The Gilded Palace of Sin
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2
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5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice
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10. Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos
11. The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard
12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo
13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk
14. Aqualung by Allan Moore
15. OK Computer by Dai Griffiths
4
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17. Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis
18. Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz
19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli
20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes
21. Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno
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26. Low by Hugo Wilcken
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30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy
31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario
32. There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis
5
33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green
34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar
35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti
36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal
37. The Who Sell Out by John Dougan
38. Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth
39. Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns
40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson
41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by Eric Weisbard
42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy
43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck
44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier
45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier
46. Aja by Don Breithaupt
47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by
Shawn Taylor
48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz
49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite
6
50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef
51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich
52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson
53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay
54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel
55. Horses by Philip Shaw
56. Master of Reolity by John Damielle
57. Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris
58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs
59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron
60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen
61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl
62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate
63. Radio City by Bruce Eaton
69. 69 Love Songs by L.D. Beghtol
7
The Gilded Palace of Sin
“One sin very naturally leans on another.”
Thomas Wilson
Bob Proehl
8
9
2008
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
33third.blogspot.com
Copyright © 2008 by Bob Proehl
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers
or their agents.
Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer waste recycled
paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Proehl, Bob.
The Gilded Palace of Sin / Bob Proehl.
p. cm. -- (33 1/3)
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-4349-5
1. Flying Burrito Bros.
Gilded Palace of Sin. 2. Flying Burrito Bros. I. Title. II.
Series.
10
ML421.F63P76 2008
782.42092′2--dc22
2008045099
11
12
13
Table of Contents
Prologue Envy: Sweetheart of the Rodeo
1. Vanity: Cosmic American Music
2. Sloth: Burrito Manor Fathers
3. Vanity: Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors
7. Lust: Dark End of the Street
11. Avarice: Burrito Deluxe Holy Ghosts
Epilogue Gluttony: Do You Know How It Feels to Be
Lonesome?
14
16
Acknowledgments
With thanks to Casey, Gregg, Khaled, Luke, Melanie, and
Shaianne for reading it, Steve for alleviating some of my
guitar-related ignorance, Eryn for listening to me blather on
about it, and Sarah for being awake three hours later than
anyone on the East Coast.
The next one will be for my mom, but this one is for my dad.
17
18
Prologue
Envy: Sweetheart of the Rodeo
Roger McGuinn had gotten his band back.
It was McGuinn who’d started the Byrds off, after all. Gene
Clark was between jobs and between sounds when he
stumbled upon McGuinn playing Beatles covers at the
Troubador in LA, a bold move in a club devoted to folk. And
David Crosby was essentially a Hollywood brat and petty
criminal when he joined the duo singing in a stairwell at the
Troub months later. The trio had mild success doing folk
songs as the Jet Set, but McGuinn had given the band its
name and, between his spiraling Rickenbacker 12-string and
his lilting tenor rising out of the harmonies to take the lead on
“Mr. Tambourine Man,” its signature sound. Bassist Chris
Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke were brought on
almost as hired help, turning the folk trio into a real band. But
as the Byrds expanded the folk rock sound they’d topped the
charts with in 1965, McGuinn found himself shouldered out
of the spotlight by Gene Clark, a naturally stronger songwriter
and singer, and David Crosby, a dynamic personality with a
penchant for bullying.
Clark’s departure for personal reasons left McGuinn and
Crosby to grapple for control of the band until midway
through the 1967 sessions for The Notorious Byrd Brothers,
when McGuinn and Chris Hillman drove up to Laurel Canyon
and informed David Crosby he was out of the band. Crosby’s
firing and the resignation of drummer Michael Clarke left
McGuinn and the shy, soft-spoken Hillman as the only
19
members of the original quintet. McGuinn entered 1968 at the
helm of one of the biggest bands in America, with a critical
darling of a record ready to be released and a sweeping vision
of the Byrds’ next step.
“My original idea for Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” McGuinn
would later explain, “was to do a double album, a
chronological album, starting with old-timey music—not
bluegrass, but pre-bluegrass, dulcimers and nasal Appalachian
stuff. Then get into the advanced 1930s version of it, and
move it up to modern country, the forties and fifties, with
steel guitar and pedal steel guitar—do the evolution of that
kind of music. Then cut it there and bring it up into electronic
music and a kind of space music, and going into futuristic
music.”
To bring this vision to life, McGuinn planned to employ a
small army of session players. Different Byrds for different
eras, revolving around the two remaining members, McGuinn
and Hillman. The pair began scouring the California scene for
players, picking up Hillman’s cousin Kevin Kelley on drums.
McGuinn, head still full of the experimental jazz sounds that
informed “Eight Miles High,” wanted a pianist who could
cover jazz and blues material. The Byrds ended up with Gram
Parsons.
“I think it was back in late 1967 when I first met him,” said
Hillman. “I’d heard about this ‘new kid in town’ who was
writing and singing country songs, but I hadn’t paid much
attention until somebody explained the International
Submarine Band to me.” Parsons’ International Submarine
Band had just recorded their first album, Safe at Home, for
Lee Hazlewood’s new label. “Young, hip guys playing
20
country music,” Hillman described the album. “I liked it.
Actually, it was an old idea of mine. And to think some young
upstart had beaten me to the punch.” He brought the
21-year-old Parsons into a Byrds’ rehearsal. Parsons faked his
way through a handful of blues tunes and an unwitting
McGuinn hired him on the spot.
“We hired a piano player and he turned out to be Parsons, a
monster in sheep’s clothing,” McGuinn lamented later. “And
he exploded out of his sheep’s clothing. God! It’s George
Jones! In a sequined suit!”
The Byrds’ new hire turned out to be an outspoken ally for
the generally quiet and unassuming Chris Hillman. A vet of
the California bluegrass scene, Hillman had been trying to tug
the Byrds into country since the beginning, meeting with
resistance from McGuinn and Crosby. But the combined
influence of Parsons and Hillman was enough to move the
band in a country direction, musically and physically.
The band spent February rehearsing Louvin Brothers tunes
alongside Dylan numbers. McGuinn had chosen two songs
from Dylan’s bootlegged Basement Tapes to book-end the
album, and they filled in the middle with songs by
Merle Haggard, the Louvin Brothers and Woody Guthrie.
Parsons wrote two songs for the album, the forward-looking
“One Hundred Years from Now” and the backward-looking
“Hickory Wind,” and brought in a song by Stax artist William
Bell, “You Don’t Miss Your Water” that had been recorded
by Bell and Otis Redding. Parsons and Hillman worked it
over into a country tune with Parsons on lead vocals. In fact,
Parsons was taking lead vocals on half the album’s tracks,
21
and McGuinn hadn’t contributed a single original song. In
March they packed up for a week’s worth of recording
sessions in Nashville, including an appearance at the Grand
Ole Opry.
Even with fresh haircuts and muted versions of their usual
hippie attire, the Byrds were clearly not welcome at the
staunchly traditional Opry. The crowd welcomed them with
taunts of “tweet tweet” and “Cut your hair!” but warmed a
little after a rendition of Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back
Home.” By the time host Tompall Glaser announced they’d
be following it with “Life in Prison,” another Haggard classic,
the Opry audience was ready to give these freaks a chance.
Amid the applause, Gram Parsons seized the mic.
“We’re not going to do that tonight,” he informed the
audience. “We’re going to do a song for my grandmother who
used to listen to the Grand Ole Opry with me when I was
little. It’s a song I wrote called ‘Hickory Wind.”’
Powerless to stop this unauthorized change of programming,
Tompall Glaser stormed off the stage. In the wings,
country legend Roy Acuff fumed. Fuzzy from the joint the
Byrds had shared backstage, McGuinn hit the opening chords
and looked on at irrefutable evidence: Gram Parsons had
hijacked his band.
After returning to LA to finish recording Sweetheart, the
Byrds traveled to London for a handful of shows. Parsons
wanted to take the entire Nashville session band along,
including the bulky pedal steel, but McGuinn and Hillman
22
balked at the cost. After one of the shows at Middle Earth—a
hazy psychedelic club in a Covent Garden basement that
played host to bands like Pink Floyd, Captain Beefheart, and
the Pretty Things—McGuinn’s friends Mick Jagger and Keith
Richards led the Byrds on a trek to Stonehenge, accompanied
by a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. As the bottle went around,
McGuinn explained that on the advice of South African
singer, Miriam Makeba,
they’d decided to tour South Africa to witness apartheid for
themselves. McGuinn had been assured they’d be playing for
integrated audiences. Equal parts awed by the Stones and
nervous about the racial politics of playing in South Africa,
Gram Parsons approached Keith Richards with his doubts
about the upcoming tour.
“We wouldn’t go,” Richards flatly replied.
Whether it was a heartfelt belief, a growing fear of flying, a
schoolboy crush on the Stones, or pure petulance that certain
of his demands regarding the tour had not been met, Parsons
never showed up at the airport. McGuinn fired him on the
spot and Hillman, who thought he’d found an ally in the
young upstart, was livid. The Byrds announced they were
looking for a new guitarist and, leaving Parsons with the
Stones, departed
from Heathrow for Johannesburg as a three piece.
The tour was disastrous. The band arrived to learn they were
playing to segregated audiences, an entirely black audience
one night, an entirely white audience the next, and returned to
Europe to find themselves vilified in the European press,
attacked as racists and hypocrites. Honestly hurt by the
accusations, McGuinn nearly suffered a nervous breakdown;
23
the band sustained serious financial losses of a questionable
nature, attributable to their new business manager, Larry
Spector, who had recently been given access to the band’s
accounts. They returned to LA physically drained,
emotionally damaged, and mentally exhausted.
Columbia Records released Sweetheart of the Rodeo in
August 1968 to poor commercial and critical response.
Having already attempted to put the album on country
stations
and unable to get the album played on rock radio stations,
Columbia ran a series of radio spots featuring song clips from
the record. Over the brief clips, a couple argued whether or
not this was, in fact, the Byrds. “For their latest Columbia
album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo,” assured the announcer at
the ad’s conclusion, “the Byrds take eleven trips to the
country. Why not fly with them?” With virtually no radio
presence, the album’s sales languished and were made even
worse by the reaction within the rock community, who called
them out not on the choice of material, but on the execution.
“The Byrds do not sound like Buck Owens and his
Buckaroos,” wrote a Rolling Stone reviewer. “They’re not
that good.” In fact, they were very good, approaching country
music with skill and a certain
5 An early attempt had gone horribly, with noted country DJ
Ralph Emery flat-out refusing to play the band’s music during
an in-studio appearance by the Byrds. Parsons and McGuinn
ridiculed Emery in the song “Drug Store Truck Driving
Man,” which essentially labeled Emery an ignorant, racist
hick.
level of critical distance. But it was a cold precision,
producing an album that sounded like clinical country. Their
24
studied approach resulted in a kind of sterility that bordered
on satire. But then, according to Gram Parsons, the album
Columbia put out hadn’t been the album he’d worked on.
“He erased them and did the vocals himself and fucked them
up,” he complained when he heard the finished product.
Parsons’ lead vocals had been all but eliminated, with only
“Hickory Wind” remaining.
There’s a story behind it—a couple, actually.
When the International Submarine Band sank, it left a
collection of legal troubles in its wake, including a contract
giving Lee Hazlewood Industries the rights to Parsons’
vocals. According to the official story from McGuinn and
Columbia, LHI threatened to sue Columbia if they used the
vocal tracks, forcing McGuinn to overdub “The Christian
Life,” “Life in Prison,” “One Hundred Years from Now,” and
“You’re Still on My Mind” with an awkward imitation of
Parsons’ southern drawl. “Roger is definitely putting on an
affected southern accent on that album,” commented Hillman.
“I think he approached it like an acting job, although not a
good acting job…. It’s funny, it’s silly.” At the last moment, a
studio rep from Columbia rushed into the studio, waving a
settlement in the air and saving “Hickory Wind” from
oblivion, preserving at least a bit of Parsons’ presence on the
album.
Sweetheart producer Gary Usher told it differently. “Those
legal problems were resolved once we were in Nashville,” he
revealed in a 1981 interview. “Whoever sang the leads on
Sweetheart of the Rodeo did so because that’s how we wanted
to slice the album up. McGuinn was edgy because Parsons
25
was getting a little bit too much out of this whole thing. You
don’t just take a hit group and interject a new singer for no
reason. The album had just the exact amount of Gram Parsons
that
McGuinn, Hillman and I wanted.” The studio tapes that
surfaced on Columbia’s Byrds box set some 20.years later,
which feature clear takes of Parsons’ vocals on all the
overdubbed songs, back up Usher’s version of events. Lee
Hazlewood wasn’t enough of a heavyweight
to intimidate Columbia Records into substantially altering
an album by one of their flagship bands. More likely,
McGuinn saw an opportunity to grab the wheel and he took it,
ensuring the Byrds wouldn’t become the backing band for a
usurping George Jones in a sequined suit.
In the end, the Byrds’ lowest selling album to date bore few
traces of Gram Parsons’ six-month tenure with the band. Two
months later, burned out from the South Africa debacle and
furious at manager Larry Spector’s handling of the band’s
finances, Chris Hillman quit the Byrds, the last of the original
quintet to leave.
And Roger McGuinn had gotten his band back.
26
27
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
28
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
29
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
30
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.”
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
31
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,
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.
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,
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
32
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.”
33
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,
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
34
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.
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
35
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.
“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
36
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.
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
37
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.
“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.
38
39
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,
but LA’s music scene was dominated by folk. Outside
a couple clubs like the Palamino and the Ace of Hearts out in
Industry, it was tough to get work as a country band. The
Golden State Boys would often play under different names to
get multiple bookings at the same venue, eventually settling
on the Hillmen.
“[The Golden State Boys] were my window on authenticity,”
said Hillman. “They came right out of the South. I was a
middle-class white kid from Southern California, a surfer, and
I’d never been around people from the South before…. We
would play all these weird clubs in California that were really
40
there for all the transplanted Southerners, who really would
have been more at home in Alabama.”
In an effort to break into more popular and lucrative
folk-oriented venues like the Troubador, the Hillmen started
including renditions of early Bob Dylan songs like “When the
Ship Comes in” and “Farewell” in their repertoire. This may
seem commonplace today, because Dylan’s songs have been
translated into every genre from reggae to death metal, but in
1964 Dylan’s material only made the rounds on the folk
circuit. The Dylan covers came at the suggestion of Hillman’s
friend, Jim Dickson, who was managing a folk trio called the
Jet Set.
While the Hillmen were trying to break into LA’s folk scene,
the Jet Set was ready to break out of it. In 1965, Jim (later
Roger) McGuinn, David Crosby, and Gene Clark burst out of
a screening of A Hard Day’s Night changed men. They
wanted to turn their backs on the sounds of the Kingston Trio
and expand their folk sound into Beatleseque pop. It was
Dickson who brought them the tools to do it. The first was a
demo of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The second was Chris
Hillman.
“Chris was playing mandolin at the time with a group called
the Greengrass Group, I think,” remembered Roger
McGuinn. “It was a horrible, watered-down, Disneyland kind
of version of bluegrass. Chris was just in it for a steady $100
a week and all the beer you could drink at the club or
whatever. So that was it.”
With the addition of Michael Clarke on drums and a new
name from McGuinn, the Byrds were formed and Hillman left
41
country music and the Golden State Boys behind to stand
quietly in the background of one of the most commercially
successful American bands of the sixties.
He may not have been on board aesthetically, but Hillman
knew a solid meal ticket when he saw one. “I was always
trying to get the band to play country songs,” Hillman
insisted, “but David Crosby always objected. We’d be driving
in the car and he’d go on and on about the sitar—how it was
unique, the way it used sliding scales, and had no frets. I’d
say, ‘Listen to this,’ and hit the radio dial until I found a
Nashville station and a steel guitar. And Crosby would shout,
‘I hate that, I hate that corny shit.”’
Outside of a Porter Wagoner song recorded for an early Byrds
album, the hints of a country influence on Younger than
Yesterday and production work on a couple tracks by former
Hillmen the Gosdin Brothers, Hillman managed to ignore the
country itch for three years, until Gram Parsons dropped a
Buck Owens tune into his audition for the Byrds.
“I suppose I convinced the Byrds that they should be doing
country music instead of trying to write their own Bob Dylan
material,” claimed Parsons. “I guess Chris had been trying to
say something like that all along but wasn’t sure that it
wouldn’t wreck his whole life, that he’d be out of money and
the Byrds would be out of a job. After a while he saw that you
could make bread at country music and the Byrds came to be
more of a millstone around his neck than anything else.”
Burrito Manor, a structure with a name as overblown as the
Gilded Palace of Sin, was a bachelor pad up on Desoto Ave.
in Reseda, California. Near enough to the beach for surfing,
42
near enough to downtown LA for hitting the clubs, the Manor
served as the shared residence of the reunited Hillman and
Parsons through the end of 1968. Since Parsons was already
renting out an apartment for his estranged girlfriend Nancy
Ross and their daughter, Polly, it was Hillman’s name on the
lease, but both men called it home.
In addition to the split with the Byrds, Hillman was in the
process of getting divorced and Parsons had recently split
with his girlfriend. Burrito Manor was a bachelor pad in every
sense. Hillman talked of the two men “taking solace in each
others’ friendship” during the months at Burrito Manor, but
also referred to the pair’s lifestyle as “the physical abuse
program.” Booze, drugs, and all-night poker games were par
for the course and the Manor played host to a bevy of women,
many of whom showed up as characters, performers, or both
on Gilded Palace of Sin. Self-proclaimed Number One
Burrito fans Miss Mercy and Miss Pamela, supergroupies of
the LA scene, were frequent visitors.
“Off we went to the outskirts of town into the San Fernando
Valley,” Miss Mercy recalled of their first trip to Burrito
Manor. “We drove up to a modern cowboy ranch with wagon
wheels paving the driveway. We entered the house and shy
Chris Hillman and the cat in the Nudie suit greeted us with a
grocery bag full of grass.”
Between the women, the drugs, and the nights out performing
and carousing, it’s a wonder they got anything done. In fact,
Parsons would spend most of his short life in situations much
like this, sharing houses with talented musicians like Keith
Richards, Rick Gretch of Blind Faith, and Ian
43
Dunlop, doing little but getting high, getting laid, and
occasionally fucking around on piano or guitar to no
particular end. But while Hillman and Parsons were free to
raise hell by night, Hillman kept them on a strict regimen
during the day. Sometimes Parsons would wander downstairs
late in the morning to find Hillman already up and working
on a song. Snapping out of his hangover daze, Parsons would
quickly join in. A song written in the morning meant the
afternoon was free for surfing, smoking pot, or just lazing
around.
Within weeks, the pair had written the better part of the
album. Songs sprung out of everything around them: a girl
Chris had met at the Troubador; a notice from the draft board;
former managers and former groupies; a Village Voice piece;
or Parsons’ ostentatious new Harley. They played off each
other brilliantly, practically finishing one another’s thoughts.
By the time a song was finished, they could remember who’d
brought the original idea to the table, but beyond that it was
nearly impossible to discern who’d contributed which snippet
of melody or lyrics. With the songs more or less written,
Parsons and Hillman began to work out the close harmonies
that would become one of the album’s sonic trademarks,
delivered in the simple but precise style of the Everly
Brothers rather than the more traditional and more vocally
acrobatic shaped-note harmonies of the Louvin Brothers and
the Carter Family. Chris Ethridge and Sneaky Pete began to
flesh out the skeletal arrangements with bass and pedal steel.
While the songs were taking shape, Parsons was already
sniffing around LA for a record deal. Columbia Records
wanted nothing to do with the duo that’d effectively
destroyed the Byrds as a commercial entity, but Reprise, a
44
division of Warner Brothers Records, took interest when they
heard Keith Richards was all set to produce the album. The
rumor came, of course, from Parsons.
“I think that’s what Gram wanted, short of being asked to join
the Stones,” said Hillman, “But I can’t remember any promise
from Keith, or even any discussion with him.”
Nevertheless, Parsons was spreading the rumor about
Richards around town. Joan Baez had scored a successful
single with Parsons’ “Hickory Wind” and, as Chris Ethridge
pointed out, “We had more Byrds than the Byrds did.”
Reprise, whose stable of artists included bands like Captain
Beefheart and Jethro Tull, would have been a perfect fit for a
somewhat out-there band like the Flying Burrito Brothers, but
the boys ended up signing to A&M Records, a largely adult
contemporary label, wooed by the promise of a bunch of new
equipment.
“They showed us some toys or something,” Parsons would
contemptuously say later. But A&M wanted the Flying
Burrito Brothers in the studio right away, and Parsons and
Hillman were sitting on a stack of freshly written songs, some
of the best either of them would ever write. Just weeks after
shacking up together at Burrito Manor and only months after
a falling out that should have ended their friendship, Hillman
and Parsons had a record deal, complete with an advance,
new gear, and studio time. The Flying Burrito Brothers were
almost set to go into the studio; the band had just one more
stop to make, at a little shop on Lankershim Boulevard.
45
Fathers
They couldn’t have been more different.
One had everything he’d even think to want handed to him,
every desire fulfilled almost before he could think it. When
he’d decided he might want to try music, a music room
appeared in the house in Winter Haven, materialized out of
his family’s money and equipped with any instrument he
might need. When he started a folk band, an all-ages
nightclub appeared downtown for him and his band to
headline at. He attended Harvard on middling grades, paid for
a NYC flophouse out of his trust fund, and moved to
California with the tab already paid on a lifetime of musical
freedom.
The other took his first job at 15. Granted, it was a teenager’s
dream job: a working musician. He diligently parlayed it into
a career. At the age of 20, he sold out the bluegrass he’d been
playing all his life and joined the Byrds, not because he
preferred it, but because it paid the bills. Music was his life,
but it was also his job, and pushing the envelope was fine as
long as the checks kept coming in.
