Live Fast Die Young: Misadventures in Rock ‘n’ Roll America

Excerpted from Live Fast Die Young: Misadventures in Rock’n’Roll America by Christ Price and Joe Harland. Reprinted by arrangement with IPG. Copyright © 2012. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher.

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.

‘Er, they did send me an email, but I don’t think I printed it off. Should be fine – they’ll have our details on file and I’ve got the credit card I made the booking with.’

‘Welcome to Dollar Car Rental. How can I help you today?’ The desk clerk beamed.

‘We’ve made a reservation for a Chrysler Sebring convertible. Name of Harland.’

‘Certainly sir – do you have the reservation number?’

‘I’m afraid not, but you should have our details on file, and I’ve got the credit card I made the booking with,’ replied Joe.

‘I’m sorry sir, but without the reservation number I can’t verify the booking.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Without the reservation number I can’t verify the booking.’

She gestured towards her computer, which resembled something out of a seventies science fiction movie. It had a built-in keyboard and VDU, with light green type on a dark screen displaying a single box labelled ‘reservation number’. Literally nothing else would allow her to process the transaction. This was a bad start. Jumping back on the shuttle, we turned the dial to ‘the future’, hoping there might be somewhere with Internet access – and a printer – back at the airport terminal.

There was. We returned to Dollar clutching the reservation documentation like prized lost treasure in an Indiana Jones movie, finally allowing ourselves to get excited about the prospect of beginning our journey. We were this close to hitting the road at long last, the wind in our hair and the sun on our faces. Our reservation was processed without a hitch and, with insurance documents and driving licences in hand, we made our way onto the forecourt to get acquainted with our wheels.

‘Sorry guys.’ The lot attendant tutted as he inspected the paperwork. ‘No convertibles.’

‘Come again?’ spat Joe, as if to say ‘I dare you to say that again’.

‘Nooooo convertibles today. Sorry. But don’t you worry, I’ll fix you up with an equivalent vehicle in nooooo time at all. I got some great SUVs to choose from.’

‘We don’t want an SUV, we want a Chrysler Sebring convertible. The one we booked and paid for six months ago,’ replied Joe. The veins in his neck were beginning to throb.

‘They’re all booked out,’ replied the lot attendant.

‘B-but… they can’t be. The lady inside said everything was in order.’

Witnessing Joe transform into Basil Fawlty was not, I’m sad to say, a new experience. I had seen it once before when he threatened to set Alan Yentob on a BBC transport executive at Glastonbury Festival. The poor woman made the unfortunate assumption that television’s need was greater than that of radio and gave our fleet vehicle to someone from Television Centre, receiving a torrent of invective for her troubles like a thousand slaps to the head of a cowering Manuel. It was a little like watching Bruce Banner turn into the Incredible Hulk. (The phrase ‘mild-mannered’ was invented for Joe Harland. But so was the phrase ‘You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry’.) The transformation was swift and terrifying, and by now I was starting to recognise the signs: a bead of sweat at the temples, a change in skin colour, the pulsing of veins in the neck.

‘Nooooo convertibles,’ replied the attendant, shaking his head emphatically. For our benefit, he went on to explain how the system at Dollar Car Rental works.

It goes a little something like this (and I’m paraphrasing here): the desk clerks accept payment as normal, process the reservation, reassure the customer that everything is in order and, pausing only to try and sell them a variety of expensive extras such as satellite navigation and additional insurance they don’t need, invite them to make their way outside to pick up their vehicle. There, the underlings on the forecourt are tasked with finding you an ‘equivalent’ car to the one you have ordered. It’s a very effective arrangement as it apparently dispenses with the need to keep in stock any of the cars that have been (a) advertised or (b) paid for.

‘Equivalent to a Sebring is an Aspen or a Land Cruiser,’ continued the attendant. ‘Great cars. A lotta room in the trunk.’

‘I don’t care how much room they have in the trunk!’ exploded Joe, arms flailing, ‘It’s not the trunk I’m interested in! Has it escaped your notice that the Aspen and the Land Cruiser have one very crucial feature in common?’

