Gene Clark & Carla Olson
So Rebellious A Lover
Extended Liner Notes by John Einarson

Gene Clark’s career had pretty much hit rock bottom by the early 1980s. The former Byrds founder and singer/songwriter, the one out front with the tambourine, left the group in early 1966. Anointed America’s Beatles, a tag the Byrds found near impossible to live up to, the five band mates were never the best of friends. A country boy of simple virtues, Gene was way out of his depth in the fast hustle of the Hollywood music milieu. A combination of reluctance to fly, sniping from his fellow Byrds over his hefty royalty cheques (Gene was the band’s principal songwriter) and ill at ease with the god-like adulation bestowed on the band members, forced Clark to fly the coop.

Despite consistently releasing critically acclaimed and creatively brilliant albums beginning in 1967 and sporadically thereafter, commercially Gene’s records had largely fallen on deaf ears. At times his frustration at failing to achieve a commercial breakthrough was palpable and nearly erupted into fisticuffs with music mogul David Geffen who financed Gene’s magnum opus, 1974’s No Other, only to leave it twisting in the wind without promotion. It was clear in the music business that Gene Clark was persona non grata, too much of a loose cannon to risk signing. His alcohol and drug use only heightened the unease surrounding him.

By the early 1980s, Gene had been dividing his time between touring with fellow ex-Byrds drummer Michael Clarke in a sort of Rolling Thunder Revue of buddies dubbed The Byrds 20th Anniversary Tribute show and recording with a few close friends. To say the Byrds tribute shows, which included at times members of The Band, Beach Boys and Firefall, were ramshackled would be polite. Coked and boozed up, Gene and his band of merrymakers stumbled through a set of Byrds favourites each night.

In sharp contrast, writing and recording with friends Pat Robinson and onetime Byrd John York at Silvery Moon studios in Laurel Canyon proved to be much more satisfying. As CRY (Clark, Robinson and York, later expanded to CHRY with the addition of pianist Nicky Hopkins), the sessions offered an oasis for Gene and a creative outlet, although his bad habits remained. Unfortunately, there was no commercial interest in CRY and the recordings would languish for several years before seeing the light of day after Gene’s death.

Besides the Byrds tribute debacle, Gene had been touring with his own band under the name FireByrd with a handful of younger players plus buddy Michael Clarke. But by the fall of 1984, FireByrd was running out of tinder.

Clearly Gene needed a lifeline. At what would become FireByrd’s swansong gig at Madame Wong’s West, a club on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles, Gene would meet singer/songwriter Carla Olson and her manager Saul Davis.

“Saul and I intentionally went to see Gene that night actually because we had never met him,” explains Austin, Texas-born Carla, who had fronted the Textones. Near the end of FireByrd’s set that night, Gene’s compadre Tom Slocum invited Carla to join Gene onstage. “I didn’t know Tom, but he introduced himself. He said, ‘You should get up and sing with Gene on the encore.’ I replied, ‘That’s okay, Tom. I’m just here to enjoy the show.’” Slocum persisted. “‘They’re going to do ‘Feel a Whole Lot Better.’ When they started to do the encore, he literally grabbed me by the hand and pulled me up on the stage and threw a tambourine at me and said, ‘Sing!’ In the middle of the guitar solo, Gene leaned over and said, ‘Hi, I’m Gene Clark.’ There’s a photo, actually, of that moment, the moment we first met. Then after the show we went backstage and talked with him.”

Carla’s Textones were among a brand-new breed of punkish country-rockers. The early ’80s Paisley Underground revival of 1960s power-pop in Los Angeles had spurred a healthy country-rock/Americana roots scene. This would ultimately spawn the alt.country movement, spearheaded in the late ’80s and early ’90s by such artists as Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, Victoria Williams, the Jayhawks, and Son Volt, among others. These performers took as their guiding inspiration the works of doomed country-rock pioneers like Gram Parsons, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Sweetheart of the Rodeo-era Byrds, and Dillard & Clark.

Carla came out to Los Angeles in 1978 with friend Kathy Valentine and formed the Textones the following year (Kathy later took a spot in the Go-Go’s). Carla’s big break came when she appeared alongside Bob Dylan in the video for “Sweetheart like You” from his acclaimed Infidels album. She would later team up with Rolling Stones guitar great Mick Taylor as well as ex-Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones among others.

“I was aware of who Gene was, certainly with McGuinn, Clark & Hillman,” Carla continues. “He was always kind of the serious guy in the Byrds. He wrote the most beautiful melodies, the most haunting.”

The arrival of Carla and Saul at that particular point in Gene’s life and career, while certainly serendipitous, would prove fortuitous. It gave Gene the chance to return to a more roots-based, acoustic singer-songwriter format—always his strength—and offered fresh, new associations that would recharge his creative batteries.

“Gene had so thoroughly destroyed his name in the music industry by the time that we first met him that it was really difficult to get any opportunities for him,” laments Saul Davis, who would take on managing Gene.

“We got together quite often at Gene’s house for business,” Carla recalls, “and I would hang around while Gene and Saul did business or we were waiting around for Gene to make one of these huge dinners. He used to love to make these big meals. Gene would start to play guitar and other people would come over like Tommy Slocum and we’d all be playing guitars and singing. I can’t remember who came up with the idea of recording this stuff. I have never really felt comfortable with my voice and I felt so honored that Gene allowed me to sing with him. He was just so totally giving that way. He never looked down his nose at anybody that was singing. He never put anybody down.”

Two songs ultimately destined for the album emerged out of those impromptu kitchen sessions. “One time I remember we were sitting there,” Carla recalls, “Gene and me and Saul, Michael Clarke, and somebody else, and we got on this ‘Hot Burrito’ kick. Gene just started playing it on acoustic guitar. I just was singing harmony under my breath. He played something else, too, then he said, ‘I’ve got this great song that my brother wrote. Listen to this.’ I thought it was a Woody Guthrie song from the 1930s. I just fell in love with it. He and Rick wrote it together.” The song was “Del Gato,” one of the highlights of the album, a poignant tale of early California history. “When we were living in Mendocino with Gene,” Rick explains, “we didn’t have a TV. That’s how we ended up writing ‘Del Gato’ because I was reading about the early history of California. That’s how the idea for ‘Del Gato’ came about and we wrote it in one evening.”

After a few trial runs singing with Gene and sharing songs plus recording with member so the Textones as well as The Long Ryders, in early 1986 Gene and Carla began sessions for their duet album, So Rebellious a Lover (the title taken from the lyrics to “Del Gato”) at Control Center studios in Los Angeles with drummer Michael Huey producing. Michael had previous drummed for Glenn Frey, Juice Newton, Joe Walsh, and Chris Hillman when Saul approached him with the offer to produce Gene and Carla. “I came of age in the 1960s with the Byrds,” states Michael. “Never in my wildest dreams did I ever imagine I would be in a recording studio producing Gene Clark. He was one of the fathers of modern rock ’n’ roll. And lo and behold he’s out in the studio with Chris Hillman! That pretty much blew me away, personally. The engineer and I just kept looking at each other all day long going, ‘I can’t believe it!’ It was pretty amazing to have these two guys there. Gene was such a wonderful man, too. Never aloof or arrogant, a pretty down-home kind of guy. He had the aura about him, but he never played on it. He was just a very charismatic guy in a kind of quiet way.

“Actually, it was the four of us—Gene, Carla, Saul, and myself—who steered that album through,” insists Michael. “We ploughed through a lot of material before we picked those eleven songs. We knew that the album was going to be rather dark because that tended to be Gene’s style. There were some uptempo, happier, rockier songs but they just didn’t seem to fit on that album. He really, really loved those down songs. That’s what he listened to, that’s what he wrote, and that’s what he played. Great songs, but any time we had something uptempo, he didn’t like it. He just didn’t like fast songs or to rock that much. That’s truly the way he was. So, we knew it was going to be kind of a dark and introspective album and we decided to go with it because it seemed to fit. That style wasn’t so much Carla. That was more Gene, as far as the direction, more of a Gene vibe, although Carla had a lot of input.”

