Flying Burrito Brothers' The Gilded Palace of Sin

Bob Proehl

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781441143495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

In 1968, the Flying Burrito Brothers released The Gilded Palace of Sin on A&M Records, selling a disappointing 400, 000 copies. Almost forty years later, front man Gram Parsons, is still spoken of with almost messianic reverence. Patron saint of alt-country, emblazoned with a shining cross, dead at 26. Overshadowed by Parsons, this album remains an anomaly in the country rock genre, a map in miniature of a moment in music, and warrants discussion as more than part of the Gram Parsons legacy.

1
Vanity: Cosmic American Music

“You should dream more….reality in our century is not something to be faced.”

Graham Greene

It’s 1956 in Waycross, Georgia, and a young boy is playing Elvis on his front stoop. He’s been practicing the moves since he saw Presley earlier that year, the sneering lip and jittering legs. Despite ears like open doors on a Cadillac, the boy’s Buddha-like cheeks and slicked-back hair make for a passable approximation of the Sun Records star. With the family’s brand new hi-fi cranking out the latest Elvis 45s and the neighborhood kids gathered around, the boy is the star of the show.

It’s 1973 in Joshua Tree Park, California, and he is not breathing. What was once baby fat has returned as the unhealthy bloat of a longtime drinker. His female companion, experienced in dealing with junkies, shoves ice cubes up his ass to revive him. He springs back to life, grinning weakly and asking the woman what she plans to do with him now that she’s got his pants off.

It’s 1958 in Winter Haven, Florida, and the boy is spending Christmas at his grandparents’ estate. His mother’s family is one of the richest citrus producers in Florida, and it has always been clear to the boy that he can have whatever he wants. Back home in Waycross, his father, exiled to one of the family business’s satellite operations and left alone on Christmas Eve, shoots himself in the head. He leaves no note and the death is ruled accidental.

It’s 1971 in the south of France, and the young man has brought his new wife to honeymoon at Keith Richard’s estate at Nellcote. In the basement of a sprawling villa, the Rolling Stones are laying down recordings that will become Exile on Main Street. The summer is a haze of drugs, humidity, and personal entanglements. He spends hours at the piano with Richards, banging out songs by Buck Owens, George Jones, and Hank Williams. The two look like boys at summer camp, both young and healthy-looking. Maybe he floats into the basement in the middle of the night while the tapes are rolling, lending his voice to one of the raucous singalongs that punctuate the album. Maybe he is buried deep in the mix of “Sweet Virginia.” He roams the house, high on other people’s drugs, nodding out in odd places. Mick Jagger, who can barely get studio time out of Keith, is giving the young man dirty looks. Anita Pallenberg, Keith’s girlfriend and undisputed lady of the manor, makes a call to friends in Ireland, singer Donovan and his wife. “Could you please take Gram? He’s out of his head and needs to be with somebody.”

It’s 1964 in Winter Haven, Florida, and a new nightclub has opened up in town. Located in an old warehouse and done up with a medieval theme, the Derry Down is owned and operated by Bob Parsons, the boy’s new stepfather, a blatant attempt to buy the boy’s love using his own mother’s money. The boy knows this but chooses not to care. His band, the Shilos have just come back from a stay in the folk Mecca of Greenwich Village and are confident they can be the next Kingston Trio. They are sharply dressed, four likely lads.

It’s 1973 in Los Angeles, and the young man is standing on the outer edge of a funeral. They are burying Clarence White, a former member of the Byrds who was hit by a car unloading gear at a gig just days before. The young man and his friend Phil Kaufman have shown up drunk, and as the preacher talks, the young man says to his friend, “Man, if I go first, don’t let them put me in the ground like that. Take my body out to the desert and burn it.” Kaufman agrees, takes another swig out of a concealed bottle. As the service ends, the young man begins singing, softly at first, then rising, joined by the other mourners, an old country spiritual called “Farther Along.”

