Swampland.com

The Chris Price Interview: Out with the Truckers, Kickers & Cowboy Angels

Chris Price Interview
Out with the Truckers, Kickers & Cowboy Angels
By James Calemine

Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock N Roll America, written by Chris Price and Joe Harland, stands as an indelible book about two British journalists traveling across America on a 4,500 mile road trip visiting musical locations that retain a resonating mojo.

It's a humorous and insightful tale that follows the authors through Laurel Canyon, Joshua Tree, Kansas, Memphis, Clarksdale,  Asheville, Waycross, Charleston,  Winter Haven and Johnny Cash's home outside of Nashville. Gram Parsons' music serves as a running motif through Live Fast, Die Young.

Stanley Booth wrote this about the book: "Among those rare volumes which are 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."

Booth's wife, poet Diann Blakely, revealed her reaction to reading these 315 pages: "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."

In this Swampland interview, Chris discusses the origins of the book, a few of the stories and historic locations they visit in this timeless chronicle. For a scent of the style and tone of Live Fast, Die Young, the book's prologue should suffice:

"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 favorite movies. Bookworms can seek out the rea;-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..."

James Calemine: If you had to write it on a postcard, what is the essence of Live Fast, Die Young: Misadventures in Rock N Roll America?

Chris Price: It’s two friends on a coast-to-coast search for the spirit of rock and roll America. Joe (Harland, co-author) and I worked in radio together at the BBC. One of our jobs was to listen to music submitted by record labels and make decisions about whether it was right or wrong for our audience. If it was, it would be added to the playlist. After a while your critical faculties become quite removed from your personal tastes in music; you have a professional obligation to listen to it in a particular way. So, for me anyway, this journey was about re-connecting with my own passion for music, and we thought a journey would be a great way of doing that. We were talking one night in a pub, and I was telling Joe about Gram Parsons and the whole body-snatching incident in Joshua Tree, which up to that point was just a mythical place in my brain because of the association with Gram. But to Joe, Joshua Tree was an album by U2.

JC: He made a documentary about that album, right?

CP: Yes, for the BBC a few years before. He’s a huge U2 fan, and I’m a Gram fanatic. So we were both coming at this place Joshua Tree from two very different perspectives. The more we talked about it, the more we realized there are all these half-real, half-imaginary places all over America which are grounded in our favorite tunes, so we went to seek them out. That’s where the idea for the book was born; we would go on a journey to search for the soul of American music, and maybe learn a thing or two about America - and each other - as we went.

We started in LA. I adore the song “Our House” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, so we went to see if we could find it. It’s there in Laurel Canyon. Then we just kept moving east until we reached the Atlantic. We had all these songs and places literally marked out on a map of America. But it became more than just a musical journey; it was also about strengthening and deepening our friendship. Joe and I had spent a lot of time together at work, so we thought we were pretty close. On the trip we learned things about each other that you can only learn locked up in a car with someone for sometimes twenty hours a day.

JC: Sometimes under trying circumstances…

CP: Yes. There was an incident about two-thirds of the way through the trip that almost jeopardized the whole thing. But we came through it.

JC: I found the Glen Campbell part interesting. When I interviewed James Burton (Elvis Presley & Gram Parsons’ guitarist), he said his schedule became so busy that he couldn’t do all the studio work he was asked to do. So, he gave them Glen Campbell’s number.

CP: “Wichita Lineman” became a kind of centerpiece in our journey – an unexpectedly poignant moment on the trip. It was a very eerie experience, arriving at the Wichita County line knowing I’d been there hundreds of times in my head. When you go on a journey you have all these preconceived ideas of what it will be like; then you get there and of course it’s nothing like you imagined, and within fifteen minutes you’ve over-written that picture with the ‘real’ place. But with “Wichita Lineman” it was exactly the image I’d held in my mind for 20-odd years of listening to that song. The stars just aligned because we happened to arrive at four-thirty or five in the afternoon just as the sun was setting. We pulled over by this rusty metal sign that said, ‘Welcome to Wichita County,’ and sat there with the roof down listening to “Wichita Lineman” with a line of telegraph poles stretching off in the distance, just like in the song. It was a pretty perfect moment.

JC: In the book you visit locations like Graceland, the crossroads at Highway 49 & 61 in Clarksdale, Johnny & June Cash’s home, but you also seek out artists like Jeff Buckley, Rick Rubin, Charlie Daniels and your early musical influences…

CP: Jeff Buckley was the one dead rock star experience that surprised me the most. We were in Memphis on Elvis business of course, but Memphis was also where Jeff Buckley died, and Jeff was one of the artists Joe and I were in total agreement about, unlike some of the others. We both could remember where we were when we heard Jeff had died. You hear this story about Jeff drinking and listening to music with friends on the banks of Wolf River and just deciding to going for a swim, and you have this romantic vision of a balmy Memphis evening, tree branches languidly stroking the surface of a lazy, slow-moving river. The reality couldn’t have been further removed from romantic. It was a very depressing experience. Plus there’s the whole controversy about whether his death was accidental or suicide, so we wanted to take a look for ourselves.

