NOVEMBER

Saturday 10

David ‘Stringbean’ Akeman

(Annville, Kentucky, 17 June 1915)

Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys

(Various acts)

The cheery, frugal-livin’ David Akeman was a much-loved purveyor of Kentucky bluegrass, his banjo never far from his side. Fondly dubbed ‘Stringbean’ by forgetful bandleader Asa Martin, Akeman also became known as ‘The Kentucky Wonder’ during the forties, so intricate was his picking. With Martin’s band, Akeman also developed his shtick as singer and comic performer – which was to serve him well in later life when he presented popular country television hour
Hee Haw.
Akeman is best known, though, as a member of Bill Monroe’s celebrated Bluegrass Boys – the definitive country pickers of their day.

The musician had no real interest in fame, however, and he and his wife, Estelle, inhabited a modest cabin in Ridgetop, Tennessee, their only luxury the vintage Cadillac parked outside. Like many older country folk of the era, the Depression had made them suspicious of banking practices, and they tended to store their money at home. Inevitably, with a name as high-profile as Akeman’s, word of this got round. On the night of 10 November, cousins John and Marvin Douglas lay in wait as Mr and Mrs Akeman returned from a night on the town. The musician was shot at pointblank range and died in front of his terrified wife – who was then pursued by the men before they picked her off too. The bodies were discovered the following morning by neighbour and country performer Louis ‘Grandpa’ Jones, who described the home as ‘stripped bare save for a chainsaw’. This crime sent shockwaves throughout Nashville, and the cousins received life sentences for the double homicide. They didn’t take all the money, however: some twenty-three years later, $20K in cash was discovered rotting in a chimney breast at Akeman’s former home.

Monday 26

John Rostill

(Birmingham, England, 16 June 1942)

The Shadows

John Rostill – originally guitarist with The Interns – was the longest-serving bass player with The Shadows, replacing Brian Locking (who had left for ‘religious’ reasons) in 1963 and even surviving a short break-up in 1968. The quiet, unassuming Rostill played on several Top Ten hits, both for the group on its own and also as back-up to Cliff Richard, while also touring extensively with Tom Jones towards the end of his life.