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.