Gram Parsons died on September 19, 1973, 40 years ago this week. We covered the death of this influential rocker in depth in Part 1, but for those of you just checking in, it can be summed up easily by saying Gram Parsons died of rock ‘n roll. He was obsessed with Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California. At the time of his death from drugs and alcohol, his stepfather Bob Parsons hatched a scheme to have his stepson’s body picked up and removed for burial in New Orleans, Louisiana — ostensibly to establish residence and lay claim to Parsons’ personal fortune.
Up until that September night Parsons had led your typical live-fast-die-young kinda story. Then it got really weird. Parsons is undoubtedly the most influential rocker remembered more for what happened after he died than for what he did while alive. Although he never formally memorialized his last wishes on paper (remember, he was only 26), according to his closest friends, Parsons often said that he wanted to be cremated at Joshua Tree and have his ashes spread there. Contrarily, his stepfather arranged to have the body shipped to N’awlens for a private funeral, to which none of his low-life music buddies would be invited.
Said buddies would have none of that. So, fortified with beer and vodka, they hatched a scheme to steal Parsons’s body and honor his last wishes on their own. The ringleader of this would-be body snatching gang has been described as the “Road Manager Deluxe.” His name was Phil Kauffman and back in the day he was a fierce-looking man who looked better suited to a motorcycle gang than a recording studio mixing board. During his career Kaufman worked with The Rolling Stones, Emmylou Harris, Joe Cocker, Frank Zappa, Hank Williams III, Etta James, and many more. He was also Gram Parsons’s best friend.
According to Kaufman, he had made a pact with Parsons prior to his death regarding handling of their remains in the event of either man’s death. “Well, it was kind of more Gram’s idea than mine. We were at the funeral of a friend of ours, Clarence White, and it was this huge Catholic funeral. We both agreed that, if he’d had the choice, Clarence wouldn’t have chosen that kind of funeral, and we realized that we still did have a choice. So we made this pact: “If I die first, I want you to take me out to the desert and burn my body! Is it a deal?” “You got it! You do it for me, I’ll do it for you!” And that was it. We shook hands on it and that was it, it was a deal. Then, unfortunately, Gram died a couple of months later, and I felt honor-bound to see the deal through.”
The larger-than-life Kauffman had the street cred that would lend itself to just such a task. Over a long and varied career, Phil Kaufman has been almost famous several times. He appeared in several movies. He drove a pick-up truck on Larry Hagman’s Son of Blob. He’s there, if you look hard enough, in forgettable films like Riot in Juvenile Prison, Pork Chop Hill, Spartacus and The Honeymoon Machine.
He met Charles Manson while the two were serving time together in Terminal Island Prison while Kauffman was serving time for marijuana smuggling. Kauffman would later produce and release the charismatic killer’s only album Lie: The Love & Terror Cult in March of 1970. Before the murders were committed that would make them infamous, Kaufman spent time living with the Manson Family. When asked about his time there, Kaufman claimed that he has slept “with more serial killers than anyone else in show business.” After a statement like that it should come as no surprise at what Kauffman did next.
Upon hearing of his friend’s death, Kaufman called the funeral parlor in the small town of Joshua Tree and found out that the body would be driven to LAX, then flown via Continental Airlines to New Orleans. He called the airline’s mortuary service and found out that the body would arrive on the evening of Thursday September 20th. Kaufman recruited another of Parsons’s buddies, Michael Martin, who also knew about the pact, to help him with the devilish deed. Together they commandeered a hearse owned by Dale McElroy, Martin’s girlfriend and one of the girls present when Gram died. The couple used the old hearse for camping trips. It had no license plates and several broken windows, but it would do in a pinch.
The two men tried on suits in an effort to legitimize themselves, but they decided they looked so ridiculous that they changed into their tour clothes: Levi’s, cowboy boots, cowboy hats, and jackets with the legend “Sin City” stitched on the back. They loaded the hearse up with beer and Jack Daniels and headed for LAX. The duo arrived at the loading dock just as a flatbed truck rolled up with the Parsons casket. A drunken Kaufman somehow persuaded an airline employee that the Parsons family had changed its plans and wanted the body shipped home privately on a chartered flight.
As Kaufman was in the airport office, signing the paperwork with the name “Jeremy Nobody,” a policeman pulled up, blocking the hangar door. They were sure the jig was up, but the officer just sat in his car and did nothing. So Kaufman walked out to him, waved his forged paperwork, and said, “Hey, can you move that car?” The officer apologized, moved the car, and then, inexplicably, helped Kaufman load the casket onto a gurney and into the back of the hearse. Keep in mind, the vehicle had no license plate and was stuffed full of liquor cans and bottles.
