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Gram Parsons knew how to live.

“The simple facts are these,” David Meyer writesin “Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsonsand His Cosmic American Music,” a new biography on thepioneer of country-rock music. “Gram Parsons lookedlike a movie star, sang like an angel, wrote like a poet,slept with every woman he wanted, took the most and the bestdrugs, hung out with the coolest people, and set the musicaltrends for the next two generations.”

But it was his death that made Parsons a legend.

And like everything else he did, Gram Parsons made surethat it was a spectacular parting shot.

After he died from a drug overdose on Sept. 19, 1973, hisfriends granted the 26-year-old musical prodigy’s lastrequest by stealing his body at the Los AngelesInternational Airport, from where it was to be shipped toLouisiana for a proper burial, and returning it to hisspiritual hideaway at California’s Joshua Tree NationalMonument, where they set fire to the casket in a primitiveattempt to cremate his body.

Thirty-five years later, that story - along with a musicallegacy that inspired and influenced everyone from the Byrdsand the Rolling Stones to Emmylou Harris and LucindaWilliams - has made Parsons even larger in death than he wasin life.

“His personality is inseparable from his music,”Meyer says. “His music has a lot of power and drawspeople in, but also it’s the idea of the way he livedand died.

“He has one of the most famous deaths in rockhistory, and certainly one of the strangest.”

Before the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt made country-rockcommercial, it was Parsons who paved the way.

A native son of Waycross, Ga., Parsons grew up in WinterHaven, Fla., where his family made (and squandered) afortune in Florida’s citrus industry. He idolizedElvis, and by his early teens, he was already playing incover bands. Rich and spoiled, he got away with in talentwhat he lacked in discipline.

Although he was reared in the cradle of country music, itwasn’t until his abbreviated stay at HarvardUniversity, where he left after one semester, that Parsonsheard Merle Haggard for the first time and decided that wasthe music for him.

He later helped steer the seminal ’60spsychedelic-rock band the Byrds in a country direction withtheir groundbreaking “Sweethearts of the Rodeo”album in 1968, and within that same year, he