For Sneaky Pete’s Sake

Pete Kleinow – “Sneaky Pete” to legions of country rock fans – died on January 9th in a California nursing home. He was 72 years old, and for the past two years had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. It is painful to contemplate the musical memories that were slowly eroding away. And now they are gone.

I grew up hating country music, and for the first two decades of my life considered it the exclusive domain of inbred cretins and rednecks. Sneaky Pete, along with Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, changed all that. Pete played the pedal steel guitar as if he had been raised in shitkickin’, honky-tonk bars. In fact, he had a successful career as an animator and special effects artist in Hollywood long before he hooked up with the hippie renegades in The Flying Burrito Brothers in 1968. The template that the Burritos established on their first two albums, The Gilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe – classic country songwriting combined with countercultural sentiments – was eventually copied by countless country rock bands, and you can hear Pete’s influence all over the early albums of The New Riders of the Purple Sage, Poco, The Eagles, and Pure Prairie League, and on The Grateful Dead’s American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead.  More than any other artist, Pete made the pedal steel guitar hip, and plenty of musicians took notice. That’s him on Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and Jackson Browne’s For Everyman and Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel, and a couple dozen other ‘70s SoCal classics.

I’ve since gone back to rediscover the classic pedal steel work in the songs of Merle Haggard, George Jones, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and many of the other country greats. But Sneaky Pete opened the door for me and showed me a room that wasn’t nearly as filled with kitsch as I originally thought.  He played with imagination and soul, and he made the pedal steel weep in whole new ways. I hope that someone, somewhere, is playing “Farther Along,” a traditional country tune that the Burritos and Pete virtually reinvented on Burrito Deluxe, and offering a toast for the journey.