After last night’s phenomenal Lyle Lovett show at the Charleston Performing Arts Center, and with a new adventure Down Under just days away, Chris finds himself lacing up an old and familiar pair of shoes. Today felt like the right time to shuffle the deck and bring this Townes & Lyle mini blog back to the top of the pack.

Today is a Townes day. The flat is rented, tickets bought. Soon I’ll be heading 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.

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.

Some of you will have seen yesterday’s Facebook post asking friends of Missing Parsons to vote for a charity called CALM, in a poll to win the proceeds of the Cage Against The Machine campaign this Christmas. Some of you – especially friends in America – might need a little extra information on both. We’ll to make this as short and painless as possible, in the hope that you’ll do one *tiny* thing for CALM at the end of it.

First, some background. In the UK, the coveted ‘Christmas number one’ – that is, the pop single which sits proudly atop the hit parade on Christmas Day – is a very big deal. We Brits get tremendously – you might even say uncharacteristically – excited about pop songs with festive lyrics concerning mistletoe, reindeers or famine in Africa, especially if they have jingle bells jingling all the way through. When the Christmas chart is announced on the Sunday before Santa arrives, we settle in by the radio with a mince pie and a glass of mulled wine, and wait with baited breath to find out what this year’s number-one-of-number-ones will be. We don’t even care if it’s Fairytale of New York every year – it’s just part of what makes Christmas Christmas.

Or rather it used to be, until one day a few sorry years ago when Christmas was taken away from us, apparently forever, by an evil dictator by the name of Simon Cowell (you might have heard of him). Simon stole Christmas and refused to give it back. He was laughing while he did it. Yes, LAUGHING.

Every year, as the Machiavellian mastermind behind The X Factor and Pop Idol (yes, I’m afraid it’s us – actually no, it’s Simon – you have to blame for American Idol), he releases a single by the winner of his tawdry little talent show and, entranced by his evil eye and shiny teeth, the British public goes out in droves to buy it. No mistletoe, no reindeers, nothing.

Then last year we fought back. A dedicated band of refuseniks stood up and said: ‘Fuck you Simon, we won’t do what you tell us‘. With the help of a well coordinated Facebook campaign, these brave insurgents pushed Rage Against The Machine‘s Killing In The Name to the Christmas number one slot, halting X Factor winner Joe McElderry’s The Climb just short of the summit. No jingle bells admittedly, just the clanging chimes of doom for the Idol monopoly. This year’s campaign – Cage Against The Machine – aims once more to deliver a decisive and festive fist to that smug face of his, with the help of John Cage’s silent masterpiece 4.33.

Now for the serious bit. CALM, a charity very close to our hearts (you’ll see their website printed in the back of the book), stands for the Campaign Against Living Miserably. It is a unique organisation aimed at reducing the suicide rate among young men, created in response to the disturbing and little known statistic – reflected around the world – that if you are male and aged 15 to 35, you are more likely to die by taking your own life than by any other means. That’s right, if you’re young and male you are more likely to die from suicide than from a road accident, drugs, disease, violent crime, anything. Take a moment for that fact to detonate in your brain, and while you do, watch this powerful poem by Mat Lloyd which says everything about why this problem exists:

Men don’t talk about their problems. They should. CALM helps them to do this. So here’s what we’re asking you to do. CALM is one of five charities in the running to receive the proceeds from this year’s Christmas number one campaign. Please, please, please would you go to the Cage Against The Machine site, select CALM on the left-hand side and then click ‘vote’. That’s it. (All five charities are doing excellent work, we just happen to know because we work with them that CALM are fine people working for next to nothing with next to no funding, tackling a hugely important but little known issue. Hope you agree.)

One last thing. If you think this is something worth shouting about, please click Like or Tweet (or both) underneath this post to share it with your friends. Many thanks.

Chris & Joe
Missing Parsons

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The pluralisation of the names – the Jacks and the Joshes – seems so casual and dismissive now. I suppose what I hoped to do, albeit by means of a rather lazy stereotype, was paint a picture: a crowded bar packed with hip young Charlestonians in skinny jeans and Cuban heels, a whiff of PBR and cheese sticks, the clack of cue ball over shouted small talk. A scene so perfectly and unknowingly stylised, it seemed to me, that it could almost have been made for a TV teen drama. But from this remove – four years almost – I realise that one of the names on the list doesn’t bear up to pluralisation. Positively resists it in fact. One of the faces in the crowd that night was Cary Ann Hearst.

Fast forward to 13 October 2010. George Dawes Green’s The Unchained Tour of Georgia arrives in Thomasville, its 1975 Blue Bird school bus disgorging a troupe of musicians and ‘raconteurs’ at the door of the Bookshelf and Gallery on its pretty main street. Unchained is Green’s storytelling vehicle The Moth transported to the towns and cities of his native Georgia in support of independent booksellers and, as a welcome side effect, enticing readers away from their Kindles and iPads into a room full of – gasp – real people with real lives and real stories.

