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.

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

Normal service will resume next post.

MPx

If you like the music (which, on the advice of the boffins in our marketing and A&R departments, we have entitled ‘Live Fast, Die Young’) there’s more to be discovered at Missing Parsons the band, or you can buy the album on iTunes and Amazon.

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.)

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.

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.

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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.

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

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 – 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.