Today is a Townes day. The flat is rented, tickets bought. Soon I’ll be heading to Swampland in south Georgia (GP Guitar Pull in September, anyone?), then later in the year it’s off 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.

Photo sections in travel books – which side are you on? A refreshing break from all that tiresome wordage, or an unwelcome visual intrusion just when your imagination is furiously beating its wings against the waters of invention, running as fast as its webbed feet of fantasy will carry it and taking flight? No matter! With Live Fast, Die Young you can have it both ways. With this unique ‘electronic’ photo supplement, not only do you not have to turn the pages (see how they magically turn themselves!), they come with musical accompaniment from Missing Parsons too! And if photos just aren’t your thing, don’t worry – simply cover your eyes with your hands and enjoy the music! (Put another way, here’s what the ’slates’ would have looked like if there had been money to put any in the book – now with added annotation.)

If you like the music (which, on the advice of the boffins in our marketing and A&R departments, we have entitled ‘Live Fast, Die Young’) there’s more to be discovered at Missing Parsons the band, or you can buy the album on iTunes and Amazon.

A little birthday gift to Joe. As regular readers of this blog – and of Live Fast, Die Young – will know, gift exchanges between us come with a certain level of pressure attached. Not for us the latest box set of The Wire or monographed handkerchiefs it seems – it was a birthday gift exchange, after all, that started a coast-to-coast quest for the spirit of rock and roll America. Anything not pregnant with significance just won’t do. But times being tight, and therefore lacking the funds to buy something made out of gold, I had to get creative. I brainstormed, thinkercised and waterholed.

The title of the resulting video gift (below), like so many things to do with Missing Parsons and its ‘output’, is a reference to Bill Drummond’s work in progress The Smell of Money Underground. The eagle-eared among you will recognise the song in the first half as Bob Marley’s Redemption Song. To find out exactly how all his relates to our story – well, yes – you’ll have to read the book. (For a video of just the music from this clip, go here. Best enjoyed on headphones, better to facilitate emancipation from mental slavery.)

This is the Social in London, where we launched Live Fast, Die Young last night. Cool, centrally located, empty. The worry was that it would stay that way all evening. Then, barely half a pint of strong Dutch lager later, the place was teeming with all of our favourite people – many of them clutching a copy of the book, just purchased from the sales stand strategically placed by the door.

But the prospect of writing more than four sentences is too awful to contemplate in our current state, so here’s a little video of proceedings instead. If you entered the competition to win a signed copy of the book, watch to find out if you’re a winner!

Commiserations to our valiant losers, winky smiley emoticon. It just remains to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who came, bought the book or both. The warm glow this morning remains undiminished by heroic hangovers. We’ll post some photos on the Facebook page soon enough, but the effort just of writing three paragraphs has caused something of a bastard behind the eyes. Please be patient – and talk in a whisper – until we do. Thanks, as always, from Missing Parsons.

Soppy Postscript – 14th May

Now that the fuzzy head has cleared, a fuzziness of a quite different and very welcome kind remains. A word or two then about pride.

Several people – dozens in fact – told us how proud they were on Tuesday night. Which of course is a lovely, lovely thing. Since the launch I’ve received emails and texts saying the same. This is also lovely; it almost goes without saying that it’s a wonderful feeling when friends and family express pride in you.

But what has struck me most – the thing that I had never really considered before – is that telling someone you’re proud of them assumes a certain closeness to your proudee – a licence issued only to a very exclusive circle of people in your club. In short, it presupposes you have earned the right to tell them that. Try telling a passing acquaintance – your mechanic for instance – how proud you are of his community service efforts and, unless he happens to be your best friend or brother, he’ll probably smile nervously and announce that the cracked sump he’s been working on really isn’t going to fix itself.

All of which is a very round about way of saying that the book launch was a wonderful reminder of the depth and number of friendships in my life. And that too is a lovely thing.

I did warn you it was soppy.

There’s a kind of wearisome inevitability about two film lovers publishing a book on May 4th and announcing it with a bad Star Wars pun. Please believe us when we say that Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America is much funnier. Promise. We’re thrilled – literally beside ourselves (er, each other?) with glee – to tell you that the book is available in stores from today. If you prefer to shop online, Amazon are still offering a 25% discount (US peeps go here for more info on the best way to get your copy). To celebrate, we’re offering you the chance to win a personally signed copy. Have a watch of the opening chapter below, then read on for how to enter:

For your chance to win, all we ask is that you share this video with your friends. If you arrived here from Facebook, hit ‘Share’ under the post for this video on the Missing Parsons page and give us a thumbs up so we know you’ve passed it on*. If you’re a Twitter follower, just retweet one of the many tweets containing this video. And if social media aren’t your thing, just share this blog post with your friends via email and then let us know in the comments box below.

