Copied this from another website. I never saw Gram or the Burritos, but always loved their stuff. This is a great eyewitness story. If you like, there's others...

Snake handlers & holy rollers

Gram Parsons "Cosmic American Music" had me by the short hairs from the second I heard it ripe and full-blown on the Gilded Palace of Sin album. I had listened to some country music all through my high school years and into early college, when my contemporaries were twirling their dials to rock stations. In my teens I began playing guitar myself, singing folk music, and for musical inspiration started to sneak out to San Francisco, to the Avalon Ballroom on Van Ness Avenue, and the Matrix on Fillmore Street, and the original Fillmore auditorium, the Longshoreman's Hall down on the wharf where the earliest versions of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Beau Brummels, Charlatans, Country Joe & The Fish and other bands were playing landmark shows. This was circa 1965-1966. There were barrels of apples laced with LSD, and trippy light shows, beautiful hippie girls twirling and floating on the stage, and it was an intimate scene before the "San Francisco Sound" became notorious world-wide. As a teenager I was in awe of what was going on, but I didn't have a clue where it would lead and how important the whole movement would ultimately prove to be.

I'd also been fascinated by the Byrds since their very first album, and had seen them live in San Franciso and at the Whiskey in L.A. Those guys had groupies like no one else on the scene except for Jim Morrison, whose groupies were all Satan's Mistresses... The Byrds were the very essence of progressive folk-rock, their jangly resonant guitars lead so ably by Roger McGuinn's 12–string, the fresh and unusual interpretations of traditional songs, those soaring harmonies. I bought all their albums and followed their musical progress like an eager puppy. But when Sweetheart of the Rodeo came out, I was confused to say the least. Where was David Crosby? Where were the solumn, chiming chords? Who the heck was Jon Corneal, Earl Ball, JayDee Maness and... Gram Parsons? What was this stuff about the Canadian Rockies and some outlaw named Pretty Boy Floyd? Was this a country music album with the Byrds on the side, or the Byrds trying to deliver a country-flavored rock record or.....? Little did I know that Gram Parsons had boldly and effectively hijacked the Byrds, bringing in his own crew from the International Submarine Band to make a superb and ground-breaking recording that just seems to get better and better, even thirty years on. I understand he was only with The Byrds for about 6 months, and to this day I wonder if Jim McGuinn ever knew what hit him.

When I heard the Gilded Palace of Sin, my life changed forever, and I am not exaggerating one bit. For some reason it resonated in me unlike any other kind of music, let alone straight country, whose themes were limited and self-obsessed, and whose musicianship was more often than not seriously stilted and formulaic. Gram and Chris Hillman's singing and harmonies had the elusive white soul component that a lot of other pop music was clearly missing. While bands like the Beatles, the Dead and the Airplane were looking towards Nepal, India and other exotic places for their musical inspiration, the Burritos found their musical gold mine right here safe at home. Besides, as a band they were just fucking nuts–who ever heard of a fuzztone pedal steel guitar being used as a lead instrument? The Nashville steel guitar players were all politely tiptoeing around with delicate, formal bits of whiney lace fippery in the background, except for about 15 seconds of lead time, then get back where you belong with the syrupy strings and muted harmony singers. Sneaky Pete was using the damn thing like a rampaging chainsaw, cutting wide swaths of dazzling musical space in your head with his incredibly inventive riffs, tight & tasteful arrangements. Straight country bass was a dull thumping dum, duhm, dum, duhm, dum, duhm. Dark and devilish Chris Ethridge fingered lyrical, intricate, punchy, loping bottom-end parts, more like counterpoint bass guitar leads than anything else. What a combination! And, uh, what was with the pill, dope leaf and flying dinosaur country suits?

I don't think San Francisco ever really knew what to do with the Burritos. Most of the popular bands here had come out of the white folk-music scene. Jerry Garcia & Jorma K and John Cippolina were ex-folkies, Carlos Santana came from the Mission District, which is mostly Hispanic now but Irish back then.. For the most part San Francisco rock in the mid-60's was high-concept white rock with an unspoken kind of counterculture formalism that encouraged experimentation only within a certain set of rules. There were rockers who were "royalty," and just like the stifling set of rules in traditional European monarchies, the rules in San Francisco were equally stiff in their own wierd way. To be blunt, no one in San Francisco knew shit about country music, or Georgia, or the South, or deserts near Joshua Tree, or real American music at all except for effete folk music rip-offs, and most of them came from black Southern field songs anyway.