The music brought them together, of course. Both men shared
a deep, abiding love for the country music they’d been raised
on. While other folks in LA’s hippie scene viewed country as
quaint and hokey, they felt it pulsing in their brains, heating
in their blood. Both Hillman and Parsons lost their fathers at a
young age, both had the course of their lives violently altered
by that loss. From that point on, the dominating male voices
in both their lives would come from their radios and record
players: the stoic baritone of Johnny Cash for moral guidance,
46
the playful tenor of Buck Owens for recreation, the trembling
high lonesome sound of George Jones for emotional comfort.
For that brief moment, those few
months in a house in Reseda, two fatherless boys, adopted
sons of country music, made brothers of each other.
47
48
3
Vanity: Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors
“The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.”
-William Blake
Born into a middle-class Jewish family in the highly
anti-Semitic Russia of 1902, little Nutya Kotlyrenko was
shipped off to America at the age of eleven, as soon as the
family’s finances allowed. At Ellis Island, he took the
Americanized surname his brother and cousins had already
adopted, Cohn, and unable to write or spell his first name, he
left Ellis Island with a botched version of it: Nudie.
“I guess that man never knew what a favor he did by giving
me that name,” Nudie wrote later in his life, “but it’s been my
trademark for years. People are always impressed by an
unusual name, and Nudie has suited me just fine.”
Nudie Cohn grew up poor in New York City’s garment
district, apprenticing under tailors and dressmakers while
dreaming of a career in music or the movies. After years of
traveling the United States working odd jobs, he wound
up back in New York City making g-strings and burlesque
costumes for the strippers in Times Square at a shop called
Nudie’s for the Ladies.
After a number of business ventures and financial hardships,
the Russian immigrant who dreamed of being a singin’
cowboy moved out to the San Fernando Valley along with his
49
wife, Bobbie, operating a small, tailoring business out of their
garage. Unable to afford a decent sewing machine or fabric to
work on his own designs, Nudie decided in 1947 that country
vocalist Tex Williams would be his springboard into the
burgeoning field of cowboy costuming.
The venture got off to a rough start. Tex Williams could
hardly afford to deck his eight-piece Western Caravan out in
new custom-made suits. But after a long talk, the charismatic
Nudie convinced Williams to sell his horse and saddle to front
money for the suits. Armed with a new sewing machine and a
supply of fabric bought on credit, Nudie made plans to get the
nine musicians together for a measuring.
“When we all got together though, we got to drinking,” Nudie
told it later. “I had a friend with me to help take the
measurements, but he was half drunk and so was I. Between
us, we made one whole drunk, and boy was he a drunk! The
band was pretty juiced too and nobody would stand still
properly for the measurements. It was a mess, but we sure had
a great time. I got home and started cutting out the suits.”
The results were disastrously ill-fitting and with only days
before Tex and his Western Caravan were scheduled to
appear at the Riverside Rancho, Nudie and Bobbie worked
non-stop to turn another batch of credit-bought cloth into nine
perfect-fitting white western suits, hand stitched with
prominently displayed Ws on the yokes. The show at the
Rancho was a remarkable success and the band made enough
to pay Nudie the full $850 for the set of suits. Although it
would remain a garage operation for the next three years,
Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors was officially born.
50
The cowboy look hadn’t always been in with the country set.
Most early country performers hailed from the Southeast and
didn’t have much trade in cattle herding. Plain plaid shirt and
overalls for the boys and simple calico dresses for the girls
were standard fare at the Grand Ole Opry and likeminded
country stages from Chicago to Shreveport, while the dapper
cowboy duds of dudes like silent film icon Tom Mix were
largely limited to the West Coast. It wasn’t until two Eastern
European immigrants, Nathan Turk operating in California
and Bernard “Rodeo Ben” Lichtenstein in Philadelphia, began
adorning Western wear with elaborate embroidery inspired by
the traditional costumes of Poland, Austria, Czechoslovakia,
and Hungary that Western clothing became haute couture
throughout the country music community. The craze was led
largely by singin’ cowboys Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but
soon a sharp tailored western suit was a sign of status on any
country stage and rodeo wear was big business.
When Nudie Cohn opened up shop in 1947, he was
unarguably small time. Turk and Rodeo Ben were running
large operations, employing dozens, and beginning to
experiment with manufacturing.
With the vocal support of his first customer, Tex Williams,
Nudie’s operation grew by underselling and out-charming the
competition. A hand-tailored Turk shirt would run a
performer nearly $60, while Nudie would do one up for you
for $19. He was a constant presence at country shows and
honkytonks, and the Cohns’ garage became a stopping
point and meeting place for cowboy personalities from Pee
Wee King to John Wayne. By 1950, Nudie had moved into
his first California storefront and managed to rope two of the
biggest singing cowboys in the business, Roy Rogers and
51
Gene Autry, away from Turk and Rodeo Ben, making them
rhinestone-studded Nudie customers for life.
Nudie took to heart the drug dealer’s credo: Give them the
first taste for free and keep them coming back. Scores of
country musicians remember Nudie helping them out at low
points in their careers. Starting out on small Southern stages
in the early forties, Alabama-born Hank Williams was one of
the few Southern country artists who adopted the Western
style, although he could only afford beat up Stetson hats and
ill-fitting second-hand shirts. In 1948, when Nudie met Hank
at the Louisiana Hayride, a country radio show out of
Shreveport, he was immediately impressed with the young
musician.
“I knew he wanted one of my suits real bad,” Nudie said of
Hank, “but he was too proud to ask me to make him a deal. I
liked that. So I decided that I would make him a real special
suit and send it to him as a gift and that’s just what I did.
Hank was thrilled to pieces when he received that suit in the
mail. Of course, once Hank hit the big time he wouldn’t wear
anything but Nudie suits.” Williams even wore his most
famous Nudie, a white drape-style suit with music notes
embroidered in black on the lapels, back and sleeves, to his
very last gig: the King of Country Music was buried in it at
the age of 29.
Nudie’s style was completely over the top. Turk and Rodeo
Ben were primarily concerned with overall design, centering
on contrasting piping and nuanced embroideries of
westernthemed
52
images (horses, pistols, and saddles along with the Eastern
European derived use of decorative floral patterns),
employing showier elements like rhinestone and fringe only
sparingly. In contrast, Nudie’s compositions were almost
hallucinogenic. With imagery personalized to the performer
and rhinestones encrusting the embroidery and often
extending onto the fringe that trimmed sleeves, yokes, and
bibs, the suits were amazing show pieces, performances unto
themselves.
Although not all that Western in style, Nudie’s most
famous creation remains the Liberace-inspired 14-karat gold
lamè pseudotuxedo he made for Elvis in 1957. The suit,
which graces the cover of 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be
Wrong
made its debut at a show in Chicago and featured almost
10,000 rhinestones, all set by hand. According to Elvis
biographer Peter Guralnick, “What stood out most for the
Colonel [Elvis’s manager, Tom Parker] was the first time
Elvis fell to his knees and left fifty dollars’ worth of gold
spangles on the floor. He went up to Elvis after the show and
asked him not to do it again.” The suit made a few more
appearances, but, Guralnick said, “after
a while he came to be embarrassed by it.”
By the mid-sixties, Nudie’s business was in decline. Country
singers, anxious to distance themselves from their singin’
cowboy predecessors, dropped rhinestone couture like a hot
rock, opting instead for the dapper, understated attire of
George Jones and Buck Owens, or the dirty denims of
“outlaws” like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. At the
same time, the rockers who were starting to dabble in country
were looking even further back for fashion tips. Dylan’s
53
amicable hobo get-up on the cover of Nashville Skyline and
the gentleman gambler togs sported by the post-Hillman era
Byrds,
the
Charlatans,
and
the
Band
drew
from
turn-of-the-century ideas of authentic cowboys, before Tom
Mix and the movies, and certainly predating the gaudy excess
of Autry and Rogers, Nudie and Turk.
Of course, gaudy excess was just what Gram Parsons was in
the market for. The idea of authenticity hangs like a
ghostword in the wings of almost any genre of music, from
Norwegian black metal to West Coast hiphop, and country
music is no exception. When Dylan decided to go country, he
not only adopted the “authentic” clothes of a poor white
southerner, he also morphed his already put-on Arkie accent
into the high nasal whine of “real” country singers like the
Louvin Brothers. The Charlatans, led by Dan Hicks, actually
opened up a saloon in a frontier nowhere town in Nevada to
garner themselves some country cred. In rejecting the excess
of the Nudie suit in favor of what they viewed as more
legitimate country clothing, country musicians like the
Highwaymen and proto-country rockers like the Byrds or
Dylan were shunning the inauthentic and untenable creature
that country music had become. But authenticity is a
notoriously tricky thing, and the
truth of the matter is, Willie Nelson never robbed a
stagecoach, Dan Hicks never roped a steer, and Bob Dylan,
40 some years of impeccable Woody Guthrie impersonation
aside, was born and raised in Minnesota.
The very notion of trying to be authentic unravels itself.
Gram Parsons had no aspirations of dressing like a real
cowboy because he had no intention of being a real cowboy.
Gram Parsons wanted to be a country star, and country stars
wore Nudie suits with all the trimming.
54
When Parsons made his first trip to Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors, it
was something of a pilgrimage. Nudie suits had, after all,
defined the visual aesthetic of country music throughout
Parsons’ childhood. A custom-made Nudie suit was no cheap
thing, but with his trust-fund backing, money was no obstacle
for Parsons. Within a couple months of his arrival in LA,
Parsons was the proud owner of a fire engine red Nudie
decked with yellow submarines
. He even sprung for suits for the rest of the International
Submarine Band, although, tellingly, the band chose
approximations of Civil War era costumes for their album
cover attire; quiet, understated and traditional.
Gram and Nudie hit it off right way. Both men were gifted
raconteurs and shameless self-promoters. “I took a kind of
special liking to [Gram],” Nudie said. “Not only was he one
hell of a good songwriter and musician, he was also real smart
and a nice boy too. He was a real downhome kind of guy, he
liked to hang around my store and pick the guitar.”
When A&M cut the Burrito Brothers their first advance check
for Gilded Palace, Parsons gleefully dragged the band to the
shop at 5015 Lankershim Blvd for fittings. Not all of the
members were as enthusiastic. Sneaky Pete in particular was
skeptical as Manuel Cuevas, Nudie’s son-in-law who
shouldered most of the design work by the end of the sixties,
showed him designs for a black jumpsuit bearing a huge
golden pterodactyl. But after years on the bluegrass scene,
Hillman was excited at the prospect of his own Nudie suit.
“I’ve always wanted to wear one of those suits,” Hillman
said. “And, y’know, you can’t do that in bluegrass. Can’t do
that. But you can wear ‘em in country music. If you plug in,
55
you can wear a Nudie suit.” With Manuel’s help, Hillman put
together a suit of bright blue velvet with peacocks whose
feathers extended onto the sleeves and a starburst of pure
sequins on the back. Ethridge’s outfit was the most
traditional: a long-cut five button white suit coat decorated
with roses that pointed simultaneously to Ethridge’s Southern
roots and the traditional peasant costumes that inspired some
of the earliest Western designs.
Literally and figuratively, Parsons’ suit outshone them all.
The white coat, cut high to show off a handtooled leather belt,
had large multicolored pills along the sleeves: white-crossed
amphetamines, red barbiturates, and green and blue capsules
to symbolize some combination of the two. Kelly green
cannabis leaves snaked up the front, and bright pink poppies
stood out at each shoulder. The lapels bore carefully
embroidered naked women, the cartoonish renderings
recalling the cover girl from Sweetheart of the Rodeo,
stripped bare. The pants flared out at the bottom with bright
red inserts, and flames rose up from the flares, licking at the
poppies that
sat at the point of each low-cut hip. But the centerpiece was
the jacket’s back, emblazoned with a red cross, rays of light
streaming out of it like a massive prison tattoo, a cholo cross.
In a tradition dating back to the beginnings of rodeo tailoring
when bands would title their matching outfits, the suit was
given a name: the Sin City.
“We spent many hours together,” designer Manuel recounted
later. “There was a lot of brotherhood going on in that
outfit—one of those things that happens once in a lifetime.
But it wasn’t until ten, fifteen years after making that outfit
56
that I discovered it was actually a map for him to follow to his
death.”
The first destination for the suits was the California desert,
just a few miles from the Joshua Tree Park bungalow where
Parsons would fatally overdose less than four years later.
“We decided to take them out to the desert and do something
kind of surreal with the Nudie suits,” said A&M’s art director
Tom Wilkes. He took the Burritos out to Joshua Tree with a
crew that included photographer Barry Feinstein, a label rep
and two attractive girls for the album cover shoot.
“Everybody was loaded,” said Feinstein. The original plan to
structure the photos around the strange foliage evolved as the
spangled, drugged out band cavorted across the alien
landscape with the girls, finally stumbling upon a ramshackle
shed in the middle of the desert surrounded by detritus:
broken crates and palettes, assorted underbrush. With the girls
propped alluringly in the shed’s doorway, the scene hardly
needed labeling. In the middle of the desert, the Flying
Burrito Brothers had found the Gilded Palace of Sin.
“Everybody knew we were in the right place,” said Wilkes.
The photo finally chosen was one of the band’s least
favorites. Parsons insisted there had been better shots, shots
that made more use of the bizarre looking Joshua trees, a type
of yucca plant found almost exclusively in the California
desert. But the effect is striking. With the white of Parsons
and Ethridge’s suits bleeding into the featureless sky above
them and the absence of any expression on their faces, the
boys look lost and stranded just outside the Gilded Palace
57
with no choice but to enter. Above and tucked just behind its
shingled roof hangs the band’s name, scrawled across the sky
in huge circus font, letters bright pink to match Parsons’
poppies, trailing the cobalt blue of Hillman’s suit.
The Burrito Brothers helped spark a renaissance for Nudie’s
shop. “Through the Burritos,” Nudie said, “I got to be kind of
well known to the rock and roll people, and I really appreciate
what they did for me along those lines.” By the end of 1970,
Nudie had made the cover of Rolling Stone twice and his
clientele included Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead,
Roger McGuinn, Mick Jagger, and Sly Stone. In 1975, on
the way to a benefit for Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, “Bob
Dylan and the entire Rolling Thunder Revue waltzed into my
store and cleaned out my racks,” Nudie recounted. “They
bought almost every special suit I had made up. They
couldn’t wait for custom orders because they were playing a
concert in Houston the next day and had decided on the spur
of the moment that a show in Texas just wouldn’t be right
without Nudies. Luckily, they were able to find a suit for
everyone in the band and walked out satisfied, leaving me
$15,000 richer.”
Throughout the seventies, the Western look dominated
the mass culture in various iterations: the country pimp look
of
Nudie
customer
Bootsy
Collins,
the
Liberace-via-Lankershim Boulevard attire of Tumbleweed
Connection-era Elton John, the blue jeans and bandanas of
new cowboy film stars Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan and
Willie Nelson, and finally the urban cowboy chic of disco
icon John Travolta.
The visual aesthetic of country, reinjected into the rock
scene by the Burritos in 1969, had spread like a virus, and
58
ideas of manufactured “authenticity” fell by the wayside. One
can imagine Gram Parsons off somewhere, smiling and
tipping a star-spangled Stetson.
59
60
4
Sloth: Hot Burrito
“So there we are, fast, there’s the dogma. And its excuse, its
usableness, in practice. Which gets us, it ought to get us,
inside the machinery.”
Charles Olson
Chris Ethridge was the once and future Burrito.
After the dissolution of the International Submarine Band,
Ethridge joined up with Ian Dunlop, who he’d replaced as
bassist in the Sub Band, sax player Bobby Keyes, who would
later record with the Rolling Stones on Exile on Main Street,
and a ragtag bunch of Californians in the original Flying
Burrito Brothers, a jam session assemblage of players fooling
around with the basic components of country and soul music.
When Dunlop gave up on LA for Boston, an abandoned Chris
Ethridge lured former bandmate Gram Parsons back from
England to pick up the Flying Burrito Brothers name.
Less than a year later, Chris Ethridge was the first to leave the
Burrito Brothers, disappointed with their lack of commercial
success and bored with their lack of direction after Gilded
Palace of Sin.
In 1974, a greatest hits compilation from A&M sparked a
renewed interest in the defunct Flying Burrito Brothers.
Informed that there were bookings available for a band with
that name, Chris Ethridge joined up with Sneaky Pete to once
61
again resurrect the Flying Burrito Brothers. Without Parsons
or Hillman, the band was, at best, a bit of a joke and Ethridge
left after the first album.
“They took the Flying Burrito Brothers name when they
should have let it rest,” said Chris Hillman. “Ethridge told me
he left because he couldn’t stand it.”
Still, Chris Ethridge holds the dubious distinction of being a
member of all three incarnations of the Flying Burrito
Brothers.
Poised to go into the studio, the Burrito Brothers were still
two songs short of an album, and the deep and immediate
well Hillman and Parsons had been drawing from was dried
up. There were a couple contenders, but nothing seemed to
click. The Burritos rehearsed the songs they had, hoping
something else would come along.
It came in the form of a musical childhood tantrum, a crafty
bit of piano pouting. When Chris Ethridge was a young boy in
Mississippi, he lived in a small house with his parents, his
brothers and sisters, and a piano in the living room. When his
parents forbade him from going out to play with friends,
Chris would plop down at the piano and bang out a repetitive
melody line until they relented. Ethridge referred to them as
his “go songs,” designed specifically to convince his parents
to let him out, shouting “Go on, get!” Ethridge had
remembered the melody lines ever since, and one evening
after rehearsal,
he plunked them out on the piano for Parsons. Willing to grab
at anything by that point, Parsons swallowed some uppers,
fed some to Ethridge and the two sat at the piano late into the
62
night, spinning the little lines into songs. The result was one
of those inexplicable moments of brilliance that can only
happen with the sword hanging overhead. By the time they
were done, they were too exhausted to even name the songs
and hastily labeled them “Hot Burrito #1” and “Hot Burrito
#2.”
Listened to together, they feel like chapters in Raymond
Queneau’s Exercices de Style, an identical subject rendered
twice in vastly different tones. Both songs are lover’s pleas,
cries from the very brink of a relationship’s end, and thinly
veiled messages from Gram to Nancy to attempt
reconciliation even as Parsons was tomcatting the LA club
scene.
“Hot Burrito #1” presented its case as aching country-soul:
James Carr meets George Jones. Parsons came on with a sort
of sad sweetness, assuring his lover:
I’m your toy,
I’m your old boy
But I don’t want no one but you to love me.
No, I wouldn’t lie.
You know I’m not that kind of guy.
Sitting with Ethridge at the piano, Ethridge taking the low
parts and Parsons the high, Parsons delivered one of the most
soulful vocal performances of his career; deep and sincere,
but still delicate, without weighty and overwrought pathos.
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“His best song probably he ever wrote was ‘Hot Burrito #1’,”
said Chris Hillman confidently. “And his best recording on
record was ‘Hot Burrito #1’.”
The companion piece, “Hot Burrito #2” presents the
same case, up-tempo and shot through with ambivalence and
frustration. The song’s narrative seems to pick up where “#1”
left off, taking the lovers’ feelings as givens. With the fullest
instrumentation of any song on Gilded Palace and high
harmonies drawn more from the Marvellettes than the Everly
Brothers, Parsons proclaims, “You’d better love me. Jesus
Christ!” Ecstatic, pleading, and frustrated all at once, he hits
the “Jesus Christ’ just as the band pauses for a beat, cracking
the song open for a second to let Ethridge’s gospel-inspired
piano and Sneaky Pete’s distorted pedal steel flood in.
With the last two originals written, the band added two soul
covers and a Parsons composition from Safe at Home, the
straight-ahead George Jones homage “Do You Know How It
Feels to Be Lonesome?” and headed into A&M’s studios for a
whirlwind bunch of recording sessions.
Produced largely by the Burritos themselves and featuring
four different drummers, a cracked chorale of LA hippies
credited as “The Hot Burrito Chorus,” and an uncredited high
harmony part by David Crosby, who just happened to be
around the A&M studio at the time, the album was laid down
in just a few weeks.
“We cut the album without any rehearsals,” claimed Sneaky
Pete. The album has a loose feel and raw energy lacking from
more rehearsed albums like Sweetheart of the Rodeo or the
64
tight session playing of Nashville Skyline, but it hardly seems
unrehearsed.
“It wasn’t quite live in the studio,” Chris Hillman said, “but it
was done in the minimum of takes.” The album was finished
in December, and A&M set up to rush release the album in
February 1969. Unhappy with the session drummers they’d
used on the album,
the Flying Burrito Brothers auditioned and quickly hired
former Byrds’ drummer Michael Clarke,
who never quite got around to learning the songs. The
promotions department took a tongue-in-cheek approach to
marketing the band, setting up a hootenanny-style barn dance
at the A&M soundstage for January. They sent out invites to
folks all over LA, containing packages of hay for that special
country feel, hoping the media would take notice. But the first
people to take notice were the folks at the U.S. Postal Service,
who suspected the hay of being extra “special” and
confiscated the invites to test the packages for drugs. The
tests were negative, but the media buzz the seizure created
was better than anything the A&M marketing department
could have dreamed up. Before anyone had heard a note of
the album, the Burrito Brothers had the exact image A&M
wanted:
psychedelic
cow-punks,
drug-addled
and
rhinestone-spangled. They were all set in the style
department, but going into their first set of live performances,
substance was still an open question. Bernie Leadon, who’d
played with Hillman in the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers and
would later join the Flying Burrito Brothers, saw the band in
the first months of 1969, before The Gilded Palace of Sin was
released.
65
“Yeah, they got the look,” Leadon said. “Yeah, they got the
attitude, they got the record deal, they got everything. But
they forgot something fundamental here: they just can’t play
or sing.”
Early performances may have been shaky, but when the
album came out in February, it was clear that The Gilded
Palace of Sin was an entirely new thing, delivering on the
promises of Safe at Home and Sweetheart of the Rodeo. A
rock album dressed up like a country effort. A country album
that didn’t behave like one. A political album without the
protest songs. A California album that sounded like Muscle
Shoals. You could call it country rock if you wanted, but for
better or worse, Gilded Palace of Sin was Cosmic American
music.
66
67
5
Lust: Christine’s Tune
“You think it horrible that lust and rage
Should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song?”
W.B. Yeats
Miss Christine is the girl climbing out of the crypt.
