Chris and Simon have been busy in the studio again, and wanted to share this new recording with you. Entitled Twenty Thousand Roads, it’s an homage of sorts to Gram Parsons, based around a loop of one of his most recognisable lyrics. Hope you like it – have a listen, comment and share if you feel inclined, then read on below if you’d like to help us make a video for it!
We thought it would be fun to get you guys involved in making a simple slideshow-style video for Twenty Thousand Roads. All we need is a photo of your favourite road – could be the one you live on, a stretch of black top you just really like, anything really – and we’ll edit them all together into a montage of vanishing points from (hopefully) all corners of the world. Don’t worry if you’re not much of a photographer; the one above (of Pontcanna Fields in Cardiff) was taken on a smartphone and spruced up in Instagram with the Lo-fi filter. Hipstamatic is also pretty good – using one of these photo-sharing apps will help give a uniformity of tone and aspect ratio to the final piece.
When you’ve taken your photo – ideally a symmetrical ‘vanishing point’-style one like the Pontcanna Fields snap above (but please don’t get run over, will you?) – either post it to the Missing Parsons Facebook page by clicking Photo above the ‘Write something …’ box, or email it to us using the Contact Us link in the sidebar over there. Tell us who you are and where you took the photo. Send several if you like – who knows, we might even get the full complement of 20,000! – and we’ll do the rest. Thanks for getting involved, and please share this post with your photo-blogging friends! MPx
If you ever hear Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix) by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on. Something terrible has just happened, possibly involving the death of the queen or an untold number of her subjects. If you’re a fan of ambient and chill-out music, try watching the rolling news with subtitles on and the radio turned up – you may never hear Chris Moyles play so perfect a selection of Ibiza sunset moments ever again.
Radio stations, especially big ones like BBC Radio 1, the UK’s national pop network, are prepared for bad stuff happening: it’s called ‘obit procedure’. When a catastrophic news story breaks, such as the death of a royal family member, each network has an audience-appropriate mix of obituary music on standby that will ‘reflect the mood of the nation’, as the internal BBC documentation has it. As Music Producer for six years in the early noughties, my job at Radio 1 involved selecting the playlist and programming music for the daytime shows – Scott Mills, Sara Cox, Jo Whiley, Mark & Lard and Chris Moyles. In times of crisis this meant finding music that young people like, but which won’t be too noisy or upbeat or just plain offensive when something awful happens. It’s harder than it sounds.
Chill-out music is fail safe because it tends not to have lyrics to trip up on before you’re even out of the blocks. As long as the mood is sombre and vaguely reflective-sounding, you can be confident with an instrumental piece about not offending anyone – for example by failing to consider that line ‘catch you when you fall’, just as news arrives of Prince Andrew’s demise in a horrific helicopter accident. (Every music programmer has a horror story about playing a ‘howler’ like this. Mine came in 2002 when, scanning artists and titles in the music logs immediately following the Potters Bar rail disaster, I deemed Overload by the Sugababes sufficiently inoffensive to be played out of the news. My forehead hit the desk just as the chorus chimed in: “Train comes, I don’t know its destination. It’s a one-way ticket to a madman situation.”) While the terrace at Pacha might seem like an odd vibe to recreate during times of national tragedy, having a good hour’s worth of harmless, lyric-free tunes to hand buys you time while you work out what to do next.
But nothing could have prepared us for 9/11. During advance obit preparations I had scrupulously considered every lyric of every song, rejecting any and all references – literal or metaphorical – to death, crashes, explosions and natural disasters, before settling on the final list. Even the most innocuous lyric takes on a sinister undertone heard in obit mode. Dido’s insipid and cheerless pop ballads make her perfect obit fodder, right up to the point when you realize White Flag – “I will go down with this ship” – might sound a tad insensitive in the wake of a ferry disaster. So how exactly do you prepare for the world’s worst terrorist atrocity? How, to coin a phrase, do you imagine the unimaginable? You don’t.
