Gene Clark & Carla Olsen - So Rebellious a Lover

So Rebellious a Lover (1987) ****

A surprising late-period comeback that showed that even a few short years from his premature death in 1991, Clark still possessed a surfeit of talent.  Of course he had more than a little help from his friends, as one tell from the billing and cover featuring the lovely Ms. Olson, a husky-voiced alt.country-punker from the Textones who reminds me a bit of Lucinda Williams in voice, looks, and songwriting style.  This is a duet album in the truest sense of the word, being more or less evenly split between solo Carla showcases, solo Gene showcases, and tunes where they duet and harmonize in tandem.   The music?  As you'd expect from the blue-denimed cover, it's straight-up country rock, with a relaxed and understated band loping along pleasantly and professionally, with the occasional touch of instrumental color (Chris Hillman cameos on gorgeous mandolin on "Gypsy Rider").  Likewise, the songs themselves (in this kind of music, these are the focus, after all) are a well-chosen and pleasing mixture of traditional standards, Olson-penned tunes, and Clark-penned tunes, again roughly split proportionally three-ways.  What it adds up to is a first-rate country-rock album, modest in ambition but effortlessly achieving all it sets out to do.

Of the covers, their poignant duet of Woody Guthrie's eulogiac "Deportees" suits the standard far better than the Byrds' sprightliness did, and a reworking of the traditional Olde English ballad, "Fair and Tender Ladies," is nearly as breathtaking in its sad loveliness as "Scarborough Fair," though not nearly as ethereal.  John Fogerty's "Almost Saturday Night," gets a jaunty bluegrass reading that betters the somewhat abrasive original, and to bring matters full circle, Clark performs a soulful reading of another dead Byrds' song, "Hot Burrito #1" (here wisely renamed "I'm Your Toy").  It doesn't erase the memory of the definitive Gram Parsons original, but it's tastefully excellent.  And then there's Joe South's "Don't It Make You Want To Go Home," which is rather....hicky.  But not in a terribly bad way!  Actually pretty good.

But let's move on to the originals.  Olson's "The Drifter," and "Every Angel in Heaven," are compellingly literate and intelligent examples of Poetry-Major Grad-School Dropout country-rock (see: Williams, Lucinda; Kristofferson, Kris), compelling story-songs; but "Are We Still Making Love," is icky-some Harlequin-Romance-Reading Housewife country.  And so now we move on to the tunes you're really waiting to dig in this album for:  the small handful of Gene Clark originals.  Only "Gyspy Rider," truly earns its place in the canon, honestly, but how it does:  turn the lights down low, close your eyes, and drift away - this song is better than a lonesome midnight ramble.  "Del Gato," tells another fine story-song, though melodically it's a bit too similar to "Give My Love to Marie," from a previous album; and "Why Did You Leave," is sad and lovely, but eh - not much more to say about it. 

Gene Clark - Firebyrd

Firebyrd (1984) ***

Sadly, the '80s got to Gene the same as they did to every other '60s dinosaur, but since Clark was on a low, low budget (and does it sound like it) the results aren't nearly as bad as they could have been.  On first listen, you might be forgiven for thinking you've picked up the wrong CD by mistake, as the low-rent sound and performances make it sound like one of those generic re-recordings of Classic Songs By Classic Artists that were floating around during the times - y'know, the Temptations as performed by the California Raisins, with a tinny glossy sheen shorn of the passion and a tinny glossy drum sound.  At first I wasn't quite sure if it was Clark at all, as even his trademark shakey baritone sounded distressingly generic on the harmonies, but relax - it is him.  This is a funny little album, and I do mean little:  at only nine tunes, four of which are quite unnecessary covers, it fits the definition of skimpy.  But '80s Gene Clark fans had to make do with what little (very little) he had to offer that decade, and considering the scarcity of post-'70s Gene Clark material, this is grudgingly essential for diehards.  Bad news first:  the remakes of Byrds classics are OK enough ("Mr. Tambourine Man," "Feel a Whole Lot Better,") but will never, ever, never displace the sterling originals and are beyond superfluous, the spitting definition of totally non-essential.  "If I Could Read Your Mind," likewise is a fair reading, but I've already got Gordon Lightfoot's (a god amongst moosejockeys) greatest hits; "Vanessa," isn't that bad, but I have no idea what the original sounds like.  Of the five remaining Clark originals, "Rodeo Rider," is too hickily country for my tastes, and "Blue Raven," is a less successful sequel to "Silver Raven," in which Clark rejoinds his darkly lit No Other classic with a tune swearing to his love that these days he's in a sunnier mood.  That leaves three Clark winners:  "Something About You Baby," "Rain Song," and "Made For Love," which land him back on his feet as a fine pop-rock/country songwriter.  Like I said - mighty skimpy.  But this album is a never less than pleasant listen, and if it's short & lightweight, who doesn't mind hearing "Feel a Whole Lot Better," for the 50th time, even in this alternate '80s version?

