[From the Ithaca Times; text by Corey Millard] Bob Proehl is a bit of a renaissance man around Ithaca. He DJs under the name Automatic Buffalo, hosts the bar formerly known as Korova’s trivia night every Monday, and owns and operates No Radio Records — a record store that’s hosted a variety of alternative concerts, from noisy psychedelic fuzz to folksy grassroots Americana. But Proehl is a writer too, and he finished writing a book over a year ago that’s finally hitting the shelves.
The book is part of series on Continuum called 33 1/3. The series provides in-depth analysis into many seminal musical albums released over the last half decade. When 33 1/3 issued an open call for book pitches in February of 2007, Proehl, figuring he had nothing to lose, decided to submit.
The proposal concerned a relatively obscure yet highly influential album put out in 1969. Somehow, against the odds, it was accepted. Now, after a long and arduous journey, the book has finally been released. “The Gilded Palace of Sin,” the debut album from the band The Flying Burrito Brothers, is the subject of Proehl’s book.
“The end of the sixties was a place where the scene had dried up and something else was needed,” says Proehl. “Rhythm & Blues and Rock were separating themselves from one another, and the political consciousness in rock ‘n’ roll was ebbing. The Burritos’ idea was to take the fledgling country of formative ‘Rock’ and bring it around to meet contemporary rock. It was a salvage mission attempting to find something decent and legit.”
Proehl attempts to illuminate this time in American music history — an era in which white musicians were beginning to realize their compliance in the hijacking of rock ‘n’ roll. Elvis Presley was not, for instance, the father of rock music — that distinction belonged more appropriately to black musicians like Chuck Berry.
The Burritos’ leader, Gram Parsons, now considered by many as the eminent figure in the alt-country movement (something Parsons called “Cosmic American Music”), wanted both to release an undeserved grasp on rock and to grab hold of something unique.
“You had bands like the Beatles who could actually get away with not knowing what was going on, and then bands like the [Rolling] Stones who knew, but went ahead and recorded ‘Brown Sugar’ anyway,” says Proehl. And then, there was the Burrito Brothers, who addressed the issue and did something about it.
Proehl’s writing subtly weaves itself through the band’s unstable career, delving gracefully not only into points of anecdotal Burrito-oriented interest — including some marvelously descriptive passages regarding the heart-wrenching capabilities of the pedal steel guitar — but also into the drug-addled mess the world of music had become in the 60s. Proehl’s work is a moving, honest tribute to the work of a brilliant yet spoiled pioneer (Parsons financed much of his activity with a trust fund), loaded with quick-witted yet reverent observations about just how important Gram Parsons’ little experiment really was.
Proehl’s attention to detail regarding the Burrito’s methods of musical creation is also on display here — a concept typically ignored by music critics and biographers.
“The cultural idea is that there’s the product, and the inspiration without the process,” Proehl says. “We don’t know how Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards worked. I wanted to sort of move into the idea of process.”
A number of scenes do just that, focusing on Parsons and his writing partner, Chris Hillman, as they clunk away at a piano late into the night, their minds somehow pushed together, working as one and forging forward, riding the temperamental waves of booze, pot, and determination. With such passages Proehl allows us to do more than simply read about the band — we get see them too.
Ultimately, Proehl shapes a narrative consisting of seemingly autonomous, loosely-sewn threads that somehow manage to lace back together, arriving at a place of relevance that emphasizes each element of the Burrito Brothers’ history as equally important.
His work, peppered with delightful one-liners about Keith Richard’s unintelligible verbiage and some humorous invective on the often inexplicably horrid Eagles, is smart and informative, but concise and readable, too. And in the end, Proehl finds wild success, if for no other reason than that, after you finish the book (which won’t take long), you won’t be able to go another night without making sure you hear the album… which, incidentally, is pretty darn good.
Bob Proehl will read from his book, “The Gilded Palace of Sin,” at the Bookery II, this Sunday, Feb. 8, at 3pm.