Shortly after 2pm London time on September 11th 2001, I received an email from a friend – Al Hamer of Sweet Billy Pilgrim – instructing me, and presumably everyone else in his pre-Twitter address book, to “turn the TV on. NOW.” I flipped to BBC News 24 as TV sets blinked on in unison around the open-plan office, and watched in dismay as the second plane hit the South Tower. Mark Radcliffe was on air from Manchester at that time – a relief under the circumstances because, though the Mark & Lard staple was toilet humour and unbridled sexual innuendo, Radcliffe was a radio veteran who could switch into serious broadcaster mode at the drop of a hat. In the 2.30 news, an audibly shaken Claire Bradley reported that two airplanes had hit the Twin Towers, with a BBC commentator speculating that it could be a terrorist attack.
The song we played out of that first news bulletin is now lost in the ensuing frenzy; I’m not sure I even want to know. But I can be mercifully certain, since we had not yet received instructions to go into obit procedure, that it wasn’t Haunted Dancehall; given what we now know about the martyrdom aspirations of the 9/11 hi-jackers, Sabres of Paradise might be the most inappropriate artist we could possibly have marked the moment with. What became abundantly clear within moments of the story breaking was that our carefully laid obit plans were hopelessly inadequate. This wasn’t a national tragedy or royal death; it was bigger and more terrible by several orders of magnitude. The radio response, somewhat perversely given the dreadful scenes already being repeated on television, demanded a lightness of touch, not mawkishness or mourning.
At 3pm, just as the full horror of the atrocities was beginning to unfold, Radio 1’s most talkative presenter went into the studio with nothing to say. Chris Moyles, then entertaining millions in the afternoon drivetime slot with a daily repertoire of bum gags and fart jokes, rightly took the view that today called for a different kind of show: “Let’s just play music and I’ll throw to the news between songs.” Under any other circumstances this would literally have been music to my ears; programming for a personality jock like Chris is a kind of tug-of-war: at one end of the rope, a presenter who wants more talk and less music; at the other end, a Music Producer loudly pleading from the production office upstairs that he “play a fucking record” whenever a link (talky bit) entered its eleventh minute. By this process of attrition, the ‘clock’ for Moyles’ show – a kind of template by which all radio programmes structure each hour – had come to contain far fewer songs than those of other presenters.
Generally music logs are delivered to programme teams around 24 to 48 hours in advance of broadcast, allowing producers time to write any relevant editorial content into their scripts. Suddenly, just minutes before he was due on air, Chris needed twice the number of songs he normally played, every one of them screened to account for the sensitivities of the unfolding catastrophe. The first thing was to remove all songs that hit the wrong tone musically. Out went anything too jiggy, too banging, too edgy or too poppy, which didn’t leave much to play with – this was Radio 1 after all. Next, lyrics: Let Me Blow Ya Mind by Eve – out. Castles in the Sky by Ian Van Dahl – out. U2’s Elevation – out. Within fifteen minutes of going to air, Moyles had played every song in what remained of his first hour.
By now Alex Donelly, my boss and Radio 1’s Head of Music, had come down from his upstairs office to manage the music response and lend a hand with the programming. A Dunkirk spirit emerged as the search for suitable music became more frenzied. We would interrogate the database for any ‘Mood 1 or 2’ songs (all music is graded in this way for radio, from very sad to very happy, in order to create an evenness of sound), feeding minidiscs into two hi-fi stereos in tandem as a final check before they went downstairs. Suddenly that throwaway lyric – ‘catch you when you fall’ – became menacing and real when people were literally falling out of the New York skyline, and nothing like it could go to air – even if it meant playing Zero 7 for the third time this hour. At one point we were delivering playlists with only one or two songs cued up in the studio, with a lot of air still to fill.
