Picture Book: Gram Parsons, Keith Richards, and Anita Pallenberg in Joshua Tree

The relationship between Gram Parsons and Keith Richards is one of the more interesting musical friendships of the early 1970s. Both were working in a space where country music and rock music overlapped. Richards was coming from the rock side, having spent the previous decade helping to define the form. Parsons was coming from the country side, or rather from the place where the country tradition meets art rock meets the Laurel Canyon scene.

Their friendship was grounded in a shared enthusiasm for country music at a moment when country music was not, in most rock circles, a respectable enthusiasm.

Joshua Tree

Joshua Tree National Monument in California was where Parsons died in September 1973 and where he had spent significant time in the years before his death. The area's combination of desert landscape, extreme temperature ranges, and particular quality of light attracted a certain kind of musician and artist in the 1960s and 1970s.

The photographs of Parsons with Richards and Anita Pallenberg at or near Joshua Tree in the early 1970s are informal documents of a friendship. They show musicians spending time together in a landscape rather than performing in a venue or posing for a press photographer.

The influence

Richards has spoken in various interviews about the influence of Parsons on his own musical thinking. The country and soul direction that the Rolling Stones pursued in the early 1970s — on Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St., and related material — reflects an engagement with American roots music that Parsons helped deepen.

Exile on Main St., recorded in the basement of Richards's rented house in the South of France in 1971, has a country-blues quality that was not characteristic of the earlier Stones records. The influence is multiple and diffuse, but Parsons's presence in Richards's life in the years immediately before that recording is not irrelevant.

The Joshua Tree mythology

Joshua Tree has accumulated a body of mythology through the years. The U2 album, the Wim Wenders film Paris, Texas (which was shot in adjacent territory), and the general cultural weight of the California desert in music have all contributed to it.

Parsons's death there — at the Joshua Tree Inn, officially from heart failure accelerated by drug and alcohol interaction — is part of that mythology. The subsequent theft of his body by roadie Phil Kaufman, who brought it back to the desert for an improvised cremation in accordance with what Kaufman understood to be Parsons's wishes, is another part.

The photographs of Parsons alive and in that landscape, with friends, have a different weight in the context of what happened there.

Related: The Return of the Grievous Angel and My Morning Jacket Covers Gram Parsons. Full Picture Book index.