Hot Burritos , livre ebook

Hot Burritos
The True Story Of The Flying Burrito Brothers
John Einarson with Chris Hillman
A Genuine Jawbone Book
First edition 2008
Published in the UK and the USA by
Jawbone Press,
2A Union Court,
20-22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com
ISBN: 978-1-906002-99-2
Editor: Thomas Jerome Seabrook
Volume copyright © 2008 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © 2008 John Einarson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in a review. For more information you must contact the publisher.
The photographs in this book are reproduced by permission from the following copyright holders, and we are grateful for their help. All efforts have been made to contact the original photographers where possible. If you think there has been a mistaken attribution, please contact the publisher. Jacket: Jim McCrary. ISB: John Nuese. Byrds: Chris Hillman. Early Burritos: Andee Nathanson. Topanga 1: Jim McCrary. Hillman and Parsons: Chris Hillman. Topanga 2: Jim McCrary. Train: photographer unknown. KRLA: Craig Folkes. Happening 69: photographer unknown. Seattle Pop: Chris Hillman. Griffith Park: Gary Jozwiak/Bill Allen/Peggy Hanson. Parsons's suit: Jim McCrary. Chairs: Jim McCrary. Great outdoors: Jim McCrary. Altamont: unknown photographer. Deluxe out-take: Jim McCrary. Leadon and Parsons: Chris Hillman. Roberts and Kleinow: Nicky Boddy. 1971 Promo: Jim McCrary. Live 1971 (2): Al Perkins. Nudie suits: Jim McCrary.

Contents
Foreword
by Dwight Yoakam
Introduction: Close Up The Honky Tonks
Chapter 1: Submarines And Sweethearts
Hillman, Parsons, and the birth of country-rock
Chapter 2: De Soto Avenue
Writing songs and making plans
Chapter 3: The Gilded Palace
The making of a country-rock classic
Chapter 4: Train Song
The infamous trip to Chicago and other misadventures
Photo Section
Chapter 5: Wild Horses
The Stones, Burrito Deluxe , and Parsons’s departure
Chapter 6: White Line Fever
Rick Roberts, the first European tour, and the ‘blue album’
Chapter 7: Last Of The Red Hot Burritos
The final live line-up and an invitation from Stephen Stills
Chapter 8: Farther Along
The Burritos’ enduring legacy (and what happened next)
Cast Of Characters
Selected Discography
Acknowledgements
About The Authors



Foreword
by Dwight Yoakam
I’d heard about, but never had the chance to actually hear any of The Flying Burrito Brothers recordings until after the original band was no more. Maybe their songs and performances were always destined to be more mythological than tangible. Like some storied phalanx of troubadouring round-table knights, perhaps their singular purpose was and will always be to have seduced those musicians who followed with a glittering musical legend and passion-filled lore so intoxicating that it drove those multitudes who came after toward a romantically exuberant and youthful re-embrace of country music. That legacy has continued to consume and infuse ensuing generations of aspiring music performers with the possibility of expressing life’s experiences with reckless abandon through country music.
The hit records that The Flying Burrito Brothers never had came to fruition for the new country artists that the group’s fabled gilded dreams gave birth to. Although the Burritos’ own journey proved ill fated, their valiant intentions have since been realized on an epic scale. Every modern country-music artist (myself included) from the most obscure to the mega-million-plus selling phenomena of Shania Twain and Garth Brooks, as well as country-rock legends The Eagles, owes in no small part the very fact of their musical existence to the bold course that was set by these maverick musicians and their attempt to share their love for country music with the world.
Moreover, without Chris Hillman acting as the connective tissue between West Coast country music traditions and the rock’n’roll generation, from Buck Owens to The Byrds, there would be no modern country music. Together, Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons held a vision of what modern country music could be. I believe the principal foundation for country music’s cultural and commercial survival beyond the 60s and early 70s was laid by the loving affection that these two and their Flying Burrito band-mates lavished upon it, capturing innocently yet irrevocably in the process the imaginations of rhinestone-clad descendants who would deliver on that promise and realize the fruits of its success for years to come.
Although their plan may have faltered, their intent never failed. Time has proven that their heart’s aim was true, and country music ultimately loved them back.
Dwight Yoakam
Los Angeles, California
August 2008



