by Chris Price
LIVE FAST, DIE YOUNG
Misadventures in Rock and Roll America
Chris Price and Joe Harland
LIVE FAST, DIE YOUNG
Copyright © Chris Price and Joe Harland 2010
All rights reserved.
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PERMISSIONS
This is Spinal Tap: Written by Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner. Used by permission.
'Our House' Words & Music by Graham Nash © Sony/ATV Music Publishing (UK) Ltd. Used by permission.
'Return of the Grievous Angel': Words & Music by Gram Parsons © 1972 Wait & See Music assigned to TRO Essex Music Ltd. of Suite 2.07, Plaza 535 Kings Road London SW10 0SZ. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
'Wichita Lineman': Words & Music by Jimmy Webb © Universal Music Publishing Ltd. Used by permission.
'I Walk the Line': Words & Music by John R. Cash © 1956 (Renewed) Hi-Lo Music Inc., all rights administered by Unichappell Music Inc. Reproduced by kind permission of Carlin Music Corp., London NW1 8BD.
'The Devil Went Down to Georgia': Words & Music by Charlie Daniels, Fred Edwards, Jim Marshall, Charlie Hayward, Tom Crain, William Di Gregorio © Universal/MCA Music Ltd. Used by permission.
From Chris to Courtney:
Twenty thousand roads – and they all led me to you.
From Joe to Nicola, Noah and Addie:
For all the things that have been, and all those yet to come.
CONTENTS
Prologue
18 October: LA Quintessential
19 October: Our House is a Very Fine House
20 October: Anarchy in the USA
21 October: Missing Parsons Report
22 October: A River Runs Through It
23 October: Does My Butte Look Big in This
24 October: Vail to No Avail
25 October: Wichita Lines, Man
26 October: Dodge Kansas, Avoid Oklahoma
27 October: Effing and Jeffing
28 October: The Shawshank Intention
29 October: Fall Out Boys
30 October: A Boy Named John
31 October: Return of the Body Snatchers 1 November: A Date with the Night
2 November: The Devil Went Down to Charleston
3 November: Piano Men
4 November: A Hostel Environment
5 November: Exit Music
Epilogue 1: Two Years Later
Epilogue 2: Two Years and Several Months Later
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
Elvis was lying to us. Turns out there's no Lonely Street after all, and definitely no Heartbreak Hotel.
The Eagles, too. Hotel California? Not in the phone book.
And the Highway to Hell? Wasn't on any road map that we could find.
Film buffs can visit the locations of their favourite movies. Bookworms can seek out the real-world setting of their favourite reads. Even soap fans can visit the soundstages. But music lovers... they can't really join in with that game.
Actually, that's not true. You just need to adjust your focus a bit, like one of those Magic Eye posters from the early nineties. Go to America today, and with the right outlook you'll see song lyrics strewn by the roadside and melodies drifting across the landscape on the breeze. You just have to look that little bit harder.
Hello. My name is Chris.
And I'm Joe. Hello.
We're radio and television producers. We play a lot of music. That radio show, where bands cover songs for Jo Whiley in the Live Lounge, that was ours.
Four lines in and already he's trying to turn his life into a movie script. He does that a lot. What he means is we used to work together at Radio 1. That's how we met.
Then I jumped ship and went to work in telly. Which would have been a perfectly good opportunity to let this whole thing drop. But we didn't. Perhaps we should have. (And Joe does the movie script thing too. A lot.)
And that's about as much as you need to know for now. Except to say that most of what follows is true.
See? It's all true. I'll start.
Joe and I have loved music since before we can remember. Our friendship is built on it. On being crushed in the mosh pit at a Mars Volta gig; on sharing a bin liner to cover our boots at Glastonbury; on getting the beers in before the Arctic Monkeys come on at the Astoria. It's built on the exhilaration of 'Crazy in Love', the befuddlement of the first time you heard The Darkness, the thrill of clapping ears on The Marshall Mathers LP. On the howl of John Frusciante's guitar, the growl of James Hetfield and the wail of Matt Bellamy. It's also built, most crucially, on five years spent arguing about all of this every Wednesday afternoon in the Radio 1 playlist meeting.
On my thirtieth birthday Chris gave me a card with a still from one of my favourite movies, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It's the scene where the marshal is in town trying to round up a posse and head off Butch and Sundance. The camera pans upwards to the balcony of Fanny Porter's brothel behind him, where Butch and Sundance are drinking beer and watching the goings-on down below. Butch says that when he was a kid he always wanted to grow up to be a hero, to which Sundance replies: 'Well, it's too late now.'