It’s 1965 in Jacksonville, Florida, and the young man is graduating from high school. Before the commencement ceremony, someone approaches him with news. The young man’s mother has died of alcohol poisoning in a hospital bed, miles away. Given the choice, he opts to go on with the ceremony, telling no one, not even his younger sister, what has happened. By the end of the summer, he’ll be a Harvard man.

It’s 1973 in Joshua Tree Park, California, and two campers have reported a large log burning on a rock in the park. The rangers investigate. It’s not a log, but a smoldering coffin, stolen from the airport the day before, with a green Western Airlines body bag lying beside it. In the coffin is the body of an overdose victim, dead at 26, only three weeks after finishing his second solo album. The album’s cover image and title are changed to a soft-focus close up of the young man’s face on a field of blue. In the upper-right corner in small white text: Grievous Angel. It’s 1968 in Los Angeles, and a young man is playing Elvis in roughneck honkytonks. Bedroom eyes and cowboy swagger, decked out in a fire engine red Nudie suit spotted with sequined yellow submarines, he frequents the open showcases, his appearance just begging for a confrontation with the regulars.

“The first couple of times I nearly got killed,” Gram Parsons told it later. “There I was in my satin bellbottoms and the people couldn’t believe it. I got up on stage and sang and when I got off, a guy said to me, ‘I want you to meet my five brothers. We were going to kick your ass, but you can sing real good, so we’ll buy you a drink instead.”’

Keith Richards has similar memories of watching Gram on the LA country circuit.

“I remember being in the Palomino club in LA and, y’know, hardened old peroxide waitresses who’d been there for yonks, tears streaming down their eyes while they’re listening to Gram play.”⁷

Gram Parsons was 21 and imagined he was about to change the world. Dropping out of Harvard after only a year, he’d formed the International Submarine Band with some friends in Boston. Taking their name from an acid-fueled discussion of a Little Rascals episode, the band’s shows included elements of country, soul, and R&B. Striking out in Boston, the band relocated to a house in the Bronx, paid for by money from Parsons’ considerable trust fund, his share of his grandfather’s $28 million citrus empire. Parsons had taken a little time away to check out Los Angeles and fell in love, first and foremost, with a blonde,⁸ but also with LA as a city and a scene. New York was hardly a hot bed of music in 1967, and within a couple days in LA, Parsons had met musicians, movie stars, and a cross section of the California social set.⁹ He called up his band mates and told them California was where they needed to be, so the band shipped themselves out West. The International Submarine Band struggled to find gigs, eventually landing a recording contract with Lee Hazlewood by promising more of a pure country sound,¹⁰ rather than the country/R&B hybrid they’d been playing. The decision to excise R&B from the repertoire split the band, leading to the departure of bassist and co-founder Ian Dunlop. Meanwhile, Parsons was schlepping from one showcase to another, losing out to wheelchair-bound Johnny Cash impersonators and yodeling grandmas, risking his neck for the approval of truckers and waitresses. The offer to join the Byrds came along immediately after the Sub Band had finished cutting their first album, Safe at Home, and Parsons was quick to grab the next rung up on the ladder.

He was determined to show the hippie kids that country music was vital, and show country audiences that a California longhair could play it just as well as anyone. By 1968, he’d blown through two bands trying to bring country music to the masses. Close listening to Safe at Home and Sweetheart of the Rodeo show them not as the country rock innovations they’ve been labeled in retrospect, but as earnest, straightforward country albums, loyal and reverential to the tradition that spawned them. The only innovation was the people playing on them, and ultimately, that was why the albums failed. The Byrds’ almost hostile reception at the Grand Ole Opry and the Byrds’ ridicule at the hands of country DJ Ralph Emery proved that the country audience was not ready to open the door for a scenester like Parsons. And the abysmal sales of Sweetheart within the rock audience proved that the LA scene was not ready to embrace a style of music whose most popular practitioners held the hippie movement in obvious contempt. Safe at Home and Sweetheart of the Rodeo made for opening arguments, but Parsons had yet to make his case.

While hanging with Keith Richards in England after leaving the Byrds, Parsons was starting to get other ideas, leaning away from pure country towards something else.

