Which is undeniably part of the reason for Parsons's posthumous renown. Of course, the other part is that his aching voice simply haunts, his songs sting with sweet sorrow, and his personal charisma still sparkles three and a half decades after he's been gone. And if one can endure the sop of so many Hillman-stomped sour grapes, Hot Burritos – almost in spite of itself – delivers tantalizing glimpses of this ongoing appeal, as well as being a compelling compendium of Flying Burrito Brother information, analyses and anecdotes.
On the scandalously underappreciated contribution Kleinow made to the Burrito Brothers' inimitable sound, for example, Einarson – an excellent researcher and wide-ranging interviewer who has written, among others, good books about Gene Clark and the entire country-rock movement – has done some much needed historical refurbishing. Ethridge: “It was unbelievable. He [Kleinow] could sound like a whole symphony orchestra on that little one-neck steel.”
Leadon: “There was no way you could get your brain around what he was doing. … So you had to laugh sometimes. It was like watching an acrobat. ‘How the hell did he make that leap from here to there?'”
And Hillman: “All of the other steel players looked at him with a wary eye. They didn't quite understand him. He was different. The steel guitar requires a very anally retentive personality. It's clean, it's shiny, it's tuned. Sneaky would set up his steel and it had all sorts of junk on it and it was never in tune. He had an old single-neck Fender and he'd made his own fuzz-tone, this big black metal box with a toggle switch. He'd hit the toggle switch and your fillings would fall out it was so loud.”
Perhaps the key to Hillman's ongoing spleen lies in the qualification he makes regarding Kleinow's ferociously innovative playing. “So he played with this reckless abandon, which sometimes was actually good. But not all the time.” Occasionally, in other words, what was called for was Hillman's favourite word of choice in Hot Burritos – “professionalism” – something Kleinow, never a typical Nashville pedal steel player, either lacked or, perhaps, simply wasn't interested in cultivating. Because it was easy. Because it was conventional. Because it was boring.
Every time (and there are several) that Hillman proudly invokes in Hot Burritos the achievements of his lengthy post-Parsons career with such very professional, very boring outfits as the Parsons-less Burrito Brothers, the Souther, Hillman and Furay Band, and the Desert Rose Band as a way to illustrate how he's the more accomplished artist, and how Parsons was just a talented kid who blew it and who never lived up to his potential, one can't help but be reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein's definition of genuine art: “A wild beast, tamed.” And, fair or not, it's the tamers we're thankful for, but it's the wild beasts we remember.
Contributing reviewer Ray Robertson's most recent novel is the Trillium Award-nominated What Happened Later.
