S i n C i t y - The Flying Burrito Brothers (Parsons / Hillman) Words and music by Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman. As recorded by The Flying Burrito Brothers, on the 1969 LP The Gilded Palace Of Sin. Lead (and harmony?) vocal by Gram Parsons. Here in D. To play in Eb, as recorded, capo one fret. D A7 D7 G 1. This old town's filled with sin; it'll swallow you in D A A7 If you've got some money to burn. D A7 D7 G Take it home right away, you've got three years to pay D D D7 But Satan is waiting his turn. G A D Chorus: This old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poorhouse G D A7 It seems like this whole town's insane G A D G On the 31st floor, a gold plated door... D A7 D Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain. 2. The scientists say... it'll all wash away But we don't believe anymore 'Cause we've got our recruits... and our green mohair suits So please show your ID at the door. Chorus instrumental break (pedal steel): last two lines of the chorus 3. A friend came around, tried to clean up this town His ideas made some people mad He trusted his crowd, so he spoke right out loud And they lost the best friend they had. chorus, with last two lines repeated: D A7 D Won't keep out the Lord's burning rain. D A7 G D Won't keep out the Lord's burning ra...in. Lyrics verified against FBB recording. - Transcribed by WA, Oct 2002. Last edited 2 Nov 2002. Formatting last tweaked 11 Apr 2003. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Emmylou Harris: Even in "Sin City," with that apocalyptic thing that's going on, it's not like "Eve of Destruction" [laughs]. There's poetry in it, so that it elevates you; it makes you think. Interviewer Bill Crandall: A friend of mine insists that, that song's about Las Vegas, and I think it's about Los Angeles, so please settle an argument. Emmylou Harris: I can't settle it; Gram never told me. All I know is that I was on the road once somewhere in California, and I had on this "Sin City" jacket that someone had given me, and this little old lady came up to me in a mall and tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Are you from Fresno?" [laughs] So there you have it. I think it is about Los Angeles, though. - http://www.emmylou.net/gpcdnow.html Parsons gravitated to the Joshua Tree wilderness whenever the excesses of the early Seventies music scene in Los Angeles - which he re-christened `Sin City' - became too much for even a confirmed hedonist such as himself. High on mescaline, he would ride his motorcycle out into the desert at dusk and spend the night lying under the star-filled sky, watching for UFOs, dreaming of transcendence. `I spend a lot of time up at Joshua Tree in the desert, just looking out over the San Andreas Fault,' he once told a reporter. `And I say to myself, `I wish I was a bird flying above it." Instead, the earthly temptations of Sin City followed him even into the wilderness and laid him low. In 1969, A&M released The Gilded Palace Of Sin, an album that lived up to its exotic title in every way, merging old-style country harmonies with a modernist backdrop of chiming guitars and sinuous pedal steel. This was the album Parsons had been threatening to make for years, highlighting both his singular lyrical gift for sad love songs and his creation of a series of dark, Gothic country parables where his Southern morality collided with his dissolute West Coast lifestyle. Sin City is a perfect case in point, Parsons lamenting, in Old-Testament tones, the imminent destruction of a Los Angeles whose moral center, in the wake of the Manson murders, is fractured beyond repair: `This old earthquake's gonna leave me in the poor house, it seems like this whole town's insane / On the thirty first floor, a gold-plated door won't keep out the Lord's burnin' rain.' `Sin City has the fear in it,' says Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie. `I know Gram loved the soul singer Bobby Bland, as well as country, and you can hear traces of that on this record. It has that feel of encroaching darkness that Bland had on Ain't No Love In The Heart Of The City. Those Southern guys were always trying to maintain a sense of morality and always slipping into sin. That battle between God and the devil makes for powerful songwriting.' - Swan O'Hagan, for The Guardian, 09-12-1998 - http://www.insurgentcountry.com/gram_parsons_the_guardian.txt "When Gram died, I felt like I'd been amputated, like my life had just been whacked off." - Emmylou Harris "Gram redefined the possibilities of country music for me. If he had lived, he probably would have redefined it for everybody." - Keith Richards "His death just broke my heart. I don't ever expect to get over it. I dreamed about him for years afterwards. Gram, whatever anyone says, was not a tragic figure like Brian Jones; he did not have death in his eyes. This was a guy who shone, who changed people's lives for ever, who should have lived for ever." - Stanley Booth, writer and friend of Parsons ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From WA's Songs Transcriptions page: Google: WA's Songs or http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/warrenallen/songs.htm Several more transcriptions are available there, each in three formats: HTML, plain text, and a Word doc formatted for readability and printing. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------