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Get a second helping of Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers with ‘Burrito Deluxe’
02.26.2019
12:51 pm
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Whenever I’m bragging about my middle-aged man’s audiophile stereo system, the all important “demo” record that I always pull out first is Intervention Records’ ridiculously fantastic reissue of the first Flying Burrito Bros. album. Pressed on a super flat 180 gram platter at RTI, the Intervention LP of The Gilded Palace of Sin is dead quiet. Remarkably so. So quiet that even people who don’t care about such things… well they tend to remark about it. It’s as quiet as a CD so when the music starts from the blackness with nary a click or pop, it’s almost startling. Gilded Palace with its chiming acoustic guitars, clean electric leads and the pedal steel work of “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow, along with that snappy Nashville drum sound, has always sounded pretty decent, but the Intervention pressing is better than any prior version, even the first pressing. Mastered by Kevin Gray at CoHEARent Audio from a 1/2” safety copy of the original stereo master tapes using all analog gear, it’s the best this album will ever sound. I simply can’t imagine how anyone could possibly find any additional sound particles on the masters that Gray hasn’t already employed here. And the bass! The bass is so focused, I guess, is the word. Really punchy bass. It’s almost odd to hear such tightly articulated bass on recordings of this vintage.

The best way to get across how great it sounds short of inviting you over and playing it for you would be comparing it to going from HD to 4K. It’s just that extra bit better than previous iterations of the album (I have the Japanese HDCD, for instance, which I always thought sounded great, and this utterly blows it away) and one of the most notable cases that I can think of of a 50-year-old album sounding better than on the day it was first issued. Already great to even greater, in other words. For one thing, that’s not easy to do, for another, you have to truly care about what you’re doing to achieve that level of audiophile quality. For those of us into vinyl, it does not get better than the lovingly restored products of Shane Buettner’s archive quality reissue label Intervention Records. Buettner is a genuine audiophile hero. He’s doing the Lord’s work. And he’s just released the second Flying Burrito Bros. album Burrito Deluxe and given it the same carefully buffed sonic treatment that Gilded Palace got.
 

 
It’s often said of Burrito Deluxe that it isn’t as good as its classic, genre-defining predecessor and while, yes, this technically might be true, it’s still a helluva good album. I first heard both albums at the same time, packaged together so they have always seemed like a two-record set to me. Was there much growth between the first and second FBB album? No, there was obviously almost none, but that’s not something to, you know, complain about either. And as with the first Intervention FBB album, the sound quality is simply astonishing here. I don’t care if you paid $600 for your mint condition “hot stamper” of Burrito Deluxe, this one sounds better and is the best, the definitive audiophile grade pressing.

And that’s the point, the very raison d’etre behind Buettner’s company, always achieving the best possible results (heavy pressings, 45rpm versions, beautifully restored artwork, think cardstock sleeves) with the shortest signal path (all analog if possible) and from the ultimate best possible source, of great albums from the 70s/80s/90s that were not being respected by the vinyl reissue market. He’s put out the definitive versions of classic albums by Joe Jackson, Judee Sill, Stealers Wheel, Erasure, Gene Clark, Matthew Sweet and more. If any of this sounds of interest, and it should, for more information visit his website at InterventionRecords.com.
 

The Flying Burrito Bros. sing “Older Guys” on ‘Something Else.’

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.26.2019
12:51 pm
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Desert trip: Gram Parsons and ‘The Gilded Palace of Sin’
05.23.2017
11:11 am
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A recent poll of young Britons found that nearly a third of younger millennials—29% of 18 to 24-year-olds to be exact—claimed that they had never knowingly listened to an Elvis Presley song. Zero percent of this age group reported listening to Elvis’ music daily. This really isn’t all that surprising—or at least it shouldn’t be. We’re soon approaching the 40th anniversary of Presley’s death and while everyone of a certain age can probably recall exactly where they were when they heard that the King of rock ‘n’ roll had died—whether you were a fan or not, it was earth-shaking news in 1977—to someone born after that, bluntly put, the once titanic cultural importance of Elvis Presley is pretty negligible. If your reaction is that this is depressing—and perhaps it is—then you’re only showing your age. It’s just the way things are.

As the editor of a blog like this one—I was eleven years old when Elvis ate his final fried peanut butter and banana sandwich and frankly I doubt that I listen to him more often than once annually myself—I’m acutely aware of the balance between nostalgia and discovery. The biggest cohort of our readership is comprised of millennials. If nearly a third of young Brits have never purposefully or consciously listened to an Elvis Presley number, then how many of them would know a DEVO song? If you were born in 1965 or 1975, how much knowledge of the music of the 1940s or 1950s do you realistically possess? DEVO’s heyday is even further back than that for someone who is a high school senior in 2017.  “Oldies” radio doesn’t play Herman’s Hermits, the Supremes or Sonny & Cher anymore, it programs Sting, Nirvana and Celine Dion where that format even still exists.
 

The FBB in their custom Nudie suits. You’ll note that Parsons’ suit is festooned with pot leaves and opium poppies
 
So where would that leave the legacy of a cult artist like Gram Parsons, who died in 1973 at the age of 26 with but a small, yet influential body of work, as the 21st-century marches ever onward? If you are of a certain age, and presuming that you are a pretty big music fan, you no doubt have heard and hopefully appreciate the “cosmic American music” of this golden-voiced country rock progenitor/genius. To be sure, I think that there’s still a pretty strong Gram Parsons cult out there, but in 2017 its members tend to be know-it-all baby boomers with graying ponytails who want to give you their opinions of whatever album you happen to be looking at in a record store.

Only in Southern California, always a stronghold of Flying Burrito Bros. fandom, does there seem to be an organic all ages awareness of the great Gram Parsons. This has much to do with the desert and how inextricably intertwined the desert trip is with the mythos of Parsons’ death by OD in room 8 of the Joshua Tree Inn and how his body was subsequently stolen and given a drunken cremation near Cap Rock by his manager, Phil Kaufman.

It’s a SoCal rite of passage to do magic mushrooms in Joshua Tree and trip out under the desert stars listening to The Gilded Palace of Sin by the Flying Burrito Bros. as there is simply no greater soundtrack for this sort of activity in that particular place and I’d wager that 99% of all the patrons of Pappy & Harriett’s, whether young or old, male or female could readily identify any song from it that came on their jukebox. But again, it’s specifically a desert kinda thing. Let’s assume that the rest of the country’s Gram Parsons fans are probably spread out a little bit more.

Which is why the word needs to get out about Intervention Records’ recently released vinyl and (upcoming) SACD re-issue of The Gilded Palace of Sin. Mastered by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio, this is one of the best-sounding slabs of wax that I’ve ever heard in my entire life, which is exactly what you would want someone to say if you’re a new boutique record label catering to the snobbiest of jaded (and easily disappointed) audiophiles.

Much more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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05.23.2017
11:11 am
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