A Burrito or more for your last supper?

If the dismissal of Gram Parsons and the disappointing showing of The Flying Burrito Bros. weren't enough to do the band in, Stephen Stills was. Since the last time we've seen them, founding member "Sneaky" Pete had left the band to concentrate - like Chris Ethridge before him - on better paying studio session work. The pedal steel was now manned by Al Perkins. Bernie Leadon was the next to go (replaced by old Hillman comrade Kenny Wertz), leaving the band to back up Linda Ronstadt, where he ran into a couple of other musicians struggling to make their mark (Glenn Frey, Don Henley & Randy Meisner) and nothing was ever heard of these four guys again. Nope, nothing. Like, ever. 

Hillman - realizing that he had a band capable of paying his first love, bluegrass, right under his nose - asked veteran fiddle player Byron Berline to join, finally adding Kenny Bush on bass, so Hillman could concentrate on playing mandolin. In mid-1972 Stills invited the core Burritos Hillman, Roberts, Perkins and Berline down to Florida to jam with him, then issued official invites to Hillman, Perkins and Berline. The latter declined, but Hillman and Perkins agreed, bringing the Flying Burrito Brothers to a temporary end.

In order to wrap up their contract with A &M Records, the Burritos still owed them a final album, and it was the classic 'live album as contract filler' situation. The Last Of The Red Hot Burritos was an okay album and a pretty good reflection of the bluegrass-heavy stage show at the time, but as a final statement of the band it was...relatively underwhelming. This got the One Buck Guy thinking: What if, instead of bringing out a live album, A & M had insisted on bringing out a studio platter as the final Burrito record? This is what Last Supper is, an album compiled from leftovers to fulfill their contract. 

The band had cut a number of songs before and after The Flying Burrito Bros., about two thirds of an album. In order to fill up the album, why not go back to the archives and the Gram Parsons era, adding three tracks from the loose cover material sessions they did right before or after Burrito Deluxe (there's conflicting information concerning the time line here). In this way, Last Supper would also pay homage to the band's entire era, not just the late-era Hillman-Roberts version of the band. 

Last Supper opens with the familiar fuzz of Sneaky Pete's steel, so "Did You See" must've come from right before The Flying Burrito Bros. From this reminder of the Burrito sound we delve right into their C&W standard war chest, with Parsons' take on "Dim Lights", before highlighting Roberts ("In My Own Small Way", later issued on Roberts' solo album) and Sneaky Pete ("Beat The Heat"), sandwiched around Hillman's take on Jesse Winchester's "Payday", before digging out the Gene Clark-led outtake "Here Tonight" to close out what would habe been side a.

Side b would then open with a fuzzy version of the Stones' "Hony Tonk Women", courtesy of Parsons, of course, before adding another cover sung by Hillman (Harlan Howard's "Pick me Up On Your Way Down"), a cameo by Bernie Leadon to sing lead on John Fogerty's "Lodi", Parsons' excellent take on "To Love Somebody" and Roberts' "Feel Good Music", closing with a reminder of the heartfelt beauty Parsons could bring to the band, on a fragment of Dylan's "I Shall Be Released". 

So, Last Supper as conceived gives you a great, democratic overview of The Flying Burrito Brothers as they were from 1969 to 1972. It could and would have been a fine way to say goodbye. But either way the goodbye was only temporary, as we will see in our next chapter of the ongoing Burritos saga here at One Buck Records Burrito Week...

Burrito week continues: Chapter two: The Burritos transform into...Eagles (?!?)

Blame The Cult Of Parsons, again. When people talk about The Flying Burrito Brothers, they basically only talk about the band when Gram Parsons was in it. To a certain type of music critic (and music fan), the band seems to stop existing the moment Parsons was fired for showing up a mess one too many times. Everything that you read about the Burritos is basically all about Parsons, so until I picked up Hot Burritos! The Flying Burrito Brothers Anthology 1969-1972 back when it came out I didn't even know that the original band had recorded a third album. Not lumped in with the new and revived Burritos starting a couple of years later and that some would dismiss as a total travesty, yet not attached to The Cult Of Parsons, it exists in a weird shadow zone of its own. One out of which One Buck Records is trying to lift it now. 

