Perfect Sound Forever, online music magazine presents... GENE CLARK A Byrd's Tale by Ray Robertson
(February 2014)
He was naturally learned: he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. --Dryden
Gene Clark was not an intellectual, and I mean that in the best possible way. Meaning, he didn't believe that having NPR on in the background while he drank his morning coffee made him any less bewildered about the shaky state of the world than the guy trying to tune in last night's baseball scores on his car radio while on route to eight hours of minimum wage servitude. Meaning he didn't let it drop to reporters that, oh yes, he'd read Rimbaud (in translation, of course), late nineteenth-century French Symbolist poetry, just one of the endlessly arcane literary influences plainly detectable in his musical oeuvre if one just dug deeply enough. Gene Clark, if he could be bothered to read at all, stuck to comic books and the Bible. And whether with the Byrds, Dillard & Clark, or on his own, no one wrote grieving minor-key masterpiece melodies married to Rorschach test tell-tale lyrics that even come close.
He was born Harold Eugene Clark in 1944 in Tipton, Missouri, the third of thirteen children, not quite a farm boy--his father graduated from fighting Hitler to working for the Swope Park, Missouri golf course--but certainly a country boy. The Clark family chopped the firewood that heated their home (a converted trolley barn) and milked the cows. Typically, the song most redolent of Gene's semi-rural childhood, "Something's Wrong," isn't a sentimental looking back, but an anguished update on life bereft of the simple somatic joys of youth. Speaking of his primary source of inspiration, Philip Larkin, another poet Gene Clark probably never heard of, said, "deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."
Gene wouldn't have read the Observer interview where Larkin was quoted saying this, but he would have known exactly what the prickly British poet was talking about.
He learned to play guitar from his father, and before he turned teenager, he could pull off respectable recreations of Hank Williams, Elvis, and the Everly Brothers, a pretty fair representation of what the best of his mature music has to offer: country soul, rock and roll desperation, superior melodicism. He joined the usual rock band--Joe Meyers and the Sharks--before forming the usual folk group, the sort of Kingston Trio knock-off that all ambitious greasers in the early 1960's eventually gravitated toward (Dylan only being different in having the superior taste to choose Woody Guthrie as his musical model and not the Limelighters). Spotted performing in Kansas City by a member of the New Christy Minstrels, he joined the ten member troupe and lent his voice to the group's very successful emasculation of popular folk songs, learning, if nothing else, to hate traveling to eighteen cities in nineteen days and how giving the people what they want is how you gain a steady paycheck and lose whatever integrity you ever had. Being a suit-and-tied singing puppet did take him to Winnipeg in February 1964 however. He would have heard the Beatles and had his life changed sooner or later anyway, but that was where he heard them first.
A couple of weeks later while on tour in Virginia, he fed coin after coin into a coffee shop jukebox trying to figure out how "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You" could sound so fresh and so alive and so joyful. He quit the Minstrels the next day and decided to move to Los Angeles and do what the Beatles did. He got lucky, as most unusually ambitious people tend to do. Jim McGuinn, another dropout from the wholesome folk factory, had noticed what Gene noticed--how the Beatles were playing ‘50's American rock and roll and R&B with an energy and elation that hadn't been heard since Elvis started doing what the Colonel told him to and Little Richard found the Lord, but through the harmony-bending folky filter of British skiffle--McGuinn was playing a Beatles tune on his twelve-strong acoustic on a slow night at the Troubadour when Gene asked him if he could sit down and play with him. Later, when David Crosby, hanging out at the same club (never underestimate the value of determined idleness) added his soaring high harmony tenor to the rich lead vocal blend of the other two, they knew they had something. Something rock, something folk, something new.
