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...