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Friday, April 02, 2021

1970 Album of the Week, April 2-8: Burrito Deluxe, by The Flying Burrito Brothers

Wikipedia doesn't show any 1970 albums released for this week, but one of its non-exact-date April releases is the second Flying Burrito Brothers album, Burrito Deluxe. Week or month, there's no way it doesn't make top cut.

Top cut for TFBB? Not according to guitarist Bernie Leadon, who said "the stuff that we did were not Gram's best songs. ... Burrito Deluxe was recorded without any of the feeling and the intensity of the first album."

Top cut for Gram Parsons himself? Not according to me. Although I'd be hard-pressed to pick between solo albums GP or Grievous Angel, or his Byrds masterpiece Sweetheart of the Rodeo, for my "take to a desert island" collection, any of those three would come before either of the Flying Burrito albums.

But easily top cut for April, or some part thereof, of 1970. Parsons on a bad day disposed of about a hundred times as much "feeling and intensity" -- not to mention pure talent -- as most musicians, and the rest of the band had plenty to brag about themselves in those areas.

Of course, the pick track here -- and it's just flat no contest, even with a Bob Dylan song also appearing on the album -- isn't, supposedly, by any of them. It's officially by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. But I suspect Parsons deserves some co-writing credit -- he spent a lot of time hanging out with Richards between his Byrds and Burritos work and Jagger says of the song "I remember we sat around originally doing this with Gram Parsons ..." And it sounds like Cosmic American, not Cosmic British, Music.

It is, of course, "Wild Horses," and The Flying Burrito Brothers released their version more than a year before it appeared on the Stones' Sticky Fingers:


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