First of all, The Flying Burrito Bros (a.k.a. the "blue album") is a very fine album. It also sounds nothing like The Gilded Palace Of Sin. By 1971 the band was completely overhauled. Bernie Leadon and Michael Clarke had already joined for Burrito Deluxe, the extremely disappointing second album (and last of Parsons' tenure). I already talked in detail about country rock's problem of following up a classic album when presenting Manassas' reworked second album Do You Remember The Americans? back in December. Burrito Deluxe is a disjointed mess, the result of creative juices stopping to flow while drugs and alcohol really started flowing, especially for Parsons. Recording sessions were haphazard, inspired songwriting at a minimum. The laziness of Parsons especially is exemplified by opening the album with, you guessed it, "Lazy Days", a song written in 1967 and already cut (and not used) by The Byrds. 

After the disppointment of Burrito Deluxe and the departure of Parsons the band needed to rebound in a big way, and did. Hillman, the best second banana in music, had drafted in another guy to share lead vocal and front man status with. The job had gone to virtually unknown Rick Roberts, who acquitted himself quite nicely. He gets credited on all seven of the album's original songs, co-writing four with Hillman and getting three solo songs including "Colorado", which became an instant standard of their live show. The sound became softer, very heavy on harmonies and shared leads. If it didn't sound like the Burritos of old, it certainly sounds a lot like the softer tracks of what the Eagles would do very soon. 

All three outside tracks are great, and Roberts' delicate balladry, verging on folk at times, bring a different aspect to the band. It's certainly an album that, a year after James Taylor's breakthrough, could have and should have found a bigger audience. Instead, it sank lile a stone, beating Burrito Deluxe by actuallycreeping into the charts, but at a disappointing 176. A harsh result for a fine album, which you are hereby cordially invited to discover (or re-discover?)...

PS: If you're thinking "Oh, the One Buck Guy is just gonna lazily post a bunch of normal FBB albums", be back the day after tomorrow for an alternate album of what could have been the swansong of the "classic era" band... 

It's Burritos week here at OBG's! Chapter one: Come into the gilded palace of sin...

Where do you go when you already start at the top of the mountain? This is a luxury problem to have, for sure, considering how many bands and artist never ever climb that mountain. But it is a problem nonetheless. What do you do, if your best work is already done right after that first album? Try to top it somehow? Have more modest additions? The accompanying question for me is of course: Is there a point to a project involving a band that by general consensus only got worse during its tumultous tenure. (And that is, if we count all approximately 1.254 iterations of the group as coming from the same bloodline. The story of The Flying Burrito Bros. is a story of devolution, rather than evolution, and a story of diminishing returns. It's a story worth telling anyway, I believe, and will do my best to do so...

So, The Flying Burrito Brothers, a name that is immediately and intimately associated with Gram Parsons and - to a lesser degree - Chris Hillman, but it's also a name that then passed through the hands of dozens and dozens of country rock journeymen, sometimes with the participation of founding member "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow, sometimes without a single original Burrito. But hold! Technically, the guys we think of as The Flying Burrito Brothers - Parsons, Hillman, Kleinow and bass man Chris Ethridge weren't the original Burritos, either. They recovered the name from a loose group of musicians, half ex-members of The Remains, half ex-members of Parsons' old group The International Submarine Band. who also let dozens of musician sit in with them, when they moved back east. Maybe the name was supposed to be passed along from one group of relatively down on their luck country rockers to others to try and make something out of it. 

After all, The Gilded Palace Of Sin is an all-time classic, an album that could conceivably be included on 'greatest albums of all time'-lists, yet it barely charted and half of the copies it sold seems to have gone straight into the hands of other musicians. Technically, only three of the Burritos albums even charted, none higher than a pretty dysmal 138, and the band never had a single charts single until a live version of "White Line Fever" became a fluke charts entry in 1979, a full decade after the Burritos we all remember started.

Is there anything interesting that I can add when talking about The Gilded Palace Of Sin? Probably not. It's a fantastic record, top to bottom, one of the most consistent records to come out of the subgenre. Some folks don't like the talking-blues-style closing number "Hippie Boy", but I think it's just fine. "Hot Burrito #1" and "Hot Burrito #2" admittedly have terrible names, akin to an artist titling a piece "Untitled No. 67", but they are fantastic, and "#1", better remembered as "I'm Your Toy" has become an oft covered genre classic. The anti-draft anthem "My Uncle" and "Wheels", the unofficial thme song for the always-on-the-road Burritos have equally reached genre classic status. "Sin City" is every bit the genre classic that Nick Hornsby's protagonist Rob describes it as in High Fidelity. I mean, really, there are no weak spots. The double covers of "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" and "Dark End of The Street" could look uninspired, but really were a matter of the heart for Parsons. 

