New review from Ray

[Andrew Gifford]

Ray reviewed a new book about the Flying Burrito Brothers in the Globe and Mail.  The link's below, but the article is only up for a few days, so I'm linking it below.

The book is:

Hot Burritos: The True Story of The Flying Burrito Brothers
by John Einarson and Chris Hillman, Jawbone, 336 pages, $19.95

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090116.wbkburr17/BNStory/globebooks/home

REVIEWED BY RAY ROBERTSON

Globe and Mail Update

January 16, 2009 at 10:38 AM EST

Clothes may not make the man, but they are a fairly reliable indication of what the man underneath is up to.

And if the man in question is attired in a white silk jacket and equally iridescent jean-cut, belled pants emblazoned with expertly embroidered depictions of poppies, marijuana leaves, LSD cubes, plenty of Seconal and Tuinal tablets, a naked woman and a flaming red cross surrounded by radiating shafts of blue and gold scarlet flames, chances are he's made up his mind to make trouble, both for himself and with whomever he happens to come into contact.

In the 26 years he was with us, Gram Parsons made lots and lots of trouble. Which is precisely why we're still singing his songs and talking about him today, 35 years after his death.

Many of those magically still-fresh songs were written and recorded while Parsons was a member of the Flying Burrito Brothers, the pioneering country-rock band he co-founded with fellow ex-Byrd Chris Hillman.

Parsons and Hillman didn't set out to create a new musical genre (“The original concept was a hip country band, not rock 'n' roll and not country-rock,” Hillman says), but that's what they – along with bassist Chris Ethridge and pedal-steel guitar player Sneaky Pete Kleinow – did.

Not just because they occasionally supplied a rock-and-roll backbeat to traditional country-and-western song structures, but because, at their best, they absolutely obliterated any understanding of not just what rock 'n' roll and country and western were, but rhythm and blues and psychedelia as well. What they ended up creating was Flying Burrito Brothers music.

If, as seems to be the case, one of the reasons Chris Hillman participated with John Einarson in the composition of Hot Burritos: The True Story of the Flying Burrito Brothers was to debunk the prevalent misconception that Parsons alone was the “father of country-rock,” his decision is understandable if ultimately regrettable. Understandable not just because Parsons himself denied that the music he made was “country-rock,” but because others (such as the Beatles, the Byrds and even the Monkees) were experimenting with country music long before either Parsons or his first band, the International Submarine Band, were doing the same thing. In fact, a good case can be made that Hillman's own composition, Time Between, from the Byrds' Younger Than Yesterday album, is likely the first country-rock song.

Unfortunately – both for Hot Burritos as a reading experience and for Hillman personally – it's not enough for him to know that those in the know know the true musical score. Hillman's bitterness regarding not only Parsons's perceived role as country-rock godfather, but his entire posthumous fame, is so palpable throughout Hot Burritos that at times it borders on the near-pathological (rarely does a page pass without some acerbic swipe from Hillman about how Parsons did too many drugs and drank too much, or how Parsons was personally selfish, or how Parsons didn't rehearse enough, or how Parsons wasn't professional enough, or even – incredibly, delusionally – Parsons never wrote any good songs after he quit collaborating with Hillman).

It's not just observers like producer Jim Dickson who claim that “Chris Hillman never got over how much more credit Gram got than he did.” As Hot Burritos makes painfully clear, Hillman himself believes that “Unfortunately it's all ‘Gram, Gram, Gram,' and I face that every day.” But, as former latter-day Burrito Brother Bernie Leadon notes, “How can you compete with a dead guy? You just can't. It's a martyr thing. Gram fell on his sword so he's a dead hero. He's mythic.”

Which is undeniably part of the reason for Parsons's posthumous renown. Of course, the other part is that his aching voice simply haunts, his songs sting with sweet sorrow, and his personal charisma still sparkles three and a half decades after he's been gone. And if one can endure the sop of so many Hillman-stomped sour grapes, Hot Burritos – almost in spite of itself – delivers tantalizing glimpses of this ongoing appeal, as well as being a compelling compendium of Flying Burrito Brother information, analyses and anecdotes.

On the scandalously underappreciated contribution Kleinow made to the Burrito Brothers' inimitable sound, for example, Einarson – an excellent researcher and wide-ranging interviewer who has written, among others, good books about Gene Clark and the entire country-rock movement – has done some much needed historical refurbishing. Ethridge: “It was unbelievable. He [Kleinow] could sound like a whole symphony orchestra on that little one-neck steel.”

Leadon: “There was no way you could get your brain around what he was doing. … So you had to laugh sometimes. It was like watching an acrobat. ‘How the hell did he make that leap from here to there?'”

And Hillman: “All of the other steel players looked at him with a wary eye. They didn't quite understand him. He was different. The steel guitar requires a very anally retentive personality. It's clean, it's shiny, it's tuned. Sneaky would set up his steel and it had all sorts of junk on it and it was never in tune. He had an old single-neck Fender and he'd made his own fuzz-tone, this big black metal box with a toggle switch. He'd hit the toggle switch and your fillings would fall out it was so loud.”

Perhaps the key to Hillman's ongoing spleen lies in the qualification he makes regarding Kleinow's ferociously innovative playing. “So he played with this reckless abandon, which sometimes was actually good. But not all the time.” Occasionally, in other words, what was called for was Hillman's favourite word of choice in Hot Burritos – “professionalism” – something Kleinow, never a typical Nashville pedal steel player, either lacked or, perhaps, simply wasn't interested in cultivating. Because it was easy. Because it was conventional. Because it was boring.

Every time (and there are several) that Hillman proudly invokes in Hot Burritos the achievements of his lengthy post-Parsons career with such very professional, very boring outfits as the Parsons-less Burrito Brothers, the Souther, Hillman and Furay Band, and the Desert Rose Band as a way to illustrate how he's the more accomplished artist, and how Parsons was just a talented kid who blew it and who never lived up to his potential, one can't help but be reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein's definition of genuine art: “A wild beast, tamed.” And, fair or not, it's the tamers we're thankful for, but it's the wild beasts we remember.

Contributing reviewer Ray Robertson's most recent novel is the Trillium Award-nominated What Happened Later.