"Mr. Tambourine Man"--a rough Dylan demo that the Byrds' co-manager Jim Dickson convinced them to take a shot at covering--is the song that gave them their first hit and, in combining brains with a beat plus McGuinn's celestially chiming twelve-string electric Rickenbacker, helped give birth to the thing called "folk-rock," but it's Gene's originals that remain the most impressive items on the first two albums. Impressive because there's something compellingly different about them even now, 45 years later. This, in spite of the fact that all but a few are harmonically saturated in the sweetly sad minor-chord sounds of melancholy and self-doubt, Top-40 gloom tunes. Not that anyone who ever acquired a genuinely unique way of doing anything ever achieved it by consciously setting out to be unique. As David Crosby noted, Gene "didn't know the rules about music so he ignored them blithely and that made for very good writing. He used chord formations and ways of doing things that other people just hadn't done because they were used to doing it by the common rules. He had no idea what they were so he just did what felt good."
But even as the Byrds soared in popularity and Gene Clark the songwriter took flight right alongside (songs like "Set You Free This Time" and "She Don't Care About Time" showing the lyric-liberating influence of Dylan, resulting in words almost as interesting as his melodies), Gene Clark the man was experiencing more earthbound troubles. Because he had more songs on the first album than anyone else and was therefore making exponentially more royalty money than the others, McGuinn and Crosby, the other two songwriters, began to blockade his new compositions in favour of their own (generally inferior) material, an understandably frustrating situation for someone for whom it wasn't unusual to write a half dozen new songs a week.
Additionally, after already eroding his confidence as a rhythm guitar player to the point that Gene relinquished the instrument for a tambourine, Crosby was the archetypal entitled child of the Los Angeles well-off-- his father an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, and every time naughty young David was expelled from private school, his parents simply writing a check and enrolling him in another. Crosby began to openly mock Gene on stage and off for not being, you know, groovy enough. That Gene, a six foot two country boy who looked less like a rock and roll star than a collegiate linebacker, didn't simply punch the butterball brat in the face is testament to Gene's well-mannered upbringing. As with the New Christy Minstrels, he was also weary of living on airplanes and in hotels, with the added aggravation of having to elude screaming pubescent girls and teen-beat reporters wanting to know what his favourite colour was.
So he had his reasons for flying the Byrds' nest. But as is often the case, external annoyances weren't nearly as menacing as the mayhem swelling inside. Gene hated to fly--more than once had gotten off a plane literal moments before it was supposed to take off, sweat-soaked and ashen and loudly adamant that it was going to crash. But his infamous fear of flying was only a symptom of either what some of his brothers and sisters indentified in hindsight as a family-shared bi-polar condition, or, at the very least, a propensity for depression and attendant anxiety attacks (which frequently manifested themselves as crippling stage fright). Self-medicating his unacknowledged condition with alcohol and drugs (remembers band publicist Derek Taylor: "as for Gene, he would do anything. He'd have a glass in one hand and a pill in another"), the moodiness and excessive introspection were only exacerbated. There were also rumours of a go-go dancer and a disastrously bad acid trip. People who can't drink milk are called lactose intolerant; people who shouldn't dabble in consciousness-mining psychedelics are called Gene Clark.
Still, his first solo album, Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, was recorded in 1967 and released the same week his ex-bandmates' new album, Younger than Yesterday, appeared, guaranteeing diminished media attention for the new guy and a divided listenership. The baffling release date (both the Byrds and Gene were on the same record label) wasn't the only curveball the industry threw at him, nor would it be the last. The Gosdin Brothers added fine harmonies to Gene's new batch of songs, but that was the extent of it- they never even set foot in the studio while the album was being recorded, and clearly didn't deserve equal billing (they and Gene shared the same manager who thought he could boost two sagging careers with one album title). Gene wanted to call his first album--his declaration of independence from the Byrds--Harold Eugene Clark. Columbia Records told him no, that his real name simply wasn't catchy enough.
