As Amazon are apparently too busy shifting units to update our lowly book entry with the new endorsements sent to them by our publisher several weeks ago, we hope you’ll indulge a tiny toot of our own trumpet by sharing them with you ourselves. We’re very excited about these; praise is always a wonderful thing of course, but to say that we’re proud to receive it from such brilliant and qualified minds as the ones belonging to Stanley Booth (author of rock-biog-to-end-all-rock-biogs The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones) and the poet and arts critic Diann Blakely, is to commit an act of criminal understatement:

“Among those rare volumes which are not only a joy sui generis, but also – and better yet – a joy to be shared by reading aloud. Mere satire is cheap; the blood in these pages is more authentic than any Nashville approximation of Americana.” Stanley Booth, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, Esquire, Georgia Music Magazine

“I howled myself silly. But like me, readers of Live Fast, Die Young will find their aching sides soothed by the heart-warming rhythms of mutual and musical harmony pulsing from two human hearts at their best.” Diann Blakely, National Book Critics Circle, Harvard Review, BookPage, Antioch Review, Nashville Scene

“A thoroughly enjoyable ride through the American musical wilderness. Live Fast, Die Young brings out the inner geek in every rock and roll dreamer.” Zane Lowe, BBC Radio 1

“A book that shows how your obsessions can shape and change your life. Excellent.” James Dean Bradfield, Manic Street Preachers

“The thinking man’s Dumb & Dumber.” Mike McCormack, Universal Music Publishing

Toot toot!

After last night’s phenomenal Lyle Lovett show at the Charleston Performing Arts Center, and with a new adventure Down Under just days away, Chris finds himself lacing up an old and familiar pair of shoes. Today felt like the right time to shuffle the deck and bring this Townes & Lyle mini blog back to the top of the pack.

Today is a Townes day. The flat is rented, tickets bought. Soon I’ll be heading to Australia for whatever rock and roll misadventure might present itself Down Under. There just remains the now customary and symbolic purchase of a new pair of Converse to mark the occasion. Time, then, to be tyin’ on my flyin’ shoes.

Music and travel are inextricably linked in my brain, and nothing captures the space in between – the inescapable urge to push on, musically and physically – than Townes Van Zandt’s Flyin’ Shoes. If you haven’t heard Lyle Lovett’s version of this song before, I recommend headphones, a quiet corner and an economy-size box of Kleenex as you do:

Being the discerning music lover that you are, I’m sure you and Townes are already well acquainted. But in the tragic and unlikely event you’ve never come across his music before, start with the stunning documentary Be Here To Love Me (which readers in America can watch on Hulu), then pop yourself out to a record store, buy some music and make up for lost time by not leaving the house for three weeks while you get to know each other.

Steve Earle once said that “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that”. Apart from the bit about cowboy boots, I couldn’t have put it better myself. So it’s a brave a rare talent that can pull off a cover which does justice to and – dare I say – improves upon the Townes original. Ignoring for a second our own forays into the TVZ oeuvre, I’ll say now that Lyle Lovett is probably the only one who can pull it off.

Goodness, that flame burns brightly still! We had such a phenomenal response to the GP birthday competition. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time and trouble to pen a message in the Room 8 guest book – we have been touched and humbled by all the GP love!

If only we could send books to all of you. Sadly we can’t – our publisher wouldn’t allow it for one thing – so we’ve had to make some tough decisions. We cogitated and deliberated, rated and debated, and in the end decided to choose stories which illustrate how Gram has been a connector in your lives, as he has in ours and in so many other people’s. So Aaron Beavers, Anna H and Graceless Lady – step forward and claim your prize! Congratulations – send your postal address to us using the ‘Contact Us’ link over there in the sidebar and we’ll mail it out to you.

