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.