If Gene hadn't entirely shed his Beatles influences by the time of his inaugural solo record ("Elevator Operator" is not only transparently Beatles; it's transparently bad Beatles) and the though string-swamped "Echoes" is baroque rock without the rock, there was enough good material on Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers to announce a major, many-sided talent. "Tried So Hard" and "Keep on Pushin'" are right there at the advent of country-rock, "Is Yours is Mine" is poppy hippy without being hippy dippy, and "So You Say You Lost Your Baby" picks up lyrically where Gene left off with "Eight Miles High," his last Byrds songwriting credit, casually throwing out images and associations worthy of anything Dylan was coming up with at the time. But when Crosby's noxious personality finally got him booted out of the Byrds and it was apparent that Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers wasn't going to sell, Gene's management (also the Byrds management) convinced him to re-join the band, at least temporarily, just in time for an impending concert tour. Gene lasted three shows before breaking down in Minnesota and taking the train back to L.A. alone while the rest of the band flew on to New York . Byrds roadie Jimmy Seiter remembers the next time he saw Gene, having been sent by management to pick him up at the train station after his long trip home:
When I got there and met him at the train, he just walked past me at a fast pace, and he didn't say a word, got in a yellow cab and split to the office. Now, Gene was always afraid of small closed spaces. He never took elevators. We had this old fashioned elevator in the office building and Gene never took it. But for some reason, he did that day. When I arrived at the office the police are there and the Fire Department--someone is stuck in the lift. Gene is stuck in the lift for two- and-a-half hours. When they finally opened it he ran out, soaking with sweat, and split. I didn't see him for six or eight months after that. The inside of the elevator was totally scratched up where he'd tried to get out. You should have heard him screaming. Unbelievable. He was going crazy in that elevator. He screamed at the top of his lungs for almost an hour.
Despite the commercial failure of his debut album, Gene managed to secure a contract with the recently-formed A&M label, likely because of his Byrds pedigree. Regardless of how he got it, he set to work on a trunk full of new songs that weren't sounding in the studio like he heard them in his head when he stumbled upon an old friend. Doug Dillard was exactly the right person for Gene Clark to run into at this precise moment in his life. A recent former member of the legendary bluegrass Dillards, Doug's Beechwood Canyon home was a nightly magnet for every progressive picker in town, and Gene soon joined in on the fun, the number one requirement if whatever you're doing is going to have any lasting value. Doug Dillard was a brilliant banjo player and a flesh and blood reminder of Gene's country music roots, but, best of all, he was a skinny hillbilly Buddah, an always grinning good ol' boy from Gene's own Missouri who never worried about much of anything except keeping his instrument in tune and his pot stash full. Older than him by a full seven years, there was a lot Gene could learn from Doug.
Unfortunately, Doug Dillard was also exactly the wrong person for Gene Clark to run into at this precise moment in his life. Jim Dickson:
When Gene got with Douglas Dillard, things changed. Douglas was amazing. He came into town on a vodka drunk, then discovered grass, and kept drinking and doing grass. Then he discovered acid and you would find Douglas drinking, smoking dope, and doing LSD at the same time. How he survived it, I have no idea. But he's fine now. Sweetheart of a guy, but he had an influence on Gene. While it didn't hurt Douglas because he didn't care, Gene was way too high-strung and too complex to deal with that.
There's no recorded history of Friedrich Nietzsche espousing a love of banjos and fiddles alongside his touting of the Will to Power, but when he wrote that "one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star," he might have been talking about Gene and Doug, because the music that these two wild boys from the Show Me State put together that became 1968's The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark more than justified whatever hangovers and burgeoning bad habits either one acquired. Gram Parsons died younger and with a lot more flair so he gets better press, but regardless of who inched the country and rock worlds closer together first, it's who did it best that matters most, and as a songwriter in a musical genre he helped create, Gene Clark has no equal.
The original vinyl version of the pair's first effort runs less than thirty minutes, but every original tune is a Gene Clark gem. "She Darked the Sun" is bluegrass slowed down and made to grow up; "Don't Come Rollin'" is 1867 back porch picking meets 1967 Summer of Love wishful thinking; "With Care From Someone" is packed full of quintessential linguistic Clarkisms wed to some beguiling descending chord changes and marvelous three-part harmonizing; and when the whole thing wraps up nine songs later with the aforementioned "Something's Wrong," you'd like to cry but are too busy singing along. Even the album's sole cover--Lester Flatt's "Git In Line Brother"-- is transformed from a fundamentalist's cautionary tale into a joyous ode to jay-smoking bliss by the clever changing of one simple preposition in the song's title ("In" to "On") and the delightful subversion of the traditional banjo picking and acoustic guitar strumming with a honky tonk harpsichord run. Get it on, indeed.