I saw the Burritos probably ten or twelve times total, at places like the old Fillmore, the Avalon Ballroom, Winterland, the Whiskey and Palamino. One of the best concerts I ever saw and heard was a gig they did out at the old Family Dog hall on the Great Highway here in San Francisco. The Family Dog was a huge old dance hall that was originally part of Playland at the Beach, a turn-of-the-century amusement park that had become run down and mostly abandoned. Some rides and amusements held on into the 60's, but the bulk of the buildings were boarded up by the time the San Francisco Sound started to emerge in 1965. It was a large rambling old place, later to become a slot car race track after the live San Francisco music scene faded away. It had good acoustics, a very high ceiling and was made of wood. It was a large venue, able to hold a couple thousand people so that promoters could book in larger acts and still make a bit of a profit. It was smack-dab across from the beach in what was then the middle of goddamned nowhere as far as most straight San Franciscans were concerned, surrounded by literally miles of free parking spaces. Best of all there were no houses or apartments close-by, so the sound could be cranked waaaaaay up.

It was probably 1970, and I was just about twenty. I admit to forgetting who opened for the Burritos that particular night, but it might have been someone like Buck Owens. I can't tell you much about the opening act, but there sure were a lot of us eagerly awaiting the Burrito's set, you can bet your cowboy hat on that. Tension was so thick you could cut it with the proverbial knife, and I'm sure there were a few Buck knives in the crowd along with the prequisite velvet floppy coats, Lennon glasses, patchouli oil perfume, bell bottoms and love beads, this being SF and all. Country rock had actually started to sink in as a separate musical form by this time, the Byrd's "Sweetheart of the Rodeo" was accepted listening fare, and the the next natural progression was the Gilded Palace of Sin, although it was a pretty far jump from "Blue Canadian Rockies" to "Wheels." Jerry Garcia was playing pedal steel guitar with the New Riders of the Purple Sage. He was an interesting if slightly uninspired steel player, but he bought the Dead's bluesy-noodling rock sensibility to his Emmons double-necker steel git-tar. He was no Sneaky Pete, no siree...

The Burritos took the stage a predictable forty-five or so minutes late, from the very beginning you could tell they were pumped (or jacked up, hard to tell which without a Physician's Desk Reference...) I was so close to the stage I could almost touch Gram, and Chris Hillman with his innocent face and blonde curly afro was just the other side of Gram on his own mike. Chris Ethridge stood there with his bass, intense and serious. I had a great clear view of Sneeky Pete on steel. Gram's hair was long and had those angelic pageboy flips just at the very ends. He was wearing one of his wilder Nudie suits, a red one I think, plus fancy-dan cowboy boots and a blue spangly scarf at his throat. He looked every bit the two-and-a-half-zillion dollar's worth of country-rock star, and all the girls in the audience lost their hearts to him the second he stepped up to the mike, shielded his eyes from the lights and asked us how we were all doin'.... Gram had a stage presence like you couldn't ever buy, he absolutely knew it and man did he ever use it.

They started out with a low-key tune, God's Own Singer of Songs, and then Gram sang Luxury Liner, a song I love, but the beginning of the set wasn't all that energetic. The band was in a great mood, relaxed, clearly glad to be pickin' and singin' for us. I recall an unusual amount of playfulness in the interaction as the songs reeled off, and a few special moments remain embedded forever in my brain. One of my all-time favorite songs of all times by anyone anywhere (did I mention it's one of the greatest all-time songs? Good...) was, and is, Christine's Tune. There's something so wicked, so expository, so confessional in a slyly abstract way, so up-front about a guy tellling us that all she'll do is hate you and she's a devil in disguise and you can see it in her eyes, can't you? It's a song bursting with beautifully crafted, finely honed, gut-wrenching lyrical imagery. I've listened to it at least 1,000 times, and I hope to listen to it another1,000 times before they lower me down in that custom-decorated Nudie casket I've got on order.

