If Gram Parsons hadn’t existed, somebody else would have connected country and rock, and that person would have become the patron saint for Americana music. But it would have been a very different story if it had been someone else five years earlier or five years later. In Twenty Thousand Roads, David N. Meyer tells Parsons’ story as the product of southern culture on the skids, one of the last members of a wealthy family with enough money to insulate himself from the challenges that confront most people, and certainly most musicians.

In high school in Florida in the early 1960s, Parsons was a rock star—actually, a folk star—waiting to happen, and his journey took him to Harvard, then Greenwich Village, then Los Angeles, along the way he developed a pattern of walking away from bands and dropping the ball when it mattered most. It’s easy to connect his money and youthful sense of entitlement to Parsons abandoning the International Submarine Band before its debut album came out, or having to be reminded by the Rolling Stones that he probably should stop hanging out with them and go home to his band, the Flying Burrito Brothers.

Much of the Parsons story is inexorably bound to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, where post-hippie ideals met the music industry, drugs and a remarkable collective tolerance for indulgence. It was there that his soulful voice and vision of a music that linked county, rock and soul took root, even if he only left behind a handful of albums to document it. Unfortunately, in books as in life, Parsons is hard to like the more you know him, and his musical legacy is obscured by his casual abuse of drugs and those around him.

Meyer’s research seems suitably exhaustive, and it’s to his credit that after pages of documenting his failure to step up in live performances or stand by friends, he could still write that Parsons possessed “existential courage.” Even if you don’t buy that take, Twenty Thousand Roads remains fascinating for its insight in the Byrds, Altamont, Exile on Main Street and the world Parsons inhabited.