Frizzlefried hair bursting autonomous from every which way,
mascara laid on a quarter-inch thick, she looks every bit the
hippie zombie on the cover of Frank Zappa’s 1970 album Hot
Rats, the photo washed over in sickly pinks. Christine Frka,
rail-thin body bent leftward by scoliosis and culminating in an
explosion of kinky brown hair framing a frantic smile, moony
beautiful eyes, and ghoulish makeup, was a crossbreed of
hippie and protogoth girl. Born in San Pedro to Yugoslav
parents, she spent her late teens on the LA strip, rising to
become part of a small sect, a new gender role within rock:
the supergroupie. Along with four other girls from the Strip,
Miss Pamela, Miss
Mercy, Miss Sandra and Miss Cyndarella, Miss Christine
was part of the GTOs or Girls Together Outrageously,
a girl group that bore little resemblance to Phil Spector’s
Ronettes or Barry Gordy’s Supremes. Organized and
mentored by Frank Zappa, the GTOs were equal parts rock
group and performance art ensemble. They released one
album, Permanent Damage, on Zappa’s Bizarre Records
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and made guest appearances on the musical efforts of other
bands. Most notably for our purposes, they were the backing
choir on Gilded Palace’s closing number, “Hippie Boy.”
They performed along with Zappa and the Mothers of
Invention under overblown names like the Laurel Canyon
Ballet Company or simply showed up in their junkshop
harlequin clothes at every show, party, or happening worth
being at. The GTOs embodied everything it meant to be a
supergroupie; they created the idea and lived it out. In the
liner notes to Permanent Damage, the members outlined what
being a GTO meant to them.
“The GTOs are a menace to American maidenhood,” they
stated. “Watch out that your teenage daughters don’t get their
hands on any of the GTOs’ literature promoting gayety,
kinkyness and flamboyancy. The GTOs are out to corrupt
your children. Watch out! There may be one lurking in your
neighborhood!” They were sexually active and sexually
ambiguous, with constant playful hinting of lesbianism within
the group.
But a couple of things set Miss Christine apart from the
rest of the GTOs. Describing herself in a Rolling Stone
interview as the cold, cruel one in the group, she was barely
sexually active, especially compared to her bandmates.
Unlike the rest of the band, Miss Christine was dead before
her 23
rd
birthday. And unlike the rest of the band, who were
only featured as the backing on Gilded Palace’s closing
number, Miss Christine was the subject of the album’s
opening salvo: a vitriolic duet by Parsons and Hillman called
“Christine’s Tune.”
69
The idea of groupie as a positive gender and cultural role
model seems a sketchy case to make, largely due to the
current perception of groupies as sexually available,
interchangeable and disposable women, an image that rose up
even within a few years of the GTOs’ heyday. As early as
1972, Robert Plant was lamenting the evolution of the groupie
role in rock.
“It’s a shame to see these young chicks bungle their lives
away in a flurry,” he told Rolling Stone, “to rush to compete
with what was in the good old days, the good-time
relationships we had with the GTOs. When it came to looning
they could give us as much of a looning as we could give
them.”
The handful of women who, sometimes grudgingly, bore the
title of groupie in the mid to late sixties were more than
simply notches on rock stars’ bedposts. They were active
participants in the scene. “We talk about groups a lot,” Miss
Christine told Rolling Stone. “That’s because it’s glamorous
and because we’re very young. If you have a fave rave in a
band, it’s like having a soldier in the war; you write him
letters and you worry about him.” Carrying on long-term
relationships of varying natures with various rockstars, both
visiting and indigenous
to LA, they often found themselves in the role of psychiatrist,
but just as often found themselves playing the part of music
critic. Parsons and Hillman had known several of the GTOs
since their pre-Burrito days, and the girls were frequent guests
at Burrito Manor. Miss Pamela and Miss Mercy were often
marks for Parsons’ evangelism on the subject of country
music, listening to stacks of 45s by Buck Owens, Porter
Wagoner, and George Jones. Miss Mercy and Miss Pamela
70
were sometimes the only attendees at Burrito Brothers shows
and were often the first outside of the Burritos to hear demos
of soon-to-be songs.
In a California music scene dominated at least as much by
style and substance, the fashionistas of the GTOs pushed
themselves and the men they were involved with further and
further out onto the cutting edge. They crafted their own
weird getups, hybrids of hippie and ren fair chic, out of
thrift-store finds and old curtains. When she wasn’t
frequenting Burrito Brothers shows or the beds of various
rockers, Miss Pamela was designing and tailoring Western
shirts as gifts for other rockers, which helped popularize the
look the Burritos were sporting.
Miss Christine transferred her heavy eye makeup and
enhanced pallor to sometime boyfriend and fellow Zappa
protégé Alice Cooper, creating the look that defined Cooper’s
image for decades
and deeply affected the content of his songwriting. In
addition to their stylistic influence on the LA scene, several of
the GTOs were active in the various experimental film
projects that sprung up on the
interface between LA’s rock star and movie star sets,
several of which, like 1971’s 200 Motels, starring Miss
Pamela, Ringo Starr as a dwarf, and Keith Moon as a nun,
spewed forth from the always-active imagination of Frank
Zappa.
But the groupie role was utterly inseparable from sex. Sex
was the mode of access to the scene and, for the GTOs,
central to their songwriting. Most of the songs on Permanent
Damage, all written collectively by the GTOs, were
concerned primarily with sex and seduction, albeit handled
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playfully and delivered in the style of a demented children’s
choir. Not to say that everyone in Los Angeles thought of
girls like the GTOs in sexual terms; Frank Zappa took a
particularly fatherly role with regards to the girls, housing
them when they hit hard times, lightly frowning upon sexual
entanglements between them and the Mothers, and hiring
Miss Christine as the nanny for his daughter, Moon Unit. But
within the rock culture at large, sexual availability was a
primary aspect of being a groupie. Nowhere is the confluence
of sex and art in groupie culture more explicit than in the case
of Cynthia Plaster Caster. Based mostly in Chicago rather
than LA, but a friend to the GTOs, Miss Plaster Caster’s long
term art project involved arousing the interest of touring
rockers, then shoving their erect members into a substance
called alginate, commonly used in creating dental molds.
Once the alginate had molded to the shape of the cock in
question, Miss Plaster Caster would remove the member, fill
the newly formed mold with plaster and have sex with the
participating rocker until the cast hardened, or until the rocker
softened. Miss Plaster Caster’s project continues today, now
expanded to include
casts of famous breasts, and her pieces have been shown in
galleries all over the world.
Miss Christine had been involved with the Byrds going back
before the release of the Notorious Byrd Brothers and
contributed to the already difficult personal dynamics within
the band. But of all the women they were involved with
during the writing of The Gilded Palace of Sin, it was Miss
Christine that Parsons and Hillman singled out for ridicule on
the album’s opener, a bouncy duet with Hillman’s voice
isolated in the left channel and Parsons in the right,
intertwining harmonies on the choruses and taking turns at the
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verses. “Now a woman like that, all she does is hate you/She
doesn’t know what makes a man a man,” Hillman explains in
the first verse, and in a sense it was true: unlike most of the
girls surrounding the Byrds at their peak, Miss Christine,
although ever-present, was sexually unavailable. “It’s all
right to call her, but I’ll bet you,” warns Parsons, “the moon
is full and you’re just wastin’ time” After all, why go through
the trouble of talking to Miss Christine, with her curly-haired
head full of ideas and body under perpetual lockdown, when
you were inundated with dozens of ready, willing, and able
girls?
At the same time, why go through the trouble of writing and
performing a duet literally demonizing a 19-year-old girl for
the utterly forgivable sin of not putting out? The answer lies
somewhere within the emerging gender role of the groupie.
While the girls of the GTOs were certainly involved with
cultural production, part of their entrance into the rock sphere
was dependent on their sexuality.
Miss Christine
found herself trapped between the cultural and sexual aspects
of the groupie role; excelling in the former, she was vilified
for not living up to the duties associated with the latter.
This move seems particularly questionable coming from the
Burrito Brothers, who were themselves operating in a peculiar
interspace
between
culturally
dictated
gender
roles.
Masculinity within traditional country music is complex and
intensely structured. Roughneck outlaws like Waylon
Jennings and Merle Haggard were permitted, through weepy
ballads and sappy odes like “You Put Me on a Natural High”
and “There’s a Tear in My Beer,” to step out of their tough
guy personas and emote in a way that would traditionally be
73
seen as highly feminized, provided of course that they
retained the costume of masculinity: the crew cut, the sharp
shave, the pressed shirt.
Visible signals of masculinity allowed safe access to more
feminine spheres of emotional content while leaving the
artist’s masculinity unblemished. The problem encountered
by the Burritos, not to mention the Sweetheart-eta incarnation
of the Byrds, in trying to find a country audience was that
they carried none of the visual signifiers that would brand
them as masculine and balance out the emotional content of
their material. Their long hair and overall demeanor clearly
branded them as “fags,” as the Byrds had learned at the Opry
a year earlier. Even if their sets had consisted of the most
gristled and butch country covers, the Burrito Brothers would
never be mistaken for “real men” by a country audience. At
the same time, by choosing to dive into the country
tradition, they aligned themselves with not just the perceived
hokeyness of country, but with all the misogynist aspects of
the country tradition, every murder ballad
and trampin’ song, opening themselves up to criticism
from any sensible feminist in the hippie community. The
weepers that Parsons favored throughout his career, the songs
his voice seemed built to sing, stood out like a sequined suit
next to the aggressive masculinity of performers like Mick
Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, and Robert Plant.
Attempting to construct a form of masculinity out of the
bricolage of two musical cultures, the Burritos were in a
double-bind. The country audiences who would understand
heart-on-sleeve balladry as masculine could only see the
band’s visual aesthetic as feminine, while rock audiences who
could accept the masculinity of long hair had trouble
understanding the raw emotive quality of the ballads.
74
“When he sang about the agonies of love, his heart breaking,”
Miss Pamela said of Gram, “tears rolled down his cheeks
without
his
knowledge.
The
Whiskey-a-Go-Go
was
unfamiliar with sobbing men in Nudie suits.”
On stage, this made for a tenuous form of masculinity, but in
their personal lives, the Burritos still felt the pull of traditional
ideas of domesticity, coupled with the often more insistent tug
of LA’s throbbing groupie culture. Parsons and Hillman’s
demands on their long-term domestic partners were fairly
traditional, and their expectations of groupies were
no less traditional, even if those traditions were still nascent.
Women like the GTOs were supposed to be emotionally and
sexually supportive, a creative and libidinous Ladies
Auxiliary to the almost exclusively male rock scene. By
presenting herself with the outer trappings of a groupie, the
wild clothes and makeup, the constant presence at shows and
parties, only to reveal herself to be sexually unavailable,
self-possessed and with no need for a man in her life, Miss
Christine constituted a threat to the delicate new structure the
boys were assembling for themselves: a devil in disguise.
Miss Christine apparently took the whole thing with good
humor. The song didn’t keep her from joining the Burritos
and the GTOs in the studio to put the finishing touches on
“Hippie Boy.” If you listen closely, you can almost imagine
it’s Miss Christine’s soprano warble riding out the other
voices in the choir, becoming the last voice you hear exiting
The Gilded Palace. Within three years, it ceased to matter to
Miss Christine. In 1972, after spending a month in a body cast
to straighten the crook in her spine, Christine Frka overdosed
on a mixture of painkillers. Subsequent performances and
recordings of “Christine’s Tune” went under the more
75
obvious title, “Devil in Disguise” and the Flying Burrito
Brothers became largely silent on the song’s origins and the
curly-headed supergroupie who opted to keep her mind open
and her legs firmly shut.
76
77
6
Avarice: Sin City
“Satan owns the fallen world.”
Don DeLillo
How do you make your pedal steel sound like the Lord’s
burning rain?
It won’t be easy. The instrument is going to resist you at
every step. In its natural guts, it wants to sound like a prairie
wind: It longs to be cold and slick and cutting, the pure sonic
embodiment of what Gram Parsons called the “high
lonesome.” Introduced into country music in the thirties, the
attraction of the pedal steel is its unmistakable glissando, its
ability to not just slide between notes like a standard lap steel
or dobro but actually bend notes. Unlike other lap
instruments, the pedal steel allows a talented player to adjust
the tuning while sustaining a note, mournfully touching the
infinitesimal spaces in between a natural and a flat. The pedal
steel desperately wants to sound desolate and to make it
sound vengeful, you’ll have to learn the instrument and then
intensively
unlearn it, returning from a place of smooth precision to a
place of brutal primitivism: harsh jumps, slamming the slide
abruptly back onto the unsuspecting strings.
Failing that, or, better yet, in addition, get yourself a fuzzbox.
A late-sixties guitar innovation developed originally for
Jimmy Page, the fuzzbox is designed to make anything run
78
through it sound relatively awful. The inspiration for the
fuzzbox was the guitar sound on early Kinks albums,
which Dave Davies produced by taking a razorblade to the
speaker cone of his guitar amp. The fuzzbox reproduced this
effect by amping and clipping the input signal, effectively
turning a smooth sine wave input into an oscillating
square-wave output, sending a signal to the amp that already
sounded burned out. Garage rock bands like the Troggs and
the Sonics used the sound for lo-fi legitimacy. Psychedelic
bands like the Pretty Things and early Pink Floyd used it to
produce the tearing sound of psychic damage. Jimi Hendrix
used it for whatever the hell he wanted, which is a major perk
of being Jimi Hendrix.
Sneaky Pete Kleinow used it to complement a pedal steel
technique that was already a perversion of the instrument’s
normal use, producing the very sound that other players
practiced to avoid. Once labeled the Jimi Hendrix of the pedal
steel, Sneaky Pete could make a lonesome wind sound like a
screeching fleet of bomber planes or a host of avenging
angels, and no one but Sneaky Pete could have used the pedal
steel to rain a distorted country apocalypse down on
late-sixties Los Angeles like napalm onto a North Vietnam
forest.
The City of Los Angeles started as a mission. Specifically, the
Mission San Gabriel Archangel in the San Gabriel Valley.
From there, the city sprawled with evangelical zeal,
converting the desert into Hollywood, into the Sunset Strip.
The Whisky-a-Go-Go, the Troubador, and the Palamino
sprung up like sectarian churches: worship rock here, kneel to
folk here, praise country here. Through most of the sixties,
Los Angeles was the Mecca of American rock music, home to
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indigenous groups like the Byrds, Love, and the Doors, along
with a host of pilgrims like Georgian Gram Parsons and
Canadian Neil Young, who’d joined the thing in process,
who’d come to be a part of something larger than themselves.
The Gilded Palace of Sin’s second track, “Sin City” started at
a particular point in Los Angeles: the garish front door of
Larry Spector’s 31
st
floor condo. “Spector was a thief, it was
as simple as that,” Chris Hillman told the LA Times almost 40
years later. Hillman’s resentment towards the man who had
mismanaged or embezzled the Byrds out of the bulk of their
finances quickly spread out from Spector and from there
infected and tainted all of the city around him. From Burrito
Manor’s safe perch on the city’s outskirts in Reseda, Hillman
and Parsons imagined an Old Testament-style judgment
visited upon the City of Angels, starting at Larry Spector’s
apartment and blanketing the entire city.
“Sin City” features the most explicit use of religious imagery
on Gilded Palace, but religious themes pervade the album in
oddly twisted forms. The album starts off by invoking a devil
in disguise,
but unlike the subject of Presley’s song—a
hellcat dressed up as an angel—the disguise here is sex and
the devil is chastity. Draped in the patchwork clothes of a
groupie, Miss Christine turns out to be a nun. The album
presents itself as the Gilded Palace of Sin, but when sin enters
the picture, it’s flipped with virtue like a vision from William
Blake: sin as the disguise, the gilding; virtue as the devil
concealed, the clatterboard shed with the gold flaking away.
From this opening, Gilded Palace of Sin spreads across forty
minutes searching for some sort of spiritual guidance, some
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moral compass. In “Juanita,” written for a girl Hillman met at
the Troubador, the singer is lost and abandoned in a dirty old
room, in a haze of alcohol and pills, when “an angel
appeared” in the guise of a teenage hippie girl. The song
takes on the form of a prayer to the Virgin Mary for direction
with the chorus’s repetition of “O Mama, Sweet Mama, won’t
you tell me what to say?” On the next track, “Wheels,”
Hillman and Parsons craft a quasi-religious ode to their
motorcycles. The plea for direction in “Juanita” becomes a
plea for deliverance, even including the gospel music trope of
getting “higher and higher every day” and replacing a direct
line of communication to God with “telephones to say what
we can’t say.” The song also contains one of the album’s
most interesting recording errors. Going into the first chorus,
Hillman’s vocals in the left channel hit the high harmonies
right alongside Parsons on the confident “We’re not afraid to
ride,” punctuated by Sneaky Pete’s replication of a Harley
engine’s roar. But on the more somber next line, Hillman
repeats the first line, while Parsons sings, “We’re not afraid
to die.”
In fact, it wasn’t long before his wheels nearly took
Parsons away. On a ride through the canyons with John
Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas during the sessions for the
Flying Burrito Brothers’ second album, Parsons lost control
of his oversized Harley and nearly died. When Phillips found
him by the side of the road, bleeding from his mouth, nose
and ears, a dazed Parsons, believing he was already dead,
looked up at Phillips and muttered, “John, take me for a long
white ride.”
Bastardized gospel forms were the perfect fit for a band
whose style was a combination of two genres that were the
willful orphans of spiritual music. Country music traced much
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of its heritage back to the Appalachian gospel of the Carter
Family and the Louvin Brothers, and many country acts owed
their harmony structures to variants of the five-part
shaped-note singing popular in Appalachian churches. And of
course, soul music has always been closely tied to the gospel
tradition, particularly the Southern soul that the Burrito
Brothers were so enamored with. The history of soul music is
peppered with stories of singers rising to the top of the gospel
charts only to turn their backs on the limited market of
religious music for the wider commercial success offered by
secular markets. In both genres, performers often translated
melodies and lyrics that were written for gospel into
commercial hits. Many of Sam Cooke’s early hits, including
“You Were Made For Me,” featured melody lines that were
variations on “The Hem of His Garment,” a song Cooke had
written during his time with the Soul Stirrers.
Johnny Cash’s first successful audition for Sun Records
included hasty rewrites of gospel songs he’d already pitched
unsuccessfully to Sam Phillips and wouldn’t get to record
until later in his career. Burritos tracks like “Juanita” and
“Wheels” cribbed the form but changed the
content for motivations almost opposite those of Cooke and
Cash: commercial viability and spiritual veracity aside, it was
the form of those early country and soul songs that was dear
to the Burrito Brothers. Leaving the good Lord out of it, the
song structures were tried and true, objects of veneration in
their own rights.
The eerie prescience of “Wheels” and the searching
desperation of “Juanita” were nothing compared to the
apocalyptic vision of “Sin City,” which fused religious
imagery with country gospel form. Hillman called the song a
cautionary tale for “people like Gene Clark from the Byrds,
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who came here from Kansas with all that talent and all
bright-eyed and talented and idealistic, and the whole thing
just swallowed him up.” Following a very traditional pedal
steel intro, the opening lines, definitely attributable to
Hillman, seem to call up his three-year stint with the Byrds.
This whole town’s filled with sin,
It’ll swallow you in
If you’ve got some money to burn.
Take it home, drive away,
You’ve got three years to pay,
But Satan is waiting his turn.
Hillman had been lured away from country and into the heart
of LA’s rock scene by the trappings of money and fame, but
three years of pop stardom had come due in the loss of his
wife and most of his money.
Hillman’s personal apocalypse was only a part of a larger end
of the world. LA had been the undisputed center of America’s
rock scene in the sixties, competing only with London as the
most important city in the world for pop and rock music. But
as the decade closed out, San Francisco was clearly in the
ascendant. The implosion of some of LA’s pioneering bands
through 1967 and ’68 had littered the scene
with too many musicians, signing too many contracts,
needing too many managers, until the “industry” part of LA’s
music industry dominated the actual music. Haunting the very
edges of the industry was its very own dark angel in the form
of Charles Manson, a failed musician
whose hippie-like Family stalked LA glitterati and music
honchos from the shadows. At the same time, the feel-good
politics underlying much of LA’s music were cracking and
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crumbling under the pressures of history, the continuing
horrors of the decade’s end. The darkened visions of the
Doors and Love’s Forever Changes presented the flipside of
psychedelia, but if sunshine and good times were tough to
market by the end of the sixties, sonic bad trips were not
faring much better. This seismic shift was swallowing the LA
music scene even as it thrust the apolitical acid rock of San
Francisco towards larger audiences and higher market shares.
The slow-drawled vision of LA’s end times in “Sin City”
came complete with a savior, albeit a failed one.
A friend came around,
Tried to clean up this town.
His ideas made some people mad.
But he trusted his crowd,
So he spoke right out loud.
And they lost the best friend they’d had.
Out of context, the reference is vague, but at the end of 1968,
the friend was obviously Bobby Kennedy, the youthful
second coming, the impossible smile that extended from
Brookline, Massachusetts, to LA County; the Christlike
righteousness
that made bulldog-faced Nixon
wilt and shrivel. The Gilded Palace of Sin was written on
the eve of the 1968 presidential election and released in the
first days of the Nixon administration, after a shot to the head
in the kitchen of LA’s Ambassador Hotel on the night of the
California primary had effectively robbed the youth of
America of “the best friend they’d had.”
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Like Wise Blood’s Hazel Motes, the Flying Burrito Brothers
were crafting the Gilded Palace of Sin into a Church without
Christ: all the trappings of the gospel music that had inspired
country and soul artists across the south for decades, without
the grounding of an underlying belief structure. If there were
any salvation, it would have to come from inside the music,
because it surely wasn’t coming from anywhere else.
In spite of its rather bleak spiritual outlook, the album closes
with a moment of peace and unity, a snippet of stolen melody
from a classic spiritual delivered in discordant beauty. At the
end of “Hippie Boy,” the memory of a youth trampled in the
events of the Democratic National Convention at Chicago just
months before stands in for divine intervention, bringing
hippies, cowpokes, and straights together if only for a
moment and letting the Burritos and their friends assure the
listener that there would be peace in the valley, even if it
came only after the entire LA scene had been laid to rubble
and waste.