Using a stripped-down, back-to-basics approach and framing the songs in a rootsy folk/country context, Michael managed to create the perfect setting for Gene and Carla’s songs. While Gene dominates the material, Carla holds her own, contributing such standout compositions as “The Drifter” and “Are We Still Making Love.”

For the sessions, Michael assembled a solid backing band whose talents complemented Gene and Carla’s musical vision. “We had pretty much an all-star rhythm section,” he states. “In Los Angeles musicians’ circles they were quite well known. We had Otha Young on acoustic guitar from Juice Newton’s band, and Skip Edwards did a lot of keyboards on it. He later worked with Dwight Yoakam.” Long Ryders guitarist Stephen McCarthy added dobro and lap steel. Michael provided the drums. Chris Hillman (who appeared on almost every album Gene released throughout his career) guested on mandolin on several tracks, demonstrating once again his long-standing support for Gene.

Despite the stellar supporting players and stressless studio vibe, Gene endured considerable personal discomfort throughout the sessions. As Michael remembers, “He was going through heavy stomach problems and intestinal problems and he was in pain a lot of the time we were recording and had to be taken to the hospital on one occasion. He would double over in pain. He was popping a lot of aspirins and Tylenol and drinking monumental amounts of coffee and smoking. I think that helped to speed up his death because all of that stuff pretty much ate a hole in his stomach. But he wasn’t drinking alcohol. He was on the wagon, or at least he was not drinking around me.”

Carla credits Gene for providing her with a musical education. “Gene taught me so many things about singing,” she recalls, “He used his voice like a woodwind or a cello, with subtlety. Gene showed me that I had to back off the mic — not just belt it out — to make every word count. Because he had played solo so much, I had to find my place in the songs, whether to use a different inversion of a chord, or find a harmony that fit. Many times I opted for a unison part but an octave above. That seemed appropriate to create a single voice on some lines.”

Saul secured a recording contract with UK indie label Demon but finding a US deal was difficult given Gene’s tarnished reputation. “Saul was gently trying to convince Gene that people were not exactly knocking down doors to sign him,” states Carla. “But that was hard because Gene always had his ego.” In the end Saul managed to convince Rhino Records, best known as reissue specialists, to put out the album. So Rebellious a Lover presented Gene and Carla’s exquisite acoustic folk/country-based songs with subtle, unobtrusive backing. “Probably it was a part of Gene that everyone longed to hear,” suggests Carla. “Most people never got to hear that on his records because of all the production. The whole idea of doing that record stripped down was to let the voices be heard. Minimal instrumentation was the direction we wanted.” The album found Carla’s songwriting well matched to Gene’s high standards and her rich, full voiced delivery a worthy partner to his melancholy baritone.

Released by Rhino Records in 1987, the album revived Gene’s flagging career. Standout tracks included the hauntingly exquisite “Gypsy Rider” “Del Gato” and an aching “Why Did You Leave Me Today.” The sympathetic, unobtrusive backing allowed the strength of the songwriting to shine through. Gene’s vocal performance throughout is both compelling and heartbreaking, especially on the tender Gram Parsons-Chris Ethridge country-rock classic “Hot Burrito #1.” While the record heralded Gene’s return, it is as much Carla’s album as Gene’s. Together the two harmonize like a folk version of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris on “Fair & Tender Ladies” and their duet on “Are We Still Making Love” is pure honky tonk heaven.

Critics unanimously heralded the album’s rootsy feel—a precursor to the entire Americana/alt.country movement—and acknowledged the return of Gene to the public eye. Sales, however, were slim. “It got great reviews, but it didn’t sell many,” Michael laments. “It was toward the late ’80s and the groups on the radio were a lot of tight pants and hair, Duran Duran and that Euro pop/rock/disco thing, and this album went against every grain of commercial success you could possibly do at that time. There was no such thing as Americana or roots rock then and also it was prior to unplugged, that MTV show. A year or two after we did the album, for artists to go on MTV and do acoustic versions of their material was a new and exciting thing, so we were ahead of the curve. But there weren’t a lot of marketing dollars behind it.” The album would be Gene’s last official release. (A reissue from Fuel 2000 Records in 2004 added six bonus tracks to the album, four of which are from the 1985 Gene’s sessions with the Textones).

While a tour in support of the album never materialized, Gene’s notorious aversion to flying a well-documented reality, the two managed several key performances including an appearance on CMT’s Nashville Now. As Carla remembers, “There were no agents interested in booking us.”

“There was some estrangement going on between Gene and a lot of people during that time,” Michael postulates. “Gene was coming out of a real drunk period and Saul had really worked him quite a bit and brought him back career-wise. He hadn’t really been straight long enough for a lot of people to know it yet and people were still kind of afraid to be around him. This was kind of like the coming out for Gene. I took it at the time that this was the first step in a long-range career plan, a comeback. We would do this album and the next one would be a little more rock. That was sort of the plan, all this to try to bring him back.”

“If Rhino Records had gone to town on ‘Gypsy Rider’ and serviced it to country radio, that might have turned into something,” Saul points out. “No one of major stature later in the 1980s or since came across ‘Gypsy Rider’ or ‘Del Gato’ or any of these other songs and made them hits, which may have revitalized his career. Adds Carla, “Gene definitely had the potential to write commercially if he put his mind to it.”

“Maybe in the right genre of music, I guess country, Gene could have had some kind of a hit country ballad,” suggests Saul. “I’ve got a stack of rejection letters where we sent out demos. Gene’s reputation unfortunately hurt him. You would think objectively, in black-and-white, here’s a guy who had been in one of the biggest American bands of all time including a couple of No. 1 records. He’s had songs cut by people like Tom Petty to the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt. He looks good, he writes great songs, good image, and great voice. Obviously, he got shafted for a record deal when you look at it objectively. But then you add all that other stuff surrounding him. So it doesn’t work as scientifically or arithmetically as you would think.”

Coming out as it did in 1987, So Rebellious A Lover was a watershed album often regarded as ground zero for the entire alt. country, Americana, roots music movement of the 1990s. “Gene and Gram Parsons are the fathers of this whole alt. country thing,” Saul insists. “The only category they could put us in for a Grammy was the country category,” notes Carla, “because there wasn’t a category for rootsy acoustic music of this kind and for some reason it didn’t register to people as folk music. And country at that point was pretty much awful stuff except for people like Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett. There was such a Las Vegas thing in country music then.”

Looking back, Carla remains proud of So Rebellious A Lover. “Here we are nearly 35 years later and people are still interested in that album,” she muses. “What an honor.”

– John Einarson, author of Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life & Legacy of The Byrds Gene Clark, Backbeat Books.

No Other
Gene Clark
Deluxe Box Set Liner Notes by John Einarson

In early 1974, Gene Clark stood at a crossroads. The release of the much-anticipated Byrds reunion album carried high expectations for the jingle-jangle folk-rock quintet to capture their original 1965 magic. It was not to be. Gone was the chiming sparkle of Roger McGuinn’s Rickenbacker electric 12-string that was the hallmark of the band’s distinctive sound. The musical backing was understated. There was no cohesiveness, no band unity of sound, replaced instead by what seemed like individual solo tracks, and not even each individual’s best writing. The album hit record shelves with a thud and stayed there. A star-studded tour was quietly scrapped. Each Byrd put the experience behind them and went their own way back to individual careers.

Except Gene Clark. His contributions, two original compositions and two Neil Young cover songs, were unquestionably the standouts on an otherwise lackluster album. Gene was singled out for praise by critics who nonetheless slammed the reunion album for missing the magic. Out in the musical and literal wilderness for years, Gene’s elevated stature following the album was impressive enough for Asylum Records honcho David Geffen, on whose label The Byrds reunion album was produced, to offer him a solo recording contract. With a whopping $100,000 budget, Geffen was betting heavily that Gene could deliver a masterpiece. Like a phoenix, Gene Clark was expected to rise from the ashes of the disappointing Byrds reunion.