So, we'll start on the top of the mountain and then slowly come down. But we'll also reclimb some modest peaks, and even in the valleys there are worthwhile sights and sounds. Well, sounds, mostly. 

So I'll hope you travel along with me all the way through Burrito week here at One Buck Records. Let's get going. First stop: The Gilded Palace Of Sin. 

Kate Bush and her sky of honey

Ah, Kate Bush, the elder stateswoman of art pop. How satisfying it was two years ago to see her belatedly get to number one with "Running Up That Hill", undoubtedly one of her best songs. Sure, it needed Stranger Things, but quality is quality, and considering what else is floating around in the charts these days...

Bush worked steadily, if slowly, throughout the late 70s and 80s and into the early 90s, but then - poof - she was gone. 1993's The Red Shoes, arguably her most streamlined and conservative pop effort, including guest spots for Eric Clapton and Prince, wasn't the start of her second career phase as some sort of adult contemporary pop star. A planned one year hiatus turned into twelve, allowing Bush to start a family and otherwise drop out of the public eye entirely.

And then, without warning, she was back. Aerial, in 2005. A double album, with pretentious titles, just like in the old days. Disc 1, A Sea of Honey, was fine, a collection of art pop songs in different style. But for me the real treasure was Disc 2, A Sky Of Honey. A conceptual piece, it is designed to show 24 hours passing by. It has a narrator and recurring characters. It is, in short, Kate Bush's fully fledged prog album. But its status as, essentially, a bonus disc of sorts makes me think that A Sky Of Honey is both underappreciated and simply not heard enough. Considering its structure as a song cycle, A Sky Of Honey makes no sense as individual pieces, so I decided to edit its songs into one album-long track. I kept the parts mostly untouched, shortening and tightening up some of the track transitions, but that's about it. I want the pieces (or now, the piece) to speak for itself.

There is one (well, one and a half) notable exception: Bush's witchy voice has its raison d'être, and can and does get used effectively, but I didn't need to hear it at this long end's journey into the night, so I did bring in my scissorhands right for the end. I found some of the noisy (and, uh, witchy) excesses of "Nocturn" and "Aerial" too much. Three quarters of A Sky Of Honey are pastoral and lush, so the intrusion of a noisier sound right at the end wasn't my cup of tea. It broke the spell of what came before a little bit, so those pieces got shortened. You will still get the gist of Bush's night's end, but in a slightly gentler way.

So, I need about 36 uninterupted minutes of your time to get lost in A Sky Of Honey. Its a trip well worth taking...

Meet Mike and Rick, shadow men of California pop rock

For guys who didn't really leave much of a mark in terms of their own name value, Richard and Michael Curtis sure left a mark. Who had the only non-member song on Fleetwood Mac's eponymous 1975 smash? These guys did. Who wrote the framework of the song that gave Crosby, Stills & Nash a Top Twenty hit in 1982? These guys did. Who was part of a legendary group that - like the aforementioned 'Mac - was a rhythm section looking for creators up front? These guys were. And yet, despite propping up Crazy Horse after all the big guns left, despite getting a leg up from old pal Lindsey Buckinham when he recorded their "Blue Letter", and despite being positioned to make some sort of dent in the California soft rock scene, the Curtis Brothers never really did. But their music is here, and its is well worth hearing, so here at One Buck Records, we want to celebrate the contributions of these two men,  constantly lurking in the shadows of California rock and pop, but never really attracting the spotlight themselves.  

Like so many other musicians closely associated with the West Coast music scene, the Curtis brothers weren't from anywhere near California. They came out of Goshen, Indiana, and music was part of the family business. These Vizitors, the band they started as teenagers included fellow brother Tom and sister Patty, their dad was a local DJ. These Vizitors recorded two singles for Capitol which both charted, but no albums or follow-ups were coming. The band had relocated to Palm Beach, Florida but when it became clear that These Vizitors had run their course, Michael and Rick moved to Southern California. 

They were hired by Billy Talbot & Ralph Molina, a rhythm section who had the right to a classic band name - Crazy Horse, obviously - but not much else. Being neither singers nor songwriters, Talbot & Molina split singing and songwriting duties between the Curtis brothers and Greg Leroy. The resulting album At Crooked Lake has its moments, but is otherwise relatively unremarkable country-influenced rock, though Rick especially brought an interesting psychedelic undercurrent to his songs. Crazy Horse became dormant after the failure of At Crooked Lake, so Michael lent his talents for one album to jazz-inspired Canadian band Truck (previously featured on All Pearls No Swine Vol. 8). 

