Cap Rock — where Gram Parsons's body was burned

Gram Parsons had told his road manager Phil Kaufman, in the way that young men sometimes speak to each other with more seriousness than anyone involved realises, that he wanted to be cremated in the Mojave Desert when he died — not returned to his family in Florida, not buried in a cemetery, but given back to the landscape he had loved. When Parsons died in Room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn on September 19, 1973, Kaufman decided to take him at his word.

Kaufman and a friend, Michael Martin, drove to Los Angeles International Airport, where Parsons's coffin was being prepared for a family-arranged flight to Louisiana. They intercepted it — loaded it into a hearse — and drove back east toward Joshua Tree. At Cap Rock, a geological formation in what is now Joshua Tree National Park, they doused the open coffin with petrol and set it alight. The fire burned what it burned, and they drove away. Kaufman was arrested and faced only a minor fine — there was no law against stealing a corpse in California at the time, only against stealing the coffin, which technically belonged to the funeral home.

Cap Rock is a large monzogranite boulder formation accessible by a short loop trail from the Cap Rock Nature Trail parking area on Park Boulevard. It is a popular and genuinely beautiful spot in daylight — Joshua trees, low desert scrub, the particular quality of Mojave light. There is no official marker for Gram Parsons. Fans leave guitar picks, flowers, and notes at the base of the rocks. The park rangers know why people stop there. The story of what happened here is one of rock music's most legendary acts of devotion, or madness, or both.