Позолоченный дворец греха: История альбома Flying Burrito Brothers

The Gilded Palace of Sin is the first album by the country rock group the Flying Burrito Brothers, released on February 6, 1969. It continued Gram Parsons' and Chris Hillman's work in modern country music, fusing traditional sources like folk and country with other forms of popular music like gospel, soul, and psychedelic rock. Although it was not a commercial success, peaking at #164 on the Billboard 200, The Gilded Palace of Sin has been widely regarded as an important album in 1970s rock. It was included in Robert Christgau's "Basic Record Library" of 1950s and 1960s recordings, published in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981). It is also listed at number 192 in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in the 2012 edition and number 462 in the 2020 edition, keeping the same position on the 2023 small review.

After spearheading the Byrds' foray into country music with the influential Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, Gram Parsons fell out with the band when he refused to accompany them on a tour of South Africa in 1968. Two months later bassist Chris Hillman left the Byrds as well and joined Parsons to form the Flying Burrito Brothers. As stated in the documentary Beyond Nashville, "Gram Parsons was passionate about country music's simple poetry. He was equally passionate about rock music. At a time when they were poles apart, he alone thought they belonged together."

The Gilded Palace of Sin was recorded at A&M Studios in Hollywood and produced by Larry Marks with Henry Lewy engineering. The sessions featured a variety of drummers. With harmonies that reveal the influences of the Everly Brothers and the Louvin Brothers, the songs on the Burritos' debut attempt to marry country music with the soul sound associated with Otis Redding's Stax Volt label and singers like Percy Sledge. Another significant characteristic of the album is "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow's unorthodox steel guitar playing, which provides an almost continuous commentary throughout some of the songs. As guitarist Bernie Leadon (who wasn't a member of the band yet when this LP was recorded and released) explains to Meyer in Twenty Thousand Roads, "Sneaky uniquely played an eight string Fender cable pull steel tuned to B6 instead of the more common C6. He played [a] usually more jazz or swing tuning in a style that most other players use an E9 tuning for. His rationale was: B is the 'five chord,' or dominant chord, to the key of E. This resulted in absolutely to Pete steel licks. And no one else thinks like him anyway." Kleinow also utilized a fuzzbox and played the instrument through a rotating Hammond Leslie amplifier, adding a psychedelic touch to several songs. Most of the songs were written by Parsons and Hillman at a house in the San Fernando Valley dubbed "Burrito Manor." "Sin City", co written by Hillman and Parsons and called a "loping lament" and a "cautionary dirge", mentions The Byrds's manager Larry Spector ("a gold plated door") and Robert F. Kennedy ("tried to clean up this town"). It may have been influenced by The Louvin Brothers. In the 2004 documentary Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel, Hillman recalls writing the song with Parsons: "Gram was sleeping. I woke up and had this idea, 'This old town's filled with sin, it'll swallow you in.' I got the first verse and most of the chorus and then I said, 'Gram, get up! I got somethin' here.' And he got up and we wrote that song in about thirty minutes. It actually wrote itself." In the same documentary bassist Chris Etheridge adds, "I told Gram I had a couple of old melodies from back when I was growin' up I played 'em for him and we wrote the two songs that day, the "Hot Burrito #1" and the "Hot Burrito #2," and then that night went into the studio and cut 'em." "My Uncle" and "Hippie Boy" address then contemporary countercultural concerns: the draft and the 1968 Democratic National Convention riots. Parsons later explained to Fusion magazine, "We kept saying we got to do a song called 'Hippie Boy' about Chicago, and it's got to be a narrative song, and Chris Hillman has to do it It was the toughest challenge on the album." The two R&B standards covered on the album, "Dark End of the Street" and "Do Right Woman", are examples of a country soul fusion that Parsons would often refer to as "cosmic American music."

The album cover features the band in Nudie suits. Parsons had taken the band to designer Nudie Cohn to have custom sequin suits made for all the band members especially for the photo shoot, but Parsons' was most unusual, featuring a naked woman (rendered as an old school sailor's tattoo on each lapel), red poppies on the shoulders, deep green marijuana leaves on the front, and embroidered Seconal and Tuinal pills scattered elsewhere. Parsons asked that a flaming red cross surrounded by radiating shafts of blue and gold light cover the back of the jacket. The suit now hangs in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Tom Wilkes, who was the head of the art department at A&M at the time, explained to director Gandulf Hennig in 2004, "We decided to take them out to the desert and do something kind of surreal with the Nudie suits. And they looked great anyway. They looked funky and kind of country western and kind of rock. I felt that look was great. They didn't really need the Nudie suits." The album cover was shot by Barry Feinstein.

At the time of its release, John Firminger wrote in Country Music Review that the album "quite clearly stands as a complete definition of the term country rock, using a heavy instrumental approach combining strong country roots." Allan Jones, writing in the influential British rock weekly NME, raved, "Let me discourse on the sheer magnificence contained within the micro grooves of Gilded Palace of Sin." In the original Rolling Stone review of the album, Stanley Booth called it "one of the best records of the year" and the best, most personal music Parsons had ever done. When Rolling Stone asked Bob Dylan to name his favorite country rock album, he answered, "The Flying Burrito Brothers. Boy, I love them. Their record instantly knocked me out." The album has since become regarded as one of the most groundbreaking of the 1960s. Rolling Stone included it on their list of "The 100 Best Debut Albums of All Time", writing that "in many ways, Gilded Palace picks up where the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo left off Together, 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, all underscored by Sneaky Pete Kleinow's radical pedal steel guitar." In a 5 star review, AllMusic's Mark Deming raved, " no one ever brought rock and country together quite like the Flying Burrito Brothers, and this album remains their greatest accomplishment." In his article "The Lost Boy", John Harris of Mojo writes that the album "remains an absolute delight, founded on the poetry that came from the juxtaposition of country music's air of sincere honesty with songs that drew much of their inspiration from the synthetic expanse of Los Angeles."