‘No sir. What’s that?’

‘A fucking roof!’ For emphasis as he delivered this last point, Joe banged his hand hard against a metal sign just over his left shoulder, swore lavishly and profusely, and began to hop on one foot. This was not going well. Once we’d established that all the ‘equivalent’ vehicles available to us had a roof – that is, there were no equivalent vehicles – it was time to see the manager. We went inside, approached the customer service desk and demanded to talk to whoever was in charge.

Clayton the manager, bright of shirt and slight of frame, skipped over all smiles and handshakes, trying hard to affect the kind of open body language he had no doubt learned about in a ‘dealing with difficult customers’ training video. He was going to need all the customer service know-how he could muster, for here were two of the trickiest customers ever to darken his reception area. One of them was angrier than a grizzly bear with a wounded paw, and the other… well, the other had seen an awful lot of high-concept action movies.

‘What seems to be the problem gentlemen?’ chirped Clayton.

Bloody Americans and Their Impeccable Customer Service

My turn. This called for some Steven Berkoff. Specifically it called for Berkoff as Victor Maitland in Beverly Hills Cop. He plays the part with casual, teacherly nonchalance, garnished with the wild-eyed intent of a serial killer about to tuck into his latest victim (always addressing Foley as ‘my tough little friend’). Think Hannibal Lecter presenting ‘D for disembowel’ on Sesame Street and you’re halfway there. I stepped into character.

‘The problem, sir, is that you’ve had six months advance warning of these two ‘gentlemen’ walking in here with a credit card and a desire to drive out in a car with no roof. You’ve failed. What are you going to do about it?’

OK not exactly up to Berkoff’s standards, much less Anthony Hopkins’, but this kind of thing doesn’t come at all naturally to me. I’m just not good at making a scene.

‘I’m really not sure there’s anything I can do sir,’ he squirmed. ‘There are no convertible cars available today.’

Berkoff would never have settled for this.

‘Now listen to me,’ I whispered (I wanted to call him ‘my tough little friend’, but resisted). ‘We’re staying in LA for two days. That gives you precisely forty-eight hours to deliver a convertible Chrysler Sebring, as ordered, to the Four Seasons Hotel on Doheny Drive, and then we can forget all about this sorry episode.’

‘Let me see what I can do for you sir.’


Crikey, it was working.

Off he went and returned with a pretty blonde in possession of a smile even wider than his and a Master’s degree in customer service. She asked us to give her ten minutes while she ‘looked into the situation’ for us.

Sure enough, eight-and-a-half minutes later she returned (we timed her), and we were dispatched to the lot once more to find a gleaming, silver, convertible Sebring waiting for us with the keys in the ignition. Bingo. I flashed a smug, self-satisfied smile at the lot attendant as I unlocked the boot, placed the luggage inside and slammed it shut. The attendant offered to give us a tour of the controls, but we had no time for that. These jokers had kept us hanging around for long enough already. It was time to hit the road.

I reached for the key. Nothing there.

‘Joe, key please. Let’s get the hell out of here.’


‘I haven’t got the key, you have.’


‘Mate, I’m not in the mood for jokes. The sooner you

give me the key, the sooner we can be sitting by the pool at the Four Seasons sipping a margarita.’

‘I honestly don’t have the key. You had it last. You put the bags in the boot.’

Shit. I had locked the keys in the boot. In a little under a nanosecond I felt less Victor Maitland and more Frank Spencer. I called the lot attendant over.

‘We, er, appear to have locked the keys in the boot.’

‘Excuse me?’
‘Trunk. I mean trunk. I’ve locked the keys in the trunk.’

‘Absolutely no problem sir. We’ll have you a new one cut in no time.’ His bubbly efficiency made me feel even smaller than I felt already. Bloody Americans and their impeccable customer service.