That evening, slightly stunned to find that it was still going ahead, a handful of us attended the Mercury Music Prize, in which PJ Harvey collected the first of her two awards, for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Improbably, she was on tour in Washington DC at the time. Holed up in her hotel room, she accepted the award by telephone; we leaned in close as Zoe Ball presented the award, the better to make out Polly’s soft, West Country lilt haunting the dancehall of the Dorchester Hotel: “It’s been a very surreal day. We can see the Pentagon from our window.” Chillers of free wine and champagne sat untouched on the tables in front of us.
It went on for days. Hitting the right tone remained the toughest challenge, as much for presenters and producers as for us, the music team. Even the next morning it was difficult to judge the mood of the nation, as the guidelines demanded we do, so we took our cues from the talent, who had a direct line to the listeners. Just when do you get back to ‘normal’ after something like this, and what role should Radio 1 play in making that happen? When do phone-ins, competitions and knob gags go back in the script? When is Bootylicious fair game again, and when does Have A Nice Day by Stereophonics stop sounding wrong? Musically we needed a kind of intermediary stage, one that would gently lift the national mood rather than yank the listener out of the doldrums and demand they feel fine again. We needed uplifting, anthemic guitar songs with shiny production and contemplative but hopeful lyrics that would bridge a gap between chill out and jiggy. We needed Yellow, Trouble and Don’t Panic. The days following September 11th 2001 may be the only time I have said this, but thank God for Coldplay.
Sad day. We lost a very dear four-legged friend and family member. Lily the Weimaraner was a special dog – faithful and loving, mischievous, with schnuggles at the ready whenever they were needed. She may also be the only Weimaraner named after a Bob Wills song. One thing we’re sure of: she’s the only dog whose misadventures were recorded for posterity by Joe in Live Fast, Die Young (ironically, because she lived slowly and died mercifully old), reproduced here as a little thank you for all the good times:
I was having a lovely dream about flying a Harrier jump jet. Piloting a jump jet is not easy, especially when your co-pilot leans in close and licks your face with her tongue.
Another lick. I woke up to a chilly Charleston morning on a blow-up bed apparently determined to tip me onto the floorboards of a wooden house warped into a Riddler’s lair by years of barometer-shattering humidity. Chris was asleep on the sofa, Courtney had left for work, and her dog, a sturdy but friendly Weimaraner by the name of Lily, seemed to want to go somewhere. Presuming that she needed the doggie toilet I took her downstairs, opened the front door and watched in horror as she whipped by my right leg and ran into the road.
‘Car!’ was all I could squeak as a red Nissan, sun-bleached pink, raced towards her.
Ohshitohshitohshitohshit. I’m going to have to tell our generous host that we’re grateful for your hospitality, we’ve enjoyed your company, and we’ve killed your beautiful pedigree dog. (And while we’re getting it out there, Chris is thinking about playing his guitar at you.) The car braked, the bonnet dipped, the rear springs rose, and with a nonchalance which said ‘I know what I’m doing, you plum,’ Lily skipped out of the way with so little time to spare that she left a sliver of drool on the bumper.
I ran over, unsure whether to chastise or kiss her. She must have thought I was going for the full snog, because she glanced left and ran like only big dogs can, out of sight in this city I didn’t know.
Nononononono!
I ran in the direction she had, looking for evidence of four-legged intrusion – upturned bins, startled children, that sort of thing. Nothing. I walked around, practising the conversation in my head. It was an improvement on the first scenario, but not a big one.
‘Hi Courtney – there’s good news and bad news.’
‘What’s the good news?’
‘I didn’t kill your dog.’
‘And the bad?’
‘I lost her. Do you fancy a go on my mate Chris?’
After nearly an hour of searching I slunk dejectedly home. There I would tell Chris what I’d done and we would get in the car and go, leaving a note of apology on the door. I walked into the living room. Chris was snuggled up on the sofa with Lily watching the Weather Channel.
‘Been for a run?’ he asked.