Last entries accepted at 14.00 BST on May 11th. We’ll pick a winner from Joe’s very large bespoke hat at the book launch (which starts at 18.00 that day) and announce the winner here on the 12th. Good luck!

*If you do enter, please do share the video or angels will die in heaven. Some naughty peoples are entering without sharing, which frankly isn’t cricket. (What’s the emoticon for ‘not angry, just disappointed’?)

Additional Brownie points, but absolutely no prize whatsoever, will be awarded to anyone who can spot the badly hidden film reference (not Butch & Sundance or Star Wars) in the prologue video above. Clue – it’s near the beginning and end of the clip.

I don’t believe in fate. For me there is no predetermined path, no pattern, no destiny. I believe existence is arbitrary, events determined by a combination of chance and free will. But today has been a very odd day. A random series of happenings, entirely unconnected to each other and invisible to anyone but me and Joe, have conspired to make today the kind of day when you question whether there isn’t some sort of bizarre matrix which reaches down into your tiny existence from time to time and plays jokes on you.

Some background. As – fingers crossed – you will read in Live Fast, Die Young when it comes out on 4 May (pre-order now for a 25% discount), Joe and I are massive fans of The KLF. Without them – without Bill Drummond especially – the Live Fast quest would almost certainly not have happened. I won’t say much more than that here because I don’t want to spoil your enjoyment of the book, but suffice it to say that Drummond’s trademark grand gestures rubber-stamped our pointless peregrinations in a very powerful way. We were out both to prove him right and wrong at the same time.

In 1988 Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, then known by another of their aliases The Timelords, released a record called ‘Doctorin’ The Tardis’ (see video above). A cheesy but exhilarating mash-up of the Doctor Who theme music, Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock & Roll (Part Two)’ and ‘Blockbuster’ by The Sweet, it was described by the music press variously as ‘excruciating’ (Melody Maker), ‘rancid’ (Select) and ‘noxious’ (Sounds). It sold over a million copies and went straight to number one.

Their next hit was a book. The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), was as much a swipe at the music industry as a fascinating and revealing exposition of how to have a number one record. In the section on ‘plugging’ – radio promotion by record labels – they assert that being a BBC Radio 1 producer is the fastest way to lose touch with whatever finer qualities your soul once had. As Radio 1 producers we were keen to prove them wrong.

As you will also have gathered, Gram Parsons is a big part of Live Fast, Die Young too. Odd then, having written a book inspired in part by The Timelords and Gram Parsons (and incidentally containing a brief mention of Gavin Rossdale from Bush) to open The Sun newspaper today and see this …

… a picture of Gram Parsons, Doctor Who and Gavin Rossdale mapped over the Joshua Tree National Park and the southwestern United States. It seems Matt Smith, the latest incarnation of Doctor Who, is a fan of Gram Parsons – indeed woo’ed his current girlfriend Daisy Lowe by singing Gram songs to her – and they’ve gone on a pilgrimage to Joshua Tree to see where it all went on. While they’re there, Daisy is going to introduce Matt to her dad – one Gavin Rossdale (see the full article). Gobsmacked isn’t the word.

You may also know that Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’ plays a big part in our story.  Whilst surfing the internet this afternoon checking my KLF facts for this piece, I stumbled across a tune I had completely forgotten about:

Bill had found us again.

Oh, and today is Glen Campbell’s birthday. Happy birthday Glen. If you’re celebrating in Joshua Tree, having just received a Doctor Who DVD boxset and a Bush best of, please keep it to yourself. I’m not sure my fried brain could handle it.

(This week’s Parson of the Week is Parson Yaz Ewers, who has been kindly sharing our blogs with her friends on Facebook. To read the incredible story of how she came to be a Parson – another coincidence which we can still hardly believe ourselves – click here.)

Several people have asked who we are and how Missing Parsons works. So here’s a short lesson in three easy steps. Missing Parsons is a book, a band and a blog. We think of all three things as being expressions of what it means to be a fan of music – mainly (but not exclusively) Americana. If you love music – especially if you love it a bit too much – you’re a Parson too. Welcome along! Gram Parsons is the inspiration for what we do because he was all about turning people on to the music he loved.