In under five minutes we were on our way. Finally, this was it! Santa Monica Boulevard, destination Beverly Hills. The roof was down as planned, but we needed some music to lift the mood. I searched the CD wallet for something to mark the occasion, the auspicious beginning of a momentous journey, a search for the beating heart of rock and roll America. Something that would summon up the spirit of Americana and help us on our way. Something that would send a message beyond the grave in a language the spirits would understand, to say that we were here and we meant business.

Huey Lewis and the News.

Two pasty tourists driving a convertible through Inglewood, one of LA’s most notorious neighbourhoods, listening to ‘The Power of Love’. Chris was living the dream. I was trapped in his nightmare. We checked into the hotel and resolved to hit the town immediately. Hoping to beat the jet lag by staying up well past LA bedtime (whenever that is), we needed somewhere fitting to raise a glass and give ourselves a rousing send-off. So rock stop number one on the itinerary was the celebrated Chateau Marmont Hotel just off Sunset Boulevard, which competes with the nearby Hyatt for the crown of ‘most rock and roll hotel in the world’.

It’s a close-run contest. The Hyatt has seen more than its fair share of wild antics over the years and for sheer, clichéd, rock and roll point-scoring it probably has the edge. Television sets thrown out of windows? Check (Keiths Moon and Richards). Motorbikes ridden along corridors? Check (John Bonham). Scenes from famous rockumentary films shot there? Check (This is Spinal Tap, Almost Famous). The Hyatt was about as rock and roll as it was possible to get without making three seminal albums of its own and falling down dead of a drug overdose after twenty-seven years.

But for all its irrefutable rock credentials the Hyatt was just a little too obvious for our purposes, posturing and posing as it does on the edge of Sunset Strip like an older, more grandfatherly version of the concrete excrescences that squint out over the Costa Del Sol. It’s big, dumb and unimaginative. Aesthetically the Hyatt is the hotel equivalent of the muscle- bound blockhead pumping iron on the front at Venice Beach.

No, the Chateau (as it’s known to its friends) was altogether more exclusive, understated, refined. Modelled on the Château d’Amboise in the Loire Valley, it sits above and slightly away from the Strip behind neatly tended hedges and gardens, turning its nose up at the vulgar and frankly rather sordid goings-on down below. Granted, Led Zep had ridden their Harley Davidsons through its lobby and, yes, Jim Morrison had performed the ‘window dangling trick’ which became the mainstay of his Hollywood hotel sojourns. It even boasted a bona fide rock death in the form of John Belushi’s drugs overdose in 1982. The Chateau’s proprietors are still a little miffed about all the fuss and bother to this day.

Yes, what went on behind the closed doors of the Chateau Marmont was an altogether more sophisticated variety of rock and roll depravity.

Most exciting of all, for me anyway, was the fact that the Chateau offered the chance of glimpsing the spot where the cover art for Gram’s 1973 album GP was shot. It’s an iconic image: Gram sits alone in a huge, elaborately carved wooden armchair wearing a pale blue shirt, pinstripe trousers and Cuban heels. A Stetson hangs on the back of the chair behind his head. To his left an enormous arrangement of flowers sits on a wide mahogany table in what looks to be a reception area of the hotel. Yellow light spills in from the left of the photograph, casting an amber glow onto the side of his face. With his long, dark hair he has all the trappings and appearance of the LA rock star, but exudes a kind of lord-of-the-manor air that suggests he all but owns the place.

Which isn’t as far-fetched as it may sound. He didn’t own the place, but he did live there for a time in the early seventies. Not bad for a struggling country-rock aspirant whose efforts to date had failed to trouble anything more than the lower reaches of the hit parade. Gram’s family money and privileged background (he was the grandson of the Florida citrus fruit magnate John A. Snively) enabled him to maintain a lifestyle more or less on a par with the contemporaries whose record sales he was so desperate to emulate – the Stones mainly – but had so far failed to match. Many held that this trustafarian spending power was precisely what stopped him from achieving this aim, which is to say he lacked the naked ambition which drove his peers to ever higher heights. Whatever the truth, he was a regular among the circles of the LA rock aristocracy, and that was enough for us. The Chateau was definitely the place to start.

