Co-written by Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman for The Flying Burrito Brothers’ 1969 debut album, The Gilded Palace of Sin, Sin City features one of the best lines in the whole of popular music. “On the thirty-first floor, a gold-plated door won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain.” Inspired by their manager Larry Spector’s lavish condominium. It captures the 1970s delusion of wealth perfectly, providing immunity from fate.
It’s also a song which, if the cover song directory Second Hand Songs is to be believed, has become a rite of passage for anyone tangentially connected to americana or country music. Since 1969 it’s been covered hundreds of times. The harmony vocal of the original has made it a favourite for special duet performances, Dwight Yoakam and K.D. Lang, Hank Wangford and Billy Bragg, and its co-writer Chris Hillman and Herb Pedersen have all delivered versions.
But the best cover by a long way came from Beck and Emmylou Harris for 1999’s Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons. It stays relatively faithful to the original with JayDee Maness’ pedal steel following Sneaky Pete Kleinow’s lines. The solo, however, is taken by fiddle player Gabe Witcher, a regular part of Beck’s band. It is very much Beck’s show with Harris along for the harmonies, and works as a tribute both to one of his songwriting heroes and Emmylou Harris’s first musical partner.
During the late 1960s, Southern California was consumed by an existential dread. People worried about “the Big One” (the predicted massive earthquake that would drop Los Angeles into the Pacific Ocean), with apocalyptic cults began gathering in the desert to wait out the coming storm. Parsons channelled this tension through what he termed “Cosmic American Music,” a fusion of traditional country, gospel, and psychedelic rock. By dressing hippie longhairs in exaggerated, rhinestone-studded Nudie suits (decorated with embroidery of marijuana leaves, pills, and flames), the band embraced the culture clash. They used traditional country storytelling, more often associated with conservative values, to critique modern urban decay and preach a secular end-times sermon.
Robert Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The verse about a friend who “came by to say hello” and was subsequently cut down is a clear response to Kennedy’s death, capturing the overwhelming sense of vulnerability felt across the country. Sin City marks the point at which the optimism of 1967’s summer of love and the uncertainty of 1968’s Civil Rights marches, January’s Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the election of Nixon found their anthem. The Flying Burrito Brothers performed at the infamous Altamont Free Concert on December 6, 1969, the place where the 60s went to die, although they didn’t play Sin City on that night, you feel it would have been appropriate.
Sin City works as a song, and a morality tale because it uses Parson and Hillman’s observation of Los Angeles as a mirror for a nation which had lost its moral compass at the close of a decade of chaos and massive change. Perhaps we need a new cover now.
The original, and still the best. Like many people I came to the song through the Sounds of the New West compilation where it fit right in with the latest and best of Alt.Country.
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