Honky- tonk angel

SOME suits tell a story, like the one on the cover of the Flying Burrito Brothers' 1969 album, "The Gilded Palace of Sin." It is worn by the band's leader, Gram Parsons; perhaps nobody else could have stood up to it. On the bell-bottom pants, embroidered flames crawl up the legs, all the way to the roses that cover the front and back pockets. Parsons' jacket lapels sport naked women, in the style of old-school sailors' tattoos. Rising up the front are impressively embroidered marijuana leaves; the sleeves feature Seconals, Tuinals and a presumably LSD-dosed sugar cube. On the back a blood-red cross is shot through with blue and gold rays.

Made for Parsons by Valley couturier Nudie Cohn, this wasn't a mere set of threads; it was the Sistine Chapel of Hollywood Hillbilly Heaven -- pleasure and pain, death and transfiguration all accounted for. It defined a moment, and to this day, when many think of Parsons, they see him in this suit.

In "Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music," David N. Meyer provides a more complicated point of view. This is far and away the most thorough biography of Parsons, who comes across here -- as he did at many a gig, party and late-night soiree -- as an elusive, never-quite-present figure, quickly retreating behind a carapace of women and drugs, guilt and hopefulness. Parsons was beloved and maddeningly separate from the scenes to which he was most attached, and it is both Meyer's achievement and his affliction to render fully a man who craved attention without understanding and got his wish. Parsons needed to be noticed, and to be apart.

He was born Cecil Ingram Connor III into a wealthy family overstocked with drunks. His mother was heiress to an orange empire in Florida, his father a decorated World War II fighter pilot known as Coon Dog, who projected "a kindly remove, an ambivalence about the world of ambition, a winning charm that drew people toward him but left them baffled as to his essential nature, a love of fun and taking risks, a tendency to addiction, a surprising lack of common hypocrisy when it came to pursuing his pleasures, and a Southern gift for doing very little but doing it with grace." These words richly suggest those of Southern historian W.J. Cash, and Meyer -- a Southerner himself -- barely raises a sweat showing how they apply as well to Coon Dog's son.