Their album a pioneering masterpiece (the Flying Burrito Brothers' equally brilliant, if very different The Gilded Palace of Sin wouldn't appear until four months later), it was time to promote it live. For the band's debut at the Troubadour, Gene and Doug thought it a good idea to head next door to Dan Tanna's, an Italian restaurant, after the afternoon sound check and begin steadily drinking martinis until show time five hours later. At some point, it was also decided that this would be an excellent time to drop acid. The show began with Gene sitting on his amplifier facing the wall and went downhill from there, Doug merrily jumping up and down on his fiddle at the conclusion of the group's second song. Chastened by club management, the remainder of their week-long residency was greeted with enthusiastic reviews--as was their just-released album--but no one had a chance to hear them outside of the L.A. area because Gene refused to tour. Not surprisingly, band members began to desert, and without tour support, the album didn't sell except to the already converted.
This time the record company wasn't the bad guy--pre-music videos and the Internet, how else but hitting the road could a band spread the word, particularly a strange new compound word like country-rock?-- A&M still believed in the boys enough to let them record a stand-alone single, Gene's gorgeously grief-struck "Why Not Your Baby?" The single fared as poorly as the album did on the charts, and when Doug Dillard invited his girlfriend, Donna Washburn, to join the band, and the original songs Gene brought to the sessions for the next album were bypassed in favour of banal bluegrass covers (one of which the warbling Washburn butchers so badly it sounds like a corn pone parody; another of which even the vocally-inept Dillard attempts to sing), Gene knew it was time to be going (although not before managing to place three instant standards on what came to be the Through the Morning, Through the Night album: the dirge-like, faintly ominous title track; the archetypal country-rocking "Kansas City Southern;" and "Polly," another Clark classic of sorrow, longing, and unconventional chord changes). He left the city and some of his more self-injurious behavior behind and moved near the ocean and got married, and when he was ready to make music again, it was to record the greatest singer-songwriter album of the 1970's.
It's as utterly cliched as it is undeniably true: genuine artists don't choose their subjects; their subjects choose them. Whether it was the nearby sea or the centuries-old redwoods or the morning ocean breezes--or new love, a clear head, a clean start--1971's White Light is the warm sound of wood and wire and human hands careful to coax out just the right note to wed to just the right word. Primarily acoustic and sympathetically produced by Jesse Ed Davis, former Taj Mahal lead guitarist and session player superstar, White Light is a perfect Mendocino day made aurally even more perfect: gently rising golden morning ("Because of You," "The Virgin"); bright afternoon sunlight magnificence (the title track; "One in a Hundred"); full, goodnight yellow moon mirrored by a midnight Northern California ocean ("While My Love Lies Asleep," "1975").
Then there's "Spanish Guitar," another plane of splendor all together- Gene Clark at both his best and his most characteristic. A delicate but assured acoustic guitar opening; lyrics more impressionistic than literal, yet always marvelously evocative (how many songs can get away with employing the word "dissonant" in the first verse?); an achingly melancholic melody with a chorus even more irresistible. "Spanish Guitar" is a four minute and fifty-seven second mini-masterpiece that isn't marred by Gene's not untypical misuse of "whom" for "who" when singing of the beggar who thinks nowhere is far, but, rather, is only more indelibly stamped by the one thing that distinguishes all great art: the creator's undeniably stained but intrepidly singular soul.
Naturally, even though those who had the ears to hear it were astounded (the always hip Dutch rock critics voted it album of the year, for example), it didn't sell any better than any of his other records, and as a capping indignity, the record company somehow forgot to print the title of the album on the cover, leading confused listeners even today to refer to it as alternately White Light and "The Gene Clark" album. If a person wasn't already inclined toward self-stupefaction with drink and drugs...