Gene Clark - Two Sides To Every Story

Two Sides to Every Story (1977) ***

After the excessive ambition of No Other, Clark returned after several years' layoff with its polar opposite:  Two Sides reeks with non-ambition, and thus goes down much easier than its more difficult predecessor.  It is nothing more or less than a straightforward country album with a few mild (read: mild) pop and rock leanings (and the latter only shows up on the swangin' Elvis-boogie of "Marylou," which is gratingly suckjobby).  So Clark wanted to issue a mainstream country album in the mid-'70s after the commercial debacle of No Other, and get back to his Kansas small town roots after all that high falutin' rock star psychedelia.  It didn't work, and this album still remains unissued on CD after it bombed even worse.  I suppose after the unsuccessful ploy for massive ambition that this was the logical direction for Clark to recoup his standing:  this is a very modest album of moderate pleasures.  It certainly isn't the place to start if you're wondering where the genius of Gene Clark lies, because there's little of that in evidence here.  It's simply a modest collection of ten country songs, and by the standards of mainstream country albums, it's clearly superior to most.  This is Gene Clark, after all - how could it be any less than a pleasurable listen?  The inconsistencies are less glaring than on his previous straight country albums, perhaps because he focuses more on the soft balladic tear-in-my-beer side of country than hicksville stomps.  That doesn't stop his cover of Leadbelly's "In the Pines," from sounding like a Dillard & Clark outtake, but most of the other tunes consist of soggily beer-soaked honky tonk laments - George Jones country, if you will.  The songs do feel soggy, as it's clear that Clark's talent is slowly fading away, but it's a gradual, graceful fade.  The centerpieces are situated side by side in the center of the album:  the lovely "Sister Moon," which sounds like an outtake from No Other and is the closest Clark approaches mystical pop territory; and the album's clear highlight, a desolate reading of James Talley's "Give My Love to Marie."  At six minutes, it has the feel of an offhand country epic in its grim, glacial pace, and is the only track that appears to reach for ambition:  this wrenching tale of the cruel pressures working life have set upon a coal miner's black lungs will leave you close to tears if you have any affection for country laments or the plight of the working man at all.  The rest of the songs feel anti-climactic in comparison; as for those - well, there's not much to say about them.  Which isn't to say that this isn't, in fact, a fine collection of country songs in a low, modest key.  Just be prepared for the mood of underwhelming and everything'll work out fine.

Gene Clark - No Other

No Other (1974) ****1/2

Man, this is one weird album.  Not so much the music, which is actually fairly conventional; it just feels like a weird one, for several reasons.  The music is considerably removed from Clark's usual rough-hewn but genteel country-rock:  it is excessively produced and overarranged, with gospelly backup singers and a cast of cameo musicians that seemingly included every session cat in L.A. at the time (perhaps they had the same coke dealers).  Yet it doesn't feel overproduced or excessively cluttered despite the fact that the music is obviously cluttered and at more than a few points bombastically overblown.  Perhaps the closest comparison is if Led Zeppelin had taken the style of "No Quarter," and decided to run with that mood for an entire album - and yeah, if comparing Gene Clark to Led Zeppelin sounds out there, that's to underscore just how weird this album feels.  While the underlying tunes appear to be rooted in basic country-rock, Clark slathers on elements of gospel, glammy pop, and what I can only describe as 'heavy psychedelia'.  Thus, it sounds like nothing else in the Clark canon, and one gets the sense that Clark clearly intended this to be his magnum opus, a great statement encompassing various styles of his own personal synthesis of Gram Parsons' "Cosmic American Music".

