(Credits: Far Out / Gram Parsons / Album Cover / Warner Bros.)
Sat 7 February 2026 23:30, UK
During my senior year of college, my roommate and I decided to adopt a pet tortoise to serve as our apartment’s resident mascot.
With little discussion, we dubbed the little guy ‘Sneaky Pete’ – not just because it’s an undeniably appropriate name for a turtle, but because we knew it would give us some opportunities to tell people about the man to whom we were paying homage: the country rock legend Sneaky Pete Kleinow.
Probably best known as a member of the fabled Flying Burrito Brothers alongside ex-Byrds Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons, Kleinow was a master of the pedal steel guitar and one of the most trusted session players in Los Angeles through the 1970s, recording with everyone from Joni Mitchell and John Lennon to Frank Zappa, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, and Leonard Cohen.
When Kleinow died in 2007 at the age of 72 after a battle with Alzheimer’s, you would certainly assume that every obituary would begin by listing off that same powerhouse CV, but incredibly enough, music was just one of Sneaky Pete’s creative endeavours, and maybe not even his most accomplished one.
In the 1960s, before joining the Burrito Brothers, the Indiana-born Kleinow was spending most of his time in LA working in television, specifically as a visual effects artist. This included a stint on the crew of the cult sci-fi series The Outer Limits, as well as a prominent role as a stop-motion animator on two of the biggest children’s programmes of the era, Davey & Goliath and Gumby. Being a musician in his spare time, he also wrote the Gumby theme music.
The Gumby Show, 1956. (Credits: Far Out / Fox Entertainment)
If his special effects career had ended there, it would still be a fun footnote, but Kleinow never really gave it up, even when he was the most in-demand steel guitarist in Southern California.
In the mid ‘70s, Kleinow would spend his daylight hours animating dinosaurs for the TV series Land of the Lost, then head over to the studio to lay down some sweet country steel for a new Harry Nilsson or Carly Simon track. Somehow, neither aspect of his work was negatively impacted by the other, and by the ‘80s, Sneaky Pete was part of the effects team on some of the biggest movies of the era: The Empire Strikes Back, The Terminator, Gremlins, and Army of Darkness, among them. He even won an Emmy for Special Visual Effects in 1983 for his work on the TV movie The Winds of War.
Kleinow’s parallel lives didn’t necessarily have a lot in common creatively, except for his own consistent status behind the scenes—a vital contributor but never a household name, outside of certain university flats with tortoise mascots.
As a steel guitar player, Kleinow was one of the undeniable pioneers of country-rock. While his Burrito-mate Gram Parsons developed a considerably larger cult following off the strength of heartfelt classics like ‘Sin City’ and ‘Hot Burrito #1’, Kleinow helped give those songs a lot of their texture and mood. On many tracks, he experimented with channelling the steel guitar through fuzzboxes and Hammond Leslie amps, giving the traditionally weepy instrument an edgier, more dynamic sound.
As country-rock came into prominence in the ‘70s, Kleinow’s contributions made immediate and major impacts on the way the steel guitar was played across the board. Everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Eagles took notes, and during the alt-country boom of the ‘90s, bands like the Lemonheads, Wilco, and the Jayhawks began singing Pete’s praises anew.
Sadly, neither Sneaky Pete the man, nor the tortoise, are still with us, but the world is a better place for having hosted the pair of them.
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