T
HEDOWNWARDTRAJECTORY of the most gifted and prolific songwriter The Byrds ever had is one of the truly puzzling career
declines in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. Darkly handsome as a tambourine-smacking front man, but lacking both the guitar chops to compete with Roger McGuinn and the thick skin to ward off the postured manoeuvring of David Crosby, Clark nonetheless distinguished himself by the age of 21 as a master of mid-tempo melancholia, penning such Byrds classics as ‘Here Without You’ and ‘Set You Free This Time’. Add to these his signature song ‘I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better,’ the wistful proto-power pop of ‘The World Turns All Around Her’ and ‘She Don’t Care About Time’, not to mention his role as principal songwriter of the perennially hip psychedelic compilation standby ‘Eight Miles High,’ and you’ve got the makings of a star.
Of course, it was not to be. Gene Clark never again reached the heights of fame he had experienced during his tenure with The Byrds. Driven out of the band by equal pressures within and without, Clark embarked on a solo career that now appears to have been doomed from the get-go. His first solo album, inexplicably co-credited to Gosdin Brothers Vern and Rex (who were conscripted to provide backing vocals, nothing else), was the victim of poor planning on the part of Columbia Records, who saw fit to release it at roughly the same time in 1967 as The Byrds’ impressive display of chutzpah and circle-the-wagons solidarity, Younger Than Yesterday. Now regarded as a strong, mature debut, but at the time lost in the attendant PR shuffle favouring his former band mates, Gene Clark With The Gosdin Brothers failure to sell was an early indicator of Clark’s frustrating tendency toward underachievement, at least in terms of being seen as a viable commercial act. A two-year alliance with Doug Dillard in The Dillard & Clark Expedition produced two similarly ignored (but now highly regarded) albums of country-bluegrass-rock, both of which were infused with Clark’s idiosyncratic mid-tempo tunes of romantic longing offset by a graduate shift towards philosophical questioning. (Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ recent multi-Grammy Award-winning Raising Sand album features two Gene Clark originals from Dillard & Clark’s second effort: ‘Polly’ and the title track ‘Through The Morning, Through The Night’, providing at least a glimmer of hope that Clark’s oeuvre might someday soon be rediscovered by both critics and fans alike.)
More solo albums followed, including ’71’s starkly elegant White Light and his towering solo masterpiece from ’74, No Other. Both were unmitigated commercial disasters. Lacklustre sales and a severe critical drubbing in Rolling Stone ensured his third underachieving solo release of the decade, ’77’s Two Sides To Every Story, would also be his final for a major label. And then there were those various brief reformations of The Byrds, including the much-maligned Byrds cash-grab on Asylum in ’73 and the ill- advised, disco-thumping foray into then- modern production techniques on the
McGuinn, Clark And Hillman album in ’79. But after that, even for his most ardent admirers, Gene Clark simply vanished, swept beneath a formidable tide of synth pop, record company indifference, and a debilitating substance abuse problem.
Byrds biographer Johnny Rogan dubbed the ’80s “The Dark Decade” for all five original members. David Crosby’s descent into drugs, guns and incarceration had to have been humiliating, and yet in becoming tabloid fodder Crosby gained an entirely new kind of notoriety. People knew his name, even if for all the wrong reasons. His subsequent recovery led to a book, a self-lampooning voiceover on The Simpsons, further recordings and continuing stardom. By contrast, in the early ’80s no one knew who Gene Clark was anymore. As author and ex- Long Ryders front man Sid Griffin remembers.
“Gene once appeared at Aron's Records to sign LPs and chat. He was promoting a new album at the time, of course. This is in LA. Three people showed up to chat with him. Three people. He manfully put up with it and chatted to the three folks there but it must have broken his heart. It would have mine.”
Carla Olson, leader of ’80s roots-rockers The Textones, and Gene’s occasional duet partner since the time of her impromptu meeting/performance with him at Madame Wong’s West in June ’83, recalls that when she and her now-husband/manager Saul Davis first met Gene it was not immediately apparent he was on the skids financially. “Gene held his head very high always,” she says. “He hung out at the swankiest places in town, drank the finest booze and ate steaks with all the celebs.” But as she and Saul got to know him better, however, his penurious condition slowly became evident. “He didn’t have a telephone when we met him. He didn’t have a car. We helped him get a few things going on. We had a friend that bought and sold cars and he gave Gene this car... an old Maverick. And then we helped him get his phone turned back on.”
was eventually forced to sell the guitar and beg for money. Hardin died in late ’80.
Sid Griffin also recalls the disillusioning realisation that Gene Clark, at least in the eyes of punters, was no longer a star. “The saddest fact of all is Gene could not get arrested in LA while I was there [’77-92] save the early days of McGuinn, Clark, Hillman.” Performances with The Long Ryders, and a guest appearance on the band’s song ‘Ivory Tower’ (as well as an appearance with Carla’s Textones on their Midnight Mission album) did little to remind a fickle record-buying public of his legacy. Members of The Long Ryders faced the bewildering and slightly embarrassing task of actually having to remind people of their guest star’s past accomplishments. “We used to have to explain to so many people, be they friends, fans or the press, who Gene Clark was when they heard about this guy singing on our LP or read his name while reading our LP sleeve credits,” Griffin says. “How sad is that?”
The paltry amount of music released by Clark during this period did little to remind anyone of his stature as songwriter. Firebyrd, an ’84 solo release on the minor Takoma label, dabbled in creating commercially viable sounds on a meagre budget. The results were mixed, although Gene’s dignified, verse- restoring reading of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ finally gave him a chance to sing lead on the song for which he’d been passed over by Jim Dickson in favour of Roger McGuinn almost 20 years before. The preponderance of covers on Firebyrd (Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Thomas Jefferson Kaye) did his reputation no favours either. If hindsight hints that Clark was second guessing his own muse, the inclusion of an unnecessary and quite frankly, flaccid, re-make of ‘I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better’ suggested Clark was resting on his laurels when he should have been taking steps to re-establish himself as a writer of consequence. The commercial failure of No Other, the last album released during his lifetime to consist entirely of material written in whole or in part by his own hand, had to have been a contributory factor in his self- conscious reliance on past glories.
Gene with Chris Hillman in the early ’70s.
For a man who had at one time been wealthy and famous enough to drive his Ferrari through the streets of Hollywood with “Mama” Michelle Phillips in tow, the early ’80s had to have been a humbling, disorienting period. Olson says that this phenomenon of ’60s-celebrity free fall was not at all uncommon in the late ’70s/early ’80s. “You could see Tim Hardin panhandling in front of The Troubadour. He’d be there almost every night.” According to Carla, he
Clark’s financial woes during the ’80s meant he needed quick money. The answer to this was the controversial decision to accept an offer to join what would eventually become a four-year, seemingly never-ending “20th Anniversary Celebration Of The Byrds” tour, a boozy precursor of Ringo’s later All-Starr tours, featuring an ever-rotating line-up of ’60s castaways, all of whom were either in similar financial straits as Clark or perceived as has-beens in the eyes of faithless record companies in search of the next Culture Club. Ex-Byrd John York, who had been playing occasional, low-key side gigs with Gene during this period (gamely billing themselves as Geno & Johnny), was asked to join, whereupon he quickly found he’d climbed aboard a ship whose captain and crew were a “bunch of drunken pirates” and whose gigs were roundly dismissed by critics of the day as the efforts of a garage band. “In terms of how good it could have been,” he laments, “had there been some kind of professional
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