The Curtises then reconvened in L.A. to plot their next move. Finally securing a record deal with Polydor, they became friends with a duo of musicians - a pair both professionally and in private - who had just recently recorded and released their debut album. Their names? Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Both played and sang on a handful of demos, including a song the brothers had written, "Seven League Boots" (previously featured on All Pearls, No Swine Vol. 3). The song wasn't great, with the Curtises still getting the hang of writing (hint: it's not a rhyme if the words are the same! "If I had to go around the world / just to find your world" is a pretty awful chorus. Who are these guys, Kid Rock's ghostwriters?). But hook and melody of the song was solid, so Stephen Stills rewrote it almost a decade later, turning it into the much more coherent "Southern Cross" for Crosby, Stills & Nash's Daylight Again album.

But the Curtises were still waiting for something big to happen, and finally in 1975 things got moving. They got a record deal with Polydor and went into the studio to record their first album as The Curtis Bros. (or The Curtis Brothers Band). And who was in an adjacent recording booth, purely by accident? Old pal Lindsey Buckingham, recording with Fleetwood Mac. Liddy Buck heard the Curtises' "Blue Letter" and spontaneously decided to record it for and with the Mac. This should've given an additional boost to The Curtis Bros. , but when their album (with their own version of "Blue Letter") came out in 1976? Crickets. If the album isn't a work of genius, it's a very fine record straddling the line between pop and rock, sometimes verging on soft rock,. It probably deserved better than the absolute non-reaction it got. 

The band went back into the studio two years later for International Artists to record a follow-up, including a couple of tracks - sign of the times - that start to have a bit of a disco flavor but that album was then unceremoniously shelved, and so was for all intents and purposes the career of Mike & Rick. In Rick's case, literally, as he seemingly quit the music business after the failure of The Curtis Brothers Band. Michel went the opposite direction, hustling for jobs, becoming a touring musician with Hoyt Axton, then later Gene Clark and others. Rick Curtis dies suddenly and unexpectedly, not to mention too young, from a seizure in 1995. 

Family Affair: A Curtis Brothers Anthology compiles pretty much everything I could find from and featuring Rick & Michael Curtis, including four tracks from These Vizitors, four tracks from Crazy Horse (with the respective lead singer mentioned first in the tracks ' credits) and every tracks from The Curti Brothers Band, both their eponymous album and the shelved follow-up. I thought that Michael's work with Truck didn't jibe well with the rest, so some of that will feature on future volumes of All Pearls, No Swine but the anthology also features a handful of Michael Curtis solo tracks, including his cover of Gene Clark's "Gypsy Rider", recorded after spending years with Clark on the road, first as part of the infamous Byrds tribute that later morphed into the Django Band (as they were credited for the live rendering of "Southern Cross" featured here). Both discs (yup, I'm still compiling these as ready-to-be-burned to disc! Sue me!) end with Michael on acoustic guitar, from only a couple of years ago. At the end of disc one he laments "Man's Inhumanity To Man", while disc two ends bittersweetly with the only solo track from Rick I could find, a mid-60s recording of him doing an acoustic folk version of "Wendigo", followed by Michael's "It's Hard To Say Goodbye", his moving eulogy for his fallen brother. 

They might have mainly operated in the shadows of bigger, more important bands and artists, but Rick & Mike deserve their hour (or two) in the spotlight, which is exactly what Family Affair - A Curtis Brothers Anthology will provide you. So, towards the light and the sweet sounds of the Seventies, folks...

  

 

Saddle Up...with Beyoncé

A couple of weeks ago I wouldn't have thought I would post an album (or rather, a variation thereof) from 2024 and I would have even less thought it'd be an album by Beyoncé. I probably haven't thought about Beyoncé in fifteen years, because in 2009 "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" was everywhere and had the potential to annoy the heck out of you. The last time I looked forward to hearing Beyonce is probably about twenty years ago (sheesh...) when "Crazy In Love" came out, which was a great single, no matter how you slice it. So color me as surprised as you are by what ended up our One Buck Record of the day. 

Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter at the end of last month as part of an ambitious multiple album project (this is seemingly 'Act II', so all i's in the songtitles are doubled. Artistic or silly, you ask? Both, I'd say!), this time venturing into country territory. And, as you all by now, you can always lure the One Buck Guy with something country-related. When I posted my little Hick Hop compilation a couple of weeks ago, I was probably unconsciously pushed to do so by having heard "Texas Hold 'Em" a couple of days before, which in turn reminded me of Bubba Sparxxx' "Deliverance" which in turn...well, you know. So rather than just letting that spark of inspiration lay where it came from, I decided to dive deeper into Beyoncé's so-called country record. And boy, is there some diving to do. Because Cowboy Carter (I'm sure the title has some gender-critical point to make that I can't care to bother with) suffers from what I called in the comment thread of my Hick Hop platter the rap album problem, namely a tendency to overstuff their albums with too many songs and a number of skits and interludes. Cowboy Carter might not be a rap album, but it suffers from that exact issue, running a rather unreasonable 78+ minutes over a whooping 27 tracks, including skits with country outlaws Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, plus a bunch of other guests. 

Cutting through all the clatter and filler was the first issue. There is some very good, and some very interesting music on that record, but it gets bogged down by too much of everything a bit everywhere. However, the idea of saving the highlights and have a much more streamlined alternate album took root almost immediately. The idea was to keep mainly the vaguely country-related stuff and build around that. Cowboy Carter isn't strictly speaking a country album, it is rather - like hick hop - a hybrid between beats, country instrumentation and imagery, and Beyoncé's background in modern r'n'b. But the country stuff does give a through line to what is now Saddle Up, a leaner by more than half collection of some of the strongest Cowboy Carter material, including her covers of the Beatles' "Bluebird" and Dolly Parton's "Jolene", complete with new lyrics. 

Highlights written by Beyoncé and her collaborators are the two singles, "Texas Hold 'Em" and "16 Carriages", the sultry "Alligator Tears", the beautiful ode to her daughter, "Protector" and "American Requiem" which is both personal and political ("Can we stand for something? / now is the time to face the wind", while interpolating Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth"). Cowboy Carter runs for more than 78 minutes, Saddle Up runs a vinyl-era appropriate 38 minutes. If it were a vinyl record, tracks 1-7 would be the a-side, and tracks 8-13 the b-side, for all you nerds (like me!) out there. 

                                                    Like a rhinestone cowgirl...

In order to get the music into a shape I like and enjoy listening to, I mercilessly cut things down to the bone, both in terms of tracks used (I think "Ya-Ya" and "II Hands II Heaven" are great songs on their own, but they didn't fit what I wanted to do with Saddle Up) and the tracks itself. "American Requiem" is entirely re-edited to eliminate some parts I didn't like, "Sweet Honey Buckin'" lost more than half of its running time (and the, uh, 'buckin' part, thus the title change), I didn't much care for the opera stylings in the second part of "Daughter", so turned it into a medley with" Flamenco" and so on and so forth. Cowboy Carter is ambitious and overstuffed, and deserves credit for the former while the latter is now being taken care of. The album's overreaching is actually to its favor, as Beyoncé reckons with country music, its history, its meaning - especially on a personal and family history level - and its makers and listeners. 

A part of the project was seemingly to counter the harsh rejection of parts of the country establishment (you can easily guess which ones) to her first country foray, "Daddy Lessons" in 2016. This is what she is referring to in "American Requiem" when she sings "Used to say I spoke 'too country' / and the rejection came and said I wasn't 'country enough' / Said I wouldn't saddle up". But saddle up she did, ain't no doubt about that. 

Cowboy Carter is one of the most talked about albums of the year, if not the last years, or if you believe Stevie Wonder (one of the cast of thousands who played on this thing), "of the 21st Century". Yet I imagine most of you probably haven't heard it, because it's not your jam. I didn't think it was mine, either, but now, as Saddle Up, maybe I can get some of you to check out what Beyoncé's ambitious, messy, complicated take on country is about...

So, folks, let's all saddle up...

The Byrds' adventures in stone cold country...

Your old pal and mine, FTIII has chimed in with some swell cover art that blows my low-budget b&w original (in which I was very disappointed) out of the water. As he would say "Should youse bums be desirous..." (and why wouldn't we be?)

Roger McGuinn knows about best laid plans of mice and men. His ambitions often outweighed the results he had to show for them. Like the musical Gene Tryp!, a hippie reworking of the Peer Gynt story, he was working on with Jaques Levy throughout most of 1969 and parts of 1970 that never came to fruitition. When Sweetheart of the Radio hit shelves in August 1968 and reintroduced the new, very different Byrds as all-out country players, this wasn't the record the ever ambitious McGuinn had planned. His big project after The Notorious Byrds Brothers closed the book firmly on the classic era of the band was to lead the Byrds into jazz and a vaguely defined "Space Music", composed on his beloved Moog. Well, Sweetheart of the Radio was...not that. As they say, plans changed. 