To our unlucky losers, once again thank you for your touching messages, which the delightful Margo at the Joshua Tree Inn has kindly agreed to add to the real Room 8 guest book. We feel like we’ve connected with some wonderful new souls this past week (with special thanks to Shilah Morrow, guardian angel and headline act of Live Fast, Die Young for connecting us). Perhaps one day our paths will cross in the real world. For now though, Facebook is our closest connection to you all, and if you haven’t joined the team there already, we’d love to welcome you along. There are loads more ways to connect with us over there on the right of this page.

A final plug for the book, if we may be so bold. Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America is our own little birthday present to GP, and we like to think it’s a tribute to friendship too. There’s more information, photos and videos here on the site or on our various social media platforms. American friends may wish to consult this handy guide about how to get hold of your copy.

Happy Birthday Gram – the flame burns brightly tonight. We’ll sweep out the ashes in the morning.

Chris & Joe

Missing Parsons

P.S. We all know that Gram started something pretty special with his vision of Cosmic American Music. But did you know that in pursuing it he very nearly killed off a whole genre of music, barely out of diapers itself? No? Then have a read of Joe’s most recent blog Gram Parsons Killed Heavy Metal, immediately below this one.

The winners of the GP guestbook competition have been announced. Go here to find out if you’re a winner. Otherwise please enjoy new bloggings from Joe.

In October 2002 Chris Price and I entered Nottingham’s hallowed and legendary music venue Rock City. We walked up the stairs to the main room where their in-house metal messiah was, as they used to say, ‘spinning’. (Rock music is, frankly, a piece of piss to DJ. Unlike the trance-trousered ilk of Van Dyk and Tiesto, whose silky-sonic segues must be faultlessly executed, the rock DJ must simply wait until one track ends and then bang in the next one before anyone has a chance to leave the dancefloor.) We ordered beers – plastic bottles, urgh – and surveyed the scene.

Then something rather odd happened. Hearing Papa Roach’s ‘Last Resort’ heave from the speakers, Chris took a long swig of his warm Carlsberg, cleared the steps down to the dancefloor in a single bound, and without explanation began wildly swinging his arms around like a marionette under the spell of a drunk and delirious master of puppets. Then he began charging around the perimeter of the dancefloor, bounding and swinging, loping and windmilling.

There was only one thing for me to do. I tripped down to the sprung floor to join him, linked my hands behind my back, hunched down and shifted lumpenly from one leg to the other as though stamping out fires with my feet. After a minute or so we stopped and returned to our beers.

‘You saw it too then?’ I said, leaning against the bar.

‘Yup,’ belched Chris. ‘Genius.’

And we’ve never discussed the incident again.

Why did this happen? Well that’s a slightly longer story.

In 1988 hard rock took over the UK. To read the alternative music press however, whose army surplus combat trousers were all in a twist about the Stourbridge Sound of the Wonder Stuff, you would never have known it. The broadsheet music press were frothing over the likes of The House of Love, but it was Guns ‘N’ Roses, not the Stone Roses, howling from the stereos of second-hand Ford Escort in high streets and car parks throughout the land.

Iron Maiden headlined the largest heavy metal gig ever at Donnington in August of that year, when around 120,000 people gathered to watch a bill which included Dave Lee Roth, Kiss, Megadeth and Axl Rose’s crew. Even the also-rans of that period – bands which nowadays would have quit long ago through lack of sales – shifted enough records, merchandise and tickets to fund a lavish LA lifestyle of cocaine, hairspray and playboy bunnies. Ratt, Poison, Cinderella, Mötley Crüe, Faster Pussycat, LA Guns, Warrant, Skid Row and more – all could sell out an extensive UK tour. Even British bands doing bad impersonations of the Americans found themselves headlining at the Hammersmith Apollo. (Quireboys, anyone?) For goodness’ sake, Def Leppard’s Hysteria, which hails from that same purple patch, has gone twelve times platinum in America. Twelve times!

In the four-channel televisual world of Great Britain however, this explosion went largely unnoticed. With the exception of Tommy Vance’s Friday Night Rock Show on BBC Radio 1, and the occasional guerrilla raid on the charts, there was no reflection of what was happening in the rock clubs. Market stall holders’ money pouches were bulging with the profits of sew-on Maiden patches, but for the most part Thatcher’s Britain looked eagerly forward to the next Phil Collins album or the ooh-cheeky-get-you thrills of the Pet Shop Boys.

