The Gilded Palace of Sin is the first album by the country rock group the Flying Burrito Brothers, released on February 6, 1969. It continued Gram Parsons' and Chris Hillman's work in modern country music, fusing traditional sources like folk and country with other forms of popular music like gospel, soul, and psychedelic rock.
Although it was not a commercial success, peaking at #164 on the Billboard 200, The Gilded Palace of Sin has been widely regarded as an important album in 1970s rock. It was included in Robert Christgau's "Basic Record Library" of 1950s and 1960s recordings, published in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981). It is also listed at number 192 in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in the 2012 edition and number 462 in the 2020 edition.
After spearheading the Byrds' foray into country music with the influential Sweetheart of the Rodeo album, Gram Parsons fell out with the band when he refused to accompany them on a tour of South Africa in 1968. Two months later bassist Chris Hillman left the Byrds as well and joined Parsons to form the Flying Burrito Brothers. As stated in the documentary Beyond Nashville, "Gram Parsons was passionate about country music's simple poetry. He was equally passionate about rock music. At a time when they were poles apart, he alone thought they belonged together."
The album cover features the band in Nudie suits. Parsons had taken the band to designer Nudie Cohn to have custom sequin suits made for all the band members especially for the photo shoot, but Parsons' was most unusual, featuring a naked woman (rendered as an old-school sailor's tattoo on each lapel), red poppies on the shoulders, deep-green marijuana leaves on the front, and embroidered Seconal and Tuinal pills scattered elsewhere. Paradoxically, Parsons asked that a flaming red cross surrounded by radiating shafts of blue and gold light cover the back of the jacket. The suit now hangs in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Tom Wilkes, who was the head of the art department at A&M at the time, explained to director Gandulf Hennig in 2004, "We decided to take them out to the desert and do something kind of surreal with the Nudie suits. And they looked great anyway. They looked funky and kind of country western and kind of rock. I felt that look was great. They didn't really need the Nudie suits." The album cover was shot by Barry Feinstein.
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gilded_Palace_of_Sin)