The Chateau was also the scheduled rendezvous for the first hook-up of the tour. We had arranged to meet an Internet superstar by the name of Terra Naomi, a musician and web celebutante who was beginning to attract the attention of the music industry in both London and LA. Her fame so far came from the millions of hits to her YouTube channel, which featured a weekly show chronicling the trials and tribulations of a superstar in the making. She and her producer-manager Paul Fox had offered to show us around LA the following day. Paul was something of an authority on the Laurel Canyon area which, along with the legendary Troubadour live music venue, had been pivotal in turning the West Coast folk scene from a backwater cottage industry into a unit-shifting hit machine responsible for some – in fact most – of the era’s biggest names. By bringing her camera crew along, Terra would make us the subject of one of her hit web shows, generating some much-needed traffic, not to mention content, for our own site.

I’ll admit it. Arranging to meet Terra at the Chateau felt pretty good. We were two high-powered media execs flying in from London to meet the Internet’s newest star. We were staying at the luxurious celebrity bolthole that was the Four Seasons hotel, and despite a touch of jet lag and a sore throat between us (either that or an elaborate ruse on Joe’s part to avoid talking to me), we were ready for a taste of the Hollywood high life. A quick call to the hotel concierge was all that was needed to secure a place on the guest list of one of the most exclusive hotel bars in the world. This had been my responsibility, as Joe was doing all he could to save his throat by not speaking. At all. We pulled up outside. I had made that call, hadn’t I?

Hadn’t I?

Shit.

‘Hello, you should have received a reservation from the Four Seasons,’ I lied, hoping that by saying the words with enough conviction it would somehow make them true. It was the same combination of hope and misplaced confidence that Joe had injected into ‘you should have our details on file’ at Dollar Car Rental.

‘I didn’t receive a reservation from the Four Seasons, no sir, I did not,’ said the doorman.

‘Well not to worry, there’s obviously been some mistake. Pop us down at that table over there and we’ll forget all about it.’

‘That table is reserved. Yes sir, it is,’ he insisted, agreeing with himself. It was like Rain Man. Not only were we being denied access, it was happening twice every time the fellow opened his mouth.

‘Oh dear. Never mind. Well, anywhere will do, we’re expecting a friend along in a minute. Find us a table if you can, old chap.’ (If at first you don’t succeed, turn the Englishness up to eleven and hope that does the trick instead.)

‘There are no tables available tonight. No sir, there are not,’ replied the doorman, one hundred per cent in agreement with himself once more.

‘Would it help if I told you we come with a message of peace and reconciliation from the Belushi estate?’

‘No sir. No it would not.’

This was going nowhere. Rather than be turned away another six or eight times, we elected to cut our losses and leave. Our chance to add a few rock and roll antics of our own to the list of Chateau-related bad behaviour would go no further, this time, than gently taking the piss out of a doorman who had no idea he was having the piss taken out of him. No sir, he did not. Finding a suitable meeting place a little further along Sunset, I sheepishly called Terra to redirect her, explaining that there had been a terrible mix- up at the hotel and by golly there was going to be one hell of a stink when we got back there.¹

If You Can’t Find a Good Reason for Doing Something, a Stupid Reason Will Do

But now that the Chateau was no longer on the agenda, the whole thing felt less like a jubilant send-off and more like, well, two blokes meeting a girl in a bar. And with Joe now virtually mute I felt the sudden pressure of having to carry the whole evening on my own. There was nothing for it but to drink heroic quantities of alcohol. It would make us funnier, more erudite and generally better company than if we’d had none at all. Joe valiantly joined in, quickly establishing that a steady flow of bourbon was just what the doctor ordered to soothe the rasp in his throat. We were starting to loosen up. By the time Terra arrived we were already at least three sheets to the wind, possibly more.

We recognised her immediately from the videos we had seen on the Internet. Inevitably she was smaller than we’d expected. (What’s the web equivalent of ‘you look smaller than you do on the telly’? In fact aren’t people supposed to look bigger than they do on the Internet?) Attractive with striking features, she had long, dark hair and wore a black, short-sleeved blouse with a ruffle at the neck and translucent sleeves which revealed an intricate, swirling tattoo on her upper left arm.