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7
Lust: Dark End of the Street
“I was hurting. I was hurting too. I could feel the rain hurting,
but it wasn’t really me. I was there in sight and soul and
everything, but my body wasn’t there. My body was at home.
I can’t forget it.”
James Carr
It’s safe to say the session was not going well.
It was late 1969 and it was a dark year for southern soul
music. Atlantic Records was searching for a successor to Otis
Redding, dead just three days after recording “Dock of the
Bay” at the age of 27. They had their eyes on Goldwax
recording artist James Carr.
In 1963, Carr left the Memphis Gospel circuit
and signed with Clinton Claunch’s nascent Goldwax label,
scoring his
first hit in 1966 with “You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up.”
Carr’s first two records on Goldwax produced a string of
minor hits, including a rendition of “Dark End of the Street,”
one of the quintessential soul performances of all time. If the
music industry were a pure meritocracy, the single would
have sold millions; with only Goldwax’s limited resources
behind it, the track made a poor showing on the R&B charts.
Carr’s studio output over the next two years was limited. He
suffered from bouts of alcoholism and severe depression,
sometimes disappearing for months at a time only to wind up
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on a friend’s doorstep in the dead of night, drunk and
jacketless in the snow. In the studio, he would often lose his
concentration, needing lyrics read aloud to him or requiring
guiding vocals laid down by songwriter Dan Penn. With no
other commercially successful artists in its stable and offers to
buy out Carr’s contract, Goldwax head Clinton Claunch was
hoping to seize this one last moment, to establish James Carr
as the next Otis Redding and save Goldwax from financial
ruin. Clinging to this hope, Claunch booked time for Carr at
the famous Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Muscle Shoals,
Alabama,
home of the Swampers, one of the greatest groups of
session players in the history of Southern music.
“We had four good songs lined up, including ‘To Love
Somebody’” recounted Claunch of the Muscle Shoals session.
“And that’s the only damn song we got on the session. He just
sat up there and looked. Man, I wanted to take a bottle and
knock him off that stool. Time was going, we got all them
high-priced musicians, and we finally got that one song. I
don’t see how he ended up singing as good as he did, but
man, he sang the whole thing through, didn’t have to overdub
or nothing. And we didn’t get anything else, didn’t get
nothing.”
What they got was one track that twisted a sugary-sweet
BeeGees tune into a tormented ballad of unrequited love. The
Brothers Gibb had no idea what it was like to love someone
the way James Carr did, and the Swampers flesh the song out
with a bone-simple drum track and a rising structure that, by
the song’s end, can barely support the desperation of Carr’s
voice. The fade out seems necessary; the listener has a feeling
like backing away from someone not right in the head and
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about to lose control of a rant. It was one of the last
recordings Carr would ever make. Shortly after signing to
Atlantic, Carr had a complete breakdown and disappeared for
over 20 years.
In California, Gram Parsons, a longtime devotee of Southern
soul’s mystery man, snatched up the 45 as soon as he saw it.
It joined the stack of Porter Wagoner, Merle Haggard, and
George Jones. Always one to make cover songs his own,
Parsons had altered the phrasing of a dozen vocalists to
wrench their songs away from them, but on the Burrito
Brothers’ cover of “To Love Somebody,” recorded after the
Burrito Deluxe sessions, Parsons had Michael Clarke
replicate the click-pop rhythm track of the Swampers. Parsons
laid the song out in the exact phrasing of James Carr, trying
his best to imitate to the Mystery Man of Southern Soul, a
voice he’d first pined for and grappled with on Gilded Palace
of Sin.
There wasn’t exactly a map for how a rock band should go
country by 1969, but there were a few general guidelines. The
first was, you had to go.
In one way or another, early efforts to “country up” required a
divorce from the California scene. The Byrds made the
pilgrimage to Nashville for Sweetheart and Dylan did the
same on Nashville Skyline, whose title imagines Nashville as
a city constantly seen from the outside, never actually
entered. The International Submarine Band, new to California
and shackled with a tight budget, deflected their inability to
record in Nashville and highlighted the traditionalism of their
aesthetic by calling their album Safe at Home. The joke was
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obvious only to the band themselves: Geographically, the Sub
Band was as far from home as they could get, but they had
tucked themselves away in a homey little corner of music that
other rock bands felt no impulse to intrude on.
Beyond a physical pilgrimage, fledgling country rock
musicians showed an awareness of country as a somehow
separate space. Struggling in an ultimately failed attempt to
cross over to a country audience, the Byrds self-consciously
coded their failure into Sweetheart, opening and closing the
album with tales of thwarted travel: Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin
Nowhere” and “Nothing Was Delivered.”
Neil Young seemed to grapple with clashes of genres and
spaces; the downhome country title track rasped up against
ragged guitar epics on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, an
attempt to escape from the “day to day runnin’ around” of
the rock scene, while Harvest strained to encompass the
spatial conflict between the back-to-the-land cheer of “Are
You Ready for the Country?” and the South totalized as the
specter of its own racial history on tracks like “Alabama” and
“Southern Man.” In a musical landscape where clear borders
existed between country and rock, transgressing and crossing
those borders necessitated a relocation, or at least lyrical
reference to going, to leaving for a sort of idyllic, unspoiled
space located permanently elsewhere.
This unspoiled space of removal and retreat was inevitably
white. As the antiwar and activist movements of the sixties
developed side by side with and often slightly behind the civil
rights movement, a lot of liberal white kids were beginning to
wake up to the racial situation in America. For white rock
musicians, this dawning racial awareness brought a sobering
realization with it: Rock and roll was a stolen medium.
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Comforting myths of Elvis sharing the stage with Chuck
Berry and Little Richard as the originators of the genre were
shattered and the truth behind them was much more
disturbing. The pioneering and revolutionary ideas of rock
and roll had originated in the black community and had been
stolen, copied, repackaged, and sold to a white audience by
white musicians before its real pioneers could see much
money from it. To take one’s place in the rock tradition, then,
was to drink from a poisoned well, to participate in an
ongoing project of cultural appropriation and racial looting.
Not to argue that bands or performers abandoned rock in
favor of country solely in order to alleviate white guilt; many
of the early readopters of country were musicians already
versed in genre-hopping for whom country offered a new
sonic palate for experimentation. But beyond aesthetic
possibilities, country offered up a musical landscape
unscarred by the strip mining of black culture and at the same
time
non-exclusionary,
encompassing
the
efforts
of
performers like Solomon Burke, James Carr, and Ray Charles
along with those of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Going
up the country was obviously not going to right centuries of
racial injustice and politically represented more of a retreat,
dodging the question, than any kind of protest. But country,
conceptualized as a
space and often conflated with Nashville as both a
geographical city and a sort of prelapsarian dream of a city
presented an Edenic vision, a skyline in the distance where
Elvis had never stolen a single riff or hip swivel.
Contrary to this tradition, The Gilded Palace is an insistently
Californian album, from the cover with its high chaparral
scenery and handmade Hollywood suits, to the lyrical content.
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While other bands pined for the green, green grass of home,
the Burritos were marking time in the urban decay of Sin
City. The pigtailed cowgirl of Sweetheart of the Rodeo had
been replaced by the threatening ultramodern groupie girls of
the Strip and prairies rezoned into the ethical morass of the
LA music scene. The album belonged more at the Whisky
than the Opry, and when its shrieking chorale of hipsters
screeched that “There’ll be peace in the valley,” it’s clear that
they were singing more about the San Fernando than the
Shenandoah. Hillman and Parsons had tried to take the Byrds
to the country, but nothing was delivered. This time, the pair
weren’t goin’ nowhere: The country would just have to come
to California.
In addition to turning their backs on the standard nod to
Nashville, the Burrito Brothers opted to pass on the usual
deep bow to the country canon. The Byrds had peppered
Sweetheart with Merle Haggard and Louvin Brothers songs to
offset their Dylan covers. The Band’s debut featured a
reading of “Long Black Veil,” and Neil Young dropped his
rendition of the Roy Acuff standard “Oh Lonesome Me” into
the very center of After the Gold Rush. Not to be outdone,
Bob Dylan dueted with Johnny Cash on “Girl From the North
Country” to open Nashville Skyline, warping his voice into a
high Appalachian nasal whine to offset Cash’s grounding
baritone. Most viewers of The Johnny Cash Show might have
heard of Bob Dylan before he appeared on the program in
1969, but few would have followed his music. They needed
Cash to tell them this kid was all right. Failing an invite from
Johnny Cash or the Opry, covers were a way to gain access
and to get the country audience on the band’s side, because,
as Gram Parsons had told Roger McGuinn, “once they dig
you, they never let you go.” A crossover onto the country
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charts could assure a band’s financial success, but equally
important to bands plowing a country field, getting in with a
country audience meant you were legit. If you could convince
an Opry audience you were the real deal, you effectively were
the real deal. Any band could toss a mandolin or pedal steel
player into a touring line up and wow the kids at the Fillmore,
but if you could nail a Roy Acuff song and work it into a set
that at once acknowledged the canon and added to it,
you might be able to dodge accusations of dilettantism and
dabbling. You might be “authentic country.”
Collectively, the Burrito Brothers knew as many or more
country songs than their California rock contemporaries.
Hillman had been playing country and bluegrass since he was
fifteen and Sneaky Pete had been sitting in with LA country
bands almost as long. A voracious record purchaser, Parsons
would occasionally leave a party, hop on his Harley, and ride
home to grab a stack of 45s by George Jones, Porter
Wagoner, and Webb Pierce just to demonstrate the relevance
and power of country music. The Burritos live sets often
included more country covers than originals. Burrito Deluxe,
the follow-up to Gilded Palace, would include country gospel
standards like “Farther Along” and “Down in the
Churchyard.”
But when they were ready to step into the studio to record
Gilded Palace, it wasn’t Nashville they looked to for covers;
it was Muscle Shoals.
A small town two hours south of Memphis, practically
unreachable by highway or plane, Muscle Shoals, Alabama
billed itself as the “Hit Recording Capital of the World”—not
an idle claim. The pride of Muscle Shoals was the studio band
billed alternately as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section and
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the Swampers. They’d backed Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett,
and Aretha Franklin, along with dozens of others. When Paul
Simon heard their recording of “I’ll Take You There” with
the Staple Singers, he immediately made the pilgrimage to
Muscle Shoals to record with them. Entering Muscle Shoals
Sound Studio, Simon was convinced he was being introduced
to the studio’s office staff and meekly asked if he could
please meet the band. His confusion was understandable;
listening to their recordings, there’d be no way to guess that
all the members of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section were
white.
You know the Jimmy Cliff song “The Harder They Come”?
That’s the Muscle Shoals Rhythm section backing him up,
and on “Sitting Here in Limbo” too. They played with James
Brown on “It’s Too Funky in Here” and Clarence Carter on
“Slip Away.” Like the Funk Brothers in Berry Gordy’s
Motown Studios and Booker T. & the MGs at Stax, the
Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section went largely unheralded as
they turned out some of the greatest tracks ever recorded. “It
was our goal not to sound like ourselves,” said Swampers
bassist David Hood, “but to sound like the band of the artist
we were working with.”
Like nearby Memphis, the studios at Muscle Shoals produced
flawless country tracks sometimes on the same day they laid
down deep Southern soul, often using the same backing band.
And in the late sixties, the Muscle Shoals musicians, like
Booker T & the MGs and the Funk Brothers, tended to be
mixed race. If California rock represented music founded on
an act of theft and Nashville country an unimpugned white
sound, the soul sounds of Muscle Shoals formed a third
space: black artists recording for a largely but not exclusively
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black audience, hiring and working cooperatively with
talented white performers to achieve their sound.
For Parsons and his dream of an all-encompassing Cosmic
American Music, a sonic rising of the South, the appeal of
Muscle Shoals was obvious and immediate. Country, after all,
was just one of the genres a southern boy would have been
exposed to growing up. On the airwaves in Waycross, delta
blues would sit just a careful twist of the dial away from the
Louisiana Hayride. In their choice of Muscle Shoals tracks,
the Burrito Brothers evidenced an almost uncanny
understanding of the problems confronting an easily racially
integrated music.
The first selection was “Do Right Woman” written by Dan
Penn and Chips Moman and recorded by Aretha Franklin.
Performed by Franklin, the song’s message is clear: to reap
the benefits of domesticity, a man must be loyal, respectful,
attentive, and sexually adequate. Not exactly a radical
feminist agenda, but well within Franklin’s overall project of
advancing and asserting basic rights of a woman in a
committed relationship.
With Parsons taking over the lead vocal, a straightforward
reading becomes impossible. It would be downright bizarre to
read the song as a plea for other men to improve their sexual
performance, and given the tendency of Gram’s girlfriends to
dote on and mother him, it seems equally implausible he’s
speaking to a lover when he threatens to leave if taken for
granted. In any attempt to read the song as a sexual parable,
the relative positioning of the speaker and object drift, shift,
and spiral into incomprehensibility.
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But if the song falls apart under straight sexual or romantic
readings, it opens up under another. Parsons as the speaker
remains the aspiring Do Right Man, but the Do Right Woman
is not so much a romantic partner as she is Aretha Franklin, or
at least the music Franklin represents. The opening line
frames not the conditional it does in Franklin’s rendering (If
you “Take me to heart,” then “I’ll always love you”), but a
plea and its accompaniment (Please “Take me to heart,” but
either way, “I’ll always love you”). The second line, posed by
Franklin as a kind of threat, is a matter of pure acceptance
from Parsons, happy to tag along whether he’s taken for
granted or not. The performance and fidelity of the Do Right
Man is not sexual but musical and offered up to the Do Right
Woman not as a duty but as a form of tribute.
In either reading, the crux of the song comes in the bridge:
“They say that it’s a. man’s world, but you can’t prove that
by me.” When Aretha delivers the line, it’s an affirmation of
everything she’s put forth so far:
Aretha might cook the meals and clean the shirts, but
there’s no question who’s in charge around here. But when
Parsons sings it, the line changes dramatically, calling into
question Parsons’ racial and gender privilege. The world he
wants access to is barred by both his gender and his race and
the “me” expands outwards from Parsons as the speaker to
include the song as a whole: a failure of the idea that a white
male has access to all cultural objects. The Burrito Brothers
can cover an Aretha Franklin song, but they can never make it
their own, a feat they arguably could have accomplished with
any country standard. The track ends up sounding heartfelt
but misguided, accepting its own defeat.
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The Aretha Franklin cover is followed by a cover of James
Carr’s “Dark End of the Street,” written by Spooner Oldham
and Dan Penn, the high point of Carr’s brief and erratic
career.
The lyrics are the stuff of country music: Carr makes a
plaintive apology to his mistress, lamenting the secretive
nature of their relationship. In the hands of a lesser vocalist,
the song could come across as an insincere attempt to placate
an illicit lover by a man who’s more than happy to have his
cake and eat it too. But Carr’s stark sincerity is at once
overwhelming and perplexing. How could the bonds of any
marriage keep the singer and his lover indefinitely in the
shadows? The situation has no hope of resolution, no
endpoint but to be caught out, and the singer leaves no doubt
of his feelings for the object of his affection. But marriage is
only assumed, never explicitly mentioned in the song, and the
“they” in Carr’s panicked cry, “They’re gonna find us” is
never clearly explained as jealous spouses. On closer
inspection, this reading of the song begins to fall apart. The
cheating narrative is insufficient and this isn’t a country song
at all. “Dark End of the Street” is not a cheating song, but a
miscegenation narrative: the black singer’s lover is white.
James Carr’s hiding the shadows is fully justified, because
being caught with his lover would be absolutely life
threatening, and the situation truly has no possible resolution.
Parsons had delivered his share of cheating songs, and it
would be easy to expect “Dark End of the Street” to translate
into a simple song of infidelity in his hands. But in the Burrito
Brothers rendition, the song twists almost to the point of
breaking and comes out a miscegenation narrative of a
different kind. Similar to the change in “Do Right Woman,”
the song’s focus shifts from the romantic to the musical and
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the illicit liaison is not with a lover but with Carr and that
Muscle Shoals sound, the deep soulful complement to the
high lonesome. It takes on the feel of secretive late-night
listening to black music on strained and static-streaked radio
stations, of stolen trips to backwater juke joints and
downtown jazz clubs.
But just like Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and Young’s
“Alabama,”
the Burrito’s “Dark End of the Street” creates a space that
is explicitly racialized. It’s this space, the song suggests, to
which white musicians must go in order to commune with
black music. Instead of the blatant acts of appropriation and
outright theft that marked the beginning of the rock and roll
era, the Burritos map out an act of love and devotion,
submitting to the draw of a powerful strain of music while
understanding that the music is not simply theirs for the
taking. Meeting black music on its own turf and terms, they
approach with the trepidation and excitement of an illicit
lover.
Within this shift, two beautiful and hopeful slippages occur.
“They’re gonna find us,” a line that’s desperate to the point of
frantic in Carr’s reading becomes a hope for discovery in the
Burritos’ reading; not just discovery of the Burritos’
particular project of musical inclusion, but discovery of a
different approach to black music altogether, a road suggested
by the mixed-race bands in the studios at Motown, Stax, and
Muscle Shoals. The song’s repeated outgoing cry of “You and
me” delivered as a call and response, backed by Hillman’s
guitar and a high looping line on Sneaky Pete’s pedal steel,
becomes an almost sing-song invitation, urging the audience
to join the band in a space full of prohibition and potential, at
the dark end of the street.
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8
Wrath: My Uncle
“See the evasions so many don,
To flee the guilt of time…”
Delmore Schwartz
There are so many issues one can take with the Eagles, but
here’s one germane to the current discussion: In June 1972,
the band released their debut album, cleverly titled Eagles,
featuring the singles “Take It Easy” and “Peaceful Easy
Feeling,” both of which would become signature songs for the
band.
What else was going on in the world while the Eagles were
runnin’ down the road, tryin’ to loosen their loads? Nixon’s
plans for Vietnamization of the war were moving slowly, with
U.S. soldiers still pouring into the country by the thousands,
and early indications were that the transfer of hostilities to the
South Vietnamese military would be ultimately unsuccessful.
As his plans abroad failed, Nixon’s plans at home flourished:
He was creeping towards reelection by the second largest
margin ever in a presidential election, thanks in part to a little
hotel break-in that went down the same month the Eagles
debuted and hindered little by the leak of the incriminating
Pentagon Papers the year previous.
Despite this, the Eagles found themselves possessed by a
peaceful, easy feeling that they knew wouldn’t let them down.
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Take it easy, they urged listeners; don’t let the sounds of your
own wheels make you crazy.
As easy (not to mention fun!) as it might be to vilify the
Eagles for their blissful ignorance of world events, by 1972
the marriage of rock and politics had all but ended. While
R&B and funk music were becoming ever more radicalized,
rock music had largely left politics behind in favor of the
personal confessional styles of singer songwriters like James
Taylor and Cat Stevens, the bombastic arena rock and Tolkein
dabbling of Led Zeppelin or the Lovecraft-infused prog of
Black Sabbath. Left coast country rockers were just as happy
to leave politics out of things, and the Eagles were no
exception.
But in truth, politics had been left out of country rock since its
inception. “I don’t like the ‘I ain’t marchin’ anymore’
attitude,” Gram Parsons told a reporter in 1970, distancing
himself from the political activism common among rock
musicians on the West Coast. But when a draft notice showed
up at Burrito Manor at the end of 1968, the Flying Burrito
Brothers fell into step with the sentiments of the anti-war
movement.
Rock music of the sixties tended towards vocal leftist politics
and saw itself as aligned with the student antiwar movements.
Rock music and the counterculture it represented and
produced were almost inherently political and of the moment,
so much so that a simple concert could be seen as a major
victory in the war against oppression, a step towards getting
us out of Vietnam. Dressing like a hippie was a political
statement, Haight-Ashbury was party headquarters for a
political movement based not around whom you voted for,
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but what you wore, what you ingested, and whom you slept
with. Within the hippie movement, the personal, the cultural,
and the musical were political.
Country music also evidence a fair share of politics. Johnny
Cash sat near the top of 1968’s country charts with his Live at
San Quentin album, a bold espousal of Cash’s stance on
prisoners rights. In front of a sold-out audience at Madison
Square Garden in the fall of 1969, Cash commented on his
trips to perform for the troops overseas. Asked if these trips
made him a hawk, Cash said, “No, that don’t make me a
hawk. No. No, that don’t make me a hawk…. If you watch
the helicopters bring in the wounded boys, then you go into
the wards and sing for ’em and try to do your best to cheer
them up so that they can get back home, it might make you a
dove with claws.” But Cash’s politics were exceptional for a
country musician. For the most part, the country
establishment was waving the flag and marching in step, with
the country airwaves full of hymns to America’s strength
alongside
love
songs and weepers.
While leftists like Abbie Hoffman draped themselves in the
American flag to claim dissent as patriotic, country musicians
wanted it made clear that they were what America really
looked like. Merle Haggard nearly swept 1969’s Country
Music Awards with his dismissive rebuttal of the hippie
movement’s claim to a legitimate and politically important
role in American society, “Okie from Muskogee”:
We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee;
We don’t take our trips on LSD
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We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street;
We like livin’ right, and bein’ free.