You’re reading the blog right now, so that just leaves the book and the band.

1. The book.

Missing Parsons the writers are Chris Price and Joe Harland. We work in radio, and met when we made programmes and devised the playlist for BBC Radio 1. Joe still works there as an executive producer and Chris, after a few years devising music strategy for MTV, runs a radio production company and media consultancy called New Slang Media.

Together we’ve written a book about our search for the soul of American music. It’s called Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America, and you can buy it here. (US Parsons go here for details of how to get your copy.) If you’d like to find out more about the book, have a read of this synopsis, or read the prologue on Amazon.

So the book side of it looks like this:

-

2. The band.

Missing Parsons the songwriters are Chris Price and Simon Kilshaw. Simon is a lecturer in Music Technology at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. He’s the technical and production brains behind the band – it’s Simon who wrote the program for playing the Theremin on a Wii (listen to it on our cover of If I Needed You) and he’s also working on another exciting evolution to Missing Parsons’ technology presence, of which more soon.

Chris and Simon met at school and have played music together for years. We recorded a soundtrack to accompany the journey described in the book, and the first track on the album, Live Fast, Die Young – can you see what we’ve done there? – has become our theme tune. We wrote the songs, sang and played all the instruments with a little help from more talented Parsons on the bits which were too difficult to do on our own (crikey the pedal steel is hard).

You can buy the album from iTunes, Amazon or your favourite digital music retailer, and if your territory supports it you can listen on Spotify.

So the band bit looks like this:

-

So far so good. Now, as we were never very good at Venn diagrams at school, the next bit is probably ill advised. But here goes. Put another way – don’t they say ‘expressed as non-overlapping sets’ or something? – Missing Parsons, represented as a whole, currently looks like this:

-

Simon and Chris are on the left writing the music, Chris and Joe on the right writing the book. We’re working on ways of making Missing Parsons look more like this:

-

More details as we have them.

Hope that clears things up for now. Thanks again for being part of the Missing Parsons community. We get so much enjoyment out of your comments, suggestions and feedback. If you’re a recently welcomed Parson and your appetite has been whetted (whet? whit? what?) there’s more on our Facebook page (where we have most fun), You Tube channel, Twitter stream, No Depression page and MySpace profile. Phew!

All the best,

Chief Executive Parsons Chris, Joe & Simon

Missing Parsons

… or ANIMALS: You’re Making Humans Look Bad. New bloggings from Chris on Wildcats, Frisbee Dogs, Racin’ Pigs and Heavy Petting.

I’m in Valdosta, Georgia.

You might know Valdosta as ‘Title Town USA’, an accolade handed down by viewers of ESPN in 2008 because of the city’s unrivalled championship football pedigree. Or maybe you know it as ‘Winnersville’ on account of Valdosta High School’s six national championship titles – ‘the winningest high school football team in the country’, as ESPN put it. (That high school football is so huge in America still amazes me, almost as much as the fact that ‘winningest’ is considered acceptable scripting for television.) Not bad though, for a city with a population of 40,000 – Valdosta apparently punches way above its weight. If you’ve seen the film or read the book Friday Night Lights, Valdosta Wildcats are like the Permian Panthers, only better – because they win.

Or you might know Valdosta by its more homely and horticultural name – Azalea City – on account of the profusion of purple, flowering shrubs found in its parks and gardens. In recognition of this, Valdosta was recently voted ‘the most bloomingest city in South Georgia’ by Home & Garden Television.

No, you’re right. It wasn’t. But they do have an Azalea Festival every year in the city’s lush and pine-shaded Drexel Park, a springtime celebration of the blossoming azalea and another chance – if you need one – to fill your face with fried dough and candy so sweet it makes your fillings tingle. This Saturday we were looking for just such an opportunity.

The Azalea Festival was a mix of British farmers’ market – all handmade soaps and homespun basketry – with some sideshow attractions of the American country show variety thrown in for added interest: racing pigs, Frisbee dogs, petting zoo, that sort of thing. (I still have to suppress an adolescent snigger 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 locked up by stern-faced lifeguards.)

Bang in the middle of all this was a wide, raised stage, tantalisingly 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 thundered from the speakers. They plodded left in time to the music, then briefly right, then turned to the back and clapped in unison. Now right, then briefly left, then an extended right heel out in front. Clap. Repeat.