Introduction
Close Up The Honky Tonks
When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” says Shinbone Star newspaper editor Maxwell Scott (played by Carleton Young) to Jimmy Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard in the classic 1962 western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence . Myth has a way of transcending reality to become legend. And as the fictional editor Scott implies, legend has a way of becoming permanently etched in the public consciousness and not easily supplanted. Take The Flying Burrito Brothers, country music’s original band of outlaws. In the four decades since the release of their stunning debut album, The Gilded Palace Of Sin , they have passed from reality through myth to achieve legendary status, casting an enormous and pervasive shadow across the musical landscape, revered in ever-increasing circles as the avatars of the current alt.country, Americana, roots, and rebel-country movements, their gaudy image emulated, their uncompromising vision venerated.
Co-founded in southern California by ex-Byrds Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons in late 1968, the group never enjoyed even a sniff of a hit record nor anything remotely close to commercial success or widespread acceptance in their time. Too country for hip, rock audiences and too rock for country music’s staid clientele, they often found themselves performing far down the bill or to half-empty houses.
Yet the Burritos’ cult of personality has become endemic. These days they are likely to be cited among a handful of seminal influences by the current crop of country-music recording artists. According to the All Music Guide , the group “virtually invented the blueprint for country-rock,” leaving behind “a body of work that proved vastly influential both in rock and country.” For Rolling Stone , “The mercurial Parsons and the levelheaded Hillman concocted a crazily coherent statement of irony-fueled hillbilly anthems, inventive covers, and achingly beautiful two-part harmonies, underscored by Sneaky Pete Kleinow’s radical pedal-steel guitar.”
The Burritos’ limited recorded output – just four albums and a half-dozen compilations – continues to generate steady back-catalog sales. Songs such as ‘Sin City,’ ‘Wheels,’ ‘Hot Burrito #1,’ and ‘Hot Burrito #2’ are regarded as classics in the lexicon of what would later be dubbed country-rock and are much covered by other artists, while recent discoveries of Burritos archival recordings have been treated with the same reverence as the unearthing of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“Our music has endured over the years over a lot of other people’s music that was way more popular than ours at the time,” says original Burritos bassist Chris Ethridge. “What’s strange is that the college crowd today just idolizes and loves the Burritos. We’re more popular now than we ever were in our time.”
What made the Burritos’ brand of country music distinctive was a characteristically defiant attitude, approach, and execution that set them apart from contemporaries such as The Byrds, Poco, Dillard & Clark, Rick Nelson, and later The Eagles. They were honest in their respect for the traditi onal country-music form and structure, yet willing to redefine it in a contemporary lyrical context that would appeal to younger crowds disillusioned with psychedelic rock’s overblown excess, underscoring it all with mellifluous pedal-steel guitar. They weren’t afraid to mock those traditions either, their tongues often firmly planted in their cheeks.
“The original concept was a hip country band, not rock’n’roll and not country-rock,” says founder member Chris Hillman. “We were the rebel outlaw band at the time.” Like Dylan on Nashville Skyline , the Burritos were bringing it all back home to a simpler, roots-based, authentic American music. Why, they reasoned, shouldn’t country music appeal to younger audiences?
The Flying Burrito Brothers are certainly deserving of the accolades bestowed upon them in recent years. But being regarded these days as true visionaries, groundbreakers, and genre-bridging pioneers is nonetheless cold comfort for the commercial indifference they experienced in their prime. “I’ve always been attracted to innovation,” says Jim Bickhart, a former freelance journalist for A&M and Warner Brothers who worked with the group in their heyday, “and the Burrito Brothers to me were right in there. They focused it on the songwriting and the lyrical mindset … creating a new tradition as they went along. The Burritos were more than a band, or even merely a backing band to Gram Parsons. They were a small-scale cultural monolith, spinning off influences and sending ideas and visions forward into the future of pop, rock, and country music.”
And yet in their prime the Burritos’ records sold poorly. For all their innovative artistic approach and occasional flashes of sheer brilliance, the Burritos albums largely fell on deaf ears. Only much later did t