But while country and rock both wore their often-opposing
politics on their sleeves, their hybrid offspring seemed
entirely uninterested in politics. Dylan’s Nashville Skyline
followed the class-conscious folk of John Wesley Harding
with vapid, down-home, feel-good antics. “Oh me oh my/Love
that country pie!’ proclaimed Dylan, grinning like a huckster
and sounding like a soft premonition of Johnny Rotten’s
snarling exit line, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
Throughout his early career, some-time country rocker Neil
Young left the politics out of his twangy efforts, saving his
messages for plugged-in rock songs like “Ohio” and
“Southern Man.” Sweetheart of the Rodeo espoused politics
that might have been appropriate to
the Populist era but bore little relevance to the times in which
the album was released. In fact, part of the appeal of country
music to rock musicians seemed to be an escape from current
politics, a way to make music without the war hanging
overhead. Early and proto-country rock bands used dated
musical themes of an indeterminate bygone era, substituting
cowboys and outlaws for hippies and soldiers. This included a
change of wardrobe for bands like the Charlatans, the
post-Hillman/Parsons Byrds, the Band, and the Dead. But the
wardrobe changes were purposefully non-specific, evidenced
most clearly in the anachronism-packed sepia cover photo of
Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s Déjà Vu. The picture featured
the band members decked out in attire from various historical
eras, including everything from a Union Army uniform to a
Buffalo Bill-style Wild West getup, even as the album title
suggested a sort of vague remembrance of the past. It was this
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kind of aesthetic atemporality that allowed the Band to get
away with a song like “The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie
Down” in 1970: If the Band gave any hint they were aware it
was 1970, writing a sentimental barn-burner about the fall of
the Confederacy in an era of newly-minted civil rights would
be unforgivable. But the Band presented themselves as not
just outside of the political scene, as they had by retreating to
the bucolic Big Pink in upstate New York to record their first
record, but outside of time entirely, smeared broadly across a
blurry pastiche of America’s past.
None of the Burritos were what you’d call overtly political.
The Vietnam War and national politics were just things on the
news, less pressing than the everyday concerns of music,
drugs, and women. Parsons was even less concerned than the
rest: He’d managed to finagle himself a 4-F deferment,
medically unfit for service. But then, as “My Uncle”
describes, a letter came from the draft board. The army wasn’t
convinced of Parsons’ 4-F status; they wanted proof. Included
with the letter was a questionnaire and a request to come on
down and get checked out by a real live army doctor. It
wasn’t a draft card, but it might as well be. Sonically, the
Burrito Brothers might be living in the past, but the war came
to Burrito Manor in 1968.
On “My Uncle,” Chris Hillman puts down the guitar and
returns to the instrument that launched his career, the
mandolin. Hillman’s precise strumming and Sneaky Pete’s
jaunting pedal steel line stand in for the drum track on a song
that comes closer to bluegrass than anything on Gilded
Palace, or Sweetheart, for that matter. In a snaptight vocal
harmony, Parsons and Hillman inform the listener of the
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situation and the song jumps immediately from the letter to
the solution without a moment’s thought; there’s not even a
full measure between the chorus and verse. They’re headed
for the nearest foreign border before the questionnaire is even
filled out. Not content to just suggest draft-dodging, the song
raises the question of what the boys owe Uncle Sam, a little
twist of JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you”
into “Ask what your country has done for you.” The Burrito
Brothers quickly assess their debt to their nation and find it
amounts to something less than everything. Even as they
romp through music that owes a deep debt to America, they
aver that the American government is clearly not worth dying
for.
The album’s closing track, “Hippie Boy” attempts to send up
the country tradition of preacher songs.
Over a languid
organ solo, Chris Hillman narrates a tale within a tale. A
“straight” (Hillman’s speaker) walks for a piece with a hippie
carrying a box, who in turn narrates a story of a young hippie
killed in the riots at the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago in the summer of 1968. The so-called riots in
Chicago were actually more of a police action, a beatdown
instigated by the Gestapo tactics of Mayor Daley’s police
force right in front of the delegates’ hotels. The incidents
were widely reported, but the Village Voice singled out one
victim in an article that was picked up by the national press
and may have served as the direct inspiration for the song.
“At the southwest entrance to the Hilton, a skinny, longhaired
kid of about seventeen skidded down on the sidewalk, and
four overweight cops leaped on him, chopping strokes on his
head. His hair flew from the force of the blows. A dozen
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small rivulets of blood began to cascade down the kid’s
temple and onto the sidewalk. He was not crying or
screaming, but crawling in a stupor towards the gutter. When
he saw a photographer take a picture, he made a V sign with
his fingers.”
This image of violence resonated with bands like the Flying
Burrito Brothers. Los Angeles and San Francisco were
enclaves of a sort, but the threat of random violence
perpetrated solely based on length of hair or style of dress
was ever-present,
especially in the types of bars and clubs the Burritos were
regularly playing.
Still, the Burritos were careful to enclose their politics in both
the satire of a form and within a framing narrative: The
speaker isn’t Hillman
and he’s recounting only the description of the incident at
the DNC from a teller whose sources are unclear. He might
have been there, but, like Hillman and Parsons, he might just
have read it in the Village Voice. The framing narrative
ultimately breaks down after the central narrative’s subject,
the hippie boy of the title, dies. As we come out of the
narrative, the voices of the “straight” and the hippie he’s been
talking with become indistinguishable, fuse, and multiply into
the album’s cacophonous closing chorus: The hippie victim in
Chicago becomes the hippie storyteller becomes the straight
becomes Hillman becomes a rising off-key chorus of GTOs
and Burritos bringing the album to its telos, a hymn sung for
and along with the victims of police violence in Chicago.
Beyond making a political statement, there were valid
aesthetic reasons for including contemporary issues in a
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country album. For one, it was more true to the tradition.
Much like folk, country music was historically concerned
with specific events of the moment. So-called classic country
songs like the Carter Family’s “No Depression” or the Louvin
Brothers’ “Atomic Power” directly addressed the immediate
political context of their composition. Treating the songs as
timeless was, in some ways, a betrayal of what the songs were
all about. Responding to the country tradition with nothing
but empty reiterations of generalized sentiments added
nothing to the canon; it allowed country to become a museum
piece, studied, venerated, and occasionally repackaged for
public consumption. The Burritos wanted country music that
breathed and bled, that was relevant and vital. To create it,
they injected the country of the past with everything at hand,
anything
they could find that mattered to them. They stuffed it full of
club girls and pot and dead Kennedys and soul and hippies
and riots and rhinestones, crossing their fingers and hoping it
would pop, dazzling audiences as sure as Operation: Rolling
Thunder’s bombing of North Vietnam or the sunburst on the
back of Chris Hillman’s Nudie suit.
Sons
The first Nudie suit I ever saw was worn by Pete Buck on the
Monster Tour in 1995. I’d gotten into R.E.M. the same time
as the rest of the non-tuned-in world with Out of Time, a
weird amalgam of lush strings, bubblegum pop, and country
rock. As the rest of my friends drifted into the teenage
rebellion of grunge music or the male posturing of classic
rock, I pined away with the high lonesome sound of the pedal
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steel on “Country Feedback,” thinking it was like nothing I’d
ever heard.
Of course, I was sixteen and not that bright.
By the early nineties, lots of young bands were getting in
touch with their inner twang. As it had been in the late sixties,
country music was nowhere you wanted to be if you were a
cool kid, and the prevailing legacy of country-rock consisted
of adult contemporary dreck like the Eagles
or the questionable politics of Lynyrd Skynyrd and their
Southern Rock confederates. Even the Man in Black was at a
career ebb, about to crest again with his remarkable American
albums. But some more savvy listeners had begun to look
past the mainstream’s version of country history and unearth
commercial failures like The Gilded Palace of Sin. College
radio staples like Uncle Tupelo and Dinosaur Jr. drank deep
from the well, finding inspiration in the source material of the
Flying Burrito Brothers: country stalwarts like Hank
Williams, Merle Haggard, and George Jones, and in the
Burrito Brothers’ spirit of experimentation. Just as the
Burritos had cross-pollinated country and soul, Uncle Tupelo
fused a country aesthetic, complete with pedal steel, onto the
hook-laden pop-punk of the Replacements,
while Dinosaur Jr. morphed the sound into their own brand of
ear-bleeding country, a combination of Burrito’s twang and
Sonic Youth’s apocalyptic noise. R.E.M. dabbled in
country-rock on Out of Time and dove in fully on Automatic
for the People. Beck pushed the genre through a synth,
breaking country into shattered bits of samples and
reconfiguring it as dance music; Whiskeytown fronted the
fiddle and alternated rasping punk vocals with nasal twang;
aging Brit art-punkers, the Mekons, who’d once planted their
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tongues firmly in their cheeks and blurted out “Never Been in
a Riot,” matured into an accomplished group of country
musicians, helping to found Bloodshot Records in Chicago, a
label that’s been a home to “insurgent country”
since its inception.
To form a list is inevitably to exclude, but you can add in the
Nashville stops on Elvis Costello’s constant world tour of
music genres, the historical revisionism of Gillian Welch, the
amphetamine cowpunk of the Old 97s, the cinematic gothic
archness of Knife in the Water and the Pinetop Seven, the
exploding/imploding dynamics of Palace, the dust-dragged
beauty of the Cowboy Junkies, the rodeo circus suicide music
of Johnny Dowd, the musical history lessons of the Drive-By
Truckers, and the country-soul noir of Neko Case to the stable
of artists who can trace a direct lineage back to The Gilded
Palace of Sin. Just off the top of my head—not bad for an
album that topped out at #164 on the Billboard and has never
been certified gold.
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9
Gluttony: The Train Song
“White freight liner, won’t you steal away my mind?”
-Townes van Zandt
You don’t trust him; it would be unwise to trust him. He is a
bear of a man but his high nasal voice wheedles out of him
and he looks like he may be planning to extract your wallet.
There’s something off about his personality and it’s the
difference between a person who is charming and a person
who tells you they are charming. He is happy to grant
interviews, assuming the interviewer is willing to pay.
Philip Kaufman was a self-labeled “road mangler.” He
enjoyed this little pun, he enjoyed all of his jokes more than
anyone else in the room and the jokes lost none of their
humor through repetition. Kaufman has also described
himself as “an executive nanny,” but procurer comes closer to
the mark. Kaufman had none of the qualities that might make
one famous and he knew it. He settled for being close to
fame, buzzing off a contact high. His connections in
the entertainment industry, never as extensive as he made
them out to be, came almost entirely from his ability to
procure drugs. He was fearless and mercenary: while half of
California’s glittering set was terrified of becoming the next
Sharon Tate, Kaufman, who’d served time with Charles
Manson at California’s Terminal Island Prison, was blithely
selling bootlegged copies of LIE, the demo tape Manson had
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given him, the one Kaufman had promised Charlie would find
its way into the right hands.
A few months after his release from prison in the summer of
’68, Kaufman found himself in the employ of the Rolling
Stones, who were in LA to mix Beggars’ Banquet. Parsons,
having recently returned to LA from his stay with Keith
Richards and Anita Pallenberg in Sussex and working on
assembling the band that would become the Burritos, met
Kaufman through the Stones near the end of the summer. The
two shared a penchant for drinking and self-aggrandizement
and became fast friends.
So when the Burritos prepared to embark on their first tour, a
cross-country train trip in February 1969, Gram Parsons
asked Phil Kaufman to be the band’s road manager. Kaufman
wasn’t exactly sure what services the Burritos expected, but
he guessed he’d be able to figure it out.
Even today, there’s a lingering romance about Amtrak’s
Super Chief, which makes the run from Los Angeles to
Chicago. It winds its way through the barren, alien parts of
America, the quasi-lunar landscapes of Arizona and New
Mexico that John Ford chose for backdrops, etching them
permanently into the visual iconography of the American
West. The Super Chief cuts across Gary Cooper and John
Wayne, passes through The Searchers and High Noon. For a
band like the Flying Burrito
Brothers, already at play in a field of American cultural icons,
the Super Chief was just another bit of mythmaking, a piece
in a patchwork of images and ideas.
It’s nice to think that, anyway.
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The truth is, the Flying Burrito Brothers didn’t want to leave
the ground. Specifically, Gram Parsons couldn’t get on an
airplane unless he was doped up to his eyeballs.
Even though the train was significantly more expensive,
the suits were picking up the bill, so the entire Burritos
entourage loaded on to the Super Chief bound for Chicago, all
of it on A&M’s tab.
Along with the band, its two regular managers and Philip
Kaufman, that entourage included Michael Vosse, an assistant
to the Vice-President of A&M Records, the label’s resident
hippie. If Kaufman was in charge of procuring the drugs,
Vosse, equipped with the company charge card, was
responsible for procuring everything else. He might have
been sent along as a chaperone, but Vosse was a willing
participant in the band’s activities, which began the night
before the Super Chief left Los Angeles. “Gram was
practically shoving up people’s noses last night,” Miss
Pamela wrote of the send-off party in her diary. “Big globs of
it.”
“Ah, the famous train tour,” drawled Chris Ethridge. “That
was something else. That was a hell of a trip, I tell you what.”
With an ample supply of drugs stowed away and the Nudie
suits cleaned and pressed, the train and Michael Vosse’s
camera started rolling. Inspired by the jittery handheld
camerawork and DIY aesthetic of DA Pennebacker’s
documentaries
as much as the more innocent and scripted hijinks of A Hard
Day’s Night, the Burritos decided to document their
cross-country journey.
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“It was like a Fellini move,” remembers Chris Hillman. “It
was like a cowboy Fellini movie travelogue.” The band,
fueled by mescaline, coke, and various other implements of
chemical alteration,
mugged for the camera like a tripped-out analog of the Fab
Four, hanging out the backs of train cars, bleating garbled
versions of Buck Owens songs, and generally terrifying the
straights. By lunchtime on the first day, the band had been
identified as disrupters of the peace.
“Some guy in the dining car,” recalled Vosse, “to this day I
think he’s a brilliant tactician, came up to all of us and said ‘I
know you gentlemen are in show business and you don’t want
to be bothered by people who want your autographs. I’ve got
a private dining room for you.’” The footage shows the truth
of the matter: Not a single passenger on Amtrak’s Super
Chief knew who the Flying Burrito Brothers were.
Safely sequestered from their adoring fans, the Burritos
settled into their posh dining car and got to the real business
of the tour: poker.
According to Michael Clarke, the band spent as much time
playing poker as they did playing music, with Parsons
generally winning by virtue of being able to afford to bet
indiscriminately—tough to read a player who can bet $500 on
a pair and not give it a second thought.
By the time they disembarked from the Super Chief for the
first show in Chicago, the lack of practice was apparent.
Ragged from the drugs and virtually unrehearsed, with a
drummer who had yet to learn the songs, the band’s live
shows skirted the edge of disastrous, salvaged only by
Hillman’s professionalism and Parsons’ occasional—if
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ultimately unreliable—brilliance. Crowds responded coolly,
and some of the band members were quick to lay the blame
on the audience. Sneaky Pete asserted that the band was
supposed to sound ramshackle; they were cowpunks, rebels.
Parsons insisted audiences and critics, both country and rock,
just didn’t get it. Hillman was embarrassed to be part of the
whole mess.
“If you do a bad show,” he said, “and you’ve got a
rhine-stone suit on, boy, getting off the stage is tough.
Y’know, you’re shining like…mmm hmm. Not good.”
Although the band hardly rehearsed, Parsons and Hillman did
manage to squeeze a little songwriting in among the
drug-hazed days of high-stakes poker in high-class hotel
rooms. Semi-inspired by the trip out, the pair penned “The
Train Song,” a mid-paced boogie number extolling the
near-spiritual virtues of train travel.
“It was a horrible song,” Hillman said of it later, “and I wrote
half of it!” But audiences seemed to like it well enough and
Parsons was so excited about the new song, he cajoled
Michael Vosse into calling A&M to have them stop all
promotions on Gilded Palace of Sin in order to throw the
remaining promotional budget behind this new single, which
the band would cut as soon as they returned to LA. Sales were
moving slowly, but the album had been critically praised,
including a glowing review in Rolling Stone and an
endorsement from Bob Dylan. Knowing that stopping
promotions at this stage would leave the half-finished tour
dead in the water, A&M refused
Parsons’ request.
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Along with fleecing his bandmates at the poker table, it
became increasingly clear that Parsons was using this tour to
establish himself as the undisputed frontman of the Burritos.
More and more, Parsons talked about Ethridge, Kleinow, and
Clarke as if they were hired help, openly discussing how
ill-suited they were for his band. In a 1972 interview looking
back on his experience with the Flying Burrito Brothers,
Parsons ran down the laundry list of complaints that had
already started to surface on the first tour.
“I sort of feel that all along the Burritos had a drummer
problem, you see,” he explained. “God knows I love old
Michael Clarke like a brother. But he’s not a country
drummer.” Parsons chuckled to himself. “I hope you erase
everything I said about Michael.”
Remarking on a recording of one of the early shows at the
Palomino he’d recently heard, Parsons said, “I couldn’t
believe the way Chris Ethridge sounded. I had never realized
that he wasn’t a country bass player. And it should have been
obvious to me cause he’s such a great studio musician. But
he’s not a country bass player. What we needed was someone
who could play a country shuffle, but it wasn’t happening.”
Discussing Sneaky Pete in the same interview, Parsons
admitted, “There were times during the first album when I
wanted to quit cause I couldn’t understand this guy doing
eight steel overdubs over himself…. Sneaky (I feel like I’m
repeating myself) wasn’t the right steel player for the group.
Chris [Hillman] sort of has two opinions about this. In a way
he digs Sneaky more than I do. I just settled for anybody
who’d play
slide guitar with pedals on it.”
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Parsons was distancing himself from the band, but at the same
time, he was making an effort to eclipse Chris Hillman. In
interviews, Parsons would claim sole credit for songs the two
had co-written and in performance, Hillman was being slowly
relegated to the position he’d held in the Byrds: the quiet guy
in the back. The Burritos’ frequent employment of tight,
Everly Brothers-style harmonies required Hillman and
Parsons to stay close and focused on each other at shows.
Unlike the vaulting harmonies of David Crosby, this style is
more responsive, like dancing without a clear lead, and it’s
nearly impossible to do well without eye contact, watching
your partner’s face for clues as to where he’s taking his
harmony next. But footage of a lip-synched studio
performance for a Philadelphia public access station during
the train tour gives a better sense of how Parsons saw the
band.
While all of the Burritos were sporting their Nudie suits, only
Parsons seemed to realize his potential as a living mirror-ball.
Hillman gamely takes the first lead vocal on “Christine’s
Tune,” forcing a smile but looking stiff and earnest as can be,
while Parsons prances kinetically behind him, his suit
throwing sparks at the camera, and when the two are
harmonizing, Parsons treats his songwriting partner like a
prop, leaning in to sing in his ear, subtly upstaging him. On
the second number, “Hot Burrito #1,” the band is barely
visible as the camera holds Parsons’ face in a tight close up,
his eyebrows arching evocatively, selling every word to the
camera and literally eclipsing the rest of the band. After all,
the songwriting was over, the hard work was done. This was
show business, and Gram Parsons had been preparing for this
since those days on his front stoop.
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After the television appearance and several shows in
Philadelphia opening for Three Dog Night, the Burritos found
themselves at the Boston Tea Party, booked for four nights of
the most ontologically confusing bill imaginable: the Flying
Burrito Brothers playing before the Byrds and after the Flying
Burrito Brothers.
Now based in Boston, Ian Dunlop’s Flying Burrito Brothers
East was still something of a pickup band, the kind of loose
collective he’d favored since his post-International Submarine
Band days in LA. Dunlop didn’t feel inclined to argue over
the rights to the name
and the West Coast contingent wasn’t about to bring it up.
Even stranger than the meeting of two incarnations of the
Flying Burrito Brothers was the confrontation between the
Byrds and the Burrito Brothers, who now contained more
Byrds than the Byrds,
McGuinn had given up his epic original idea for the album
that became Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and the electronic
experiments that were supposed to follow the Byrds country
excursion never materialized. Abandoned by Hillman and
Parsons in a California dream of Nashville, McGuinn had
gone native, and the Byrds had adopted a predominantly
country repertoire and the pastiche of outlaw garb favored by
the Band and the
Dead. As always, the Byrds remained grounded in McGuinn’s
pristine pop sensibilities and their country efforts sounded too
clean, lacking the technical complexity of accomplished
blue-grass and the barnstorming spontaneity of the best
Burrito Brothers’ efforts.
On the last of four nights, the two bands played together, with
Parsons fronting the Byrds on “Hickory Wind” and “You
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Don’t Miss Your Water.” The crowd, most of them there to
see the Byrds anyway, responded much more positively to
Parsons with the Byrds than they had to the Burritos, and
everyone—particularly Parsons—took notice. For his part,
Hillman couldn’t help but notice how much more interested
Parsons seemed in playing with the Byrds than in playing
with his own band.
The tour ended in New York and the band, strung out from
weeks of rough living and disappointed at the reception
they’d received, were at each other’s throats. Whatever nerves
remained in their tattered systems were frayed and irritated.
Emotionally and physically wrecked, they put themselves in
the tender care of Phil Kaufman, who’d spent the last few
weeks aiding and abetting their diets of self-abuse.
“The train tour ended, I think it was pretty much a train
wreck,” Phil Kauffman quipped. “I think we flew home,
because I remember Gram and Michael Clarke and Chris
Ethridge, I got em on the plane and I had to order three
wheelchairs in LA when we landed for the boys who were
‘airsick’. Airhead’d be more like it.” Delivered with his
wheezing laugh.
The Burritos returned to the safe environs of LA and the
comfortable, if not always lucrative, LA club circuit, but more
bad news piled up. Tired of playing to cold audiences and
half-empty rooms, Chris Ethridge quit the band. The Burritos
learned that by opting for the train tour, they’d passed on a
little festival in upstate New York in the nowhere town of
Woodstock. The biggest gathering of hippies the world would
ever see and they’d missed it. But the worst news came in the
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form of the bill on Michael Vosse’s company card. The
Burrito Brothers now owed A&M Records somewhere in the
range of $80,000 plus the recording costs for Gilded Palace
of Sin and “The Train Song,” neither of which had made any
progress on the charts.
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10
Envy: Let It Bleed
“The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye…
One joins him there for company.
But at a distance, in another tree.”
-Wallace Stevens
Frankly, the Rolling Stones scare the fuck out of me.
First off, there’s no way they should still be alive. As a band,
for one thing. None of the bands of that era still exist in any
recognizable form. And don’t even say the Who.
Even more impressive, they’re all still alive! Do you realize
that as of 2007, no one has ever died while he was a Rolling
Stone? It’s like the sweet black angel that swept through the
field of sixties musical luminaries ensuring no major band
escaped into the 1980s unscathed, simply passed over the
Stones. If it had happened to the Beatles, people would say
the hand of God was on them. But one doubts God would
want anything to do with the Stones. You know when the
jokes about Keith Richards being a corpse stop being funny?