So why a crossroads? Five years earlier Gene had fled Los Angeles’s hustle and bustle for the bucolic comfort and languid pace of Northern California’s coastal community centered around Mendocino. In Los Angeles, and Hollywood in particular, he was Gene Clark, ex-Byrd and rock music god, both tags he chaffed at. Up on the Northern coast he was Gene Clark the one-time country boy who enjoyed the simple rural lifestyle that the community offered. There were no expectations, no star-maker machinery pursuing him. Married, he and his wife Carlie resided in a large rustic character home that had once been a coach house at the end of Middle Ridge Road near Albion, a community a few short miles south of Mendocino. Located on a ridge, it gave them a view of the ocean. Country life appealed to Gene and reconnected him to his childhood growing up in rural Kansas. It also stirred his creative juices. While residing along the Northern California coast, Gene would ultimately produce four albums worth of songs, among the finest of his career.

But a new recording contract brought with it the prospect of having to relocate to Los Angeles for the duration of the recording sessions, abandoning, albeit temporarily, his rural refuge. Once again, the music business, with all its vices, temptations and superficiality, was beckoning Gene.

Throughout his post-Byrds career, Gene was continually frustrated by the fact that his records did not sell. He was forever at odds with his record labels for failing to adequately promote and market his recordings. It most certainly wasn’t an issue of quality. Gene’s recorded work was held in the highest regard by critics and contemporaries. But they don’t buy records. What Gene refused to accept was that he needed to become a more public person—tour, do interviews, and perform—in order to get his records wider public attention. It wasn’t just about writing a batch of songs, surfacing from his secure sanctuary amid the wilds of Mendocino to record them before retreating back into obscurity. Gene did not want to play the game and suffered the consequences.

“How do you market Gene if you don’t have him capable of being the public person to back that record up?” insists former Byrd Chris Hillman. “You can’t put a record out and go back to your cabin in the woods. Going on the road is what I’m talking about.” That was still the tried and true means to success.

If Gene’s public performances were scant in the late ‘60s since leaving The Byrds, they were virtually nonexistent following his move up to beautiful Albion on the Mendocino coast. Despite the starkly stellar music and rave reviews, his previous album, White Light, sold poorly. Once again, Gene presented his label with an outstanding effort only to refuse to tour or perform in support of it.

Back home in Albion, with a recording date looming, Gene awaited the muse to imbue him with inspiration. Local friend, drummer Andy Kandanes, had a cottage by the ocean near Mendocino and offered Gene use of it whenever he felt the need to be alone to write. “I said to him, ‘Here, go up to my place. Don’t smoke up everything, but have a good time.’ It was a beautiful house on a cliff overlooking the ocean where the whales used to come in and rub their barnacles on the cliffs. It was just north of Mendocino in Indian Shoals, which is right by the Caspar lighthouse, a fantastic area that looks like a combination of the Cotswolds in England and Cornwall.” Gene found the breathtaking setting inspiring and the contemplative solitude stimulating. In this secluded environment he began an exploration of the essence of spirituality and the human condition.

Frequent conversations with a local friend, blacksmith Philip O’Leno, on various religions, philosophies, and beliefs further stirred questions in Gene. An avid reader and explorer of the spiritual world in all its incarnations and guises, ancient and modern, Philip became Gene’s guru and sounding board. Philip’s personal library was impressive, reflecting a man on a quest for answers to the fundamental questions of life. “I always said to people, here was this amazing poet who’s never read a book in his life,” acknowledges Philip. “That’s a fact. Gene never read. I’m a great reader and I study and Gene depended on me for some of that. He would ask me what I read about. We wouldn’t get into conversations about it, but he would understand it. He would talk about albums and how he would produce this song or that song, bringing in singers here, and kind of use us as his soundboard. Then there was the life stuff, the philosophy, the more abstract stuff we got into. I would lend him books but he wouldn’t read them. He had a kind of moral and ethical compass that wasn’t spiritual or religious or anything like that, but he had a sense of right and wrong and he stuck pretty much close to that. Reality was very important to Gene, getting through the bullshit and down to what is meaningful, what is the truth. He was no abstract philosopher, but he wanted to get at the truth of things. To me it seemed as if he had an old soul, an innate wisdom beyond his being.”

Gene’s friend David Carradine introduced him to the precepts of Zen philosophy and although he never read about it or practiced it, Gene was fascinated enough to incorporate some of its precepts into his writing and to cite it in interviews.

Gene’s writing was never frivolous or superficial. With this next album he would apply his poetic gift far more than he had ever before and take great personal pride in being able to vocalize those concepts, ideas, spiritual extrapolations, and deep soul searching in song. “Being around him, he was sort of the typical down-home country boy,” notes Gene’s friend Dennis Kelley. “Very laid back and easygoing. There was just no indication from his everyday speech that his writing could be so literate and poetic. During our conversation one time, Gene made the comment that he loved poetry and the way words and phrases could flow. Then he said, ‘But to be able to sing those words is really where the beauty lies.’ He said that really made them come alive. The look on his face, coupled with the almost reverential tone in his voice, made me realize that singing his poetry was truly one of the greatest joys that Gene could imagine.” It has frequently been speculated that Gene’s songs on No Other were drug-derived; that Gene conceived the eight songs in some cocaine haze with the subsequent recording sessions dusted in white powder, anointing Gene as the king of the Cosmic Cowboys. To this day, reviews of the album dwell inordinately on that erroneous assumption. The reality is much less beguiling: many of the album’s themes derive from the Bible, while others examine the eternal conflicts between the inner spirit and the outer realities of life.

“Those songs were not conceived on drugs,” contends Carlie Clark adamantly. “Mendocino was our cooling-out place and we had kids there.” She insists that Gene was not a frequent recreational drug user at that point. In fact, she asserts, Gene didn’t even like drugs. “Gene didn’t do drugs well. He was way too sensitive to go to any valid or workable place with a mind-altering substance. I’m sure it was a great escape for him because he lost a certain amount of that intense reality or that intense consciousness or pressure. But it didn’t go good. I can’t say that I can ever remember him getting high and laughing and having fun when everyone else would be giggling and having fun. If Gene took a hit off of a joint he was really trying to be sociable because it wasn’t his thing. He didn’t like the way it made him feel. David Crosby had every kind of drug imaginable, but Gene would say, ‘No thanks.’”

“Critics tend to read too much into the lyrics,” Dennis Kelley hypothesizes. “We had been talking about the album and I mentioned that I liked that particular song ‘From a Silver Phial,’ especially the line, ‘Said she saw the sword of sorrow sunken in the sand of searching souls.’ Gene himself told me the lyrics were inspired by the Book of Revelations. I’ve read where someone said it was about a cocaine burn-out.” Gene explains the song’s inspiration. “‘Silver Phial’ was written in a state of, could I say, meditation? I had a house on the ocean at that time in Northern California. I was just sitting watching the waves come in. It was real quiet and... okay... here it is.”

References to needing a fix in “Some Misunderstanding” are not alluding to drugs but to the need for a bearing, a compass, some spiritual grounding of some sort, especially during the decadent “me-decade” of the 1970s. “Yes, a fix, a bearing, Gene explained to Dominic Priore. “My feeling about saying that was if you fix yourself in such a pattern that you haven’t got any channels of release or escape to go out, look, think about it and come back in. The thing about Zen and the form of music is that Zen to me is only a tuning, but it is a spiritualism. A lot of people have said, ‘Your music has such spiritual undertones’ but you take a film-maker, a director, an actor, a poet, a novelist, if they don’t have a tuning to the inner self something can’t come through them. Any great movie, great poem, great novel is all performed out of soul searching. To me, that's a simplification of Zen and music.”

Gene expounded further to Steve Burgess in a 1977 Dark Star magazine interview, “People sometimes think, and I know they’ve asked this of Dylan, ‘Do you write songs out of personal experiences or do you write songs like a novelist writes a novel?’ Actually, in many cases you write them out of examples you get from watching other people or situations you see, or just dream up a situation. It is sort of like a novel writer. It’s not always written because you went through a particular situation. A lot of times they are, but for the most part, most of the songs I’ve written are from observations. Something you see. Like you could be sitting at a coffee shop and see some guy arguing with his old lady and write a song about it.”

Gene confided to Burgess, “‘Some Misunderstanding’ was written in a dream. I got up and wrote it down. I woke up and I told my wife, ‘Look, I’ve gotta get up, turn on the lights for a moment, and write this down.’ I wrote the song in completion because the dream was still fresh in my mind. I can’t contrive a song.”

