The Gilded Palace of Sin is the debut studio album by American country rock band The Flying Burrito Brothers, released on February 6, 1969, by A&M Records.

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 the development of 1970s rock.

I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.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.

As guitarist Bernie Leadon (who wasn't a member of the band yet when this LP was recorded and released) explains to Meyer in Twenty Thousand Roads, "Sneaky uniquely played an eight-string Fender cable pull steel tuned to B6 instead of the more common C6.

"Sin City", co-written by Hillman and Parsons and called a "loping lament" and a "cautionary dirge", mentions The Byrds's manager Larry Spector ("a gold plated door") and Robert F. Kennedy ("tried to clean up this town").

The two R&B standards covered on the album, "Dark End of the Street" and "Do Right Woman", are examples of a country-soul fusion that Parsons would often refer to as "cosmic American music."

[7] 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.

Parsons asked that a flaming red cross surrounded by radiating shafts of blue and gold light cover the back of the jacket.

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.

Allan Jones, writing in the influential British rock weekly NME, raved, "Let me discourse on the sheer magnificence contained within the micro-grooves of Gilded Palace of Sin."

In the original Rolling Stone review of the album, Stanley Booth called it "one of the best records of the year" and the best, most personal music Parsons had ever done.

Rolling Stone included it on their list of "The 100 Best Debut Albums of All Time", writing that "in many ways, Gilded Palace picks up where the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo left off...Together, the mercurial Parsons and the levelheaded Hillman concocted a crazily coherent statement of irony-fueled hillbilly anthems, inventive covers and achingly beautiful two-part harmonies, all underscored by Sneaky Pete Kleinow's radical pedal-steel guitar."

In a 5 star review, AllMusic's Mark Deming raved, "...no one ever brought rock and country together quite like the Flying Burrito Brothers, and this album remains their greatest accomplishment."

In his article "The Lost Boy", John Harris of Mojo writes that the album "remains an absolute delight, founded on the poetry that came from the juxtaposition of country music's air of sincere honesty with songs that drew much of their inspiration from the synthetic expanse of Los Angeles."

Bands like Uncle Tupelo, Wilco, Son Volt, Whiskeytown, and the Jayhawks, as well as such musicians as Dwight Yoakam, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris (Parsons' one-time singing partner), and Steve Earle all have recorded music that bears traces of The Gilded Palace of Sin.

In the liner notes for the 1997 reissue, Sid Griffin wrote that while Gilded Palace only sold 50,000 copies, "...like the first album by the Velvet Underground, it would seem everyone of those 50,000 went out and formed a band inspired by what they'd heard."