It didn't work out that way, and to understand why this album fails just short of the masterpiece it was intended to be, one has to look at its history.  Recorded under a cloud of cocaine and an excessive recording budget (how much went to the lavish production and how much to the musicians' dealers is anyone's guess), No Other was originally intended as a sprawling double album, but Asylum Records balked and issued a painfully truncated eight-song version instead.  A commercial and critical flop, the album wasn't even released on CD until 26 years later, and caveat emptor, without the missing tracks.  Thus, the only version still available is the eight-song cycle, which makes this album seem oddly short for an album with such overblown scope.  It's as if they cut The Wall or whatever sprawling double album rock magnum opus in half - sure, they might have cut out some dross, but it just doesn't feel right.  It's comparing the two-hour version of Once Upon a Time in America that was released in theaters and rightfully reviled, to the masterwork that the uncut four-hour version turned out to be.

So, sigh, we must make do with what we have.  Only one song clocks in at under four minutes, with "Some Misunderstanding," running over eight - and it predictably does meander, but not as much as you'd expect from the length.  So the songs are bloated, but the bloat fits the ambition of the album well.  The melodies are translucent rather than direct, but after they sink in prove to be consistently among Clark's finest, while the lyrics - well, I did mention that this feels like a very under the influence album recorded by a large group of coked-out L.A. session musicians, didn't I?  Which makes the beautiful, "From a Silver Phial," all the more powerful, I suppose, as its drug casualty observation obviously comes from close and direct experience.  The album's probable highlight, the indescribably haunting, "Silver Raven," appears to be about some drug experience, as well; appears because Clark's metaphorical obtuseness prevents the listener from grasping what he's trying to get at on certain songs, not that he isn't lyrically direct and poetically forceful on certain others ("The True One," "Life's Greatest Fool").  But it's not so much the occasional lyrical references as the hazy, sepia-toned feel of the performances and unconventional song structures on tracks like the weirdly, creepily, flakily bombastic "Strength of Strings":  this album is as coked-out California pop as classic Fleetwood Mac.  Perhaps it's not surprising, however, that brilliant as much of this music is, it was a commercial failure:  the title track, which oddly and creepily admixtures a soul gospel backup chorus to a Bowie-esque creeping synthline hook, is the closest to single material on here, and it clearly would've been a bit too 'out of it' to be a hit in 1974.   Maybe baby, they'll see fit to release the rest of the sessions and we'll finally to be able to judge Clark's attempted double album as the sprawlingly complete mess it was intended to be.  Until then, we'll have to accept this sprawlingly incomplete mess as a poor man's substitute.

Gene Clark - Roadmaster

Roadmaster (1972) ***1/2

After a string of commercial failures (if artistic triumphs), Gene Clark was such a commercially dubious proposition that the record company only released this in Holland, because the Dutch were apparently the only countrymen with ears wise enough for White Light to sell like tulips in Dikeland.  It's an uneven album of odds and ends, with material culled from several different sessions over several different years.  The opener, "She's the Kind of Girl," sounds like it was written by the Clark of a decade earlier, as it's the kind of simpler teenbeat fare fit for the Byrds '65 - and it's unsurprising that it is, indeed, an outtake from the Byrds' failed 1973 reunion.  It's delightful Beatlesque folk-pop and gets the album rolling off on a good start.  The next track, "One in a Hundred," had appeared in a more downbeat version on his 1971 solo album, but reappears here in a sprightlier reunified Byrds version; "Full Circle Song," is another Byrds cut, one that would turn up a year later on the Byrds' s/t.  "Here Tonight," and "In a Misty Morning," are pop-country ballads featuring the Flying Burrito Bros. (sans Gram Parsons) as backup band, and are quite good, though the gloop of syrupy strings on "In a Misty Morning," drag it down a bit.  So, the first five songs are fine examples of Clark and his songcraft in strong form, and crucially containing one virtue that White Light lacked - diversity.  From then on the parts that this longplayer was cobbled together from start to creak.  "Rough and Rocky," is a fair Flatt & Scruggs cover, slowed down to mournful soulfulness, but the title track finds Clark in strutting cock-of-the-road posturing, a style that doesn't suit his gentlemanly, taciturn persona at all.  The soggy remake of the classic Byrds B-side, "She Don't Care About Time," slowed down several tempos, doesn't work and comes off as unnecessary padding.  The other three ballads that close off the record are mostly gloopy and forgettable pop-country with strong gospel feels. though they have their lyrical and melodic moments.  Despite its unevenness - unsurprising given the hodgepodge nature of the source material - another solid winner from one of classic rock's most perplexingly underrated singer-songwriters.  Almost as perplexing as how a tune as first-rately Byrdsy as "She's the Kind of Girl," got left off their underwhelming 1973 reunion album.  Why, McGuinn?  Tell me why?  Why?