One inspiration proved to be far more mundane in reality than oft speculated. In interviews, Gene would wax philosophical about the inspiration for his mysterious “Silver Raven” arising from a flying saucer, which he did indeed believe existed along with alien visitations to Earth. However, the silver raven in question was wife Carlie’s favorite footwear. “I used to have these platform shoes, silver leather platform shoes made for me in the days of platform shoes,” reveals Carlie. “I would dance with those shoes on and Gene called them my silver ravens.” Confirms Ea O’Leno , “The song ‘Silver Raven’ is about Carlie’s silver platform shoes. She was a very good dancer and she could fly.”

In discussing the gestation of the songs for No Other, Gene told radio host B. Mitchell Reed in 1974, “I spent a year of writing and analyzing the material on this album. I live at my ranch in Mendocino. That’s where I do all my writing. I do maybe half of each song, then I fly down to L.A. and finish them. And then I use this energy to record them. So it’s a balance to me of the two. It is not a San Francisco sound or an L.A. sound because one or the other is lacking in one flavor or the other. In other words, I get my clear head and my creative writing ability from the peaceful northern coast. But when I come to L.A. the energy hits me to inspire me to finish and to then give it the punch and to get all the way down. And also I have access to the finest musicians in the world. All the finest professionals are in L.A. at this time.”

By the time Gene entered Village Recorder in Los Angeles in April 1974, he had assembled before him the A-list of studio aces who were ready, willing, and able to translate his lyrical revelations into musical form. With him on this journey would be a producer capable of matching Gene’s grandiloquent visions pound-for-pound: elaborate arrangements framing Gene’s exquisite poetry in musical mini-operas of wailing gospel choruses, screaming electric violins, swirling organs, and funked-up bass. In Thomas Jefferson Kaye, Gene had found his soul mate. Over the next five months the two partners would shape an album like no other in Gene’s career.

“I would say probably that if any relationship was the relationship, it was Gene and Tommy Kaye,” declares mutual friend and record producer Ken Mansfield. “I’ve never seen two people on such a wavelength as they had, and such good friends. These guys were like back-to-back buddies ready to take on the world. I actually envied their relationship in terms of how close they were.”

Four years Gene’s senior, Tommy Kontos was born and raised in New York where his career in music began at the age of 18 as head of A&R at Scepter Records. He adopted the surname Kaye shortly thereafter. Tommy enjoyed remarkable success as a producer, arranger, and songwriter for a diverse list of artists including the Shirelles, Maxine Brown, Jay & the Americans, Three Dog Night (he penned their hit “One Man Band”), Link Wray, and Loudon Wainwright III, as well as his own band, White Cloud, to name a few. Highly regarded in the recording industry, especially for his elaborate vocal arrangements, Tommy was just coming off producing the Triumvirate album with Mike Bloomfield, John Hammond, Jr., and Dr. John, as well as a controversial, colossally over-budget (reportedly $200,000 in costs), self-indulgent album for Dylan acolyte and road manager Bobby Neuwirth on David Geffen’s Asylum label. The album was rumored to be part of a deal with Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, to get Dylan himself to sign with Asylum. Talented, gregarious, well connected, and a partier renowned for his drug and alcohol excesses in spite of being a diabetic, Tommy was at the top of his game when he received a call from David Geffen to take on production chores for Gene Clark.

Some have insinuated that David foisted Gene on Tommy as an act of revenge for the costly Neuwirth fiasco. In his July1997 column The Blacklisted Journalist, writer Al Aronowitz details the extravagant nonsense surrounding the Neuwirth sessions and Tommy’s involvement with them. He also points out that David was, indeed, furious about the debacle. However, no one surrounding Gene at the time corroborates that assertion, and David Geffen has no interest in talking about Gene Clark. It seems unlikely, though, that he would ponied up $100,000 for Gene’s album, an enviably substantial budget in 1974, merely as an act of vengeance. Clearly, David was betting on Gene, anticipating he could deliver a quality, marketable product that could stand shoulder to shoulder with his other Asylum artists such as singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, whose sense of poetry matched Gene’s.

In an unpublished 1991 interview with musicologist Ken Viola, Tommy Kaye recalled his initial meeting with Gene. “David Geffen asked me if I would like to produce Jackson Browne or Gene Clark and I said, ‘I’d like to produce Gene Clark.’ David thought that was really weird that I would say that. I told him Jackson didn’t need a producer and I was always a Gene Clark fan from The Byrds. That’s how we met. Gene was still on Asylum after the Byrds reunion album and David believed in him.”

But the two did not hit it off at first. “David Geffen set up a meeting and I went up to Gene’s house, my wife and I, and Gene was there with his wife, Carlie. He got drunk and started in on me and insulting me. ‘So what, you did Bobby Neuwirth! Fuck you!’ Real nasty stuff. So I just split. The next morning he called me up and I said to him, ‘Before you say a word, if you’re going to say you’re sorry, man, forget it. I’m going to tell you something. If this is any indication of how we’re going to work together you tell me right now ‘cause I’ll call up David Geffen and I’ll tell him where the fuck you’re at and why I don’t want to do your record.’ And he went, ‘Wow, no one’s ever talked to me like this!’ It was the most horrible night I’ve ever spent in my life. But he called me up, like a little kid, the next day, and we became best friends. We argued, but we never got into it again like that.”

Among the stellar supporting cast of musicians for the No Other sessions were bassist Lee Sklar, piano player Craig Doerge, and organist Mike Utley. Despite their individual track records for logging hundreds of recording dates as topflight studio musicians collectively known as The Section with drummer Russ Kunkle, all three agree that the No Other sessions were quite remarkable and memorable.

“It was a hard album to do,” Lee notes. “I don’t know where their heads met, he and Tommy, but it was a slightly arduous album to make. Each song took a while to sort out. I don’t remember how much pre-production there was or how prepared Gene and Tommy were for it. It was just really a tough project just sorting through the songs.” As for Gene’s preparedness for the rigourous sessions, Lee recalled, “Gene was in great shape. He was a big, robust guy, quite a physical presence. And I was such a Byrds fan that it was a kick to be able to work with him. I had worked with Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman over the years so it was really a treat to get to work with Gene. He appeared to be in real good shape physically, musically, and emotionally. Everything was cruising. Gene was very focused on the project. It seemed very important to him. Tommy, too. Gene seemed fairly introverted and I think he was just real focused on the music. That was really dominating his mind. As much fun as it was to get together and play and hang out, the studio’s not a hang out. Everybody was really focused on making the music.”

Confirms Craig Doerge, “Gene was in wonderful shape. Everybody was in good shape. It hadn’t gotten crazy yet. He and Tommy were really focused and ready.”

Gene himself confirmed that the sessions were arduous in a 1977 interview with Steve Burgess in Dark Star. “Yes, it was a hard album to record. Not hard in a painful sense but hard in a sense of being so different to the musicians who recorded it. It took them a while to adjust to the approach Tommy and I were taking.”

One feature of the sessions that the players found quite unique was the fact that Gene was present for every facet of the album’s recording. “Gene was there for every minute of it,” marvels Lee. “We constructed a vocal booth in the studio and he sang through everything, not like one of these absentee artists who comes in later and does their work. He was hands-on throughout the project.” Archivist and reissue producer Andrew Sandoval supervised sound production for the No Other CD reissue in 2003 for Warner Music and confirms, “They didn’t just do backing tracks and have Gene come in and do overdubbing of his vocals. They actually did live tracking with Gene. And Gene is the most consistent of all the players at the sessions. Everybody in the sessions made mistakes, but Gene really carried the sessions and was great throughout. His performances are spot-on each time. For example, ‘From a Silver Phial,’ there are a zillion takes and he’s on all of them and they’re all really good.”

As Gene relates, “We recorded the ‘No Other’ track itself for a week before we got a satisfactory take. We kept recording and recording and the musicians were going crazy. Finally we called up [percussionist] Joe Lala and he came down, listened to it a few times, said ‘I’ve got it!’ and we cut it. It was just that added percussive feeling that had been missing all along that we needed to bring it all together. He and Butch Trucks really got together on that one.”