When you realize he’ll be dancing at your funeral. And your
kids’ funerals.
If their continued existence is off-putting, their music is
downright terrifying. Find a song conceptually similar and
listen to it up against the Stones. Here, I’ll give you a start:
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listen to the Stones cover of Lennon and McCartney’s “I
Wanna Be Your Man.” The Beatles are singing to no one but
themselves,
engaged in the harmonic interplay of their own voices. The
Stones are singing to your girlfriend
Ever wonder why “Gimme Shelter” is in half the films Martin
Scorcese ever made? Listen to “Gimme Shelter” right after
the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City.” The Spoonful
paint a snarling picture of the way summer heat skirts the
edge of violence, only to offer the cooling respite of the
bounce pop chorus: just tap your feet, it’ll be all right.
“Gimme Shelter” assures listeners that, foot-tapping aside,
everything will not be all right: it starts with the match struck
and burns away from there. Shelter’s just a shout away,
shouts Mick over and over, even as the song fades out and
leaves the listener feeling brutally exposed.
At least from 1968 to 1972, they were the most important
rock band in America. Actually, that’s not quite right. They
were the most important American Rock Band. Their early
efforts might have had the Mr. Fish paisley tint of Swinging
London blues dabbling, but from Beggars’ Banquet to Exile
on Main Street, there was no band more American than the
Rolling Stones.
The final frightening thing to deal with about the Stones is
their wake. Maybe you can’t die while you’re a Rolling
Stone, but being around the Rolling Stones can seriously fuck
you up. When the Stones came back to LA in 1969 to record
Let It Bleed, they had just buried their former lead guitarist,
Brian Jones, who had lived only one month after getting
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kicked out of the band. The coroner’s report concluded Death
by Misadventure, and that more or less hit it on the head. If
the Beatles were encouraging fans to roll up for a Magical
Mystery Tour, the Stones were offering only Misadventure,
with all the consequences that might entail.
Gram Parsons’ first misadventure with the Rolling Stones had
cost him a job, but gained him a friend for life.
“I said, there’s a good one,” remembered Richards. “I just got
you out of the band. You were a member of the Byrds
yesterday, today you ain’t got a gig!” He chuckled at this in
the strange husky laugh of his. And it’s that chuckle that says
it all. Richards is talking about costing his friend a dream job,
and his only response is to chuckle as if to say, “Yep, kid,
that’s what happens.”
With his new wings already clipped, Parsons was warmly
welcomed into the home of Keith Richards and Anita
Pallenberg in Sussex. It’s difficult to think of Keith Richards
as anything but the relic he is now, propped in a chair like a
taxidermist’s triumph, perpetual cigarette dangling from
skeletal fingers, but in 1968, he was a skinny, vibrant kid of
twenty-four. He was living hard but he was only starting to
live hard: The heroin habit that would dog Richards for most
of his life was only a hobby and the daunting cocktail of
substances that would pass through his legendary liver
were still
held at a recreational level. Coming off a string of best-selling
records whose creative direction had been largely dictated by
Brian Jones, Richards was looking for ways to make his
presence more strongly felt within the Stones and pick up the
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slack left by the drug-addled Jones. He and Parsons clicked
immediately.
“Gram’s one of those guys,” Richards said, “you meet with
him and you say, bam, I’ve known you forever. And you can
only find out more about each other. But it was kind of like
that immediately between him and me.”
In pictures from the months in Sussex, they look like two kids
at summer camp, goofy and wild eyed, grinning from ear to
ear. and when Richards talks about Parsons, it’s with a
faraway sweetness reserved for friends of one’s early
childhood who are preserved by their early departure from
one’s life.
Mick Jagger didn’t take to Parsons as easily, and was
occasionally brusque to him, but he couldn’t help but respect
Parsons’ musical knowledge, and if the two were never
friends, they were at least briefly partners in an overall
musical project. The first meeting of the three in 1968 opened
up a new musical playing field for the Stones in a period of
flux. Jagger and Richards knew a thing or two about country,
but didn’t have the deep and passionate knowledge of
Parsons. Most importantly, Parsons introduced them to the
Bakersfield sound, a plugged-in variant of country music
popularized by Bakersfield, California-based artists like
Merle Haggard and Buck Owens as an alternative to the
polished orchestrated music coming out of Nashville at the
time and nicknamed “Bakersfield shitkick.” Parsons also
introduced Richards to Nashville tuning, an open tuning in
which the C, D and E strings are tuned a full octave higher,
creating a ringing double tone similar to a 12-string. Richards,
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who had been playing weaving double guitar lines with Jones
before the latter grew
bored with guitar, was instantly enamored of the tone, and it
would show up in his acoustic playing over the next four
albums,
including Beggars’ Banquet, which marked the beginning
of the withdrawal of Brian Jones from the band leading up to
his eventual ouster.
Keith Richards credits Parsons and his injection of country
music into the band’s repertoire with helping to spark the
renaissance of the Rolling Stones. But Roger McGuinn,
discussing the Parsons-Stones connection in 1976, put it
differently. “They pulled him over and started romancing
him,” McGuinn told an interviewer, “and they ripped him off
for all he knew.”
Parsons surely never saw it that way; he adored the Stones,
particularly Richards. Throughout his career, he spoke
excitedly about the album he and Richards were going to
record together, as soon as Keith found the time. And it
wasn’t a case of Richards stringing Parsons along. Being a
Rolling Stone was awfully time-consuming, and, as Richards
said, “I always figured, oh, he’s about the same, he’s a little
younger than me, he’ll be around for ages. We can do loads of
stuff. I mean, we weren’t even really just getting going.”
When the Stones hit LA in fall of 1969, shacking up at the
home of Stephen Stills to finish recording Let It Bleed,
Parsons became an immediate fixture, both at the house and
in the studio. For their part, the Stones frequented Burrito
Brothers shows, trekking to out-of-the-way clubs like the
Palamino and the Golden Bear to lend the boys a little
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secondhand credibility. The Stones had known Hillman since
his early days with the Byrds, and although they’d never been
good friends, they shared a mutual respect of talented
working musicians. But the
Stones were an established band, finding their feet again after
the death of Brian Jones, while the Burritos were a new band,
threatening to implode after just one album, and Hillman
couldn’t help but be frustrated by the amount of time Parsons
was spending with the Stones and not the Burritos.
People have speculated as to whether or not Gram Parsons
wanted to be a Rolling Stone, but come on, who wouldn’t
want to be a Rolling Stone? Who would opt to stay with their
struggling, deeply in-debt band rather than join the most
successful band in the world? And more than any other band,
even the Flying Burrito Brothers themselves, the Rolling
Stones were realizing Parsons’ dream of a Cosmic American
Music: Beggars’ Banquet came on as an explosive
experiment with elements of country, but over the next three
albums, culminating with Exile on Main Street, the Stones
were producing a polyglot of country, soul, R&B, and rock,
juxtaposing pedal steel and twang with rich soul vocals and
blistering guitars. Of course, Gram Parsons wanted to be in
the Rolling Stones. But there was no room in the Rolling
Stones for Parsons.
That didn’t stop him from overselling his connection to the
band. In addition to the constant talk of a collaboration with
Keith Richards, Parsons and his fans have at various times
claimed that he wrote “Honky Tonk Women,”
that he arranged or performed on “Country Tonk,” the
front-porch hootenanny version that appears on Let It Bleed,
and that he contributed vocals on Exile,
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Parsons also claimed he was the
inspiration for “Wild Horses,”
later backing off to claim the Stones had written the song
for him to record.
In truth, Richards had sent him the demo of “Wild Horses” so
he could pass it along for Sneaky Pete to record a pedal steel
track. Parsons latched onto the song and asked Richards for
permission to record it for Burrito Deluxe, an album which
was stalled out due in no small part to Parsons’ overall
disinterest. Richards agreed and although Hillman wasn’t
overly fond of the song, they were short on material and a
new Jagger/Richards composition would sell records,
assuming Burrito Deluxe ever got completed.
Parsons’ time with the Stones was affecting more than just his
already shaky work ethic: It was altering his stage presence
and fashion sense. In a video for “Older Guys,” a series of
shots of the band goofing around on the California coast,
popping in and out of the cabin of a yacht, structurally similar
to a video Parsons and Hillman had done with the Byrds for
“Hey Mr. Spaceman,” the boy who’d once been ecstatic just
to sit on a bench, grinning and harmonizing, was now
prancing and strutting, trailing pink scarves and wagging a
finger at the camera, even delivering a Jagger-esque pout as
he sang, “It’s so coastal living by the ocean.”
The scarves were just part of it. “Painted nails, all that
effeminate shit,” recounted one of the Burritos’ roadies.
“He’d come into the Palomino when it was a real truck-driver
place in these faggy outfits and the other guys would say ‘We
can’t go on stage with this fucker.”’ The drift towards
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androgyny was shared by most of the Stones’ entourage.
Stones biographer
Stanley Booth said, “We all got faggier by the day. The
wonder is that by the end of the tour we weren’t all wearing
dresses. We all had to brush our hair out of our eyes every
eight seconds. You never saw a more limp-wristed bunch of
sissies.”
But Booth was stressing a positive aspect of the band. The
Stones’ toying with ideas and imagery of femininity and
homosexuality was a reinforcement of their own masculinity.
Besides, the Burritos had been parading into roughneck bars
in rhinestones suits since the outset. If Parsons wanted to push
that envelope a little further, the rest of the band was willing
to let it slide.
What didn’t fly was his failure to show up at a recording
session at A&M’s studios in Hollywood. After a couple
phone calls, Hillman found him in a location he might have
guessed. “I tracked him down to a Stones session,” recounts
Hillman. Busting into the Stones’ studio, Hillman
immediately apologized for interrupting and spotted Parsons
sitting in the corner of the studio, watching the Stones. “Mick
Jagger, the other professional in this business, comes over to
him, says ‘Gram, you have a responsibility… Chris is here.
Go with Chris. We’re working.’”
Like a petulant child, Parsons got up and left the studio with
Hillman.
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11
Avarice: Burrito Deluxe
“Here is the math that will explain just how fucked they are.”
Steve Albini
Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass made the kind of album
covers hipsters frame and hang ironically on their walls—a
woman caked in whipped cream wearing a little tiara and set
against a kelly green background; an unbearably slick-looking
gentleman done up in a matador-gaucho pastiche posed on a
flimsy hacienda set; gaudy seriffed lettering; amazing kitsch
objects.
The music is significantly less amazing—a step above the
Ray Coniff singers, but essentially elevator music.
Not too surprising then, that when Alpert paired up with
businessman Jerry Moss to start A&M Records in 1962, their
stable of artists didn’t exactly set the world on fire—Sergio
Mendes & Brazil ’66; Fairport Convention; Burt Bacharach.
But the target market for music has always been the young
folks, and the kids just weren’t buying Sergio Mendes
albums. By 1968, A&M had some success with folk acts like
Joan Baez and We Five, but wanted to tap deeper into the
youth market. A&M was ready to rock.
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The Flying Burrito Brothers were their first real foray into the
rock scene and it seemed like a sure thing. The band
contained two former members of the Byrds,
Joan Baez had scored a minor hit covering Parsons’
“Hickory Wind,” plus they’d work for next to nothing. The
cash advance for Gilded Palace of Sin amounted to
approximately $1500 for each band member, and all A&M
had to put up additionally were recording, promotional, and
touring costs.
Of course, after working with modest artists like Mendes,
Baez, and Bacharach, A&M could never have anticipated the
Dionysian excesses of Parsons and the Burritos, both in the
studio and on tour. In addition to the $80,000 the band had
spent on the train tour, A&M had shelled out another $50,000
on recording and promotion for the band’s first album and
subsequent single and had seen practically no return on
investment. They weren’t pulling the plug just yet; A&M had
always said the Burritos were a second album band and they
were willing to spend money to ensure the second album was
a success. But playtime was definitely over, and it was time
for the Burritos to start making money.
With the departure of Chris Ethridge, the Burritos should
have been shopping for a bass player, but instead hired lead
guitarist Bernie Leadon, veteran of country acts like the
Scottsville Squirrel Barkers with Chris Hillman, and Dillard
& Clark with former Byrd Gene Clark. Leadon was a stronger
lead than Hillman, who agreed to switch back to bass, an
instrument he’d more or less abandoned since his time in the
background of the Byrds.
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A&M also hired producer Jim Dickson, who had known
Hillman since his bluegrass days and had been with the Byrds
when they were still a folk trio. He had introduced them to
Chris Hillman and introduced them to the songs of Bob
Dylan, starting with “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Throughout his
time with the band, Dickson had encouraged the Byrds to
cover Dylan, believing their sound to be uniquely suited to his
material. Dickson’s job was simple: Craft the Flying Burrito
Brothers into a commercially viable entity and churn out an
album that would sell.
Regardless of how Hillman felt about moving back over to
bass, it was nice to have another professional on the team.
Leadon shared Hillman’s hard-nosed work ethic and
discipline. His playing was solid, his songwriting was
competent, firmly grounded in traditional country and
bluegrass, and his patience with Gram Parsons’ flamboyant
antics was low.
Parsons and Hillman had written no new songs since “The
Train Song” so the rehearsal sessions for Burrito Deluxe
began with castoffs from The Gilded Palace of Sin. When
those weren’t enough, the Burritos unearthed a Parsons tune
that had been cut from Sweetheart of the Rodeo, “Lazy Day,”
which seemed to sum up everyone’s sentiments regarding the
second album.
It’s a lazy day.
I’m bored with nothing else to do.
It’s a lazy day.
I’ve got something that I wanna try with you.
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With the inclusion, at Jim Dickson’s insistence, of the older
Dylan number “If You’ve Gotta Go,” the early tracklist for
the sessions seemed like a collection of songs Hillman and
Parsons had already attempted with no luck. In fact, with
Hillman on bass, Dickson at the boards and the switch from
two-part, Everly Brothers inspired harmonies to a three-part
harmony including Leadon,
the Flying Burrito Brothers were looking suspiciously like
a poor man’s version of the Byrds.
Filling up the extra spots on the tracklist was a major point of
contention. Parsons felt that, like Gilded Palace, the second
album had to include R&B numbers to get across what the
band was all about. He suggested tracks like Larry Williams’s
“Boney Maronie” and James Carr’s “To Love Somebody.”
Leadon, who was not at all an R&B guitarist, argued that the
band should make a more earnest attempt to woo country
audiences by dropping in more traditional country and
spiritual material. The deciding vote fell to Hillman, and it
wasn’t a tough call to make. Parsons was looking for ways to
make an artistic statement, an appeal to an R&B audience
who wanted even less to do with the Burritos than rock and
country audiences already did. Advocating a more artistically
safe route, Leadon’s approach sounded more like a marketing
plan than a musical manifesto. Hillman’s band was deep in
debt to their label, and there’d be no trust fund to bail him
out. He sided with Leadon and the Burritos jettisoned R&B
from their repertoire.
It was a good day in the studio when everyone showed up.
A&M had moved the sessions out to Hollywood, believing
that LA provided too many distractions, which it did. But the
move just made those distractions more appealing for a group
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who would already rather not brave the traffic to Hollywood
just to see who else had made roll call that day. Leadon and
Hillman were there all the time, as was Michael Clarke,
who’d finally been hired as the full-time drummer after the
train tour,
but Parsons’ attendance was sporadic and his condition
unpredictable when he did show up.
“I can’t even claim to have really even participated,” Parsons
said later. “I did what was asked of me and that’s about it. It’s
a pretty lousy thing to have to admit. I waited to see if the
album was gonna be a freak hit and then split.”
Other than “Wild Horses,” he showed no interest in the
material, and his vocals were tepid and limp. Sneaky Pete was
perhaps the only member who’d gotten more work as a result
of the first album and would often prefer to work a paying gig
than suffer through another fruitless session with the Burritos,
a band for whom he was mostly hired help anyway.
The result reflected the band’s utter lack of enthusiasm and
inspiration. The playing was competent. Even Michael
Clarke, dismissed as a poor drummer since his time with the
Byrds, had developed into an adequate one. Jim Dickson took
what the band gave him and polished it, giving it a smooth,
post-production sheen, but in doing so did further damage to
an already-flawed album. The final cut lacked any of the
honky-tonk grit the Burritos could manifest in their better
moments
and flattened out the band until all elements were precisely
equal in the mix: nowhere does Sneaky Pete’s pedal steel
commandeer a song like an air invasion, Nowhere does
Parsons’ vocal rise out of the mired harmonies to grab the
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audience’s interest. Everything sits firmly in the middle of the
mix, non-offensive, never challenging. In short, Burrito
Deluxe fit in perfectly with the rest of the albums put out by
A&M Records.
Holy Ghosts
It’s easier to valorize a young dead man than a live old one.
This may be universally true, but it’s certainly true for rock
musicians: a reputation is better served by a short, strong
career than an extended, varied one. To add to the problem,
few musicians are able to transcend their initial moment of
cultural relevance: the sixties were rough on the stars of the
fifties, the seventies were trying for the stars of the sixties,
and the eighties were outright brutal to everyone left around.
We needn’t list examples on this, but let’s do—just for kicks.
First and ever foremost are the surviving Beatles. Sure, we all
wish John Lennon had gotten a chance to appear on the
Simpsons, but few of us wanted to see him as a six-inch tall
train conductor on a children’s program, or spouting jingoist
pro-American lyrics on a Super Bowl halftime show. The
handful of albums recorded by Jimi Hendrix remain vital,
while Eric Clapton’s best work strains under the weight of
two decades of dismissible pop and sentimentalist tripe. Nick
Drake and Elliott Smith have earned permanent seats in the
coffeehouse of miserablist culture as much through their
talent as by being brief, brilliant gems of sadness, and Kurt
Cobain remains untarnished by the alternarock monster he
inadvertently created and abandoned.
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It’s an unfortunate truth, but dead rock stars are inevitably the
ones who are canonized and airbrushed onto t-shirts. It’s the
way of the world.
So it is with Gram and Chris. Together they produced an
album that would become the blueprint for a musical
movement, that bent genres and opened doors into other
things that rock and country could be. It’s an album musicians
like
Uncle Tupelo, R.E.M., Gillian Welch, and Beck discovered
and returned to, taking it as a cue not to repeat, but to
reinvent; to approach music with the same sense of wonder
and reverence paired with experimentation and play that
pervades The Gilded Palace of Sin. As much as any effort by
Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards, The Gilded
Palace of Sin is a collaboration, two individuals at the peak of
their abilities, coming together to form something larger than
either. The Gilded Palace of Sin is an album by Hillman and
Parsons.
But it never plays that way. Gram Parsons has become the
patron saint of alt-country, while a significant number of the
genre’s younger proponents wouldn’t recognize Chris
Hillman’s name. Leaving the scene at the age of twenty-six,
Parsons cemented his place in history and preserved his
image as the child prodigy, the golden boy with the shining
cross. He didn’t have to stick around while the Eagles turned
the musical style he’d helped advance into a “plastic dry
fuck”, didn’t have to spend the seventies bouncing around the
ruins of the California scene in collapse, brushing against
other lost musicians hoping for a spark that never came. He
could exist forever as potential energy.
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But in none of Parsons’ most brilliant moments was he alone.
Not one. Hillman is as much a part of Parsons’ early work as
Parsons himself, just as EmmyLou Harris was an equal
partner in his later efforts. Since his death, the two have kept
Parsons memory alive in their own ways: Harris with an
almost starry-eyed reverence, Hillman with the cool
objectivity we reserve for only our closest friends. If Hillman
seems a little bitter discussing Parsons, it’s understandable:
Much of his career has been spent working in a genre that’s
become the Church of Gram Parsons, an edifice he and his
friend had built together in the low desert of the late sixties.
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12
Wrath: Under My Thumb
“See the Rolling Stones and die.”
-Stanley Booth
He enters the frame from the upper left corner, licking his lips
anxiously, sporting a suit of violent green. Someone leans
over to inform you, That’s him, that’s Meredith Hunter and
for the next ten minutes, as Mick in a motley red and black
shirt trailing scarlet scarves from his arms urges everyone to
be cool, get it together, the crowd in front of the stage at
Altamont Speedway is no longer a simple muddle of hippies
and Angels: It becomes a dark space, waiting for the
unnatural brightness of the green suit to violate it again. Your
eye is searching for Meredith Hunter, to catch the last few
moments of his life on screen.
The band lopes its way through “Under My Thumb,”
trying to ease the crowd back from something awful.
Denim-clad arms crossed, Sonny Barger, the head of the San
Francisco branch of the Angels, is giving Mick a look that
could be desire or disgust. It’s impossible to tell if he wants to
fuck Mick or fight him. Mick is pleading, “It’s all right, I pray
it’s all right” and at the foot of the stage, the kids are shaking
their heads at him, in sympathy or disagreement.
Suddenly, he leaps back into the frame from the left, arms
flailing. The Angels have created a space at the front of the
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stage and Meredith Hunter jumps into it, only to be dragged
down and out of the frame, stabbed repeatedly in the back and
the side of the head. An 18-year-old Berkeley student, he is
dead before the helicopter can get him to the hospital.
The fact of it is, California deserved Woodstock more than
New York did. A quick rundown of the Woodstock line-up
reveals almost entirely West Coast imports without an
indigenous New York band among them. By the end of the
sixties, New York City’s rock scene was under the sway of
Warhol and the Factory, the cool-to-the-point-of-icy aesthetic
of the Velvet Underground. Yasgur’s farm in upstate New
York simply never earned the right to host the signature event
of late sixties musical culture; San Francisco had put in the
work, only to be passed over. The West Coast was entitled to
a Woodstock-level event and the Rolling Stones were set to
provide.