A&M were, however, willing to finance the sessions for another album--a captivating hybrid of Dillard & Clark twang with White Light-style wood smoke mysticism--but not only ended up shutting things down before all of the songs were recorded, but refused to release what was completed, a crime against civilization that in a better world would be punishable by death from long-term exposure to Pablo Cruise records. Tunes like the existentially anthemic "Full Circle" and the intoxicatingly hazy "I Remember the Railroad" are, remarkably, matched in their brilliance by the covers, such as the elegiac reconstruction of Flatt and Scrugg's "Rough and Rocky" and his own, Byrds era "She Don't Care About Time," which gets slowed down and made even more stunningly yearning. Great players always want to play with great songwriters, and Sneaky Pete Klienow's innovative steel-guitar and Byron Berline's forlorn fiddle and Clarence White's always tasteful guitar only further enrich several remarkable compositions. Several remarkable compositions eventually released only in the Netherlands (where Gene was revered, Dylan his only peer), leading to the perfect absurdity--so unfortunately typical of so much of Gene's career--of North American fans having to buy expensive imported copies of what became the Roadmaster album, an album recorded in North America by a North American recording artist.
After contributing the only two good original songs to the Byrds' limp 1973 reunion album ("Remarkably, the best stuff was Gene Clark's," contends Byrds road crew member Al Hersh. "For a guy that couldn't string a sentence together, he could write some incredible lyrics"6), David Geffen temporarily rescued Gene from label-less limbo by signing him to his own Asylum Records--named as such because Geffen maintained he wanted to provide a sanctuary for ambitious recording artists from cold commercial storms. Utter bull****, of course--Geffen soon revealed his true turncoat colours by asking the justifiably proud producer of Gene's next L.P., Thomas Jefferson Kaye, what the hell Asylum was supposed to do with an album with only eight long songs on it and no obvious single? But this is what the majority of businessmen do--lie in order to make themselves feel better for wasting their lives, and then artists are advised to cease being surprised and disillusioned by such money-dictated mendacity, and, instead, steal as much cash from the ignorant sonofabitches as possible before the till gets slammed shut. To their credit, Gene and Tommy Kaye managed to steal a lot--the reported budget for their album was $100,000, a tremendous amount of money in 1973 for a musician with Gene's poor commercial track record. And not a penny of it was wasted on what was to be Gene's most elaborately produced (but never slick) album.
Grounded in solitude, but not ground down by isolation; enjoying a smoke or a shared bottle or two with friends and not having to apologize the next morning for what went down the blurry night before; attentive to nature's quiet lessons without turning into a back-to-the-earth ninny; a family man, finally--finally being a part of family of one's own choosing--but never forgetting that we're all, all of us, all alone together: the stars aligned, his ying shook hands with his yang, maybe he just got lucky. Anyway, Gene was ready to make his masterwork. He called it No Other, and he was right.
"Life's Greatest Fool" starts things off, and might (and maybe even was intended to) mislead: a jaunty country-rocking opener with a very catchy chorus, it's not until the words fall away from the melody that it's apparent that this is no ordinary twang tune. Life's winners and losers, and whether freedom or fate decides who is who, and what's the best seat in the stadium for watching the whole silly competition take place: Gene and his usual collection of stirring sidemen (Jesse Ed Davis's stinging electric guitar work and the wailing, choral-like contribution of the assembled background singers being particularly impressive) manage to keep your feet tapping while setting your soul sailing, a rare rock and roll double play. By the time the next cut, "Silver Raven," is even a minute old, the veil is lifted, you know why you were danced from there to here. No Other will thank you by crooning you and calm you or confound you and eventually send you singing back to yourself only to discover that you were right there all along. "Strength of Strings" is the best song ever written about the transformative, dwarfing power of music, "Some Misunderstanding" isn't about a relationship gone wrong and just might be about how feeling truly alive means necessarily flirting with dying, and "Lady of the North" is the only song on the entire album that directly addresses romantic love--in this case, a love that's too real, too intense, too exquisite to continue for very long. Not incidentally, Gene never sang better (not only instrumentally, but vocally, No Other is his densest LP). Or more ambitiously. In places, his reaching, soaring voice is the most distinctive--and compelling--instrument. It was the same voice, but it was a long, long way from what he'd been doing with it in the New Christy Minstrels.