We exchanged kisses to both cheeks – it seemed like the right thing to do when greeting LA cyber-royalty, though to my knowledge there’s no established protocol here – and I ordered drinks for us all.

‘Do you guys have any money?’ she enquired.

Good lord, this one didn’t waste any time. I know struggling musicians find themselves short of a dollar from time to time, but hadn’t she just pulled up in a Mercedes? And, come to think of it, hadn’t she just signed a lucrative publishing deal with Universal?

‘The ATM was broken and I don’t have a cent on me. I’m so embarrassed.’

Fair enough. Broken ATM or not, I suppose it wouldn’t do for a lady, much less a popstar, to be entertained by two gentlemen and have to buy her own drinks.

We sat down and explained how the idea for the trip had been born, talked through our rough itinerary and what we planned to do along the way. Fortified by the booze, Joe and I slipped into what would turn out to be a familiar and well-trodden schtick before we even knew we were doing it. Tonight, as on many others over the coming weeks when faced with a willing American audience, we adopted the patter and dynamic of a TV comedy duo, but with long, overblown anecdotes instead of actual jokes. Out came the favourite about The KLF burning a million pounds of their own money in the name of art, the one about Bill Drummond’s travails trying to sell a Richard Long photograph for $20,000 (and how thirty, dollar-sized pieces of it ended up hanging on my living room wall – more of which in a minute), even the one about Joe’s mum being a professional chocolate taster who counsels anorexics in her spare time. Our audience was enraptured and we were playing to it, pulling out only our choicest yarns and spinning them out with hilarious asides and amusing bonus content. We were literally the two funniest, most engaging people on earth.

Joe, to give him his due, is a wonderful raconteur. When he’s in ‘oratorical mode’ – usually after no more than one- and-a-half glasses of rosé – you can wind him up, let him go, and settle in for several hours of gripping, ripping entertainment. His capacity for memorising names, dates, quotations, entire speeches, lists or anniversaries, and then weaving them into an exhilarating narrative, is astonishing. Conversationally he can hold his own on any subject you care to throw at him – music, cinema, technology, travel, literature, sport. From Rush to Rachmaninov, Swayze to Scorsese, quantum theory to Timothy Leary, Harland not only knows things that you don’t, he’ll impart them with all the timing and precision of a seasoned toastmaster. You name it, Joe knows stuff about it. And he’s going to tell you.

(What’s more – and this delights me and enrages others – he talks like he’s on the radio more or less all the time, most often, but not limited to, Radio 4. Give him a call on his mobile some time and have a listen to his voicemail greeting. It has all the hypnotic, undulating timbre of the shipping forecast, rising and falling with the ebb and flow of his carefully constructed message. Or watch his fingers on the table as he’s chatting away in a bar and you’ll notice him reflexively fading records in and out of his own amusing repartee. He can’t help himself.)

Allow me at this point, if you will, a brief excursion into the crazy world of art terrorist and avant-pop artiste Bill Drummond of The KLF. It is necessary here I think because, first of all, the reference above to the $20,000 Richard Long photo probably needs a bit of background. Secondly, it might give you some idea of how unutterably bored Terra must have been by the time we were through with the story. And lastly, it might just give you some sense of the spirit of arty stupidness in which this whole ridiculous enterprise was conceived. It was the same spirit of arty stupidness that led Chris and me to becoming the only two men on the entire planet driving across America to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of a virtually unknown country-rock artist. Drummond, after all, was a man who once drove around London’s orbital M25 motorway for twenty-five hours in order to find out where it led.

I’ll try and keep it short. A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind was a landscape photograph, taken by Long and bought by Drummond, of a small stone circle somewhere in Iceland. Bill decided one morning that the photo, which hung on the wall of his Buckinghamshire home, needed to complete a circle of its own. He planned to sell the photograph for the exact amount he paid for it, bury the cash under the stone circle which featured in the original work, take a photograph of it, and then hang the resulting work – under the new name The Smell of Money Underground – in precisely the spot that the original had occupied in his house. You have to admit it has a certain illogical symmetry to it.

