Your California Dive Bar Jukebox Song of the Week

You are either already an avid fan of The Flying Burrito Brothers, or you are about to become one.
The seminal Los Angeles band, The Byrds, pioneered folk-rock in the 1965, making hits of Bob Dylan songs before most of America knew who Bob Dylan was, but in the subsequent years the Byrds' sound began moving ever further south from the East Village and deep into the Appalachia.  The culmination of this was the 1968 album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, which featured pedal steel guitar, fiddle, banjo and honky-tonk piano alongside a Southern twangy voice singing, "I like the Christian life."  That voiced belonged to the man who replaced David Crosby in the band, a handsome Floridian by the name of Gram Parsons (the guy in the picture in the white suit with pot leaf embroidery).  Parsons and founding Byrd, Chris Hillman, wanted to keep this new country-rock sound going, so they left the band to form The Flying Burrito Brothers.  Their debut album, The Gilded Palace of Sin, built upon Rodeo's country-rock, adding some R&B piano and psychedelic guitar, with easy-going songs that sound like a group of guys who were just waiting not treat making music as a business anymore.  "Sin City" is usually regarded as the "hit" of the album, but with songs like "Hot Burrito #2" and an amazing cover of "Dark End of the Street", it was no easy choice on which song to put here.  The next album, Burrito Deluxe, features, along with another slew of great originals, a version of "Wild Horses" that Keith Richards actually gave to the band when he thought the Rolling Stones weren't going to use it.
This original incarnation was not meant to last- although they did play the imfamously ill-fated Altamont Speedway festival with the Stones- and Parsons left in 1970 to start a solo career.  He seemed to be a sure-fire star, touring to adoring crowds with a young, then unknown, Emmylou Harris, but in 1973 he died, at age 26, of a morphine overdose in Joshua Tree.  A number of solo Parson's recordings were released posthumously and they are heartbreakingly beautiful.  Hillman left the Flying Burrito Brothers in 1972, but the band played on with a rotating cast of members and under many name variations, never to again produce the magic of the first two albums.
Nothing sounds so much Californian to me as The Gilded Palace of Sin and listening to it on this sunny February afternoon I have a very strong urge to put my dog in the car, drive around town until I run into a bar with a patio, treat the jukebox listeners to the full run through of this album and watch the sun go down with a Pacifico or four.

Your California Dive Bar Jukebox Song of the Week

Rodger Collins was born in Texas circa 1940, but his family was among the massive migration of Southern African-Americans who came to the Bay Area in the 40's in search of industrial jobs created by the war.  For a long time his 1967, "She's Looking Good", was his considered his biggest hit, having been covered by Wilson Pickett and David Lee Roth.  But this 1970 song, "Foxy Girls in Oakland", has become a cult hit over the decades and you haven't lived in Oakland until you've seen a dance floor explode when the instantly recognizable opening guitar lick come through the speakers.  I still remember the first time I heard it at the Ruby Room on 14th Street in 2001- it was like the moment in a beer commercial when the top is popped off a the bottle and the spraying suds alter the fabric of reality, turning a dull evening into a wild party full of carefree and attractive people.

After playing shows with Elvis Presley and Ike & Tina Turner, Collins went on tour with Joe Tex and with him converted to Islam, changing his name to Hajj Sabrie.  He quit the music business, aside from an occasional handful of shows under is old name, started a family and opened an shop called Trustworthy Appliance Repair in Oakland.  As far as I know, he's still there.

Your California Dive Bar Jukebox Song of the Week

The Los Angeles punk scene in the early 80s was one of those crazy moments where it seems impossible so many talented people are in the same place making so much original music at the same time.  X, Black Flag, The Cramps, The Blasters, The Germs are just a handful of some great bands to come out of this scene, but one of my favorites has always been The Gun Club.  The band had a revolving cast of members of the years, featuring players from The Cramps, The Bags, 45 Grave, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, but at the center was always singer and guitarist, former president of the Blondie fan club and notorious drunk: Jeffrey Lee Pierce.  Apparently only able to go on stage and record after getting into a falling down stupor, Pierce had a reputation for being sweet guy who was impossible to work with.  Still, that didn't keep him from creating the classic 1981 album (one of the first for critics to apply the label of "pychobilly", for its fusion of punk, 50's rocknroll and country), Fire of Love, with popular songs like "Sex Beat" and "She's Like Heroin to Me".  Until recently, I had completely forgotten about the Gun Club's 1987 album, Mother Juno, which opens with "Bill Baily".  Last week I paid the obscene 50-cents-a-track on a bar jukebox to play this song and was rewarded with every jukebox selectors dream: a stranger turned to me and said, "Dude!  Who the fuck is this?!"