This is when things begin to get ugly. His album another artistic success and commercial catastrophe, Gene didn't improve relations with his record label any by threatening to kick David Geffen's ass at Dan Tanna's one night for undervaluing and under promoting No Other, the trickle of support Asylum had been supplying to the album immediately turned off at the tap. Gene was drinking more than ever, and had added cocaine to his arsenal of self-obliteration, an ill-advised pharmaceutical decision for someone already perpetually anxious and agitated. But just as ruinous as what he was putting up his nose was what he was putting himself through because of No Other's lack of commercial success.
Gene grew up in a music business that operated by two very simple rules. One, a big-money, major label was the only place for a legitimate artist. Two, the way that one stayed signed to a big-money, major label was to have a hit record. This is what happened to The Byrds, after all, and was why Gene became increasingly confused, angry and bitter, when with stunning album after stunning album, his diminishing commercial worth failed to keep pace with his mounting critical reputation. Today, he'd be making records for an artist-friendly independent company, or perhaps even his own label, and using the internet and other social media to connect with the kind of open-minded, non-mainstream audience that every authentic artist needs in order to survive. Instead, he played the game--at the time, the only game in town--knowing, at least at some level, that the race was rigged and that he'd never rate anything more than an honourable mention. This situation made him confused about his place in the music industry, angry at whichever label he was with at the time for not doing enough to promote his work, and bitter with the public for not listening closely enough to what he was doing and for not supporting his vision. All of which made him a fairly miserable human being.
Miserable enough, in fact--and desperate enough to do what he could to change--to actively tour for the first time since he went solo nearly ten years before. This created its own set of problems--domestic problems, for example. Gene's wife, Carlie:
Pretty soon he started to change. When he started going on tour, he would come back and it was like his eyebrows were just sticking up and his eyes were rolling around in his head. It was just insane and I got to absolutely dread it when he was coming home . . . The real manic stuff was always when he had been drinking. He was the kindest, gentlest, most loving soul in the world as long as he wasn't drinking.
The Silverados, the three-piece band Gene assembled with himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica, Duke Bardwell on bass and banjo, and Roger White on electric guitar, was predicated by economy more than any new minimalist aesthetic, but the result was high-lonesome wonderful, as can be heard on the posthumous Silverado 1975 release--at least on the nights when Gene wasn't too drunk or stoned. Bardwell: "I think if someone is looking for a reason for him to get as ****ed up much as he did, then panic disorder's as good as any . . . I don't think he was comfortable with performing, but it was like a part of it that he really had to do. What else was he going to do? Sell cars?"
Adding to his growing sense of professional failure was the decidedly cut-rate nature of his touring. He was label-less again (and with a growing reputation within the industry as a money-losing loose cannon) and without any tour support. And while several of his far less talented former colleagues travelled by Lear jet to their sold-out concerts at hockey rinks and baseball stadiums, the Silverados took turns driving a used Dodge van to their modest club dates, unloaded and loaded out their own equipment, and were frequently confronted with small audiences disappointed not to hear a Byrds greatest hits show. But on a good night in front of a good audience--as thankfully captured on Silverado 1975--it was worth it, goose bumps and a humming head several decades on, as close to immortality as any of us is ever going to get.
And he kept writing--even at the otherwise miserable end, he was still writing new songs--and what he was coming up with was frequently first rate material. So productive was he, in fact, that several of the best songs from this period, like "Daylight Line" and "What Is Meant Will Be" and "Wheel of Time" were never recorded and released, testament as much to Gene's resilience and his deep need to keep making music as to his sizeable talent. Brother Rick Clark: "Gene was one of those people who couldn't sit down and discuss what he felt inside with most people. His pain came out through his art, his writing. And even though it was heartbreaking and emotional, he created some of his most beautiful songs and work through expressing those feelings."