‘Er, yeah, sort of.’
‘It’s going to be a beautiful day. Breakfast?’
‘Yes please.’
Lily looked up at me with a mischievous glint in her eye, and growled a little growl that sounded disquietingly like a laugh.
R.I.P. Lily Dale Connor-Price, 17th July 1998 – 5th Sept 2011.We’ll miss you.
Friends of long standing will know how desperate eager we have been, since Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock & Roll America was published in the UK last year, that it should become available in the US. It’s a book about rock and roll America, after all. Many kind souls have responded to our repeated begging appeals for help in making that happen.
So we’re thrilled to be able to tell you that your hard work has paid off. Our little tribute to GP in book form – a tale of two men on a coast-to-coast search for the soul of American music – will be available in bookstores and interweb sites everywhere on that fine continent from 1 April 2012! It’s a little way off, but we hope you’ll agree it’s worth the wait. (If you can’t wait until next year, or you live in the UK, you can always buy it here.) And you can be quite sure we’ll be reminding you again nearer the time. Quite sure.
As always, thanks for your support and encouragement. If LiveFast, Die Young is new to you, go here for some blurb about it, or watch this video of Chris and Joe reading the prologue:
For now though, we’ll leave you with some words from nice people who have already read it:
“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
“Heart-warming and hilarious … Bill Bryson meets Nick Hornby.” Country Update Magazine
“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
“A book that shows how your obsessions can shape and change your life. Excellent.” James Dean Bradfield, Manic Street Preachers
“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, Harvard Review, BookPage, Nashville Scene
“The thinking man’s Dumb & Dumber.” Mike McCormack, Universal Music Publishing
We’re a little off brief with this post, but given our current UK/US continent-spanning presence, we couldn’t resist posting this hilarious face-off between Jon Stewart and John Oliver about whose country is more f*cked at the moment. UK – 1, US – Nil.
Exactly one year ago today, four friends – Chris Price, Joe Harland, Dan Kennedy and Matt Davey – met in a south London pub to celebrate the birthday of legendary AC/DC singer Bon Scott. Several pints of strong Italian lager later they visited the scene of his ‘death by misadventure’ at 67, Overhill Rd to pay respects to a rock and roll hero. Eight months after that, on the anniversary of Bon’s death, Chris arrived – with Adam Yee of Aussie legends Smudge in tow – at Bon’s graveside in Perth, Western Australia. A lot of stuff happened in between. If he ever gets around to writing the damn thing, you can read all about it in Chris’s next book. Meanwhile, enjoy this video of the final moments of that journey, along the real Highway to Hell – the Canning Highway in Fremantle – to the Raffles pub, where AC/DC played early gigs in the seventies. The tow-away zone you see at the end of this vid is the culmination of a 9,000-mile journey. That is all for now.
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.)
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 (notButch & Sundance or Star Wars) in the prologue video above. Clue – it’s near the beginning and end of the clip.
Missing Parsons the band have been busy again. Here’s another taster from the longplayer, a song called What’s In A Name? (Genevieve). This one’s an homage to all those artists who gave country a groove - in particular Mike Nesmith and Little Feat – and an excuse to break out the wood blocks, bongos and much underrated vibraslap. It’s cut to footage from the first leg of the Live Fast, Die Young road trip from LA to Joshua Tree.
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The album is available on iTunes, Amazon or your favourite digital music retailer. Listeners in countries that support it can listen on Spotify. Hope you like it – there’s more information about the band here. Be first to see new Missing Parsons videos by subscribing to our You Tube channel.
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!
Chris and Simon have been busy in the studio again, and wanted to share this new recording with you. Entitled Twenty Thousand Roads, it’s an homage of sorts to Gram Parsons, based around a loop of one of his most recognisable lyrics. Hope you like it – have a listen, comment and share if you feel inclined, then read on below if you’d like to help us make a video for it!
– 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 
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