Regular Moth and McSweeney’s contributor, Rock On author and plaid-wearing nerd Dan Kennedy opened with an oddly touching account of missing out to Carson Daly as host of MTV’s Total Request Live. (Thank goodness, for our sakes if not for his, that he did or we might have been denied his contribution tonight). Next, performance artist, poet and playwright Edgar Oliver gushed a shadowy recounting of a claustrophobic Southern upbringing, all the more gothic for the sinusoidal baritone delivery. Novelist Tina McEloy Ansa related a deft and poignant story of 1950s black emancipation by means of her childhood relationship with water (and its effects on her hair), and finally a heart-warming retelling of childhood in Booneville, Mississippi by Moth stalwart Wanda Bullard.

Interesting to note the choice of the title ‘raconteurs’ for tonight’s speaking contributors, perhaps pre-emptively side-stepping the narrow, rocky terrain that separates the multitude of offerings qualifying as spoken word. Even if Kennedy’s delivery occasionally felt like stand up, Oliver’s at times performance, all were story tellers of the highest calibre.

But by far the brightest star of the show, if ‘unchainedness’ is the measure of luminance, was Nashville-bred, Charleston-wed singer-songwriter Cary Ann Hearst. ‘Are You Ready To Die’, written for a moribund uncle, opened on a picked acoustic pizzicato, slowly gathering steam before unleashing a freight-train vocal performance hitherto held in check on harmony contributions for singing partner Michael Trent. My own appropriation and pluralisation of Cary Ann’s name for the purposes of scene-setting in a travel book now seems almost criminal in the face of singing and song-writing talent so manifestly singular.

Hearst’s accomplice Trent in Shovels & Rope may well have been among the cool crowd that balmy Charleston night back in 2006, I can’t remember now. More likely he was still in New York, leading moderate garage successes The Films. In any case his first name, being single-barrelled and devoid of a J, would have failed to gain him an audition for whatever film I imagined myself the star of that night. Which is a shame, because if he had been there I might have realised sooner just how perfect he and Cary Ann are for each other. To discover later that they are husband and wife was almost too perfect for words.

The Unchained Tour of Georgia continues until the end of October, taking in Newnan, Macon, Zebulon, Gainesville, Athens, Washington, Savannah, Augusta, Canton and Atlanta. Go here for full listings and tickets.

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Much as we agree with Bill on many things, if you do work in advertising or marketing – or you happen to have a brain for creative commercial tie-ups – please don’t blow your brains out just yet. Put them to good use – you might just be able to help us. We’ve been offered the chance of placing a Live Fast, Die Young extract and competition with an in-store magazine for the UK’s largest menswear chain, the venerable and venerated purveyor of low-slung trousers, vigorously patterned cardigans and fluorescent sweatbands that is Topman. Our Wonderful Publisher™ is approaching relevant companies about stumping up a super cool competition prize.

You know the kind of thing: we ask Jack Links, official suppliers of Missing Parsons road food, to offer up a year’s supply of Turkey Jerky to anyone who can name a type of poultry beginning with T, or prove themselves otherwise fit to complete a task so insultingly easy that lots of people will enter and stupid people won’t feel excluded. We need your help brainstorming a list of ‘creative partnerships’.

We think we’ve considered most of the really obvious ones – Chrysler cars because we drove a Sebring, Best Western because we stayed in their fine motels, and so on – but we think the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ might either (a) pick up any that we’ve missed, or (b) dream up something infinitely more creative than our own tiny brains can muster. (Joe suggested Glaxo Smith Kline, official providers of Missing Parsons emergency herpes remedies, which gives you an idea of why we need the help.)

If you’ve read the book or need an excuse to reacquaint yourself with it, we would be very grateful for your suggestions. Likewise if you can’t be bothered to (re)read the book but work for a large, profligate multinational looking to invest goods or services by way of entry into the cash-rich, time-rich and increasingly colourful young male market, we would be very interested in hearing from you. Leave a comment below or, if you arrived here from Facebook or Twitter, feel free to drop us a line there.

Many thanks in advance for your ideas, loot, cash or custom.

Missing Parsons

Some background, for any companies wanting to get involved: Live Fast, Die Young is a book about music and travel. Music companies – record labels, radio or TV stations and so on – might consider offering gig tickets or music. Travel companies could provide flights, holidays etc. A genuine opportunity to place your product or service on the counter of every Topman store in the UK.

There, we did it. Now let’s all watch this so we can feel better about ourselves:

Not so with the newly opened Missing Parsons shop! There ARE no shops. Okay there are no Segways either, and it’s really just online retail, but we’d love you to pop in and browse ALL THREE of our products.

That’s right. No more must you find yourself confused and immobile in the aisles, incapacitated by the bewildering array of options when all you want is to sweeten your coffee. In the Missing Parsons shop it’s just T-SHIRT, BOOK, CD. That’s it. What could be simpler?

Put another way, we’ve made some excellent loot available in the US especially for our esteemed American friends. (Specifically it’s about making the book available at an affordable price in the US – if you’re shopping from the UK it’s still cheaper to buy from Amazon.) We would love for you to stop in and have a browse. We use Paypal to process your transactions – it’s completely secure and trusted by squillions around the world to buy stuff online.

Thanks!

Missing Parsons