But something was happening. And somewhere deep within the offices of the BBC’s flagship cultural documentary strand Arena, a plucky producer had resolved to make a sixty-minute programme telling the story of the genre. On April the 7th 1989, ‘Arena: Heavy Metal’ was broadcast on BBC2.

‘Arena: Heavy Metal’ is not a great documentary, but it is a wonderful document; evidence of a stiff institution like the BBC attempting to embrace something it knows it should, but can’t quite bring itself to do. All the greats are in there of course – Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osborne, Bruce Dickinson (complete with requisite fencing scene and a remarkably Tufnell-esque tour of his stage wardrobe), Maurice Jones guiding us backstage at Donnington, where the only concession to comfort is an orange plastic swing and an empty paddling pool. But for every embarrassing metal moment there is some tremendous live footage of Hetfield’s mob, Slayer, Maiden, Napalm Death and more.

But all that becomes irrelevant around forty-five minutes into the programme. Following a peculiar section on Japanese metal, and a brief chat with a moustachioed Brummie metalhead espousing the delights of music that ‘picks you up and throws you across the room’, it cuts to a circle of air guitarists in a club rocking out. A lone man, lost in the music, bounds around them swinging his arms like an orangutan on acid. The caption reads: ‘Rock City, Nottingham’. It starts at 5.58 in this clip:

So that’s why we did it, and that’s why as we drained our beers we wore the smiles of men who’d fulfilled a childhood ambition. Albeit one that we had forgotten we held. But why am I writing all this now, eight years after the fact? Well, on Monday night a friend and magnificent man by the name of Russell Hancox came to my house armed with rosé wine, fine conversation and a DVD he’d dubbed off for me. It was the Arena show, exactly as I remembered. Except for one thing.

When I first watched it, I hadn’t noticed Raw magazine editor Malcolm Dome – aptly named and pleasingly bald – explaining the genesis of the term ‘Heavy Metal’. The phrase, he tells us, was first used in a musical context by a producer and music journalist called Sandy Pearl in 1968, in a review of the Byrds song ‘Artifical Energy’. He thought it apt to describe the aluminum quality of the Byrds’ guitar sound. ‘Artificial Energy’ comes from the album The Notorious Byrd Brothers, the last Byrds album before Gram Parsons joined and took them all whimsical and country.

So, though I’m week late, ladies and gentlemen please raise your glasses and wish a Happy 64th Birthday to Gram Parsons, the first man to try to kill off Heavy Metal.

Good-as-new musings from Chris – remixed, refixed and rebooted for his ‘An Englishman in Georgia’ column in the Glass Onion magazine.

After three months as a permanent resident, and several more as a regular visitor, I feel that Valdosta, Georgia and I are coming to understand each other on a deeper level. We’ve made it through those early first dates, the stilted conversations yielding to public hand-holding and balmy evenings spent dreaming up pet names for each other. Our toothbrushes, once perfect strangers separated literally by an ocean, now face one another contented and aglow across the top of a Harriet Carter ultraviolet toothbrush sanitizer. We are, it might be said, entering something of a honeymoon period.

I know this because my feelings towards Valdosta’s less appealing traits have mellowed somewhat. Like a coffee-slurping habit that might once have jeopardized a second date, I now feel permitted either to joke about her peccadilloes without fear of offense, or they’ve just stopped mattering altogether. It’s a nice feeling.

I’ll explain. Google ‘Valdosta, GA’, and somewhere among the top five entries you’ll see the phrases ‘Title Town USA’, ‘Winnersville’ or ‘Azalea City’. Title Town, of course, is the 2008 accolade handed down by ESPN in recognition of the city’s unrivalled championship football pedigree, and Winnersville the deserving title arising from Valdosta High School’s six national championship wins – ‘the winningest high school football team in the country’, according to the grammatically innovative ESPN. Azalea City – rather easier for me to grasp, this one – springs from the profusion of pink flowering shrubs abounding in Valdosta’s parks and gardens. Football and flowers, it seems, are how Valdosta rolls; to understand my winningest, bloomingest new home, I needed to experience both.

