byrdsongs, xxviii

I’m not a big Burritos guy, but I gotta admit that The Gilded Palace of Sin is pretty damn cosmic sounding. Sneeky Pete does what otherwise seems impossible in making the pedal steel sound psychedelic.  And Hillman and Parsons replicate Everly Brothers-style harmonies in all their elfin strangeness, something nobody else has ever been able to do successfully, to my knowledge. …Released in early 1969, Gilded attempts to resolve some of the key tensions of the moment, and perhaps it’s its failure to do so that makes the music compelling. It’s a record that tries to be city and country, sophisticate and bumpkin, hippie and backwoodsman, modern and pre-modern, rock and country, and so on and so forth, choose your own binaries.  The album takes things a step beyond Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which doesn’t try to resolve the tensions so much as it simply seeks to flee the disquietude of the 60s altogether.  With Gilded, things are complicated by indecision. The desire to run away is still there, floating atop an idealization of rural simplicity, but the music also expresses a wish to keep one foot in the muck and mire. The music ends up sounding deeply conflicted. And this is not necessarily a bad thing.  Notorious Byrd Brothers is also very conflicted sounding, but the the music coalesces around a dizzying effort to preserve pop as a viable art form. Gilded isn’t nearly as tragically heroic.  The Burritos are merely trying to assimilate dueling tendencies into a coherent statement.  They come close on a few songs, but the record as a whole tends to leave me feeling scattered and disoriented.  Perhaps it couldn’t be otherwise.  The music is a reflection of the muddled mindset of its time.  But looking at the album now some 43 years after it first appeared, I see it as a vista point along the meandering march into boomer narcissism.  The hippies will find out soon enough that one can’t simply run away and then have it both ways, being engaged and disengaged.  And the disenchantment that comes with this realization will compel a deeper retreat into the self. The Flying Burrito Brothers, in other words, are not so far removed from those sensitive denizens of the canyons and passes, the troubadours of the Me Generation…