Not to argue that it was a selfless move. The Stones had
botched the free concert’s original site in Golden Gate Park
by announcing themselves as the concert’s “special guests” in
order to drum up press for both the show and the forthcoming
Let It Bleed. Once the city of San Francisco knew the Stones
were playing, they nixed Golden Gate Park due to the traffic
and policing problems the show would create, forcing the
move to the Sears Point Raceway. Additionally, the Stones
had already sold the movie rights for a sizable sum, and
financial disputes over distribution led to the breakdown of
the Sears Point site, necessitating the last minute move to the
Altamont Speedway two days before the show. But there is a
sweet and generous naïveté that comes through in Mick’s
plans for the concert, as explained to radio reporters in the
week leading up to Altamont.
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“It’s creating a sort of microcosmic society which sets an
example for the rest of America,” he told them. “The
concert’s like the proscenium of a theater, it’s like an excuse
for everyone to get together and, like, talk to each other and
sleep with each other and ball each other and get very stoned
and just have a nice night out and a good day…. It’s not just
getting up there and seeing, sort of, the Grateful Airplane,
y’know. The Rolling Dead.”
It’s important also to remember the amount of time
compression we’re talking about, the short span between
Woodstock and Altamont, a distance of less than four months.
In Rolling Stone, Hunter Thompson described this period in
typical gonzo-prophetic prose as possessed with “that sense of
inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil… We had
all the momentum, we were riding the crest of a high and
beautiful wave.” Four months after Woodstock, it could only
feel natural that the momentum was continuing, even
building, and that Altamont would be another Woodstock: an
incarnation of everything the California scene was about.
From the crest of the wave, there was no way to
tell that everything had tipped, gotten just ahead of itself, and
was crashing into the first year of the seventies.
Even hiring the Hell’s Angels as a security force was not as
monumentally idiotic as it seems. The Angels had provided
security for a number of Grateful Dead shows without
incident, and the Stones had used the British wing of the
Angels for security at their recent Hyde Park show,
which had been as big as the projected Altamont turnout.
The Angels also shared a kind of outsider status with the
hippie movement, although the politics of the two groups
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showed little to no overlap. And there were good reasons for
not using the police: It wasn’t just that there would be drugs,
there had to be drugs. Drugs were a crucial part of the
equation. The Stones needed a security force with an open
mind regarding conspicuous consumption of substances, they
needed it on the cheap,
they’d had positive experiences with the less-bellicose
British version of the Angels, and the Dead, who knew the
San Francisco scene as well as anyone, had given the Angels
their blessing. That naiveté again: Nothing bad could happen.
We were winning.
But the Rolling Stones were the wrong band to replicate
Woodstock. The Stones had a darkness to them that’s otherly,
that was utterly outside the Woodstock scene. Even their
experiments in acid-fueled hippie-dippery resulted in Their
Satanic Majesties Request,
. Janis and Jimi had a bit of that darkness
in them, but in Joplin and Hendrix, it showed itself as an
abandonment of self in favor of excess as art, a sort of ecstatic
self-destruction. The Stones themselves were indestructible; it
was everyone else that was wrecked in their wake.
Inevitable, well-meant, and doomed from the start, the
planned free concert barreled through myriad obstacles to its
final destination at the Altamont Speedway, 40 miles north of
San Francisco, on December 6, 1969. At least 200,000 kids
were expected, the largest West Coast concert audience since
the Monterey Pop Festival two years earlier. And Parsons
wanted to be part of it.
The Burritos were nowhere near the caliber of the rest of the
bill numberwise. Santana was coming off a career-making
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performance at Woodstock, and their debut album was
climbing the charts. The Grateful Dead and the Jefferson
Airplane had just recorded and were about to release two
albums
that would each in its own way map and define a solid and
crystalline moment of a scene that was already disintegrating.
Crosby Stills Nash and Young were nothing short of a
supergroup, built out of Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and
the Hollies. The Burritos could barely draw a crowd at the
Palomino, and the uninspired Burrito Deluxe was dying on
the charts. Even Parsons’ friendship with Richards was not
enough to convince the rest of the Stones to hire the band on
as an opener. Only after Parsons agreed to pay the Burrito’s
travel expenses out of pocket was the band tacked onto the
bill. So on the morning of December 6, the Flying Burrito
Brothers trucked up from San Francisco to Altamont, stuck in
traffic with 400,000 Rolling Stones fans.
The day got off to a bad start. Sneaky Pete got into a minor
car accident on the drive up and the band arrived in poor
spirits.
The Speedway was already full of kids, many of whom had
filtered in the night before and camped out, ingesting alcohol,
speed, hallucinogens, and anything else on hand
to ready themselves for the show. The boys milled about,
spending a fair amount of time in the smoky trailer of the
Rolling Stones. By the time the Burritos took the stage,
Altamont had already been blessed with the first of the day’s
four births,
and the Angels had taken up their posts at the end of the
low-set stage, sporting pool cues weighted with lead at the
butt end, skinny implements less imposing but no less
effective than a caveman’s club. A handful of audience
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members caught the business end of a pool cue during the
Burritos’ set, but overall, the band seemed to have a calming
effect on the crowd.
“Gram up there and I mean, he’s a very gentle guy,” Keith
Richards remembered. “Very soothing effect on people. And
he knew it, y’know? But I think, I mean, that probably saved
at least some other peoples, and some other heads gettin’
broken. For a little while, y’know… Gram could do that. He
had a very commanding presence.”
Hillman agreed. “I must say, the Burrito Brothers did calm
the crowd down. In the movie [Gimme Shelter], you can see
that. But I found it the most disturbing thing in the world.”
Even with a strong performance and a positive reception,
there was something in the air at Altamont that set Chris
Hillman’s teeth on edge. He wasn’t the only one to pick up on
it; the Dead were informed upon arrival that the Angels had
turned violent and immediately loaded back into the
helicopter
and left.
Hillman had enough concert experience to know something
wasn’t right.
“I had played Monterey with The Byrds. That was the best
pop festival ever, over Woodstock, The Isle Of Wight, any of
them. And Altamont was the exact opposite. It was a dark
day. The Hells Angels were like uncaged barbarians,
attacking anything that walked. God knows what they’d
ingested, but they were just frightening. I went to get onstage
with my bass, and I was stopped by two Hell’s Angels. It was
like dealing with two sociopaths. I had to talk to them like
they were children: ‘I’m going to play now, I have a show to
145
do, I’m playing the bass, this is it what I’m holding, I have to
go on the stage now.’ It was the monk at the monastery
dealing with the Norsemen. Once we’d finished playing, I left
immediately. Immediately.”
Hillman and Kleinow cut out and were back in San Francisco
by nightfall. Naturally, Parsons wanted to hang out and see
the Stones play; it had been months since the whole band had
played out together on the West Coast. Leadon and Clarke,
who’d both missed out on Woodstock, wandered through the
crowd after the Burritos’ set, not really in with the Stones’
entourage.
Things went bad quickly. During the Jefferson Airplane’s set,
Airplane singer Marty Balin leapt off the stage to stop the
Angels from beating on an audience member and received a
punch in the face for his efforts. When Paul Kantner took the
mic to inform the audience his bandmate had been abused,
one of the Angels stepped up to Balin’s mic and clearly
explicated the Angel’s policy for the day.
“You’re talking to me, now I’m going to talk to you.
You’re talking to my people. Now let me tell you what’s
happening. You. What’s happening. You know what’s
happening? We’re partying, like you.”
The event was massive, covering miles of ground and some
concertgoers remembered Altamont as an overall positive
experience, only learning of the violence through news
reports later. But as the daylight waned and a pause stretched
out between the end of Crosby Stills Nash and Young’s set
and the beginning of the headlining act, violence, particularly
around the foot of the stage, escalated.
146
When the sun had gone down and the Stones were ready to
take the stage,
the three remaining Burrito Brothers had found spots in the
wings to view the show. Parsons stood apart from his
bandmates with a comforting arm around Michelle Phillips,
former member of the Mamas and the Papas,
who had gulped down a couple swallows of liquid LSD
from what she thought was a cup of apple juice. By the time
the Stones hit stride with their third song, “Sympathy for the
Devil” the crowd was in a frenzy and at the foot of the stage,
audience members warily backed away from Angels, who
were now beating people without provocation. Mick Jagger
was visibly shaken and tried to stop the band, but Keith
Richards, blithely caught up in his performance, continued
ripping through to the song’s finish.
“People, come on,” Jagger urged after the first couple songs.
“I mean, who’s fighting and what for? Why are we fighting?
We don’t want to fight. Every other scene has been
cool…All I can ask you, San Francisco, is like, the whole
thing, this could be the most beautiful evening we’ve had for
this winter and we’ve really, don’t let’s fuck it up. I can’t do
any more than to ask you, to just beg you to keep it together.”
Despite Jagger’s pleas, his insistence that everyone sit down,
it was too late. Everything had gone to hell. The darkness that
seethed through the Rolling Stones had spilled over like a
bucket poured into a cup. Somewhere in the middle of a
loping, midpaced version of “Under My Thumb,” Meredith
Hunter was stabbed to death by Angel Alan Passaro.
Hunter was airlifted out of the show, but died en route to
the hospital. No one told the Stones, but something came over
them. After the restrained rendition of “Under My Thumb”
147
their performance became blistering, apocalyptic as they
destroyed songs like “Brown Sugar” and “Street Fightin’
Man.” As frenzy ripped through the crowd, the Stones were in
total control of themselves and their craft, even if they’d lost
control of everything else.
Nine songs into the set, a crisis point was reached; the stage at
Altamont was no longer safe. The band was shuffled off the
stage and towards a waiting helicopter. Parsons shepherded
Michelle Phillips along with the rest of the entourage, while
Leadon and Clarke, sensing that the only way to stay safe was
to remain as close to the Rolling Stones as possible, followed
as near to Parsons as they could get. Not close enough.
Parsons, Phillips, and Stones’ biographer Stanley Boothe
crammed into the copter and the door shut behind them, in the
faces of Leadon and Clarke. As the helicopter left like the last
airlift out of Saigon, half the Burrito Brothers were stranded
on the ground, watching their lead singer being
flown to safety.
“When it was over,” said Bernie Leadon, “we weren’t invited.
So Gram, y’know, just gets in the rush with all the followers
and the road crew and they just rush him off to the helicopter.
And Michael and I were just… [shrugs] ‘Typical. Let’s fend
for ourselves.’”
Miss Pamela, who left Altamont along with Miss Mercy not
long after the Burrito Brothers’ set and a confrontation with
the Angels, met up with Parsons and the Stones hours later,
safe and away at the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco.
Keith Richards plucked absently at his guitar. Mick Jagger
paced the floor, remarking that this is it, this is the end of the
Rolling Stones. They had to end the band. “I didn’t want it to
148
be like this,” he said, not in the voice of the world’s biggest
rock star, but of a kid whose actions have spiraled out of
control. In the corner, his arm still wrapped around Michelle
Phillips who could only watch, paralyzed, with pupils still
wide as dinner plates, Gram Parsons was asleep, the events of
a day that ended an era already sloughed off his shoulders.
149
150
Epilogue
Gluttony: Do You Know How It Feels
to Be Lonesome?
A working mother, struggling to make ends meet, she was
singing at low-paying gigs, earning five, maybe ten bucks a
night at clubs around DC. A former beauty queen, she
specialized in folk songs, Joni Mitchell covers, but
occasionally she’d dip into old country tunes. She was
indulging herself that night at Clyde’s, a singles’ bar in the
District, singing Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made
Honky Tonk Angels” to a small crowd that included a couple
of kids who were calling themselves Flying Burrito Brothers.
That fall in 1971, the Burritos were what country aficionados
referred to as a “large band,” which means exactly what you
think it means. The band was still headed up by Chris
Hillman, but the rest of the original band had left. Two of the
newer members caught the woman’s act and brought Chris
Hillman to see her the next night. Hillman was suitably
impressed and tried to figure out what to do with the young
woman. He contemplated producing an album with her or
even taking her on as the first Flying Burrito Sister, but in
truth, Hillman was just about done with the Burrito Brothers,
having just been offered a job with Stephen Stills’ new band,
Manassas.
While thinking it over, Hillman ran into his old friend, just
returned from a tour with the Rolling Stones. The thin, bright,
and beautiful boy had grown thick, his face doughy and
151
unhealthy. Although a long sabbatical at the bucolic Sussex
farm of former International Submarine Band bassist Ian
Dunlop had helped him kick the heroin habit he’d been
indulging in during his time with the Rolling Stones at Keith
Richards’ Nellcote villa during the Exile on Main Street
sessions, the wear on him was visible.
“He was this caricature, because his pants and shirts wouldn’t
button,” Hillman said. “Here was this very cuddly young kid,
very thin, nice brown eyes, this good-looking kid who turned
into this monster three years later, this overweight, loud,
stupid person.”
Although Parsons and Hillman hadn’t spoken in months,
Hillman seemed to intuitively know that Parsons simply
wasn’t capable of making music on his own. For a handful of
months in Reseda in 1969, the men had been like brothers:
The talent, craftsmanship, and discipline of Chris Hillman had
been kindling for Gram Parsons’ spark, but that fire had gone
out for good at the end of June a year before. Seeing his
former friend ready to work but lacking direction, Chris
Hillman handed Gram over to the woman who would tend to
the sputtering flame of his talent until it finally extinguished
itself on September 18, 1973.
“You’ve got to go to Washington and meet this chick,”
Hillman told Parsons in a Baltimore hotel room. “She’s
perfect for you.” When Parsons hemmed and hawed, Hillman
picked up the phone, dialed it, and handed it to Gram. At the
other end of the line was EmmyLou Harris.
152
By the beginning of 1970, the end of the Flying Burrito
Brothers had been scripted, but it took another six months to
play out.
Altamont had shaken the entire West Coast music scene and
although the first few albums of the new decade, including
American Beauty and Volunteers, still seemed baked in the
optimistic California sun of the 1960s, the plaintive,
post-coital moment of 1970 found its apotheosis in Neil
Young’s After the Gold Rush, an attempt to fuse the sweet
harmonies of CSNY with the ragged glory of Crazy Horse,
released just weeks before the deaths of Jimi Hendrix and
Janis Joplin. Tending towards a certain hazy sweetness and an
ambivalence about moving forward, the album is loaded with
images of grandeur in decline, castles burning, all in a dream.
California rock, with its hippie aesthetics and outspoken
politics, was withering on the vine.
While A&M prepared to release Burrito Deluxe, which hit the
middle of the charts with a dull thud in April 1970 and started
sliding downward, the label pushed the band back into the
studio to record a third album that would be rushed out in the
fall and deliver on the promise of Gilded Palace. The sessions
took place in the Sound Factory in Hollywood and the songs
were mostly country classics—“Close Up the Honky Tonks,”
“Green, Green Grass of Home,” “Sing Me Back Home,” and
“Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down.” Parsons still wanted to
include more elements of R&B and rock, recording “Honky
Tonk Women” and James Carr’s “To Love Somebody” with
the band loping half-heartedly behind him. With the
exception of the latter, carried by one of Parsons’ stronger
vocal performances, the tracks sounded limp and lifeless, the
band loose and sloppy but without the energy they’d
153
displayed on Gilded Palace. Even on the selections he
brought to the table, Parsons’ vocals showed none of the
depth they had on the
Burritos’ previous soul efforts. The Burrito Deluxe sessions
had already scraped the bottom of the barrel for
Hillman-Parsons originals, and the pair had written no new
songs for the rushed recording sessions, which were put on
hold to allow the band to go back out on tour.
In his heart, Parsons had already left the Burritos by the time
they left California in May 1970. Musically, the band was
drifting further and further from his grand vision, sliding back
into nostalgic lukewarm country, and the latest recordings of
R&B tracks sitting next to country tracks rather than an
integration of the two proved it. Parsons had once again
started spreading rumors of a solo record, or a record with
Keith Richards, or a solo record produced by Keith Richards.
As with any story Gram told about himself, the details were
fluid. He had both eyes on the exit, but no intention of being
up front about it with his bandmates. “I didn’t know quite
how to say it to Chris Hillman and not get into a fistfight,”
Parsons said later, “so I tried to stick it out and make it work.”
He didn’t try very hard. By this point, Parsons was using a lot
of downers and when the band had to fly to a gig, his fear of
flying would cause him to ingest enough Tuinal to completely
incapacitate him. Roadies would have to push him through
the airport in a wheelchair, decked out in a Nudie suit.
Another cause of stress within the band was financial, or
more specifically, the financial disparity between Parsons and
the rest of the band. The band and most people associated
with them knew that Parsons was well off, but with the band
154
struggling, Parsons began flaunting his wealth. While the rest
of the band arrived at gigs in a cramped van and helped the
roadies unload gear, Parsons would regularly show up late,
making his ostentatious entrance in a limousine.
A mess of alcohol and pills, Parsons’ performances were
increasingly erratic, without the occasional moments of
brilliance that had redeemed his efforts on previous tours. His
stage persona had devolved into a lounge lizard
impersonation of Mick Jagger. At the same time, the rest of
the band had built themselves into a professional unit.
Lacking the raw and ramshackle energy of the original
Burrito lineup, they could play the material and play it well.
Unfortunately for the rest of the band, their lead singer was a
train wreck.
“He wanted it all, but he didn’t work at it,” Hillman
explained. “And that’s what I finally realized. He didn’t put
his time in. Discipline was not a word in his vocabulary.”
Things finally came to a breaking point at the end of June,
and while it was Hillman who took action, Gram had given
him little choice.
“Gram shows up right two minutes before our show time, not
in good shape,” Hillman recounted of the Burrito’s last show.
“Drunk. Stoned. And we start the first song, which was a fast
shuffle. Gram comes in and starts singing a ballad! It was like
the Keystone cops crashing into the wall. We had to…‘Oh my
god, he’s doing a ballad! Stop!’ and… Mike keeps the time
going on the cymbal, we slow waaaay down. Here’s Gram,
he’s like, slow motion.”
155
Backstage after the first set, a fuming Hillman put his fist
through the body of Gram’s acoustic guitar, stunning Parsons
even more than the rest of the band, who’d seen this
confrontation coming for a long time.
“What’d you do that for, Chris?” Parsons asked, playing
the wide-eyed innocent. Hillman glared at his partner and
informed Parsons he was out of the band. “You can’t fire
me,” insisted Parsons, “I’m Gram.” No, stated Hillman,
you’re fired. Goodbye. Dropping his guitar, Gram Parsons left
the show and the band played the second half of the set
without him.
It was and wasn’t the end of the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Hillman kept the band going for several years in various
permutations, even briefly picking up former Byrd Gene
Clark for a few 1970 recordings. In 1971, disappointed with
the band’s dwindling commercial prospects, Hillman left to
join Stephen Stills’ Manassas. The band briefly continued
with various lineups after Hillman, but by 1973, the Flying
Burrito Brothers were through.
Bernie Leadon, who had been instrumental in keeping the
band moving after the initial push of Gilded Palace, would go
on to become one of the founding members of the Eagles. We
all make mistakes.
After years of session playing, Sneaky Pete tried to resurrect
the name in 1975 following the release of a greatest hits
collection, even roping in Chris Ethridge for the endeavor.
The attempt failed in every conceivable way, and the new
Burrito Brothers dissolved after less than a year.
156
Chris Hillman spent the following decade working solo and
with various survivors of the California scene, including
Richie Furay and Roger McGuinn, eventually forming the
successful Desert Rose Band with Herb Pederson in 1985. He
has since returned to the mandolin and continues to tour with
Pedersen as an acoustic duo, playing Byrds and Burritos
songs along with bluegrass and country standards.
In late September 1973, the body of Gram Parsons, dead at 26
from a drug overdose in Joshua Tree Park, was stolen from
the Los Angeles airport by the Burritos’ former road manager,
Phil Kaufman. In a borrowed hearse, Kaufman took
the body back out to the Joshua Tree Desert, a mile from
where Parsons had died and within 20 miles of the chaparral
scenery of Gilded Palace’s cover photo and burned the body
in accordance with Parsons’ wishes and in defiance of
Parsons’ stepfather, who pressed charges against Kaufman.
The next month, Kaufman staged a wake in his backyard to
raise legal fees for his defense, selling commemorative
t-shirts and bottles of “Gram Pilsner” beer. Miss Pamela still
has one that she uses as a candleholder. He decorated the
backyard with cardboard tombstones. Novelty act Boris
Pickett and the Crypt Kickers performed, along with a
scrawny college boy from Boston named Jonathan Richman
and his band, the Modern Lovers, who would soon produce
one of the seminal protopunk recordings of the seventies.
The same night on the other side of town, a group of Gram’s
friends, gathered to play music and listen to the recordings of
the album that would be titled Grievous Angel, which had
been completed only days before Parsons’ death. It was a
157
quiet gathering, a counterpoint and balance to the hokey glitz
of Kaufman’s carnivalesque funeral event. Ignoring the
trappings of celebrity and show business, it was about the
music that they’d shared. One can only guess which of his
funeral services Gram Parsons would have attended.
158
159
Bibliography
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Booth, Stanley. The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones.
New York: Vintage Books, 1985.
Cabrall, Mary Lynn. Nudie the Rodeo Tailor. New York:
Gibbs Smith, 2004.
Des Barres, Pamela. I’m With the Band: Confessions of a
Groupie. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005.
Doggett, Peter. Are You Ready for the Country: Elvis Dylan,
Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock. New York: Penguin,
2000.
Einarson, John. Desperados: The Roots of Country Music.
New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001.
Fong-Torres, Ben. Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of
Gram Parsons. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1991.
George-Warren, Holly and Michelle Freedman. How the West
Was Worn. New York: Harry Abrams, 2001.
Greenfield, Robert. Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with
the Rolling Stones. Cambridge: DeCapo, 2006.
Guralnick, Peter. Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke.
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160
Guralnick, Peter. Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis
Presley. New York: Diane Publishing, 2000.
Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and
the Southern Dance of Freedom. New York: HarperPerennial,
1986.
Janovitz, Bill. Exile on Main St. New York: Continuum Press,
2005.
Lott, Eric. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the
American Working Class. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995.
Mailer, Norman. Miami and the Siege of Chicago. New York,
Signet, 1968.
Menck, Ric. Notorious Byrd Brothers. New York:
Continuum, 2007.
Ricks, Christopher. Dylan’s Visions of Sin. New York: Harper
Collins, 2003.
Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. New
York: Random House, 1971.