I started with the Azalea Festival, a springtime celebration of the burgeoning azalea in Valdosta’s lush and shaded Drexel Park; a chance, if you need one, to fill your face with fried dough and candy so sweet it makes your fillings tingle. It appeared on first glance to be a familiar mix of British farmers’ market – all handmade soaps and homespun basketry (sadly no Victoria sponges) – with American sideshow attractions such as Racing Pigs, Frisbee Dogs and a petting zoo thrown in to pep things up a little. (I still have to suppress an adolescent snicker whenever I pass a petting zoo. Where I’m from, petting is something you’re banned from doing in public swimming pools, not something you do to small animals. The phrase ‘petting zoo’ conjures images for me of caged, amorous couples in bathing suits looked on by stern-faced, keychain-swinging lifeguards.) Bang in the middle of all this was a wide, raised stage, tantalizingly empty on first passing but with a large PA system promising untold excitement if we stuck around until show time.

An hour later we passed again, just as a line of people, all dressed in matching white T-shirts, black jeans and cowboy boots was filing onto the stage. Thumbs hooked through their belt loops, they formed themselves into four rows of five and waited for the music to start. Garth McGraw, Travis Brooks or some such racket twanged forth from the PA system. The display team plodded left in time to the music, then briefly right, then turned to the back and clapped in unison. Now right, then left, followed by a right heel extended to the front. Clap. Repeat. This was my first taste – in the flesh – of line dancing.

Is there something I’m missing with line dancing? Would someone who knows be kind enough to drop me an email explaining the appeal of it? I hesitate to ask what the point of it is, because let’s face it what’s the point of football or cycling or singing or just dancing at all for that matter. But what’s the point of a line dancing display? What makes line dancers think other people want to watch them doing it? Line dancing is so close to what humans do in the course of their everyday lives – that is, propel themselves briefly by means of their legs in a variety of directions – that surely it barely qualifies as dancing at all. I do something very close to line dancing just moving around the kitchen, only without the clapping (unless I’m feeling especially pleased with my porcini risotto). Inviting people to watch you line dancing is a little like selling tickets to a monster trucks display and staging a series of synchronized three-point turns – only much, much less interesting. (Perhaps that’s what the clapping is for – somebody has to do it after all.)

More to the point, what hope is there for a line dancing display at an event which also lists Frisbee Dogs and Racing Pigs among its attractions? Surely when applying for your pitch it pays to check out the competition first. (‘Shit Bill, are you sure you wanna go ahead with this line dancing display? They got frisbee dogs and racin’ pigs.’) If nothing else, line dancing proves beyond doubt that not everything is a spectator sport. What consenting adults get up to in the privacy of their own community center is of course entirely up to them, and if pacing around in close formation to bad country music is your thing, then good luck to you. Just remember that, like heavy petting in the shallow end of your local swimming pool, doing it in public makes people uncomfortable.

But just as one eventually comes to overlook coffee slurping, I have forgiven Valdosta its line dancing. For entertainment value alone the Azalea Festival puts British country fairs decisively in the shadows. English village fêtes, I fear, will pale by comparison from now on, and no amount of Mrs. Postlethwaite’s admittedly divine Victoria sponge will make up for the absence of racing pigs. Now that my eyes have seen the light, Victoria sponge racing is the only answer.

Either that or synchronized heavy petting.

Some trivia fun by way of post script. There’s another reason I feel very at home in Valdosta. It’s the birthplace of a dearly-departed hero of both mine and Joe’s – first name William, middle name Melville – who appears both in Live Fast, Die Young and a posting barely a stone’s scroll from this one. The first reader to post his name on our Facebook page wins the respect, admiration and adulation of the 2,000-strong Missing Parsons social media community.