“There were a lot of takes,” acknowledges Lee. “We labored pretty hard on it. It wasn’t one of those projects where you just kind of nailed it immediately. I think there was a lot of looking for things. As I recall, on a lot of things we did a lot of takes, but from a developmental standpoint, not from making mistakes. It was ‘Cut it,’ then we’d listen to it and say, ‘I don’t know. Let’s try this.’ There was a lot of experimentation. There was a skeletal form to it, but then when it came to the track, people were then searching for parts. Gene may have had the melody and the lyric, but there wasn’t the full structure. We would have to find parts. That was the luxury of that period where you weren’t being pressed to like, ‘Come on guys, look at the clock. We’ve got nine tracks to get today.’ If you were in there all day and got a couple of tracks, that was great. That created personality in the music. It was given time to go through its formative state and then start to find some cool things that gave it its uniqueness. That’s what I miss today. To me, that’s what music was all about, that creative interaction. There was so much dimensionality to music from that period, and certainly with Gene’s project, where each song was really a seed that then got to be planted and grow, as compared to now, where they come in 90 percent finished and you’re just tidying up. I miss those days.”

“When you had a band with Russ and Utley, Kootch and Bruton, just that whole assembly of characters,” notes Lee, “that’s really what top music at that time was about. There were never any lead sheets. It was usually just some kind of a chord sheet and everybody developed parts, which allowed personality to be developed, and experimentation. That was that whole West Coast sound that was based on that camaraderie and experimentation and you had all these guys who pretty much worked together enough where they could start to read each other and fall into some pretty cool things. I know with Russ [Kunkle] I felt that way because we had worked together so much, and Kootch, too, and with Doerge and Utley. It was a real vital time musically with a lot of creative processes taking place. And it was just so cool to work with Gene because I remember going and seeing Byrds concerts and seeing them perform. To me that was one of the great bonuses of developing the career I did. Everyone I ever found fascinating or was a fan of through the years I’ve gotten to meet and work with. And Gene was certainly one of those guys to me. To me, he holds a real deep space in that kind of contemporary West Coast pop music scene.”

Comments Mike Utley, “Gene’s songs were not your standard fare as far as the structure of the songs, like what you would get from a regular songwriter: two verses and a chorus, real structured songs. Just the titles of the songs show they were pretty introverted. That’s the kind of writing he did. I had never worked with someone like Gene before. You didn’t know where the song was going to go. Eventually I worked with Jackson Browne and he was like that, too. Gene would come out into the room and play the songs for us like he was a solo singer-songwriter. We would then make up chord charts and start working on them and he would describe the way he heard the song. With singer-songwriters, it’s sort of like painting a picture. That’s the way you look at it. It’s sort of like a lot of color rather than just a feel or a groove, just getting into a groove and that’s where you stay. With singer-songwriters, you listen to the lyrics. With me playing organ, I usually wouldn’t come in from the top. I would wait until an appropriate time depending on what the lyrics said. The songs were great, but they were just so unusual. That’s typical of somebody who’s singing their own material. They’re writing it, so it’s a little more personal rather than pitching it to someone else to sing.”

“It was to Gene and Tommy’s credit that they really set out to get the best they could from this group of players,” offers Craig Doerge, “as opposed to just coming in and telling them, ‘We know exactly what we want, you guys just have to realize it.’ They came at it from a better angle, and from a musician’s standpoint it’s always nice if you are accorded the respect of the producer and the artist saying, ‘We have you here because you’re special, whatever it is that you do that’s unlike the next cat,’ allowing us to take it to the best place we can. And that’s great because studio time is expensive. I think that’s the reason why a lot of records from that era came out so great and lasting because you weren’t under this big gun saying, ‘Well, you’ve gotta get six songs done in six hours,’ because of money restraints. People were spending more on albums and you really had time to develop them. And Gene, of course, was nothing but nice. He was very cool and couldn’t have been nicer to all the players. He was especially nice to myself and Lee. That was our one and only session with Gene. It was a pleasure to be treated so well.”

Gene’s friend Jesse Ed Davis was invited to contribute his distinctive guitar style to the sessions. “For me it was a great session because I had never played with Jesse Ed Davis before,” notes Doerge. “I had heard a lot about Jesse. I was very impressed with him.”

Another contributor to the sessions was banjo player extraordinaire Douglas Dillard who had teamed up with Gene in 1968 for the pioneering country rock-bluegrass amalgam The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark. “Doug’s a happy-go-lucky kind of guy,” smiles Mike Utley. “They were an odd couple, Gene and Doug, even though they came from the same area of the country. Doug would walk into a session and just start laughing. That wasn’t Gene. ”

Lee and Craig laugh about the time British singer Joe Cocker crashed the sessions. “At one point we were doing this one song, we had been working on it for a couple of days, and it was finally coming together,” Lee recalls. “We were in the middle of a take and Russ Kunkle and I looked at each other as if to say, ‘This is it. We’re finally getting it.’ Joe Cocker was working next door in the other studio there. And at the time, Joe was pretty out of it. He was drinking real hard and whatever the hell else he was doing. He came wandering into the control room while we were working and got really into the song. He was sitting there behind the console just rocking back and forth, really digging it. He got so excited that he reached forward and hit the talkback button and let out one of his famous Cocker screams. It literally blew everybody’s headphones off their heads. Gene knocked over the constructed vocal booth trying to get out to get at Joe. Joe’s handlers dragged him out of the studio and rushed him down to the other room so that they could lock him in so Gene and Tommy wouldn’t kill him. We went back and listened to the tape. You couldn’t hear the scream, but you would have sworn someone had just taken a razor blade and cut the tape. The stop was so instantaneous because of the pain level of the scream that went down. It was just unbelievable. We all had to go home; nobody could hear anything. Everybody’s heads were ringing. We had to come back the next day and start over again.”

As for the oft-held contention that the sessions were dusted with excessive amounts of white powder, Lee disagrees. “Personally, I never did drugs at all and never drank. But as I recall, those dates with Gene were so kind of consuming and intense that I don’t recall seeing anything going on there because there was so much focus. And [drummer] Russ Kunkle was really straight, Utley was really straight, Doerge, the list of musicians there, most of those guys were pretty straight-ahead. I don’t remember seeing any blow or anything on those dates. No, Gene was very straight-up and very focused. That’s the thing. There’s always this kind of bullshit Random Notes mythology that all this stuff was real drug-oriented. Certainly there were sessions going on with other artists where there was a lot of drugs involved, but for the most part I would tend to say that when you listen to the quality of the music that came out they were so embarrassed by it they didn’t do it again. You can’t get that kind of recording done by being out of it. It’s one thing when a session is over and somebody went out and partied, that’s a whole other thing. If Gene did that then that was fine. But during the actual recording, most guys were pretty much intact. There is always so much mystique about that recording process and people always want to paint some sort of dark, weird, drug-induced atmosphere rather than copping to the fact that this was a creative process and it was a bunch of creative people getting together and making it the best they could. We were all well aware that this was our career. You don’t get that way by spending a career being out of it.”

Mike Utley found Gene oddly introverted and not very talkative during the sessions. “Gene never got excited. You go in and record something and think to yourself, ‘That was wonderful’ but Gene would come in with his head down listening. You never knew if he liked it or not. It was hard to tell with him. With some artists I worked with they would come in after a tracking session and say ‘That’s it! That’s the one’. Not Gene. Tommy was completely different from Gene. He was ‘Yeah! I like that!’ That kind of thing. Gene was a loner. But he must have been happy with it because we kept working with him.”

Following the tracking sessions, Tommy went into high gear on the overdubs and brought in a gospel chorus, Seatrain member Richard Greene on wah-wah violin, Chris Hillman on mandolin, ex-Butterfield Blues Band guitarist (and inventor of the Feiton tuning system) Buzzy Feiton, Poco bass player and singer Timothy B. Schmit, and percussionist Joe Lala. While Tommy’s forte was elaborate arrangements and No Other shows his ability to cast Gene’s songs in grand musical contexts, some insist that he overwhelmed the lyrics and melody. In a 1977 interview with UK journalist Barry Ballard, Tommy even suggested the album was like “my answer to Brian Wilson and Phil Spector, as a producer.”