Plans mainly changed due to one Ingram Cecil Connor III, better known as Gram Parsons. As McGuinn half-humorously, half-horrified explained: "When I hired Gam Parsons, it was as a jazz pianist...I hired a piano player and I got George Jones in a Nudie suit!". Yup, that he did. And got way more than he bargained for. Parsons' love for country music reignited Chris Hillman's own soft spot for the genre, and while it took some convincing, soon McGuinn was on board, hatching another super-ambitious plan that, again, didn't come close to fruitition: an album presenting an all-encompassing American musical history of the 20th Century, starting with traditional old-time bluegrass, then country music, then rhythm'n'blues and rock'n'roll to finally move into - you guessed it - the music of the future, "space music". But Parsons' traditionalist country leanings soon put the kibosh on McGuinn's expansive plans and any notions of "space music". Instead it was all country, outfitted with enough rock energy to appeal to the counter-culture. 

But that, of course, wasn't the end of the story, either. Parsons more or less hijacked the group from underneath McGuinn's nose, not only dictating the musical direction, but also taking the lion's share of lead vocals, essentially refashioning the Byrds as his band and relegating McGuinn to a bit player, while simultaneously lobbying to include pedal steel player J.D. Maness as a full-time Byrd. Then fate, in the shape of a possible contract dispute with Parson's old label, Lee Hazlewood's LHI, intervened. Not being sure that Parsons had fulfilled his contractual obligations over there, CBS wanted Parsons' vocals to be wiped off the album, so McGuinn began re-recording all of Parsons' lead vocals. When the dispute got cleared up, only Parsons' sentinemental classic "Hickory Wind" hadn't been touched. To appease Parsons, two covers with his lead vocals, Merle Haggard's "Life In Prison" and 'You're Still On My Mind" were put on the album, but as Parsons himself rightfully pointed out, these pedestrian covers were recorded as warm-up numbers, not necessarily serious contenders for the album. Not to mention that a Parsons outtake such as "Lazy Days", could have been put on the album instead. In the end, this reversal of fortunes was no doubt something McGuinn was secretly happy about. His status as King Byrd had been re-established while forcing Parsons in the supporting role he was originally supposed to have. 

Sweetheart of the Rodeo remains a slightly baffling album, and for me personally, not a favorite of the band. Its importance in the band's discography and in the development and cultural acceptance of crossing the borders between country and rock'n'roll is undeniable and gives it classic status, but as an album of music it just doesn't do it for me. So this Byrds album logically is the first to get the patented OBG alternate album treatment. First order of the day: Chuck those mediocre country covers, while also re-installing some of Parsons lead vocal work. Unlike what has long been reported, not all Parsons leads were irrevokably erased (in fact, traces remain on the original album, with McGuinn and Hillman dubbed over them), so future expanded and deluxe editions wielded a number of tracks with Parsons' original lead vocals in tact. On the finished album, McGuinn had - in what became somewhat typical for him - imitated the source, aping Parsons' vocals rather than singing in his normal style, with questionable results. "The Christian Life" was an especially egregious example. The irony of Parsons - who probably knew every deadly sin's second name and favorite pet -  evoking Christian values and a life of purity was one thing, but in McGuinn's mannered ersatz vocal, the song sounded like pure parody. 

With Parsons' lead vocals on "You Don"t Miss Your Water" and "The Christian Life" restored, I now wanted to rebalance the album, so McGuinn's slightly psychedelic take on the folk standard "Pretty Polly" gets reinstated here. I split the difference between Parsons' own take on "One Hundred Years From Now" and the excellent album version that features co-leads by Hillman and McGuinn, so both get the nod, one as the opener, the other as the closer. Given its presence, it naturally becomes the new title song (I never liked Sweetheart of the Rodeo as a title much either). And there is some small amount of justice for Kevin Kelley, who got the short end of the stick when the band drafted in Clarence White who in turn asked for old bandmate Gene Parsons to join, so Chris Hillman had to tell his cousin that his services were no longer required. For years, Kelley's lead vocals on "All I Have Is Memories" were considered lost, but have now also been recovered, so Kelley at long last gets a highlight spot on the only Byrds album he played on. 

So, One Hundred Years From Now it is, an album that I think genuinely runs better than the original Sweetheart, while also giving a pretty democratic view on the Byrds as a country group with balanced contributions by everyone. 

So, let's revisit those country roads with them country Byrds once more, shall we...?!

My original, very not awesome cover art...