Joshua Tree Inn — where Gram Parsons died

The Joshua Tree Inn is a small motel on the 29 Palms Highway on the edge of Joshua Tree, California — a single-storey adobe building with rooms arranged around a courtyard, the kind of place that exists in the American Southwest in large quantities and generally passes without notice. Room 8 is where Gram Parsons died on September 19, 1973, aged twenty-six. The cause was a drug overdose — morphine and alcohol — after a night of use that several people present have described with varying accuracy in the decades since. He had been staying at the inn while recovering from a tour.

Parsons had been drawn to the Joshua Tree area since the late 1960s through his friendship with Keith Richards; the two would visit the park together, camping, talking about music, taking peyote, watching the sky. Parsons had a genuine mystical attachment to the Mojave Desert landscape, and the Joshua Tree Inn was his base camp for those excursions. His death in Room 8 on the 29 Palms Highway was consistent with the trajectory of a life spent pursuing experience at its most extreme — though no one who knew him suggested it was any kind of deliberate exit. It was, by all accounts, simply a night that went too far.

Room 8 is still bookable at the Joshua Tree Inn and has become the most requested room at any small motel in America. Guests leave tributes on the walls and in a guest book that functions as a continuous rolling memorial. The surrounding landscape — the park, the high desert, the quality of light — is unchanged from what Parsons saw when he chose to keep returning here. The park rangers know why people stop at certain formations.