“One of the hardest things to do in this business is to know when to stop,” avers Lee Slar. “Some people get so excited and so involved, they go, ‘I could have an orchestra on this!’ Does it need it? That question was never asked. Maybe a little quartet might have been nice, but the next thing you know they’ve got a 100-piece orchestra. That’s always a tough call with so many producers, especially back then. It was a pretty indulgent time where there weren’t people sitting there staring at budget sheets and saying, ‘Nice idea, but we really can’t afford it,’ which sometimes saves your album. If they had a $100,000 budget, that’s a lot of money.”

“When a record’s gone through all the sweetening and additions and an extra long mixing process and mastering process like Gene’s album,” states Doerge, “sometimes you lose some of the spark that was right there at the end of the day when you had just the basic players on it. But that wasn’t the case with this album.”

It has been rumored for decades that No Other was originally conceived as a double album, Gene himself fueling speculation that hidden treasures cut during the sessions remained in the Asylum’s vaults. However, as Tommy revealed to Ken Viola, No Other was never a double album and the eight tracks were always the focus, although a version of “Train Leaves Here This Morning” was attempted. “Before we did No Other we went into the studio and did about ten or 15 things with just him and an acoustic guitar. A lot of those things were his new material for No Other. Gene might have meant those sessions. We did do a lot of demos of our songs.”

As befitting such a grandiose album, Gene and Tommy sought to package their masterwork in an equally elaborate and eye-catching sleeve. To that end they turned to Gene and Carlie’s Albion companion, Ea O’Leno. “Gene asked me to do a cover that I felt was a feeling of his life that nobody else caught,” enthuses Ea, with great pride. “And this is what I came up with. Glamorous. We had him looking like a swashbuckler. He was totally okay with it. We were thinking glamorous movie stars, 1940s-type movie stars. If you look at the images, the prizefighter, it’s very masculine. Everything is painted by hand. I think the images reminded me of Gene.” But while Ea’s rococo/high Hollywood/silent film/Rudolph Valentino/art deco look was achieved on the front cover, the portrait of Gene on the back was, many fans agree, unsettling. There was Gene Clark, the handsome Kansas-raised folk/country-rocker from Northern California’s redwood forests, decked out in women’s clothing and makeup, his hand provocatively placed on his thigh close to a rather intimidating bulge. “Ea and I could talk him into just about anything,” laughs Carlie. “It was like a dress-up thing for him. He was okay with it. He just let us play with him all day. Judy Hadash had this store, the Pleasure Dome, and she helped us with the women’s clothes. Gene was in a mold in terms of his image that was very difficult for him and he really would have liked to be able to break out and be free. So he tried. The minute we were done, though, he was back to the way he always was with the lumberjack shirts.”

Adds Ea, “I gave his hair a permanent and took him out and made him get used to those clothes. I put makeup on him and took him out to places like Dan Tana’s for about four nights so he would feel comfortable looking like that. A swashbuckler was what he was supposed to be.” Ea defends her controversial decision to redefine Gene’s image. “He’s got a masculine pose with his hand on his hip. He loved the Barrymores and he liked that whole 1920s period.”

“That photo on the back drives Kelly and Kai nuts,” laughs Carlie. “ ‘Mom, how could you dress him up in drag like this?’ They hate it. We were trying to get some kind of change there for him. That photo was from when we were at Noah Dietrich’s house up in the Hollywood Hills. He had this big mansion. It had all these fountains and all this stuff all over it so that’s where we shot it.”

When Gene and Tommy presented the completed album to Asylum boss David Geffen, they anticipated accolades from the label executive. Instead the response was hostile. As Tommy told Ken Viola, “Asylum was not behind that record. I got flack from David Geffen about how come there are only eight songs on the record after they spent all this money? They were eight great songs and that was it. We were trying to make a real piece of art and we thought that David Geffen, being a really artsy guy, would get it. But he didn’t. I think it went over his head. The reason we had only eight songs on that album was because it was the vinyl thing and there was only so much time you could get on each side to get a great sounding record. That’s why we went with the eight songs. They were very long songs.”

Asylum released the album with a minimum of promotion and let it twist in the wind. “David just dropped it and wouldn’t get behind it,” Tommy informed Barry Ballard. “He wouldn’t give us any money to go on tour, or to subsidize a band or anything. At that time Geffen was thinking of going into movies and he sort of lost his desire.” A near punch-out with David one night at Dan Tana’s sealed the album’s fate. According to Philip O’Leno, “Gene went after Geffen right there in the restaurant. I don’t know what he was going to do to him, but he was going to get physical. [Troubadour manager] John Desko got Gene outside. John had his heavy shoe on Gene’s hand and said to him, ‘If you continue to resist I’m gonna break your fuckin’ hand!’ And Gene was very protective of his hands, of course. They were sensitive because he played guitar. That was rage, more than just drunken rage.”

“Gene burned so many bridges,” sighs Chris Hillman. “But doing that to Geffen, that was a pivotal point. That shut it down for Gene. Geffen had the power then. He’s a very powerful man. You can’t do that to a guy like him.”

Nonetheless, reviewers were staggered by the grandiloquence of No Other and heaped praise on both Gene and Tommy for their daring ambition, citing tracks like the darkly exquisite “Some Misunderstanding” and the ethereal “Strength of Strings” with its banshee-wailing backup voices as marvelous pieces of art. Inspired by Carlie, “Lady of the North” builds to a dense climax of searing electric violin. “Silver Raven” retains a haunting aura, while the title track is funked-up, propelled by Joe Lala’s percussion and Jerry McGhee’s fuzz guitar. Gene retained his appreciation for country-rock with the opening track, “Life’s Greatest Fool,” and with “The True One.” Both were autobiographical ruminations on the price of fame, a theme Gene knew only too well. Fans and critics had a field day attempting to decipher all the hidden messages and inspirations in Gene’s oblique lyrics.

Despite the critical response, the album rose only as high as No. 86 on the Billboard album chart before disappearing. Many record buyers were confused by the apparent contradiction of cover image and music inside, while others found the album far too radical a departure from the acoustic balladeer of White Light or the bluegrass-country boy of The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark. As Gene later confided to Barry Ballard, “I thought it was a truly fine album and I felt very let down, very disappointed, that it didn’t do better than it did. Almost to the point of depression, because I thought I’d finally found a niche with my own art that I could carry on into other areas.” Surmises former Dillard & Clark guitarist and future Eagle Bernie Leadon, “That album might be considered a masterpiece. It’s certainly an ambitious album.” In hindsight, some critics have suggested the album was too far ahead of its time, or merely out of its time, to be fully appreciated in 1974. Artistically, such a pronouncement is a high compliment. Commercially, it’s the kiss of death.

“With the exception of maybe a year with the Byrds, Gene was never quite in synch with his time,” suggests writer Jim Bickhart. “That may be what makes him distinctive in pop culture history and music history and what makes him worth remembering, but it also contributes to the melancholy memory I have of him. It could be said of Gene that the one thing he never did create was a stylistically consistent body of work. There was folk-rock and then there was the countryish stuff, then country-rock, and then whatever you want to call No Other. To those who were familiar with Gene Clark it always sounded like Gene Clark, but to Columbia Records or A&M Records or the Tiger Beat magazines or the program directors at the radio stations who liked to hear Rolling Stones records that sounded like Rolling Stones records, Gene Clark didn’t qualify. In the abstract that was great, but for making yourself successful in a pretty brutal hit-making business, it just didn’t work. It might work on a one-off, but it didn’t happen for him. He needed more consistency, some stuff that sounded just enough like the Byrds to remind people of where he came from, and then to sound enough like itself over the course of a couple of albums that people would recognize who he was. And he didn’t do that.”

With the benefit of time and hindsight, the world has caught up with Gene’s masterful art piece. Today No Other is spoken of in the superlatives it so richly deserves and is often cited among the greatest recording achievements. Too late for Gene who passed away May 24, 1991. In his time he came to regard No Other as an expensive failure. He had infused his very soul into that album. It was a bitter blow, a personal disappointment, and career setback from which he never fully recovered. Nonetheless, in an impressive career-spanning canon of recorded work, No Other stands apart from the rest, profoundly insightful and stunningly recorded.