Inside the card, just one handwritten word: 'Hero.' I'll treasure that card until the day I die. Two months later, knowing Chris' obsession with deceased country musician and sometime drug addict Gram Parsons, for his birthday I gave him a home-made card bearing a photograph of his outlaw hero. Inside, one word: 'Heroin.'
Within ten minutes he had lost it.
I don't feel good about it. To be fair, we were in a busy club at the time and my attentions were more focused on not losing the expensive, table-sized work of art that Joe had just presented to me as a birthday gift (more of which later). But this humble exchange of cards turned out to be the beginning of something that got rather out of hand. It was the catalyst for a journey which would see us cross a continent in search of places we weren't even sure existed, of people who were nearly all long dead. A journey that would brush for the DNA of the American music aristocracy and dust for the vomit of a string of deceased rock and rollers. You see, the birthday cards set us talking about Gram, his extraordinary life and the bizarre circumstances of his death on a patch of desert in southern California called Joshua Tree.
Joshua Tree. Two words more exotic and alluring than any travel brochure, more instantly redolent of rock music and all the boundless freedom it implies than any biography I had ever read. Of power chords wrought by rock gods across an infinite, wide
screen sky. A sort of imaginary place which exists beyond the law, where the sky's the limit and the streets have no name. Let's face it, who doesn't think of the biggest rock band on the planet™ when they hear those words?
Well me, for one. For longer than I could remember, the words Joshua Tree had been linked in my mind with the story of one man: Gram Parsons. They were words from the pages of a book, the setting of a story which had enthralled me for almost as long as I had loved music. To me they evoked images not of Bono and friends but of the tiny motel room where Parsons decamped with his girlfriend and took a fatal overdose of morphine in 1973. Or Cap Rock, his favoured Joshua Tree perch for UFO spotting and LSD tripping, and the scene of his final, twisted, DIY cremation at the hands of friend and road manager Phil Kaufman. U2 are heroes to most, as Chuck D might just as well have said, but they never meant shit to me.
And, frankly, Gram Parsons never meant shit to me. Chris had been guffing on about him for years but I had never seen the appeal. Country music is for truckers and rednecks if you ask me. But that, I realised, was sort of the point. Yes, Joshua Tree meant very different things to us, but the more we talked about it, the more we realised virtually every song, album or artist we held dear was attached in our heads to some half real, half imaginary place, nearly all of them in America. It seemed obvious to me what the next chapter of the birthday exchange should be.
Two men, a CD player, the open road. On a journey that would span both coasts of the United States we would share great music, good times and rock and roll hi-jinx. Roof down, stereo up, we would create the definitive soundtrack for the ultimate road movie. But more than just listening to our favourite tunes, we wanted to live them. We would travel in search of the places and people that would connect us to the music we loved. Stand on the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil, take a bite of the burger that finally finished off The King, taste the loneliness of the 'Wichita Lineman'.
It could be a birthday present for Gram, who, had he not fouled it up by dying thirty years previously, would have been nearing his sixtieth birthday. So that's why, three years later, Chris and I hired a car and drove from Los Angeles airport, where his body was stolen, via the motel room he died in and the Joshua Tree setting of his makeshift cremation, finally arriving at the Florida town where he was born precisely sixty years earlier. In between, we would tick off some of the most important landmarks in rock music history in the hope of learning a thing or two about America, its music, and each other.
There were several reasons why it took us three years to hit the road. First, Joe had just used up one of the tri-annual 'travel passes' given to him by his partner Nicola. Wonderful wife (and mother) that she is, Nic indulges Joe's near insatiable wanderlust by allowing him a guilt-free pass every three years for a trip of his choosing. Having just completed 'Beijing to Bayswater over land' (Joe is the only man I know who makes travel choices based on alliterating destinations), he would have to wait three years for the next pass.
Which happened to time perfectly with Gram's sixtieth birthday. And besides, we had a lot of preparing to do. We built a website which would give us a platform to blog about our experiences, as well as offering the means of meeting a few interesting people along the way. And the trip, we figured, would make an excellent subject for a documentary. A radio documentary perhaps or, even better, a TV programme. We would shop the idea around to a few of our friends in radio and telly and if no one bit, then – what the hell – we could take a camera and film it ourselves.
No one bit.
