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 (not Butch & 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!

All the best,

Chief Executive Parsons Chris, Joe & Simon

Missing Parsons

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.

Missing Parsons continue their quest to ‘live the music’.

In this episode, Chris finds out what it’s like to think of a calico bonnet all the way from Cheyenne to Tennessee, just as his hero Gram Parsons does in Return of the Grievous Angel.

But will he do it? Can he make it through Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Mississippi thinking of nothing but a calico bonnet? We’ve condensed five states, an awful lot of thinking and a smattering of facial hair into one four-minute video so that you too can enjoy the tedium.