John Einarson is author of Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life And Legacy of The Byrds’ Gene Clark (Backbeat Books)

Gosdin Brothers
Gene Clark
Extended Liner Notes by John Einarson

When Gene Clark walked away from the Byrds in late January 1966 all expectations pointed to a successful solo career. After all, the handsome Missouri-born, Kansas-raised singer had been the group’s visual focal point as well as their principal songwriter, both essential ingredients to launch a solo venture.

But his abrupt departure from America’s #1 pop group was borne not of vanity or ego but necessity. The previous year had been a whirlwind of recording, touring, press interviews and fan adulation on par with The Beatles and Gene found himself unable to cope with the pressures of fame. Boarding a flight to New York he bailed out of both the plane and the group he had formed 18 months earlier. Conflicts from within and anxiety from without all contributed to what Gene claimed was a nervous breakdown.

“It was the general craziness of it all,” he opined years later, “the accelerating rock group-fan magazine nuttiness. You had tremendous egos in that group, myself included, a tremendous amount of ego and conflict all of the time. Finally I just had had it.” Retreating to his Laurel Canyon home Gene withdrew. “I literally went to bed for three months. I had just broken apart, the tension and the stress and the whole thing of it.”

What should have happened was that within weeks Gene entered a recording studio and rushed out a single to capitalize on the publicity of his departure. His dark, brooding presence was perfect fodder for the teen magazines and his knack for crafting Dylanesque folk-rock minor key masterpieces a surefire chart bet.

Instead he cooled out, not releasing his debut recording for some 10 months, taking his time and coming to terms with life beyond the media glare. “Gene was doing okay on songwriting and publishing,” states manager Jim Dickson. “He was still earning money long after leaving the Byrds because the money for the first two albums came in after he left and they still had to pay him. There wasn’t that much pressure to get some Gene Clark product out from anybody.” The delay would ultimately affect his career trajectory.

By May, suitably rested and ready, Gene formed Gene Clark & The Group with friends Joel Larson (drums), Chip Douglas (bass) and Bill Rhinehart (guitar). Rehearsing at Gene’s house (while he carried on a clandestine affair with Mamas & Papas beauty Michelle Phillips) they made their debut at the Whisky-a-Go Go on June 22. “It was a folk-rock oriented group,” recalls Douglas, “but Gene really wanted to be like the Beatles. That was his biggest influence. I could sense that the songs he was coming up with he really wanted to be Beatles-like.” Their two-week stand failed to set the Sunset Strip on fire. “After the Byrds there was all this pressure on Gene,” notes Douglas. “This was supposed to be better than the Byrds, but how could it be? We didn’t have Crosby or McGuinn. People didn’t come up raving about us. No one was going ‘Hey! Wow!’”

Undaunted, on July 10 Gene signed a solo contract with CBS Records and took the group into LA’s Criterion Studios in late July to lay down demo tracks for a possible album under Jim Dickson’s direction. But the sessions failed to capture any magic and the group folded soon after. “It was a tense recording session and things didn’t sound quite as good as they had sounded in rehearsal,” reflects Douglas. “Gene was disappointed. It didn’t sound like the Byrds or the Beatles. He just didn’t have the right guys in us to do his songs with. A lot of them were very complex, very deep, the more complicated words the better.”

Abandoning a self-contained group, Gene instead entered Columbia Studios on August 26 backed by seasoned session players and friends to begin his debut solo album. Staff producer Larry Marks recruited Leon Russell and Glen Campbell, both of whom had played on the “Mr. Tambourine Man” session. “Glen Campbell did a lot of the guitar playing on that album,” confirms Marks. Session logs reveal Leon Russell contributing piano, organ, glockenspiel, harpsichord and percussion throughout the sessions. While studio drummer Earl Palmer played on some tracks the nucleus of the rhythm section was the Byrds’ bassist Chris Hillman and drummer Michael Clarke. Guitarists Jerry Kole and Bill Rhinehart also contributed as did keyboard player Van Dyke Parks.

“Gene was kind of thrilled to be doing his first solo album,” offers Marks, “but there was a lot of pressure on him. A great deal of it was self-imposed as I recall.”

With a catalogue brimming with new songs, for the first session Gene cut “Couldn’t Believe Her” and “Is Yours Is Mine”, the former the most Byrds-like track on the album boasting jangly electric twelve-string guitar as well Beatles’ inspired licks at the end from Campbell. “Gene was really chasing the Beatles at that point,” suggests Marks. Over the next week the same lineup returned to complete further tracks including the country-flavored “Keep On Pushin’”, a holdover from The Group’s set. A 12-bar blues “That’s Why” was laid down only to be discarded. Gene’s uncharacteristically optimistic “I Think I’m Gonna Feel Better” and “I Found You” were cut on August 31 before Gene interrupted the sessions on September 2 to rejoin the Byrds temporarily for a 12-night stand at the Whisky after David Crosby fell ill, followed by a gig at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium on September 25.

Four days later he was back in the studio with a new composition, one destined to be the centerpiece of the album. Initially titled “Regina Dance”, “Echoes” offers Gene’s personal musings on life post Byrds. “I try to write songs almost always that have some kind of meaning, even if they’re light,” he revealed in a later interview. “With ‘Echoes’ that was just things that appeared evident to me about the world.”

“When I first heard ‘Echoes’ it so overwhelmed me that he could write that,” marvels Dickson. “I really began to look at Gene in a whole other way after that song. The poetry was amazing. That whole song sort of takes place at the Whisky. ‘You can watch Regina dance in the crystal panes of glass’; that was the girl’s name who danced in the glass cage at the Whisky. ‘On the streets you look again at the places you have been’; that was his introspection about leaving the Byrds and what happened after that. It was exactly about that world he was in at that moment and it was so clear.” Dickson enlisted Leon Russell to arrange the song.

Adds Larry Marks, “Leon gave ‘Echoes’ a lot of thought and you’ve got to give him credit for the sonic style of that track. It was probably one of the most produced things we ever did with Gene, a one of a kind track. We were looking at it as a single and we thought it might be the thing we might wrap the album around.” As abstract poetic vision, “Echoes” is a masterpiece of complex emotions and angst laid bare; as a recording it is a mini-opera of swirling strings and flutes. Further sessions in early October completed the baroque folk track. Concludes Dickson, “Leon kind of overdid it and Gene never could really put a vocal on it with all that music overwhelming him.”

Sessions continued through October with old friend Douglas Dillard added his Rickenbacker electric banjo to “Keep On Pushin’” on the 13th. That session also included the funky Beatlish “Elevator Operator” featuring Bill Rhinehart on lead guitar. “That was one Joel Larson kind of came up with and Gene jumped on it after he heard Joel singing it,” recalls Chip Douglas. “It was really Joel’s song and he and I were working on it when Gene kind of took it over. I guess our names got lost in the credits.” Bluegrass guitarist extraordinaire Clarence White arrived on October 20 for “The Same One”, a track that would require four sessions to complete. “Clarence was just getting into electric guitar at the time,” recalls Marks. “We were trying Clarence out on a couple of things. I think Jim Dickson brought Clarence by and introduced him one night.”

The sessions took an abrupt turn at the beginning of November after Larry Marks left CBS to join A&M Records (he would later produce Dillard & Clark) and Jim Dickson brought in Byrds producer Gary Usher to complete the album. The first track Usher worked on was “Needing Someone” again featuring White on lead guitar. “Gary just sort of stood there,” claims Dickson, who maintains he finished the album. “He got kind of enthusiastic about one song, the one about the tar paper track [“So You Say You Lost Your Baby”] and wanted to get involved with that but as far the basic recordings, the stuff with Chris, Michael and Clarence, he just sort of sat there through all that. I finished that album.” Nonetheless Usher did see fit to retain Leon Russell to provide a lush string score for “So You Say You Lost Your Baby”. White’s deft country picking propels “Tried So Hard”, laid down on November 10, furthering the country tone of the album.

Dickson exercised further sway over the sessions by recruiting clients, country duo Vern and Rex Gosdin, to add backing vocals to the existing tracks. The two were not unfamiliar to Gene having recorded his “The Reason Why” a year earlier and toured with the Byrds. “I had been working with the Gosdin Brothers since the Hillmen album,” notes Dickson. “They could sing excellent harmonies with no problem. They came in and did the harmonies and that was that. It was all overdubbed.”