Gene Clark - White Light

White Light (1971) *****

First let me point to the obvious flaw:  all nine of these tracks, with the exception of the sprightly title track, cover the same stylistic ground at a similarly slow pace in an overwhelmingly melancholy mood.  That is to say, this album is a mood piece, and so points should not be deducted for that, as it's one of the landmark LPs of the singer-songwriter movement of the late '60s/early '70s.  Yes, there is a noticable Dylan (John Wesley Harding-era) influence, but who didn't?  Neil Young?  Lou Reed?  John Prine?  Leonard Cohen?  Nope, no overt Dylan influences I can see in those artistes, nada nicht  沒有 ничто zip.  So, those two problems out of the way (it all sounds the same and breaks no innovative ground), what we have is an album of exquisite gorgeousness.  Like all moody mood albums you have to be in the mood for it, and that mood is moody:  Clark's forte is tortoise-paced melancholy pop-country ballads brooding on failed romance, and here you get seven A- to A+ level of'em (I already mentioned the title track as an exception, and the other is a cover of Dylan's "Tears of Rage," that matches/outshines the Band's depending on whether you like the Band at all).  The lyrical contents are generally generalized to abstraction, though it's often pretty clear what he's vaguely paintbrushing at - another failed love affair, eh?  ("With Tomorrow," "Because of You").  So I won't dwell on the lyrics.  The arrangements are sparse but not starkly so, based around Clark's acoustic guitar strummings with substantial fills from organs feeding the warmth; this is a mightily pleasant album to listen to sound-wise.  At nearly five breathtakingly lovely minutes, "For a Spanish Guitar," is sonically the stand-out track with the skilled pluckings of said instrument and lonesome harmonica adding to the aura of lush but stripped-down gorgeousness.  I once recommended this album to a friend who was into Gram Parsons and Nick Drake as a midpoint amalgamating the best of both, and that's a fair summation I might as well stand by.  With the focus squarely on the intimate delivery of his songs and fortunately armed with some of the strongest material in his catalogue, naturally this is the highlight of Clark's career and though a commercial bomb at the time, has gone down in recent MOJO-subscriber reissue-nerd years as a lost five-star classic essential for rediscovery.  And unlike a lot of "lost classics", it really does earn its belatedly feted reputation.

Dillard & Clark - Through the Morning, Through the Night

Through the Morning, Through the Night (1969) **1/2

This isn't really a bad album if you lower your expectations to that of a mainstream '60s country record (note I did not say country-rock).  But from Clark we expect better.  One of the problems is that there are only four Gene Clark originals, and of those, only "Polly," is up to his usual darkly-lit standard.  "Corner Street Bar," in which he inexplicably adopts a snooty faux-upper-twit British accent, may indeed be the worst song he's ever written, a dreadfully failed attempt at comic barroom sleaze.  Of the two remaining Clark songs, "Kansas City Southern," is a pretty good mid-beat country song about that traditional country theme, train hoppin', and the title track is soggily maudlin but prettily melodic in Clark's by-then-patented glacially-paced tortured ballad mode.  The rest are shitkicker covers.  There's some shitkicking gospel ("I Bowed My Head and Cried Holy"), some chirpy bluegrass ("Rocky Top"), some maudlin honky-tonk balladry ("Four Walls"), and surprisingly, a cover of Lennon/McCartney's "Don't Let Me Down," that closes off the LP.  It doesn't work, because Clark's shaky vocals lack the gritty aluminum howl of Lennon's, whose vocal hook made half the original song's appeal.  Since there are only four Gene Clark penned tunes and none of those are soul-wrenchingly essential, this is recommended only to Clark completists.  But as luck would have it, this little LP is paired on a two-fer CD with the first Dillard & Clark album, so you get to hear it for free if you pick up Fantastic Expedition.  And if you cherry-pick the good songs from both LPs with the CD programmer, you've got yourself a bonafide four-star Gene Clark album.  The band split shortly after this commercial dud of an album, and so by the next review we rejoin Gene Clark's solo career proper.