After after a couple of slower numbers, they started in on Christine's Tune, one of the most recognizable songs from the GPoS album, something the audience had been eagerly waiting for it. The rhythm guitar riff that kicks the song off is so Pavlovian to me that I think I peed my pants when it came roaring like a steam locomotive out of the p.a. system, and Gram and Chris stepped up to their mikes. The bass kicked in, and then... Sneaky Pete did his steel guitar black magic thing. Back then Pete was regarded as some kind of a mystical electronic pedal steel guitar God. I don't know if he had what they call "technicians" but I never saw anyone but Pete himself fiddle around with the cables and such, so probably not. He had this button on the front panel of the steel guitar body facing his playing position, and it was the button that controlled the fuzztone technique.

The band was just flat-out pounding Christine's Tune for all it was worth, Chris Ethridge effortlessly holding down the bottom end with notes so deep and resonanat they weren't heard so much as felt through the floor and rafters of the hall. The drums hit crisp and hard, the guitars nasty, ringing and Sneaky Pete's steel dancing and growling and leading everyone else around, all totally backwards from what you thought a country music sound should sound like. Chris Hillman and Gram were trading beautiful lead vocals and harmonies, and it was enough to make you see God I swear. Gram would sing a verse with Chris doing harmony. Then Chris would sing another verse with Gram on harmony, and they'd both sing the chorus. They were doing the harmonies just a tiny bit of a note off, so it created an eerie, floating, otherworldly dissonance in the hall. The whole band was trading glances and smiles, and when it came time for Sneaky Pete's trademark fuzztone steel riff, Gram would step back from his mike, turn towards Pete and grin like a Cheshire cat. Sneaky Pete would lean back in his chair and whack that fuzztone button hard with his hand and launch into the fuzztone riffs... ohmygawd. No one in the audience knew if they were hearing a psychotic country musician on acid or some astonishing lead guitar rocker who really knew how to move the pedals on that wierd-looking stringed box. It was awesome to see and hear.

That evening the band played as hot and hard as I ever saw or heard them, ever, and they played the songs with feeling and sincerity so you alternately cried, laughed or simply stood there mouth gaping open, reeling under the onslaught of so much talent and concentrated emotion directed at you, and you alone, because that's they way Gram and the Burritos could make you feel when they really wanted to. The hall was hot, the air thick with dope smoke, the stage lighting halo'd the musicians so it looked more like a messianic holy-roller snake-handling convention instead of a country-rock music concert. I think Gram would approve of this comparison. The Flying Burrito Brothers were preaching without judging, and we were hearing and being converted without having to lift one finger... for the piddly price of admission.

Later they sang"Dark End of the Street," and Gram played a trick on Chris Hillman. Their mikes were just a few feet apart, and at the end of that song there's a section where they each sang "You and me...." "You and me...." "You and me...." "You and me...." a bunch of times. Gram would sing the words and then Chris would sing 'em, and so forth, normally. But on about the third go-round, Gram casually walks over to Chris' mike and sing Chris's words. So Chris walks over to Gram's mike and sings his words, and so they go back and forth, round and round in this loopy, funny, real-life game of musical chairs (or in this case, mikes). Gram would fake Chris out and lunge for his mike, then when Chris started to move towards Gram's mike, Gram would pull back, laughing, and so forth and so on. the whole thing was really hysterical because this was way before cordless guitar connections, so their guitar cords got tangled up and they had to stop and get things straight before ending the song. They probably strung out this genuinely playful ending to 3, 4 minutes or so.

I think some bands are unable to recreate the excitement and emotional intensity of their studio-recorded albums for various reasons. Then other bands do as good as what they can record, and maybe better. Sometimes, once in a real rare while, you'll get a bunch of musicans to whom the album is just a tight little flower bud, and their live performances are the full, fragrant, opulent blooms, far surpassing anything you could ever hope to hear or feel by just listening to the recordings. The Burritos could be all over the map. Sometimes they were too wierded out by the tense interpersonal relationships, especially when Gram got so caught up in getting high that his music became sloppy. At other times they could, almost literally, walk on water. The sheer force of Gram's vision, the collective talent and beyond-cutting-edge musicianship, the spare but spinetingling arrangements made them special to those of us who were touched by the music in our hearts and souls. But the the Flying Burrito Brothers were, what, 20 years ahead of their time? Being pioneers, someone once said, gets you shot in the back with arrows and buried in a shallow grave.

Brian Day September 27, 2000