316: THE GILDED PALACE OF SIN | THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS

The Gilded Palace of Sin is the first album by the country rock group the Flying Burrito Brothers, released in 1969. It continued Gram Parsons' and Chris Hillman's work in modern country music, fusing traditional sources like folk and country with other forms of popular music like gospel, soul, and psychedelic rock.

The Gilded Palace of Sin is included in Robert Christgau's "Basic Record Library" of 1950s and 1960s recordings, published in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981).  It is also listed at number 192 in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

The Gilded Palace of Sin was recorded at A&M Studios in Hollywood and produced by Larry Marks with Henry Lewy engineering. The sessions featured a variety of drummers. In the Parsons biography Twenty Thousand Roads, A&R man Michael Vosse recalls to David M. Meyer, "Larry Marks was a staff producer at A&M. He was a good guy, but he wasn't a good match for them. He was completely flummoxed by their behavior. They were less prepared and less conscious of money and time than he was used to. There was a lot of wasted time and a lot of crap. There were also a lot of good sessions." With harmonies that reveal the influences of the Everly Brothers and the Louvin Brothers, the songs on the Burritos' debut attempt to marry country music with the soul sound associated with Otis Redding's Stax-Volt label and singers like Percy Sledge.

Another significant characteristic of the album is "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow's unorthodox steel guitar playing, which provides an almost continuous commentary throughout some of the songs. As guitarist Bernie Leadon (who wasn't a member of the band yet when this LP was recorded and released) explains to Meyer in Twenty Thousand Roads, "Sneaky uniquely played an eight-string Fender cable pull steel tuned to B6 instead of the more common C6. He played an usually more jazz or swing tuning in a style that most other players use an E9 tuning for. His rationale was: B is the 'five chord,' or dominant chord, to the key of E. This resulted in absolutely-to-Pete steel licks. And no one else thinks like him anyway." Kleinow also utilized a fuzzbox and played the instrument through a rotating Hammond Leslie amplifier, adding a psychedelic touch to several songs.

Most of the songs were written by Parsons and Hillman at a house in the San Fernando Valley dubbed "Burrito Manor." "Sin City", co-written by Hillman and Parsons and called a "loping lament" and a "cautionary dirge", mentions The Byrds's manager Larry Spector ("a gold plated door") and Robert F. Kennedy ("tried to clean up this town"). It may have been influenced by The Louvin Brothers. In the 2004 documentary Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel, Hillman recalls writing the song with Parsons: "Gram was sleeping. I woke up and had this idea, 'This old town's filled with sin, it'll swallow you in.' I got the first verse and most of the chorus and then I said, 'Gram, get up! I got somethin' here.' And he got up and we wrote that song in about thirty minutes. It actually wrote itself." In the same documentary bassist Chris Etheridge adds, "I told Gram I had a couple of old melodies from back when I was growin' up...I played 'em for him and we wrote the two songs that day, the "Hot Burrito #1" and the "Hot Burrito #2," and then that night went into the studio and cut 'em." "My Uncle" and "Hippie Boy" address then-contemporary countercultural concerns: the draft and the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots. Parsons later explained to Fusion magazine, "We kept saying we got to do a song called 'Hippie Boy' about Chicago, and it's got to be a narrative song, and Chris Hillman has to do it...It was the toughest challenge on the album." The two R&B standards covered on the album, "Dark End of the Street" and "Do Right Woman", are examples of a country-soul fusion that Parsons would often refer to as "cosmic American music." Read more