Can someone please explain the appeal of line dancing to me? 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 daily lives – that is, propel themselves by means of their legs in a variety of directions – that it barely qualifies as dancing at all. When a group of people collectively display such a staggering lack of artistic ambition, a crowd can only ever feel short changed. Inviting people to watch you line dancing is a little like selling tickets to a monster trucks display and then staging a series of synchronised three-point turns. Only much, much less interesting.

And more to the point, what hope is there for a line dancing display at a festival which also lists Frisbee dogs and racing pigs among its attractions? You would think that 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.’)

What consenting adults get up to in the privacy of their own community centre 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. But like petting in the shallow end of your local swimming pool, doing it in public makes people uncomfortable.

In fact, here’s a suggestion. Let’s outlaw line dancing in public – make it a new commandment even – and replace it with synchronised heavy petting at next year’s Azalea Festival. Feedback welcome.

(And – ahem – you can pre-order Live Fast, Die Young on Amazon now at a guaranteed 25% discount.)

Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top is known to play guitar with a Mexican peso coin instead of a plectrum, as it gives him a sound that no plastic pick could achieve. Queen’s Brian May uses an old money sixpence piece on the grounds that it has perfect rigidity for maximum control. (I just checked his Wikipedia page, which states that ‘he is known to carry coins in his pockets specifically for this purpose’. The temptation to change this to ‘specifically for buying things’ was almost too much resist.)

This weekend I went one better than both of them:

Or rather Joe did. For some time now we’ve been throwing ideas around as to how we should spend the modest advance we received from our publisher for Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America – something we can look back on in years to come and remember the first time (hopefully not the last) that somebody paid us actual cash-money to write words. Joe, as you can see in the blog post below this one, thought long and hard about a suitably literary memento, and bought a hat. (Your guess is as good as mine – a thinking cap maybe? Stop the words escaping?)

But his track record for buying other people gifts is rather better. For my thirtieth birthday he rallied a posse of work colleagues who clubbed together and bought me the nicest, most thoughtful present I have ever received. I’ll say no more about it here than that it’s a piece of art by a highly respected ‘art terrorist’ we both love, and has pride of place on my living room wall. The real telling of that story is reserved for the book, which – fingers crossed – you’ll enjoy when it comes out in May (although by all means pre-order it now). Suffice it to say that it has been one-nil to Joe in the thoughtfulness stakes for a long time.

I hadn’t decided what my gift to myself would be. A nice writing pen perhaps, or a new laptop. Then Joe went and bought me this, as a thank you present for the joyful experience of writing the book together:

I like to write and play guitar. That’s a solid gold plectrum engraved with … well you can see what it’s engraved with. If you can think of a more perfect gift that Joe or anyone else could have bought me, I’d like to hear about it. I don’t mind telling you I had to fight back a tear when he gave it to me on Sunday. Don’t mind telling you one bit.

Thank you, author and friend.

Another short excerpt from the book - Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America, out May 2010 - which our lovely publisher has kindly allowed us to post. This one’s about an unplanned overnight stop in Vail, Colorado.

Note that like many of the blogs we’ve posted to this page, the action involves us either trying to do something and failing, or just failing to do anything at all. This is because we’re saving the really exciting stuff – the bits where we try to do things and succeed – for the book, which costs money when it comes out in May. We hope you won’t be offended by this. If you are, keep in mind that old saying from the world of publishing: ‘Books with people trying to do things and succeeding cost money. Blogs where they try and fail do not’.

This one is in bold for Joe and, er … unbold for Chris:

We fell short of reaching Denver by sundown and settled instead for Vail, which competes with Aspen, a couple of hours west, for the title of ‘American ski resort most likely to cripple you financially if not actually’. (Aspen holds the record currently; killing a member of the Kennedy family scores triple points.) Excited at the prospect of enjoying a night on the tiles in one of the world’s most prestigious mountain resorts, we checked into the least prestigious lodgings we could find in order to conserve pennies for a ‘massive night out’ in the village.

In season, Roost Lodge is the ideal place for Vail’s youngest and least affluent visitors to sleep off a hangover. Off-peak, it apparently served as a dosshouse for the hundreds of construction workers bussed in to make the place ship shape for the start of the season. And us. We checked in, then immediately jumped in a taxi up to the village in order to avail ourselves of all that’s available in Vail.

Pre-season Vail at night is what Harrods must be like after the doors have been locked and the cleaners move in. It’s pristine, unspeakably pretty, but unutterably dull. After a brief look around we found the only place with more customers than staff, an Italian restaurant and bar called Vendettas, and tucked into a pizza just smaller than our table.