If emotional pain and suffering were a large part of what was necessary to cook up good art, then Gene had all of the main ingredients to whip up one hell of a new album. Compounding his career troubles, Gene's wife had finally had enough, packed up the couple's two young boys and sued him for divorce. Abandoned by his family and without a record contract once again, he took the Silverados into the studio and got to work on spec, paying for the sessions himself. Soon however, Thomas Jefferson Kaye, back in the producer's chair, dismissed Roger and Duke and brought in various session musicians. On a purely musical level it wasn't a damning decision--old friend Doug Dillard's rollicking banjo powers "Home Run King" just fine, and Jerry McGee and Skunk Baxter were highly in-demand guitar players for a reason--but it did hint at what plagues both what became Two Sides of Every Story and every project Gene subsequently involved himself in, feel and instinct being nudged aside in favour of professionalism and calculated commercial ambition. It's easy to be a self-righteous snob about this, but then, it is helpful to remember that he was thirty-three years old and the radio had begun to sound like a foreign language and mortgage payments don't particularly care about feel and instinct.
Not that Two Sides of Every Story, which was eventually picked up by RSO after every other record label passed on it, doesn't contain some wonderful songs. "Home Run King" makes for a sprightly sing-a-long opener, and the doleful quartet of original songs on side two that explore the breakdown of his marriage are all quintessential, melodically beguiling brooding Gene. But the remake of Dillard & Clark's "Kansas City Southern" which is meant to sound "contemporary" circa 1977 sounds instead like a bored bar band circa anytime, and the cover of "Marylou" dresses up an already weak song in an unfortunate, faux-50's arrangement (N.B.: If you're going to sell out, be sure to sell). Even the four core ballads on side two are string-sweetened to the point of borderline syrupy, and the album's most effective cover, James Talley's "Give My Love to Marie," is nearly smothered in violins. Gene's voice--particularly when wedded to a song as sadly powerful as Talley's--doesn't need a string section to make its point.
The next time Gene recorded was as a third of McGuinn, Clark and Hillman, a not-so-super group assembled because Capitol Records had a hunch that three-ex Byrds could replicate a portion of the success of one of their many imitators, the Eagles. All three members were professionally stalled, and the upfront money from the label was too tempting to pass up, and if by the time they entered Miami's Criteria Studios to record their first album, Gene and McGuinn were so estranged they were using roadies to communicate, and Hillman was still sulking because Gene's name was going to come before his on the album cover, it was at least a relief for everyone involved to be making music again.
As for the music itself, Capitol Records had a substantial investment to make back, so they did the only sensible corporate thing--put the band in the studio with a pair of producer brothers who would give the album the hip and happening disco sound that had recently rescued the Bee Gees from commercial irrelevancy. It's unnecessary to individually examine Gene's four contributions to the album for the same reason that eleven turds in a toilet bowl are, whether considered separately or cumulatively, just a bowlful of ****.
If the songs Gene recorded during this time are, to anyone who loves Gene Clark's music, quite literally unlistenable, what he was up to personally is noteworthy, if for all the gone-wrong reasons. Road manager Al Hersch recalls how during this period:
Gene was into [heroin] big time. Terri [Gene's new drug-dealing girlfriend] had this little metal strong box. I never got to look at it firsthand, but there was a famous incident one night. They got into a horrendous fight, they were always fighting, and my recollection of it was the two of them running down the street stark naked with this strong box in this incredibly wealthy neighborhood in Miami and Gene tackling her right in the street.
"Near the end Gene was barely able to finish a sentence, he was such a mess," Hillman remembers.
The 80's were mostly a decade of demos, debauchery, and increasing disillusion. The majority of the songs Gene recorded during this time (as can be heard on a seven CD bootleg and on 1984's Firebyrd, recorded for the small Takoma label), are lyrically thin and musically mediocre, and made worse by being marred by archetypal 80's production values, all three being sad signs of Gene aspiring toward contemporary relevancy but only managing to sound like what he most feared, a has-been willing to do anything to have a hit. There were periodic attempts to get clean, some more successful than others, and an unfortunate, debasing decision to front something called "Twentieth Anniversary Tribute to the Byrds." If clubs were unwilling to pay Gene Clark-solo artist properly, they were happy to book what was essentially a Byrds tribute band for the growing Baby Boomer nostalgia crowd. For someone who'd been attempting to escape the shadow of his former group's enormous wing span for nearly two decades, it must have been artistically humiliating, if not financially rewarding.
