It seemed rude not to. With our *debut* live performance coming up at the Gram Parsons Guitar Pull (Okefenokenee Fairgrounds, Waycross, Georgia, USA, Saturday 18th September, 2.30pm), we figured it was about time Missing Parsons had some T-shirts out there. They don’t exist in real life yet, but we’re too excited not to share these designs with you now. We may even consider bumper stickers if they go down well …

Some huge thank you’s are due. The first and most important goes to the always incomparable Courtney ‘Annie Rich’ Connor (whom readers of Live Fast, Die Young have met) for making the gig happen in the first place. That there Ms. Rich is an amazing lady and we’d be nowhere without her. The second thank you goes to our stylist, web designer and friend Thomas Eagle for the wonderful shirt designs. We absolutely LOVE them. What do you think?

Leave us a message here in the comments box below or, if Facebook is your preferred social medium, pop by and say hello. Join the team if you haven’t already – it’s the easiest way of staying in touch with you all and we’d love to have you along.

Today is a Townes day. The flat is rented, tickets bought. Soon I’ll be heading to Swampland in south Georgia (GP Guitar Pull in September, anyone?), then later in the year it’s off 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.

Photo sections in travel books – which side are you on? A refreshing break from all that tiresome wordage, or an unwelcome visual intrusion just when your imagination is furiously beating its wings against the waters of invention, running as fast as its webbed feet of fantasy will carry it and taking flight? No matter! With Live Fast, Die Young you can have it both ways. With this unique ‘electronic’ photo supplement, not only do you not have to turn the pages (see how they magically turn themselves!), they come with musical accompaniment from Missing Parsons too! And if photos just aren’t your thing, don’t worry – simply cover your eyes with your hands and enjoy the music! (Put another way, here’s what the ’slates’ would have looked like if there had been money to put any in the book – now with added annotation.)

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.

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.)

The book goes to print today, and just in the nick of time the final cover design has arrived. Chris got so excited when he saw it that he let out a small wee. And cover art that makes a man wee should be shared, we hope you’ll agree.

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):

-

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.

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.

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:

-

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:

-

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:

-

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:

-

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

Several of our esteemed American friends have asked about US availability of Live Fast, Die Young, so we thought it worth putting together a simple guide. As yet we have no publishing deal in the US, so there are two main options for getting hold of your copy:

1. Order the book from Amazon.co.uk. This will be shipped from the UK, so the postage will be slightly higher than your usual Amazon orders, but if you pre-order now (ahead of publication on May 4th), they’re guaranteeing a 25% discount which goes some way to covering the difference.

2. Order from Amazon Canada. At the time of writing the book is priced at CDN$12.33. Postage varies obviously, but it might be worth comparing with the cost of shipping from the UK.

3. Sign up to be notified by Amazon.com when the book becomes available in the US. As we have no American deal yet, unfortunately we can’t tell you when this will be, but this is a pretty good second best if Options 1 or 2 don’t appeal. And the more people that sign up and register their interest, the more likely it is that US publishers will sit up and take notice!

If you’ve enjoyed our blogs, videos and other ramblings, we would love it if you would consider signing up with US Amazon anyway (Option 3), even if you’re buying from the Commonwealth or haven’t the slightest intention of buying at all! You’re under no obligation to purchase, and your clicks might just add up to that illusive publishing deal that will help us find the American audience we would so love to reach. Our Research & Insight department (Facebook) tells us that roughly 75% of the Missing Parsons community is American, and we would love the book to be made available in your fine book stores and upstanding interweb sites.

As ever, thanks for your support, Parsonage and friendship.

Chris & Joe

Missing Parsons

P.S. Parsons based outside of the US and the Commonwealth should find that Amazon in their own territory will offer a similar ’sign up’ facility to the one in Option 2 above, or of course you can order from the UK. Australian buyers should have no difficulty.

P.P.S. While we’re in selling mode, the Missing Parsons album is available digitally worldwide on iTunes or your favourite digital retailer.

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.