“I always had this dream about doing stuff in England,” Parsons told an interviewer, “starting a country band in England, cause England is so unjaded that way, they’re so open minded about it, really. They’re so open minded they’re ignorant. They don’t know. Maybe it’s just a dream but it seems like the perfect place to start a country music scene. Only the musicians can’t support it. Unfortunately. So you had to take over American musicians and it costs a whole lot of bread.” He started to believe that he could pioneer a form of music that was insurgent and new, which demonstrates part of the problem with Gram right off: “pioneer” isn’t really a title you get to give yourself, and it wasn’t till long after he was gone that anyone credited Gram Parsons as one of the pioneers of country rock.

He hated the term country rock, by the way, referring to the genre in 1973 as a “plastic dry fuck.”¹¹ Parsons tried a list of names to describe this new genre—mountain gospel; white soul—but the one that seemed to get the most press was the most overstated. Gram Parsons was going to invent a Cosmic American Music.

It was more than hippies playing Merle Haggard at the Opry, although that was part of it. It was more than the inescapable bathos of George Jones, gussied up in a rhinestone suit at the Whisky-a-Go-Go. It grew from the lessons of Ray Charles’s landmark efforts, Modem Sounds in Country and Western and Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues,¹² two albums that demonstrated the artist’s ability to take the best parts of country music, its raw emotional content, the elegance and simplicity of songwriting, and personalize them through translation to a foreign medium and aesthetic. Charles dove into his native Southern music as if there were never racial boundaries between country and soul, layering Hank Williams and Patsy Cline with lush strings, backing choirs, and his own soulful vocals. Cosmic American Music would embrace Southern music by black and white performers and drag it into the multicolored lights of the California psychedelic scene. It would be Buck Owens singing Aretha Franklin songs, on acid and plugged in, barreling forward on a Tennessee two-beat and sprawling out in fuzzbox and wah-wah.

During Parsons’ sabbatical in England, everything was happening in California. The slow dissolution of the Byrds and the breakup of Buffalo Springfield, bands with too many front-men for their own good, had left LA teeming with available talent. Lineups formed, dissolved, and reformed as musicians caromed off one another. Assessments of the homefront from former International Submarine Band bassist Chris Ethridge convinced Parsons that LA was the only place to be. Arriving in August 1968 just as Sweetheart was hitting record stores, Parsons talked extensively with Richie Furay from Buffalo Springfield about starting up a band, but after failing to agree on a lineup, the two decided to strike out separately.¹³

While Parsons and Ethridge were trying to put a new band together, Chris Hillman was recovering from a season in hell with the Byrds in South Africa.

“McGuinn and I in hindsight were fools to do that tour,” Hillman said, “but we were professional. Both of us were probably the two most professional out of the original five guys. We felt, ‘Well, we have a contract—we’d better go.’ And we were assured, ‘Oh, you’ll play for black and white audiences’, which was not true. And we shouldn’t have gone.”

Adding to the stress of the South Africa experience and the vitriolic backlash against the Byrds in the European press, mysterious “expenses” incurred by the band under the questionable management of Larry Spector depleted the band’s accounts to almost nothing. Finally fed up, Hillman quit the Byrds not long after they returned to the States.

It didn’t take Parsons long to track down his former bandmate. Bearing marijuana and a bass player, Parsons went to visit Hillman at his home just outside LA. Hillman was still justifiably angry over the way Parsons had left the Byrds in the lurch, but the inclusion of Chris Ethridge on bass would allow Hillman to step forward on guitar for the first time since he’d left the Hillmen to join the Byrds in 1965. The opportunity was too much to pass up.

“I had been talking with Chris Ethridge about starting a group,” a stoned Parsons said in a 1971 radio interview. “And finally Chris Hillman came around and said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to go to South Africa either. It was the wrong thing to do. I think I’ll quit the Byrds and join you guys.’ I said, ‘Fine. Two guys named Chris in the band. Why not?”’ In truth, it was Parsons and not Hillman who did the apologizing, and Hillman gave a different, more accurate version of the pair’s reconciliation.

