Flying Burrito Brothers – Hot Burritos: The Very Best Of The Flying Burrito Brothers (19691972)

When Universal Music Group acquired PolyGram and its labels in early 1999, the reissue team at MCA/Universal eagerly attacked the storied catalog of A&M Records, and the results of their efforts are starting to hit record stores. The most welcome of this first wave of A&M reissues is surely this two-disc gathering of the three albums involving original members of the Flying Burrito Brothers, augmented by a handful of additional cuts from the period.

The title, then, is a misnomer; this is the best and a lot of the rest of the music recorded by the seminal group between its milestone 1969 debut, The Gilded Palace Of Sin, and the departures of remaining original members Chris Hillman and Sneaky Pete Kleinow three years later. Thus, we get the hit-and-miss second LP, Burrito Deluxe, such frequently anthologized items as “Six Days On The Road”, “Dim Lights” and “Sing Me Back Home” (if you’re a Burritos fan, you already have these songs on two or three collections), and this set’s chief curiosity, the band’s self-titled third album, available on CD for the first time in the U.S.

I have a soft spot for The Flying Burrito Brothers because, along with Rod Stewart’s Every Picture Tells A Story, it provided the soundtrack to my first coast-to-coast driving trip back in 1971. Hearing it again so many years later, I’m struck by the timelessness of the Chris Hillman-sung tracks, including the opening “White Line Fever”, a Merle Haggard trucker’s song whose unsentimental poignancy is deftly captured by Hillman’s world-weary performance; Gene Clark’s delightful “Tried So Hard”; and Bob Dylan’s doleful “To Ramona”.

It’s also hard to miss the persistently mellow presence of country-rock lite as manifested in the songs and vocals of one of the subgenre’s creators, future Firefall leader Rick Roberts, who was given the unenviable task of replacing fired auteur Gram Parsons. But even on Roberts’ most laid-back concoctions, “Colorado” and “Four Days Of Rain”, the crisp playing by the band, which by then included soon-to-be-Eagle Bernie Leadon, lends the tracks a surprisingly durable authenticity. Despite the smarm quotient, the third album belongs with its two predecessors. I’m glad somebody finally connected the dots.

In retrospect, the unlikely pairing of the visionary Hillman and the journeyman Roberts makes The Flying Burrito Brothers an apt representation of the transition from the audacity of the original Burritos to the polished country-pop of the Eagles and their lesser contemporaries. By threading together the Burritos’ three studio albums, the set provides the bridge between Sweetheart Of The Rodeo and “Take It Easy”. Plus it’s just nice to have everything in one place.

What nobody has done yet is assemble a definitive best-of, one that encompasses the whole Parsons/Burritos story, from the International Submarine Band through Gram’s two solo albums, while leaving out the dross. When will some label get that together? (With the addition of Hot Burritos to the archives, now it’s at least possible to compile your own anthology.) This Burritos set begs a second question as well: Doesn’t Chris Hillman warrant a career compilation of his own?