Films
Fallen Angel (Gandalf Hennig, 2004)
Gimme Shelter (Albert Maysles, David Maysles and
Charolotte Zwerin, 1970)
161
Albums
Presley, Elvis, 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong, 1959.
The Louvin Brothers, Satan is Real, 1960.
Charles, Ray, Modern Sounds in Country and Western, 1962.
Charles, Ray, Country and Western Meets Rhythm and Blues,
1963.
Carr, James, You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up, 1966.
Love, Da Capo, 1966.
The Beatles, Magical Mystery Tour, 1967.
The Byrds, Notorious Byrd Brothers, 1967.
Dylan, Bob, John Wesley Harding, 1967
Dylan, Bob and the Band, The Basement Tapes, 1967.
Franklin, Aretha, I Never Loved a Man the Way That I Love
You, 1967.
Love, Forever Changes, 1967.
The Rolling Stones, Their Satanic Majesties Request, 1967.
The Velvet Underground, Velvet Underground and Nico,
1967.
The Band, Music from Big Pink, 1968.
162
The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, 1968.
Cash, Johnny, At Folsom Prison, 1968.
Dylan, Bob, Nashville Skyline, 1968.
The International Submarine Band, Safe at Home, 1968.
The Rolling Stones, Beggars’ Banquet, 1968.
The Beach Boys, 20/20, 1969.
Cash, Johnny, At San Quentin, 1969.
The Charlatans, The Charlatans, 1969.
The Flying Burrito Brothers, Gilded Palace of Sin, 1969.
The GTOs, Permanent Damage, 1969.
Haggard, Merle, Okie From Muskogee, 1969.
The Rolling Stones, Let It Bleed, 1969.
Young, Neil, Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, 1969.
Zappa, Frank, Hot Rats, 1969.
Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath, 1970.
Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Déjà vu, 1970.
The Flying Burrito Brothers, Burrito Deluxe, 1970.
163
The Grateful Dead, American Beauty, 1970.
Hazlewood, Lee, Cowboy in Sweden, 1970.
Jefferson Airplane, Volunteers, 1970.
Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin III, 1970.
Stevens, Cat, Tea for the Tillerman, 1970.
Taylor, James, Sweet Baby James, 1970.
Young, Neil, After the Gold Rush, 1970.
The Band, Cahoots, 1971.
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street, 1971.
The Rolling Stones, Sticky Fingers, 1971.
Parsons, Gram, GP, 1972.
Young, Neil, Harvest, 1972.
Parsons, Gram, Greivous Angel, 1973.
The Flying Burrito Brothers, Sleepless Nights, 1976.
The Eagles, Eagles, 1972.
Uncle Tupelo, No Depression, 1990.
REM, Out of Time, 1991.
164
REM, Automatic for the People, 1992.
Uncle Tupelo, March 16-19, 1992, 1992.
Cash, Johnny, American Recordings I-V, 1994-2005.
Dinosaur Jr., Without a Sound, 1994.
Steams, Jennie, Angel With a Broken Wing, 1998.
Welch, Gillian, Hell Among the Yearlings, 1998.
The Carter Family, Wildwood Flower, 2000.
Welch, Gillian, Time (the Revelator), 2001.
Parsons, Gram, Big Mouth Blues: A Conversation with Gram
Parsons, 2002.
Nelson, Willie, Cray. The Demo Sessions, 2003.
The Flying Burrito Brothers, Live at the Avalon Ballroom
1969, 2007.
165
One of Crosby’s more famous stunts was criticizing Gene
Clark’s rhythm guitar playing until Clark agreed to give
Crosby his brand new red hollow body guitar and switch to
tambourine in the early days of the Byrds, mostly because
Crosby felt self-conscious on stage without an instrument.
166
Let’s not picture McGuinn screaming in the passenger seat
as Parsons and Hillman steered the band off the road and into
the brush, laughing maniacally. McGuinn was, and remains, a
consummate student of music and embraced the band’s new
direction. He took to listening exclusively to country music
and even bought himself a Cadillac, unhip wheels by
California standards, but a clear sign of success in country
circles. But the show at the Opry made it clear who was in the
driver’s seat.
168
Born in Johannesburg, Makeba’s records were banned in
South Africa after she testified before the United Nations
Committee Against Apartheid. Not long after the period
described here, Makeba married Black Panther leader Stokely
Carmichael, a decision that cost her her U.S. record deals.
169
An early attempt had gone horribly, with noted country DJ
Ralph Emery flat-out refusing to play the band’s music during
an in-studio appearance by the Byrds. Parsons and McGuinn
ridiculed Emery in the song “Drug Store Truck Driving
Man,” which essentially labeled Emery an ignorant, racist
hick.
170
His discovery of Nancy Sinatra’s vocal talents and the
secret
genius
of
his
Cowboy
in
Sweden
album
notwithstanding.
171
A caveat: many of the Keith Richards quotes in this book
have been transcribed by the author and should be taken only
as approximations of the sounds Keith Richards produced. I
repeat, this is not necessarily English as you know it.
172
She happened to be the fiancée of David Crosby, but that
didn’t hold things up much. Crosby was out of town, so
Parsons drove right up to his house, knocked on the door, and
when Nancy Ross answered, he informed her, “I’ve been
looking for you for a long time. And I’m taking you with
me.” And that was pretty much it.
Most importantly, Peter Fonda, a movie star who dreamed
of being a musician. Fonda recorded one of Parsons’ songs
and landed the International Submarine Band an appearance
in Roger Corman’s film, The Trip although the band’s music
was overdubbed by another band after Corman decided they
were not psychedelic enough.
Also by allowing Hazlewood’s girlfriend to produce their
album.
173
A perfect description of the genre’s commercial standard
bearers in 1973, the Eagles: synthetic, unsatisfying,
impersonal, and only almost there.
Released in 1962 and ’63 respectively, they were both
favorites on the turntable at the flophouse the original
International Submarine Band had occupied in New York.
174
Furay went on to form Pogo, which changed its name to
Poco after a lawsuit from Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly.
Abandoning Poco as a commercial failure years later, Furay
formed the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band with Chris Hillman
and Linda Ronstadt-collaborator J.D. Souther.
175
This was common practice for Gram, who announced to
the press collaborations that never quite took shape, such as
those with Keith Richards, Rich Gretch, solo albums on the
Rolling Stones’ label and other dream projects.
176
Kleinow also wrote and performed the show’s theme song.
His work outside of music includes production work on “The
Empire Strikes Back,” Army of Darkness, and an Emmy for
The Winds of War.
177
A firm believer in the band as a collective, Dunlop would
continue to play music as the Flying Burrito Brothers East
even after Parsons and Hillman appropriated the name.
178
The Godfather of the San Francisco scene, Jerry Garcia,
dreamed of joining up with Bill Monroe’s band and formed a
number of bluegrass outfits before moving into the more
improvisational jug band music that eventually developed
into the Grateful Dead.
179
Neither designer was ever content with the quality
resulting from manufacturing, leaving the mass production of
Western clothing to “ranchwear” outfitters like H Bar C and
Rockmount.
180
Years later, Hank Williams, Jr. commissioned a
reproduction of his father’s burial suit, which he sported when
posing such timeless musical questions as “Are You Ready
for Some Football?” One can only wonder what a rhinestone
suit sounds like when its wearer is spinning in his grave.
181
Wagon wheels for Porter Wagoner, a sullen cowboy
behind bars and spider webs for “In the Jailhouse Now”
singer Webb Pierce, just as examples.
According to Nudie, “In all my years designing, I have
only refused to make one suit. A fellow came up into my shop
one day and asked me to embroider some pornography on an
outfit.” The fellow in question was Keith Richards, who had
requested a suit featuring embroidered penises.
In the attic space of Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame, a 2000 exhibit on Elvis featured a massive screenprint
of this cover, with a dozen iterations of Elvis in the gold suit,
each one at least twelve feet tall. Filled with a Kantian terror
at the sheer size of both Elvis and his fanbase upon viewing
this, I returned home and meekly submitted to liking Elvis’s
music. Twelve-foot-tall Elvises can’t be wrong.
182
Contrary to popular belief, Nudie had nothing to do with
designing Elvis’s Vegas-era jumpsuits, which are far more
embarrassing.
183
A curious afterthought to the issue of authenticity and
period-dress involves two mid-sixties pop bands: Paul Revere
and the Raiders and Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, the
former decked out in Revolutionary War uniforms and the
latter in Civil War uniforms. While, like the current indie rock
band Clinic and unlike, say, GWAR, their outfits had nothing
whatsoever to do with the content of their songs, the absurdity
of their costumes relegated them to the status of novelty act.
Could the Band, for instance, expect to be taken more
seriously in their four-in-one ties than Paul Revere and the
Raiders in their tri-corner hats?
A reference not to the Beatles album and film, but to
Parsons’ short-lived band.
184
Manuel was central in designing much of the Dead’s early
iconography, including the cover of their album, American
Beauty.
185
Actually, the outfits in Urban Cowboy were fairly
authentic: Costumers took extra care in choosing jeans that
would withstand the heavy friction of regular mechanical bull
rides.
186
Of the four drummers, former International Submarine
Band drummer Jon Corneal did the most work on the album,
laying down five tracks, but according to Hillman, Corneal
and fellow Georgian Parsons never much got along.
Not so much hired as picked up. Clarke recalled the band
driving by him on the street a day or two after an admittedly
shaky audition. Parsons stuck his head out the window and
yelled, “Hey drummer, let’s have some fun,” and Clarke was
effectively hired.
188
The “Miss” appellations had been bestowed upon the girls
by ukulele-playing falsetto Tiny Tim, LA’s own high-pitched
answer to Oscar Wilde.
The name could also stand for “Girls Together Only,”
“Girls Together Occasionally,” or “Girls Together Often,”
depending on who you asked and when.
The album includes contributions from Zappa and the
Mothers, along with Jeff Beck, Ry Cooder, and Rod Stewart.
189
The storied sexual conquests of Miss Pamela, for instance,
are chronicled in Pamela des Barres’s autobiography, I’m
With The Band and included Chris Hillman, Mick Jagger,
Jimmy Page, Noel Redding, and a dude named Nick St.
Nicholas, who was apparently in Steppenwolf.
190
Miss Pamela eventually took a short-lived position at
Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors, although she was dismissed due in
part to Bobbie Cohn’s concern that Nudie was becoming a bit
too affectionate towards the young girl.
Christine’s enthusiasm for the look of tear-streaked
mascara shows up in the song’s assertion that “It gets her off
to see a person crying,” as she had essentially rendered her
boyfriend into a perpetual state of sobbing.
191
Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson in
particular had close ties to the California music scene around
this
time,
resulting
in,
among
other
things,
the
Nicholson-penned Head, a bizarre piece of psychedelia
starring the Monkees.
192
Then, as now, women were criminally underrepresented in
rock music, particularly women unattached to a male
musician. Acts like the Mamas and the Papas or Sonny and
Cher, in which the women were safely paired off, were more
the norm, with Janis Joplin and Grace Slick as notable
exceptions.
193
For a very strange intersection and explosion of any ideas
on gender, emotion and appearance in country music, check
out mid-fifties photos of Willie Nelson. Before becoming a
recording artist himself, during the period he was penning
songs like “Crazy” and some of the most brutal two-minute
weepers ever written, young Willie looks almost exactly like
present day androgynous country star k.d. lang.
194
The past few years have seen women in country music
grappling with this part of the tradition, subverting and
reversing gender roles in ultra-violent murder ballads,
sometimes by taking the voice of the usually silent victims
(Jennie Stearns’ “Knoxville Girl”), by assuming the narrative
role of the killer in traditional murder ballads (Neko Case and
Laura Cantrell’s renditions of “Poor Ellen Smith”) or by
writing new narratives in which the oppressors get their
comeuppance (Gillian Welch’s “Caleb Meyer,” the Dixie
Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl”).
195
“You Really Got Me” is the first instance of this technique,
but many of the Kinks’ early hits utilize the same sound.
196
Los Angeles, more than New York, has long been a literary
target for Biblical disasters. Perhaps because New York
already seemed post-Apocalyptic, or perhaps because LA is,
by its nature, more of a spectacle of a city, LA-based authors
like Philip K. Dick and Steve Erickson seemed particularly
inclined to visit the Wrath of God onto their hometown.
The song is also the most direct homage Parsons ever paid
to his primary musical idol, Elvis Presley.
197
In fact, it was one of the last songs he wrote for the group;
Cooke had already been working on secular songs when he
showed up for a Soul Stirrers’ session without any new
material. Cooke picked up a Bible, opened to a page in the
New Testament and composed the song on the spot, directly
from Matthew 9:20-22.
199
Although not entirely unsuccessful. In 1968, Dennis
Wilson of the Beach Boys picked up a couple female
hitchhikers outside of LA and within days found his place
overrun by Family members, including Manson himself. The
meeting led to the Beach Boys recording Manson’s song
“Cease to Exist” for their 20/20 album, renaming it “Never
Learn Not to Love.”
200
Could he even be a product of California? Surely Bobby
Kennedy, tan and healthy, not Richard Nixon, sallow and
hollow, was California’s true native son.
201
The rumor that he had once been a member of the Soul
Stirrers, the same group that launched Sam Cooke, was
fabricated, probably by Carr’s own manager.
202
A surprising number of Carr’s songs express love or its
lack as a form of mental illness.
The town’s name is a willful misspelling of Mussel
Shallows, referring to the mollusk-encrusted sandbars
(shallows or shoals) in the Tennessee River that effectively
cut the town off from riverboat traffic. Assuming it was
Mussel Shoals cost me hours of Google-related frustration.
203
Carr resurfaced in a mental institution in the early nineties
and Claunch made efforts to put together a comeback that
were again stymied by Carr’s mental illness.
204
The album is literally boxed in by McGuinn’s devotion to
Dylan, although the Basement Tapes from which the songs
were drawn marked a major retreat for Dylan into the oddities
of American music history.
205
Kind of the “Tradition and the Individual Talent” approach
to country music.
Largely at the insistence of new Burrito Bernie Leadon and
over the protests of Gram Parsons.
206
As well as a slap back at James Brown’s earlier musical
assertion that this is a man’s world.
207
There’s no room for Muscle Shoals in Neil Young’s
horrific vision of the South, a reduction Lynyrd Skynyrd
rightfully calls him out on.
208
In one of my favorite album reviews ever, the Village
Voice’s Robert Christgau wrote that the Eagles were “the
tightest and most accomplished rock band to emerge since
Neil Young’s Crazy Horse. They are the culmination of the
vaguely country-oriented mainstream of American rock….
Another thing that interests me is that I hate them….
Listening to the Eagles has left me feeling alienated from
things I used to love.”
209
And sometimes conflated with. Glenn Campbell’s 1969 hit
“True Grit,” for instance, is “God Bless the USA” dressed up
as “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.”
210
This situation should sound fairly familiar to anyone who
paid attention to the state of country music following the
World Trade Center attacks. Willie Nelson scored his first hit
in years with the militaristic “Beer for My Horses” and Toby
Keith’s warning to terrorists that “We’ll put a boot up your
ass, it’s the American way” soared to the top of country
playlists across the United States.
Haggard later claimed the song was meant to be satirical,
although he never got around to saying who was being
satirized.
The Sex Pistols were the first punk band to abandon punk;
Dylan may have been the first sixties musician to altogether
abandon the sixties.
211
If this situation sounds familiar, it might be because of the
recent revival of “old-timey” music, which has based itself in
similar aesthetic decisions regarding a vagueness of historical
placement. Old-timey music often resorts to songs that were
intensely political in their original context to give the
impression of leftist politics for NPR listeners, without all that
pesky contemporary political content. Keep on the sunny side,
new-grassers!
212
Many of which, like Buck Owens’ “Cigarettes and
Whiskey” or Hank Williams’ “Luke the Preacher,” were
already satirical.
213
Remember the ending of Easy Rider? That movie has
insured I get a haircut every time I plan on going south of the
Mason-Dixon.
214
Although it’s possible to imagine the speaker as Hillman
and his hippie interlocutor as Parsons.
215
Who made the lamentable decision to reunite in 1994,
despite previous promises they would never play together
again.
216
Yet another attempt at labeling the genre. “Alt-country”
was in the lead for a while and “No Depression” has also been
tossed around as a contender following the title of Uncle
Tupelo’s debut album and the launch of a magazine under
that title, but it seems that “Americana” might be the current
winner in the race to name a diverse subset of music.
217
Anxiety over flying had also prompted Gene Clark’s
departure from the Byrds a few years earlier. Leaving for a
tour, Clark became so agitated he had to get off the plane,
even though Crosby and McGuinn made it clear that doing so
would cost him his spot in the band.
218
Standard Gram Parsons thinking: act big to get big. If it
was good enough for Dylan and the Beatles, it might be good
enough for the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Chris Ethridge remembers Parsons pushing something he
described as cough syrup that could boy-howdy lay you out.
Weird parallel to A Hard Day’s Night: Pestered by their
fans, the Beatles are forced to ride in a freight car, playing
cards and performing “I Should’ve Known Better” to no one
in particular.
219
The track was eventually recorded with the help of Johnny
“Guitar” Watson and copious amounts of marijuana and made
a poor showing on the singles charts. By the time Burrito
Deluxe was recorded, Hillman was so disenchanted with “The
Train Song” that it was left off the album entirely.
220
Or to suggest perhaps the Parsons/Hillman crew designate
themselves the Flying Burrito Brothers West during their stay
on Dunlop’s turf?
Ethridge was the only Burrito who’d never been a Byrd,
while McGuinn and Clarence White were the only two Byrds
who’d been Byrds before the restructuring that followed
Hillman’s departure. Or to put it another way, the Burritos
had two of the original five Byrds, while the current Byrds
only had one original Byrd. See how it gets a little
skull-clutching? To make things slightly worse, Gilded
Palace of Sin also featured the work of two of the original
Byrds, even though Michael Clarke doesn’t play on the
album. David Crosby happened to be in the studio and laid
down an uncredited vocal harmony on “Dark End of the
Street,” probably just a6 a little “fuck off” to Roger McGuinn.
Oh, and Gene Clark would later join up with the Burritos for
a handful of recordings after Parsons’ departure, meaning that
four out of five original Byrds were, at one time or another,
Flying Burrito Brothers.
221
This wasn’t an entirely new experience for Chris Hillman.
At the Monterey Pop Festival less than two years earlier,
Hillman and the rest of the Byrds had watched David Crosby
make a guest appearance with Buffalo Springfield, whose
members included Stephen Stills and Neil Young. Crosby’s
inspired performance highlighted his recently lackluster work
with the Byrds and the incident helped to precipitate Crosby’s
break with the band.
222
Everything about the Beatles is about the Beatles; they are
a signifier that signifies itself.
Or possibly your mom.
223
The same one since the beginning, I should add, unlike a
certain David Crosby I could mention.
224
A clear example of the tone we’re talking about can be
heard in the opening chords of “Street Fighting Man,” by the
way.
225
Patently untrue, since there are demos to prove the song
was written on tour in Brazil.
Unlikely, but possible, although he might have helped
guide the arrangement and definitely suggested Byron Berline
for the fiddle part.
Entirely possible, since no one at the Nellcote recording
sessions was straight enough to keep track of who was in the
dank basement studio at any given time.
226
While the inspiration for the song remains disputed, it
certainly wasn’t Parsons. Keith Richards claims the song was
about being forced to leave Anita Pallenberg and their son
Marlon to go out on tour. Mick Jagger claims the chorus came
from the first words Marianne Faithful said to him after she
woke from an attempted overdose.
227
Apparently no one at A&M knew or cared that Parsons and
Hillman had been responsible for the worst-selling album of
the Byrds’ career.
228
Which, without the deft and unexpected harmonies of
David Crosby, sounded bland and conventional.
229
Thirty years later, Hillman got a chance to do justice to the
album’s strongest Hillman/Parsons composition, “High
Fashion Queen.” Teamed up with Steve Earle for a Gram
Parsons tribute album, Hillman made the track loose and
rollicking, a barroom punch up—everything Burrito Deluxe
wasn’t.
230
There seems to be little else to Meredith Hunter other than
his life on screen. The press ran no details at all on Hunter
after the incident; not so much as a quote from his mother, if
he had a mother, and he was buried in an unmarked grave.
232
Not “Sympathy for the Devil,” as Rolling Stone, the paper
of record, reported after the fact. This urban legend kept
“Sympathy” off Stones’ setlists through most of the seventies.
233
Held only two days after the death of former guitarist and
Stones founder Brian Jones.
One concertgoer made reference to goblets of
LSD—goblets.
The Angels were reputedly hired for $500 dollars and beer,
although Sonny Barger would later claim they’d never been
“hired” at all.
An attempt to out-Sgt. Pepper the Beatles, featuring the
closing track, “200 Light Years from Home,” which is
exponentially more isolating than “A Day in the Life.”
234
Seriously, goblets of LSD.
A number which exactly balanced the day’s four deaths. In
addition to Meredith Hunter, two people were killed in a car
accident and one drowned in a drainage ditch.
236
Meaning that, timewise, it should have been the Dead on
stage at the point Meredith Hunter was stabbed. In some
parallel universe, “Saint Stephen” is playing when Angel
Alan Passaro puts the knife in once, again, again.
237
Mick Jagger was accused of stalling the band’s
performance for better light for the film. In fact, Bill Wyman
didn’t arrive at Altamont until sundown, struggling with the
traffic from San Francisco.
Michelle was the ex-wife of Parsons’ motorcycle riding
buddy John Phillips and had been briefly kicked out of the
band for dating founding member of the Byrds, Gene Clark.
238
At least it was Passaro who was convicted of the crime.
Sonny Barger has claimed Hunter actually shot one of the
Angels, who was spirited away because he was a wanted
felon, but no evidence for this exists.
239
The Burritos had once mocked this same vehicle in song
with their rendition of Hank Williams’ “Long Black
Limousine,” a parable on the dangers of wealth and fame that
was a staple of the Burrito Brothers’ live sets.
240
Unable to charge Kaufman with stealing the body under
California law, Parsons’ stepfather had to charge him with
stealing the coffin.
241
Document Outline
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright 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
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