To add to the lunacy, the equally pie-eyed Martin got behind the driver’s wheel and headed out of the hangar, only to run into the wall on his way out. The officer, after observing all this, commented ruefully, “I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes now,” got back in his patrol car and left. The two drunk bodysnatchers followed the clueless cop out of the airport with the body of their friend. They stopped at a gas station, filled a can with 5 gallons of high test gasoline (“I didn’t want him to ping,” Kaufman later said), and headed out for Joshua Tree.
They reached the park in the wee hours of Friday morning and drove until they were too drunk to drive any farther in the dark. There, near Cap Rock, a landmark geological formation in the park, they unloaded their friend’s coffin. He flung open the coffin and soaked the naked body of his friend with gasoline and threw in a match. The two watched as a giant fireball arose from the coffin carrying their friend’s ashes into the desert night. Kaufman saw car lights in the distance and concluded the police were on their way. Then they abandoned the charred remains and headed back to LA. Kauffman, in a typical unvarnished recollection recalls, “I looked in the box, and he was bubbling when we left. When they got there, all they found was brass and bones.”
The trip back to L.A. after burning the body was every bit as weird as the trip out had been and involved a stalled hearse in the desert, a multi-car pile-up on an LA freeway, a C.H.I.P.S. patrolman handcuffing Kaufman and Martin together and finally, Martin slipping his hand from the cuff followed by the hapless duo fleeing the scene in the hearse. When they got back to LA, they sawed off the other cuff, stashed the hearse, and went into hiding.
The smoldering coffin and Parsons’ partially cremated body were discovered by hikers at 9 a.m. the next morning. Park visitors also told police that they had seen a hearse containing two men near Cap Rock before the coffin was found. Back in Los Angeles, Kaufman and Martin read in the newspapers the story of the theft of Parsons’ body, the attempted cremation in the desert, and the speculation as to who might have done it and whether the amateur cremation had been “ritualistic.” The bosom-buddy-body-snatchers were arrested after witnesses at the airport and Joshua Tree identified them from photos. They appeared in West Los Angeles Municipal Court on Nov. 5, 1973 which, ironically, would have been Parsons’ 27th birthday. In 1972 there was no law against stealing a corpse, so the duo was charged with grand theft for stealing the coffin, each fined $300, and ordered to pay $708 in restitution for destroying the coffin.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kaufman threw himself a party to raise the fine money calling it “Kaufman’s Koffin Kaper Koncert.” They pasted beer bottles with crude homemade labels featuring a bad likeness of Parsons they named, “Gram Pilsner: A stiff drink for what ales you.” Dr. Demento served as deejay, and live music was provided by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt Kickers of “Monster Mash” fame. Despite the graveyard humor that permeated the party, it turned out to be a memorable wake for their friend.
Bob Parsons had the charred remains of his stepson shipped to New Orleans, where, after a small service attended by family only, he was buried in The Garden of Memories, an unimpressive cemetery on a highway near the airport in Metairie, just outside of New Orleans. Gram’s bronze plaque marking the gravesite is routinely adorned with liquor bottles and beer cans left by adoring fans. Although his stepfather succeeded in getting Gram’s body to Louisiana, his scheme to seize control of the rock star’s fortune was thwarted by a Florida court. About a year later, Bob Parsons died of an alcohol-related illness. He never made a dime off of Gram Parsons.
Despite his lack of commercial success, Gram Parsons acquired a small but fervent following. To this day, devoted fans travel to the Joshua Tree Inn to stay in Gram’s favorite room #8 and the room in which he died, room #1. These same fans chipped in to pay for a plaque that was placed near Cap Rock at the site of the attempted cremation. The concrete plaque has the title of the album released by Parsons’ International Submarine Band in 1968 “Safe At Home” inscribed upon it. Fans often camped out at the site and scrawled graffiti on the nearby rocks.
Since the cremation site was attracting so many unruly visitors to Joshua Tree National Park, the National Park Service decided to have the concrete slab removed, and it was brought to the Joshua Tree Inn, where it rests in an inside courtyard, just outside of Room 8, now known as the “Gram Parsons Suite.” It should come as no surprise to you to learn that the hotel is now rumored to be haunted by Gram Parsons. His ghost is said to manifest itself by rattling the round mirror on the wall of room # 8. The mirror is the only piece of furniture remaining in the room from the day he died.
So after all this, you still have never heard of Gram Parsons or his strange death and aftermath? Well that’s probably because, regardless of the macabre details surrounding the event, Gram’s demise was eclipsed by the death of pop star Jim Croce in a plane crash on September 20, 1973, the very day they snatched Gram’s body from the airport.
Al Hunter is the author of “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Indiana National Road” and “Haunted Irvington” book series. Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