How To Be An Artist is a book by Drummond which tells the story of how he tried to find a buyer for the photograph by placing placards in hundreds of unremarkable locations around the country: attached to motorway flyovers and road signs, tied to parking meters or garden gates – you get the idea. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t have any takers. The book was also a present from Chris on my thirtieth birthday, the same year as the Butch and Sundance card which started all this.

Undeterred by his failure to flog the photograph by unconventional means, Drummond’s next tack was to go one better; he cut it into twenty thousand evenly-sized pieces and tried selling them individually for a dollar each. When the last of the pieces had sold, he would take the cash to Iceland as planned and complete the work of art he had held in his head since he removed it from the wall of his house.

Which is how thirty tiny pieces, or precisely 0.15 per cent, of A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind came to be hanging on my living room wall – framed, individually mounted and certified by Drummond himself. Continuing the Drummond- related exchange of gifts, for my thirtieth birthday Joe had bought thirty dollars’ worth of the fragmented photograph, one for each of my years, and in doing so completed a little circle of our own. This was the table-sized work of art I was concerned about not losing when I ‘mislaid’ Joe’s home- made birthday card. It is the nicest, most thoughtful present anyone has ever bought me. It’s also the only piece of ‘real’ art that I own. So you can see a sort of pattern emerging: a tradition of marking ridiculous anniversaries in ever more ridiculous ways. You can also sort of see why we sort of had to spend nearly a month of our lives driving 4,500 miles in search of rock and roll America as a sixtieth birthday present to a musician most people have never heard of. After all, who else was going to do it?

And there was one more Drummond dictum which had stuck in our minds back in the planning stages. Another of his books – The Manual: How to Have a Number One Hit the Easy Way – had asserted that being a Radio 1 producer was one of the fastest ways of losing touch with whatever finer qualities your soul may once have had. We weren’t sure whether this was true of us – what would we know, we were Radio 1 producers after all – but surely a quest to find the soul of American music might help us hold onto what few fine qualities we had left.

Several hours and a good deal more Jack Daniels later, Terra finally got a word in edge ways.

‘Those guys, the ones that burned a million dollars…’

‘Quid,’ blurted Joe. ‘A million quid. That’s nearly two million dollars.’

‘Right, a million quid. Why would they do that?’

‘Art,’ I burped, slamming my glass on the table top for emphasis.

‘Art?’ replied Terra, incredulously.

‘Yep. They made a film called Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid.’

‘What, and then sold it to a studio?’


‘Nope.’


‘So how did they make the money back?’


‘They didn’t. That’s the whole point. If they had, it wouldn’t have been art,’ I explained, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. And it kind of was the most obvious thing in the world, to Joe and me at least.

‘But… I don’t get it. How is that art?’

‘How is anything art?’ said Joe, as though by simply asking the question he had settled once and for all a matter which has been taxing the finest minds in the world for centuries.

‘It just seems like such a waste,’ said Terra. ‘Couldn’t they have just given it to charity?’

‘Of course they couldn’t have given it to charity,’ I jumped in, ‘otherwise it wouldn’t have been art.’

‘And beshides,’ added Joe, his sore throat now a distant, bourbon-tinged memory, ‘isn’t it fun to do something just for the shake of it shometimes?’

‘I gue-ess…’ said Terra, with a weary look suggesting she was actually thinking ‘… and I’m going to spend a whole day with these losers tomorrow?’

Now don’t get me wrong. Neither Joe nor I had any pretensions that what we were doing was art. We were under no illusions that this was anything more than two friends on the road in search of rock and roll America, hoping to learn a little something along the way. What we were doing though, was making a grand gesture for the hell of it, because if you can’t find a good reason for doing something, then a stupid one will have to do. In our own little way we were burning a million quid, or at the very least circumnavigating the M25 for twenty-five hours. And we didn’t care whether people got it or not.