So we borrowed a camera and got on with it. We wanted to capture the sights, the sounds, the smells… of two passionate music fans on the road. And we got that. But we got more. A lot more.
But hey, enough of my yackin', whaddya say…
Enough.
18 OCTOBER
LA QUINTESSENTIAL
On the flight over I drew up a to-do list. As a birthday present to Gram we planned to end the expedition with a performance, on guitar and ukulele, of one of his most enduring recordings, 'Return of the Grievous Angel'. This would present no significant problem for Chris, who has been performing the song to anyone that would listen for half of his life. I, on the other hand, have never strummed, plucked or struck anything more taxing than an air guitar. Top of my list then, are:
1. Learn to love the music of Gram Parsons.
2. Learn to play the ukulele.
3. Learn to play the music of Gram Parsons on the ukulele.
And for Chris:
1. Grow a formidable moustache.
By 'formidable moustache' he means the horseshoe, or what I'm assured is known in the trade as the 'cockduster'. You will recognise this particular type as the trademark facial adornment of The Village People's 'Leatherman', usually attached to two thirds of Crosby, Stills and Nash, or nestling under the nose of Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. It extends vertically downwards on either side of the mouth, stopping level with the jaw line or, on the more adventurous wearer, protruding very slightly below. Easy Rider and CSN were fine by me; Joe's reference points were more James Hetfield (who favours the more flamboyant downward protrusion described above) and Dave Grohl. It's no coincidence that these men wield guitars in the fiercest rock outfits ever to have filled an enormo dome. In fact it's nigh on impossible to carry one off if you don't. Anyone contemplating wearing a horseshoe, but who shaves less than three times a day, should proceed with extreme caution.
Which is why I was a little uncomfortable with the 'formidable moustache' directive. For one thing the phrase is something of an oxymoron in my case. My beard has never approached respectable, much less formidable, in anything under two months. And Joe has a definite head start in the 'tache stakes. He has been wearing either a full-blown cockduster (don't you just love the use of the verb 'to wear' for facial hair, like it's something you slip into before breakfast), or more often a goatee beard, for as long as I can remember. So for him 'growing' a formidable moustache is simply a case of shaving out a section of stubble approximately one inch by one inch under his bottom lip. (Which is a shame because his beard is an autumn of colour in this area – a fetching vermilion here, a touch of burnt sienna there.) I, on the other hand, must first grow a beard and then shave out as required, which is several weeks in the doing and we only had three. Just as Joe's moustache was entering the realms of the truly formidable, mine would be somewhere shy of barely discernible, and then it would be time to come home.
And so to LAX airport, the setting for the beginning of a journey conceived nearly three years earlier; a dream of the open road in an open-top car, of two fearless explorers driving coast to coast across the land of the free. The flight from Heathrow had lasted about ten hours over a distance of six thousand miles, but we'd come a hell of a lot further than that. This was the culmination of months, years of planning, of a trip that would see us catalogue some of the most significant landmarks in music history. A friendship built on a fascination for them was, we hoped, about to find its fullest expression. But LAX was also to be where that same dream, of distant vanishing points sucked in over the windscreen of a two-seater, came within a hair's breadth of being snuffed out.
Renting the car was Harland's job. I had no reason not to believe it was in safe hands: Joe's capacity for forward planning is the stuff of legend. We once made a radio programme featuring rock stars reading books, which required us to roam the backstage area of Reading Festival knocking on tour buses and politely asking their confused, unsuspecting occupants to give a recital from whatever literature they had lying around in their bunks (you'd be surprised). Joe, with his eye on the prize, had made arrangements to be tagged on to the end of the Foo Fighters' press junket for the day. When his turn came to record lead singer Dave Grohl, the moustachioed rock god politely turned him down on the grounds that he had only ever read one book in his entire life – Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. So unless Joe just happened to have a copy of it on him right now, it was a no-go.
Cue Joe, to the astonishment of both Grohl and his press officer, reaching into his bag and producing a copy of the only book that Dave Grohl had ever read, having done his research that morning and popped into Waterstone's on the off chance. Cue tape, hit record, and two paragraphs later my prized recording of the bass player from Editors reading Brave New World was looking altogether a little pathetic.
So as you can see, I had no reason to suppose he didn't have this all worked out in advance. Arriving at LAX, we hopped onto a shuttle which took us to the car rental dealers about a mile or so away from the terminal. On the way I enquired whether Joe had brought all the necessary paperwork in order to pick up our shiny, convertible Chrysler Sebring.
