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.

The book goes to print today, and just in the nick of time the final cover design has arrived. Chris got so excited when he saw it that he let out a small wee. And cover art that makes a man wee should be shared, we hope you’ll agree.

Here’s what to look for when you’re browsing your local book store for Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America on May 4th. Or if you’re ordering from the interweb, they’ve sent you the wrong book if it arrives and doesn’t look like this (click on the image to see it full size):

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If we sound a little too excited by the prospect of an actual book with an actual cover with our actual names on it, containing actual pages with words on them that we actually wrote – well, it’s because we probably are. Thanks again for your help making it happen – helpful Parsons can find out if they have qualified for the ‘Most Helpful’ title in the acknowledgements at the back of the book. Naturally we’re keeping quiet about who they are for now, winky smiley face.

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:

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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:

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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:

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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:

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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