PROLOGUE

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.

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.)

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.'

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, widescreen 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.

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.