“I forgave him, and we started anew. I was so stifled, I felt asleep—I needed stimulation. Gram kind of came to me, hat in hand, and said, ‘I’m sorry that I did that.’ We made up, and we embarked on a brand new journey.”

With Hillman on board, the new band was coalescing quickly, which was good, because Parsons had been telling Melody Maker about the band since the moment he’d gotten back to LA.¹⁴

“The group’s already formed, although I can’t say too much about it,” Parsons told the magazine. “It’s basically a southern soul group playing country and gospel-oriented music with a steel guitar.”

All they needed was the steel player Parsons had promised. And, of course, a name. After striking out with a couple Nashville pedal steel players Parsons had been interested in, they settled on their third choice, “Sneaky Pete” Kleinow, an animator on the Gumby television show.¹⁵ Older than Parsons, Hillman, and Ethridge by a good eight years, Kleinow was a fixture on the LA country scene and had played with the Byrds during some of the post-Sweetheart shows in California. After being approached by Hillman and Parsons at the Palomino, Kleinow agreed to join the fledgling band. Already equipped with three Byrds or pseudo-Byrds, they tried to recruit two more. Clarence White and Gene Parsons (no relation) had been signed on to the Byrds fulltime after the South African tour as a guitarist and drummer, respectively, but both opted not to join the group of McGuinn’s castoffs. Even with no official drummer, the boys decided the lineup was complete.

Finding a name proved to be even easier. Founding International Submarine Band member Ian Dunlop, who’d help come up with the band’s original name and had followed Parsons out to LA, left the Submarine Band before the Safe at Home sessions and formed a loose collective of musicians playing soul music along with country. Determined to actively avoid commercial success, Dunlop chose a ridiculous and unmarketable name: the Flying Burrito Brothers. The line-up included guitarist Barry Tashian and sax player Bobby Keyes, who would go on to record with the Rolling Stones. Parsons had actually opened for the band at their debut gig. Once it was apparent that Safe at Home was the Sub Band’s swan song, Chris Ethridge, who’d replaced Dunlop as the Sub Band’s bassist for the recordings, joined up with the original Burritos. But the band had no interest in being popular, shunning LA’s music industry and refusing to sign to a label. After being recognized by a fan on the streets of LA, Dunlop decided the band was getting too big and moved back to New York City, leaving Ethridge without a band and the Flying Burrito Brothers moniker vacant.¹⁶

“I stole it from him,” Parsons practically giggled later. Without pausing to contact Dunlop, Parsons, Hillman, and their new band picked up the name and ran with it.

2
Sloth: Burrito Manor

“Lazier than a toad, I’ve gotten by without lifting a finger: I’ve lived everywhere.”

Arthur Rimbaud

Not everyone gets his musical career subsidized by a trust fund. Chris Hillman had been in love with music since he first picked up an instrument. But unlike Gram Parsons, he also depended on it to pay the rent.

Born and raised in San Diego, Hillman started working on the LA country scene as a teenager, joining the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers in the early sixties and taking a job as the mandolin player for the Golden State Boys soon after. The San Francisco scene had a strong base in country and blue-grass,¹⁷ but LA’s music scene was dominated by folk. Outside a couple clubs like the Palamino and the Ace of Hear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue Envy: Sweetheart of the Rodeo
• 1. Vanity: Cosmic American Music
• 2. Sloth: Burrito Manor Fathers
• 3. Vanity: Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors
• 4. Sloth: Hot Burrito
• 5. Lust: Christine’s Tune
• 6. Avarice: Sin City
• 7. Lust: Dark End of the Street
• 8. Wrath: My Uncle Sons
• 9. Gluttony: The Train Song
• 10. Envy: Let It Bleed
• 11. Avarice: Burrito Deluxe Holy Ghosts
• 12. Wrath: Under My Thumb
• Epilogue Gluttony: Do You Know How It Feels to Be Lonesome?
• Bibliography
• Footnote
• eCopyright