JC: Another dark pursuit is Robert Johnson’s legendary soul-selling deal at the crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi. You guys made your own deal there. Talk about images of a place – I bet y’all didn’t imagine a Church’s Chicken sitting across from the street where Johnson waited on the Devil…

CP: Yeah, Church’s Chicken—not a church! The pact with the devil is one of those legendary stories you just want to get closer to. There’s Robert Johnson of course, but also Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and so on. Growing up in the UK listening to the Stone Roses I always loved the line ‘I don’t need to sell my soul / he’s already in me’ from “I Wanna Be Adored”, and I was fascinated by the Faust myth from reading Thomas Mann at university. And there was a practical element to us going to the crossroads. Joe had always wanted to play an instrument, but failed at everything he tried. So I said ‘OK, try the ukulele; it only has four strings, it doesn’t get much easier than that. We figured if we sold his soul to the Devil we could get him on the fast track.

JC: Did the devil show up?

CP: You’ll have to read the book!

JC: Another vital stop in the book is Johnny Cash’s house in Hendersonville, Tennessee. His son John Carter Cash lives there and showed y’all around. I’m sure that was mind-blowing.

CP: Mind-blowing is an understatement. Joe and I have been Johnny Cash fans as long as we’ve known each other—Joe especially because another of his heroes is Rick Rubin. Some say it was Rick who resurrected Johnny’s career.

JC: Especially for this generation…

CP: Absolutely. Those five American albums are the most incredible way to close the career of one of the greatest singer/songwriters, and seeing where they were recorded –right in Johnny’s own back yard – was the most incredible privilege. It came about by chance when we met Polly Parsons—Gram’s daughter—and her friend Shilah Morrow in Joshua Tree. Shilah connected us to John Carter and we were invited out to Hendersonville to the Cash estate. We spent an evening talking to John, listening to the music he was working on. He runs the Cash Cabin as a commercial studio now. We got to play the piano Johnny played on “Hurt”, and Joe got to sit in the co-pilot’s seat behind the mixing desk, which of course was Rick Rubin’s chair. There’s a great scene in the book where Joe is sitting there trying to be cool and not blow it, as he has a long and illustrious history of doing with famous people. There are quite a few examples of that in Live Fast, Die Young.

JC: You say in the book that you once turned down the opportunity of meeting Emmylou Harris…

CP: I did. It was a few years ago in London. I was working for BBC Radio 1 at the time. Her record company invited me to the show; they knew I was a huge Gram Parsons fan and asked me if I’d like to meet her backstage. For some reason I decided in the moment that Emmylou was a hero I didn’t want to meet. But I really regret it now.

JC: Tell me about your project Missing Parsons. It’s a band as well as a book, right?

CP: Yeah, Missing Parsons is something that just grew and grew. Joe and I had been blogging under that name for a while as Gram had become a kind of guardian angel for the journey, and around the time we did the road trip, another friend – Simon Kilshaw – and I were recording some songs which became a kind of soundtrack for Live Fast, Die Young.

JC: Who are the other members?

CP: Everyone! Everyone is in Missing Parsons (laughs). It’s huge a community of followers who have galvanized around this project – we’ve made about 2,000 friends along the way. So if you’re a friend of Missing Parsons, you’re in Missing Parsons, part of the band. That’s how we see it.

JC: And you’ve relocated to Georgia now?

CP: Yes, my girlfriend lives here. It’s odd how I’ve ended up in Georgia, as so many of my teenage obsessions emanate from this part of America, although I had no idea at the time. There’s Gram of course, and the Black Crowes. I was 16 when I heard Shake Your Money Maker and it blew me away. I spent several years in my teens actually trying to be Chris Robinson. But I had no idea he was from Georgia.

JC: They played “Hot Burrito #1” & “#2” the other night in New York. On Croweology, there’s a great cover of Gram’s “She”.

CP: Oh, really? The Crowes were one of the bands that led me to Gram Parsons. There was an article in the New Musical Express commemorating the twentieth anniversary of his death, and Chris was quoted in it, saying how much this guy Gram had influenced the Black Crowes. Also around that time, I was in love with the Stones and reading The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth who I know is a good friend of yours. In the last two months or so since I’ve been in south Georgia I’ve had the inestimable privilege of spending time and working with him on a piece he’s writing about the Stones. All roads lead to Georgia…

To Purchase Live Fast Die Young Visit MissingParsons.com

(All Photos courtesy of Chris Price)

related tags

Read More...

Currently there are 48 comments. Leave one now!