Kelly Prescott and Anders Drerup star as Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons in Grievous Angel: The Legend of Gram Parsons, playing two shows at te NAC's Fourth Stage.

OTTAWA - In a celebrity-obsessed world, the celebrities we obsess over the most are those tragic rock icons who blazed a trail but died way too young -- Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, Kurt Cobain.

One of the least known, but perhaps most tragic, was American country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons, who gets his due in a new musical biography -- Grievous Angel: The Legend of Gram Parsons.

Parsons' family was a magnet for tragedy. When Gram was 12, his dad "Coon Dog" Connors committed suicide two days before Christmas after discovering his wife was having an affair.

Then, like a figure out of a Tennessee Williams' play, Gram's mother promptly remarried Bob Parsons and drank herself to death five years later. During that time, the stepfather had Grams' younger sister Avis committed to a psychiatric institution before he eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver.

Initially, Parsons seemed unscarred by his family's epic dysfunction. He was the Harvard-educated heir to a fortune who also happened to be a spectacularly gifted guitarist and songwriter with the International Submarine Band, The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers before going solo. Later, he paired up with singer Emmylou Harris.

"Things came easily to him," says Michael Bate, who wrote and directs Grievous Angel.

"He was the coolest guy in the room, the only person who could upstage Mick Jagger at a party, he had so much charisma."

Despite seeming to have it all, Parsons couldn't escape the isolation and abandonment he experienced as a child, hiding in booze, cocaine and heroin.

He died in 1973 at age 26 after an overdose of morphine and tequila in Joshua Tree, Calif.

In his final drunken request, he asked to be cremated, with his ashes spread around the spiritually significant Joshua tree.

Tour manager-friend Phil Kaufman absconded Parsons' body from the tarmac at LAX airport, drove it out into the desert, got drunk and tried to burn the body, but had to abandon the gruesome task, leaving the body a 39-lb. mass of charred cinder.

"Even in death, Parsons was a slow-motion suicide, a tormented artist who went to the dark side for inspiration and fell in," Bate laments.

Bate met his hero in March, 1973 in Boston, six months before his death. That 30-minute conversation turned into Grievous Angel. Named after Parsons' final album, Bate's sketch of his hero is seven parts concert and three parts Greek tragedy, with Anders Drerup as Parsons and Kelly Prescott as Emmylou Harris.

"For Parsons, there was always a struggle between sin and salvation. If he had met Emmylou Harris a couple of years earlier, he might still be alive today. She almost saved him. But ultimately, he was destined to end tragically."

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