Dillard & Clark - Fantastic Expedition

The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark (1968) ***1/2

Historically this may be the first country-rock album, but who really cares about that - the style seems to evolved so naturally, from the Byrds' initial ventures into the territory, that it hardly matters and who-got-there-firsts are difficult to pinpoint as so many musicians were working in the style.  Fronting a duo with banjo man Doug Dillard, the album is evenly split between traditional melancholy Clark balladry and more straight-up country songtwangs, and that's the problem:  for every lovely heartbreak as "Train Leaves Here This Morning," (covered enough that it sounds like and deserves to be a standard) there's a shitkicker like the hillbilly gospel stomp, "Git It On Brother," that does absolutely nothing for this small-town slicker 40 years removed from '60s rednecks.  Perhaps I'm not being fair, but music is subjective, and the country songs do less than nothing for me.  That said, the surfeit of excellent songwriting when Clark's in the mood to brood pop-melodically over failed romances (as opposed to kicking the shit or praising jay-zus) allows me to overlook the country leanings.  Yeah, I know, I'm supposed to appreciate those leanings as groundbreaking, but country is simply a genre that Gram Parsons handled a lot better; Clark's forte is pop, most decidedly so.  On the other hand, the countryish songs are the only rousing tunes here; with the exception of the A-side, "Why Not Your Baby," which combines banjos and syrupy strings to slightly odd but pleasant enough effect, the pop songs are all crawling ballads.  "Why Not Your Baby," is the only track that would have fit in the style of his debut solo album, as Clark ventures into more lethargic melancholy territory for many of the other tracks.  Some listeners might fall asleep without getting past the glacial pace of the opener, "Out on the Side," but just bite into the darklit thrummings of the haunted "The Radio Song," which finds Clark driving the backstreets of Memphis on a Kentucky rain night.  Speaking of the Elvii, the album ends with an incongruous cover of "Don't Be Cruel," that doesn't fit in here at all - as a rocker, Clark makes a great country-rocker.  Guitarist Bernie Leadon later went on to help found the Eagles, but don't let this album setting those foundations hold you against it; it's a really good album, better than I've let on so far, as several of Clark's ballads are dash-darn essential.  It's just that several of the hick numbers are just too hicky for me.

Gene Clark - Echoes

Echoes (1967) ****1/2

Gene Clark's debut solo album is actually more consistent than any album the actual Byrds released in their lifetime, an entire record filled with none but good songs and none the Dylan and suchlike covers that the Byrds had been for so long over-reliant upon.  This CD is actually a repackaging of the 1967 Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers LP, with the first six bonus tracks distractingly added to the front of the CD - and even worse, they're totally extraneous, consisting of nothing more than six randomly chosen Byrds songs that bear the Clark songwriting credit, and having nothing at all to do with the solo material on this issue.  The three bonus tracks tacked on to the end are more fitting, consisting of a pair of brilliantly performed covers, "The French Girl," and "Oh Colombe," that the liner notes accurately peg as sounding like the Left Banke gone folk rock, in addition to an excellent acoustic demo of "So You Say You Lost Your Baby." 

The eleven songs sandwiched between that constitute the original album are uniformly excellent in songcraft and performance, with Clark alternately issuing soundalikes of his old band ("Is Yours Is Mine") to '66-era Beatles ("Elevator Operator") to the sort of country-rock he, along with Gram Parsons, would pioneer ("Tried So Hard") to bristling, jauntily upbeat folk jingle ("Think I'm Going To Feel Better") to over-orchestrated late '60s strings'n'things McArthur Park melodrama (the title track).  None of the songs are up to the caliber of "Feel a Whole Better," or "Eight Miles High," but what is?  During his tenure in the Byrds, Clark proved himself an intermittently decent songwriter capable of delivering three or four good songs per album; no one would have suspected the depth of his songwriting talent based on such a meager track record, until this album blossomed his talent once and for all.  It may or may not be his best solo album; up until the mid-'70s, he rarely released a bad one.