No matter how messed up he got on drugs or alcohol during this time, though, or how he frequently compromised his enormous musical gift, he still had his supporters, some of whom were admirers of not only his considerable backlog of wonderful songs, but of him as a human being. Michael Hardwick, a talented guitar and pedal steel player who was part of the Firebyrds touring band, recalls how Gene:
barely had management . . . barely had bookings. I got paid a lot of money with Jerry Jeff [Walker, his previous employer] and I just walked away to play with Gene... I had already worn out two copies of No Other. I know I was present during certain problems, he had his problems and I was there when some unpleasant things went on and everybody has lots of stories about Gene, but I was also there and I saw a real goodness in Gene... He had a good heart. I remember we were loading out in Santa Fe , the very first show [Hardwick played with the band], and he grabbed my amplifier and he's carrying it out behind the club and he almost slipped in the snow. And I said to him, "Oh, you don't need to do that, I'll carry it," and he goes, "Ah, I don't mind." And I'm thinking, `Here's Gene Clark of the Byrds carrying my amp out, loading out after the club's closed, stomping around in the snow.' The other guys were all inside having drinks.
Despite suffering from an ulcer so severe it would eventually result in Gene having the majority of his stomach lining removed, when he decided to record a duet album with Textones front woman Carla Olson toward the end of the ‘80's, he was clearly moving in the right direction, musically and otherwise. Abetted by being simply too broke to score hard drugs or indulge in weeklong binges, he was sober enough to begin putting his neglected finances and health in order, filing his taxes for the first time in years and even going so far as to start working out. And while So Rebellious a Lover can't be called classic Gene, it was the best music he'd been a part of making in a decade. Only "Gypsy Rider" rouses vintage Gene Clark goose bumps (and there are far too many covers, even when they're wonderful, as with "Fair and Tender Ladies"), but the singing is committed and passionate, the harmonies Olson lends to Gene's lead vocals are superb, and, best of all, the production is as uncluttered and unprocessed as music could be during the 80's. Released today, with a name roots producer like T-Bone Burnett attached to it, it would have been the honest segue back into public consciousness that Gene so craved. As it was, it appeared and disappeared faster than you can say ‘I want my MTV.'
What killed him before he could make the follow-up LP Olson and he were planning is cruelly ironic to a degree that rarely exists outside of bad movies and maudlin novels. Justifiably concerned that the "Twentieth Anniversary Tribute to the Byrds" was cheapening their former band's image, McGuinn, Crosby, and Hillman briefly reassembled to perform a few concerts in an attempt to bolster their lawsuit intended to keep the Byrds name off the road. At one of these shows, long-time Byrds fan Tom Petty was in attendance and was inspired enough to decide to record a song from the group's rich catalogue for his next album, a sure-fire royalty bonanza for whomever the lucky writer turned out to be. Unfortunately, it wasn't one of the three ex-Byrds performing that night at the Ventura Theatre, but Gene, whose "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" was included on Petty's massive-selling Full Moon Fever album. The Byrds helped give him his start, the Byrds would help finish him off.
With the promise of regular royalty checks that would eventually amount to well over $100,000, Gene wasted little time in getting to work spending his windfall, no one more gluttonous than a starving man. He bought a Cadillac and a motorcycle, but mostly he bought drugs, crack cocaine in particular. When it was discovered he had throat cancer, the fun turned ugly, Gene frequently disappearing with just his pipe and the sort of Hollywood hangers-on who always manage to attach themselves to someone determined to enjoy himself to death. At the end, he was down to 130 pounds and the Petty money was almost gone and quart bottles of vodka were where he spent the majority of his remaining days.
The coroner ruled his death heart failure, which really means he wore himself out. Gene had wanted to be buried in St. Andrew's cemetery, just outside Tipton , Missouri , and his family made sure that his wishes were respected. What's engraved on his headstone is simple and honest and undeniably moving, just like the man underneath it. It reads:
HAROLD EUGENE CLARK Nov.17 1944 May 24 1991 NO OTHER
________________________________________________
The actual writing of a song usually comes in the form of a realisation. I can't contrive a song. Ð GENE CLARK
