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 Live Fast, 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

Update: we’ll be closing the TEAM AMERICA free t-shirt offer on Friday 15th July at midday EST.

U2 broke America by touring relentlessly. We plan to do it with a little help from our friends.

Here at Missing Parsons HQ we receive a lot of mail from readers in the US who have enjoyed Live Fast, Die Young. It literally warms our cockles to know that anyone has taken pleasure in reading our words, but it’s doubly pleasing to get feedback from American readers, as we know they’ve had to go that extra mile – maybe even pay a few extra dollars – in order to get hold of their copy. Three-quarters of our website traffic, Facebook friends and Twitter followers come from the US, and yet to date it’s not possible, sadly, for them to walk into Barnes & Noble and pick up a copy of the book.

So it’s time, this 4th of July weekend, to raise our game in the US of Stateside, to make Mr. Barnes and Mr. Noble sit up and take NOTICE, goddamnit! We are inviting our American friends to join a CRACK TEAM of advocates who, in return for a *FREE* Missing Parsons t-shirt (pay postage and packing only), will help us break America by sharing our content with their Facebook friends, Twitter followers and anyone else who will listen. All we ask is that each time we post a new blog, video or self-congratulatory news item on Facebook or Twitter, you Share or Re-tweet it to your friends. In return you get a Missing Parsons t-shirt (one per person) and entry into an exclusive club: MISSING PARSONS TEAM AMERICA. We’re thinking about asking this team of superusers to contribute in other ways too, like suggesting cool stuff to post on Facebook, writing guest blogs etc. Go on, it’ll be fun.

Who’s in? OK then, just visit the Missing Parsons shop, select your size, and complete your ‘purchase’ via Paypal by clicking ‘Buy Now’. (It’s also helpful if you can give a thumbs up to this posting on Facebook if you use it, so we know who’s on the team.) While stocks last, the cost of the t-shirt is ZERO DOLLARS. When we run out of t-shirts, the deal is up. PayPal is a completely safe way to order goods online – if your order cannot be fulfilled, you won’t be charged a penny. (And if your shipping address is outside the US, sadly we can’t send out to you either, so your order will be ignored.)

Thanks for your Parsonage – and Happy Independence Day America!

MPx

Postscript: apparently Paypal won’t let us sell stuff for zero dollars. So we’re charging a penny and taking a penny off the postage. That’s FREE!

I live in Valdosta, Georgia, birthplace of American comic genius Bill Hicks, whom readers of Live Fast, Die Young will know is a hero of both mine and Joe’s. With the new Hicks movie opening in America this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about him (proper blog to follow); I’ve even tried to find the address of his first house.

Which reminded me this morning of a similar wild goose chase a few years back, in search of Gram Parsons’ childhood home in Winter Haven, Florida. For reasons which are now lost in the fog of red wine and deadlines that was the final edit for the book, this weird episode didn’t make it into the final chapter. Luckily we have this ‘lost’ footage, which we offer to you now by way of free bonus content. Fans or fanatics? You decide.

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.

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.)

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.

-

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.

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.