But pizza wasn’t why had come to Vail. We were two red-blooded males starved of excitement for days in the desert, and we wanted action. I quizzed the waitress as to the possibilities for stimulation in Vail off-peak. She disappeared and returned a moment later brandishing a card detailing something called a ‘Pub Crawl’ taking place every Tuesday night in the village. All we needed to do was drink one beer in each of five bars dotted along the main street, and we would be entered into a prize draw by the host venue after midnight. Prizes included tickets to see the Denver Broncos, and a snowboard.

We did the math. There were approximately fourteen people in the resort at the time, most of whom were either behind a bar or at the wheel of a taxi, so the odds were stacked in our favour. How could we lose? Drink some beer, stay up until midnight and win a prize. This should present no significant problem for two hard-drinkin’, street-fightin’ fellas like us. Bring it on.

In fact we turned out to be a couple of softies for whom the prospect of drinking more than three alcoholic beverages in anything approaching quick succession was scarier than a baby with fingers for eyes. We managed one more beer in a bar round the corner, which turned out not to be a participating venue anyway, and retired to bed, pooped. We tried our best to convince ourselves that, well, it had been a long drive hadn’t it, and this prissy place probably couldn’t handle us anyway. But there was no escaping the fact that we were two grown males faced with near-certain odds of winning a prize relating to extreme sports or football, and neither of them were sufficient incentive to put away a measly five beers. We picked up our handbags and left.

Dumping our handbags on our separate beds in our separate rooms, we separately flicked on our separate televisions. The men on mine were playing rounders, only not.

It’s all too often said how bemusing and baffling cricket is. But the implication has always seemed to be that all other sports are simple by comparison. Football, bar the offside rule, is almost as simple as it’s possible to be, with the possible exception of boxing (or ‘hitting’ as I’ve always felt it should be called), but baseball seems every inch as complex as cricket.

And I now had the perfect forum to learn the complexities, the peculiarities, and the delights of a sport that my father first tried twenty-six years ago to get me into. That forum was the World Series. This year the St. Louis Cardinals faced the Detroit Tigers. We didn’t know that the series was on until meeting up with Punk Rock Mike in LA, where we had watched part of the deciding game which took St. Louis to the final. The Mets lost, but if you get the chance to glance at You Tube, look up ‘chavez catch mets’ and witness the most extraordinary catch you will probably ever see in sport. The ball was not just heading out of the ground, it was out of the ground. Chavez though ran to the fence and jumped so high, arched his arm back so far, and tilted his glove so much that he caught the ball despite its being almost two feet over the fence. When he landed he had the same look of disbelief that was on every face in the crowd. If life were the movies they would have gone on to win the game, and then the series. It isn’t, and they didn’t.

Which brought us to where we were today. After three games of the World Series, St. Louis led two games to one. This, we were told in an array of bellowed sportspeak, was a big deal for them. Seventy-two per cent of game three winners in the last nine years had won the series, and sixty-four per cent of away teams with pitchers over 6’ 2” had won two consecutive games in Detroit in the last four seasons. And of course ever since Roberto Alomar hit the winning home run for the Toronto Blue Jays back in ‘92, no avian-themed team with Hispanic lead batsmen had lost in the World Series. I made some of those statistics up, but in the context of the absurdly over-analytical world of baseball stats, they’re entirely plausible.

Baseball coverage has long since crossed over from meaningful interpretation of events to a hybrid of statistics and superstition. And how baseball fans love statistics. It seems they simply can’t bear to admit that this might be just a sport, susceptible to human error and – dare we say it – luck. Apparently it is a holy sporting algorithm that one day men with abacuses will be able to predict with total accuracy. At which point presumably the teams won’t even have to play – the managers can just announce the teams and the bean-counters will determine in a matter of minutes who the winners would be, thereby saving the messy business of actually having to play the game.

It was too early to know who the star of the series would be. We couldn’t yet know which batsman, pitcher, catcher or baseman would be the hero of this year’s contest, but I already had a favourite. I’m sorry to say that he was my top choice not for his skills on the field (though he appeared to be something of a talismanic bat for St. Louis), but for his name. Whilst the name Albert Pujols didn’t make me laugh per se, I was cheered when he took the field by thoughts of small children across America falling to the floor and choking on their chips when the commentator said (and the phonetics are important here): ‘We’re in the eighth innings and it’s getting pretty sticky at the bottom for St Louis – which means one thing – it’s time for poo-holes.’ If I listened carefully I could hear moms all over America tutting as they wiped spittle-flecked popcorn from the fifty-six inch plasma screen.