“I did all the arrangements at my home and we went into the studio and put it down,” Vern remembers. “I just had the demos. We sat down and worked through the arrangements at Gene’s house and my house.”

The sessions wound up on November 18. A week later CBS issued “Echoes” as Gene’s debut single backed with a two-page ad in Billboard proclaiming “The solo debut of a first magnitude star.” Gene performed alone in early December at the Santa Monica Civic Center, his only promotional appearance. Perhaps too sophisticated for AM radio the single received limited airplay in LA but failed to chart.

On January 16, 1967, almost a full year since departing the Byrds, CBS released Gene’s solo album under the surprise billing Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, elevating Vern and Rex to co-starring status on an album of Gene’s own songs. While there is no denying the sterling vocal presence the duo brings to the album, Larry Marks remains bothered by the title. “The Gosdin Brothers were not involved in that album at all when I was there,” he insists. “I was doing a Gene Clark solo album, that’s all, and that’s the way it would have finished if I had stuck around to the end. Even if they had done the singing on it, which was great, it wouldn’t have been ‘Gene Clark With the Gosdin Brothers’. It was Gene’s album. Dickson might have thought it was good marketing for both artists.” David Clark recalls his brother Gene wanting to title the album Harold Eugene Clark but being overruled by the record label.

In a move prompted by their apparent lack of faith in Gene as a solo artist, CBS released the Byrds’ latest opus Younger Than Yesterday the same week as Gene’s debut effort all but sinking his chances at solo success. Years later Gene remained circumspect. “That was a chance for me to spread my wings on vocal arrangements on that particular project. The album sort of never went anywhere at the time, of course now it’s a collector’s item. At the time I was on the same label the Byrds were on and I think that they sort of felt they had a conflict of interest with me coming out on one side and the Byrds coming out on another. ‘The Byrds were already a saleable product so we’ll probably put the promotion behind them’. So that’s where it went.”

Often mislabeled the first country-rock album, Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers is far less country than pop. Folk-rock based with country leanings, its songs are more pop-oriented than the Byrds’ canon with healthy doses of Beatles, baroque, and Buck Owens influences. Fans expecting to hear Byrds music from their leading songwriter were disappointed. Despite the presence of three Byrds, the distinctive elements of their sound were conspicuous by their absence. By early 1967 folk-rock was on the wane and Gene was ready to move on.

CBS brought Gene back into the studio with Gary Usher for one more try on April 4, 1967 to record Ian & Sylvia’s “The French Girl” backed by a lush baroque arrangement from wonderkind Curt Boettcher. Boettcher, who had scored chart success with the Association and artistic plaudits with Millennium, went uncredited, as he had yet to officially join CBS’s staff. Awash in classical, baroque folk-rock—somewhat akin to the Left Banke’s hits—the track is an extension of the “Echoes” experiments with harpsichord and orchestration bathing Gene’s sympathetic vocals. The intended flip side, Gene’s “Only Colombe,” another slice of Dylan-inspired abstract poetry, received the same treatment with more positive results (the presence of backwards guitar adds a contemporary psychedelic edge).

Gene returned to the studio on May 10 and May 17 to finish up the tracks with Boettcher and his group Ballroom adding elaborate backing harmonies heard for the first time in the original mono mix on this CD release. Rumours to the contrary, this would be the only time Gene would work with Boettcher.

The single was ultimately shelved (a version of “The French Girl” released that spring by Daily Flash may have pre-empted CBS’s plans) and Gene’s contract lapsed a month later. He would wait a full eighteen months before releasing another recording with contemporary bluegrass outfit Dillard & Clark signed to A&M Records. The interim would mark a troubled period for Gene following the optimism surrounding his first solo effort.

Gene Clark had every opportunity for solo success following his exit from the Byrds. His failure to do so was in no way the result of a lack of talent, just timing. “Gene made a lot of good tries at making it,” postulates Jim Dickson. “He made a lot of good music. But there is a lot of luck in getting that break. If one good song on his own had been a hit he would have had a whole different career. Sometimes you just don’t get a hit song because things don’t come together.”

– John Einarson, author of Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life & Legacy of The Byrds’ Gene Clark (Backbeat Books, 2005)

Gene Clark

Silhouetted and Mountain Stage

Extended Liner Notes by John Einarson

If you’re reading these notes chances are you are at the very least casually acquainted with the name Gene Clark. Widely regarded as the heart and soul of the original Byrds and their strongest, most evocative songwriter whose minor key melancholy ballads and dark, Dylanesque poetic lyrics tugged at heartstrings, the Missouri-born singer/songwriter is hardly a household name.

Despite expectations for a high flying solo career following his abrupt departure from the Byrds in early 1966, Gene failed to attain the same level of commercial success as his former band or band mates David Crosby, Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn. By the mid 1980s his recording career had bottomed out. Having released several critically acclaimed and artistically innovative albums for a succession of record labels Gene had nonetheless burned enough bridges to ensure any comeback attempt would be a tough road.

“Gene had so thoroughly compromised his name in the music industry by the time that we met him that it was really difficult to get any opportunities for him,” offers then manager Saul Davis. “Whatever the specifics were he just couldn’t quite get that consistent support. In spite of his great songs, his looks, his voice, and artists from the Turtles and the Eagles to Linda Ronstadt and later Roxy Music recording his songs, given his reputation, for Gene to make the kind of career moves he should have been able to make based on his immense talent was almost impossible.”

Following a chance meeting at one of Gene’s last Firebyrd gigs in late 1984, Saul teamed Gene with singer/songwriter Carla Olson. Texas-born Olson fronted the Textones who cut a few tracks with Gene in an effort to land him a recording contract. When that failed Saul suggested the two collaborate on an album. “At that time Gene’s name didn’t really mean anything to the record-buying public and he didn’t really have an audience,” recalls Carla. “And I was pretty much unknown, a singer from a cowpunk band in LA. Saul was gently trying to convince Gene that people were not exactly knocking down doors to sign him. But that was hard because Gene always had his ego. That star thing never left him, bless him. He always held his head high and dressed to the nines.”

Recorded in Los Angeles in 1986, So Rebellious A Lover was a watershed album often regarded as ground zero for the entire alt. country, Americana, roots music movement of the 90s. “Gene and Gram Parsons are the fathers of this whole alt. country thing,” Saul insists. The album presented Gene and Carla’s exquisite acoustic folk-country based songs with subtle, unobtrusive backing. “Probably it was a part of Gene that everyone longed to hear,” suggests Carla. “Most people never got to hear that on his records because of all the production. The whole idea of doing that record stripped down was to let the voices be heard. Minimal instrumentation was the direction we wanted.” The album found Carla’s songwriting well matched to Gene’s high standards and her rich, full voiced delivery a worthy partner to his melancholy tenor.

Released by Rhino Records the following year, the album revived Gene’s flagging career. “Gene was coming out of a real dark period and Saul had worked quite a bit to bring him back career-wise,” recalls the album’s producer Michael Huey. While a tour in support of the album never materialized, Gene’s notorious aversion to flying well documented, the two managed several key performances including an appearance on CMT’s Nashville Now. As Carla remembers, “There were no agents interested in booking us.”

On October 2, 1988, Gene made a solo appearance on the syndicated radio series The Mountain Stage recorded live at the Cultural Center Theater at the Capitol Complex in Charleston, West Virginia. A sometimes mercurial live performer, the seven-song set (joined on two numbers by a stellar house band) found him in top form as he ran through material spanning his post-Byrds career, from “Tried So Hard” off his 1967 debut solo album and “Train Leaves Here This Morning” from his groundbreaking country-rock collaboration with Doug Dillard through to “Gypsy Rider” and “My Marie”, two of his most poignant latter day compositions. This CD marks the first official release of this set, regarded among Clark aficionados as among his finest solo live performances.

Back in Los Angeles attempts at a follow up Clark/Olson studio album, mentioned by Gene during his Mountain Stage set, stalled. “We had an offer from Rhino to do a second Gene and Carla studio album,” notes Saul, “but I think Gene wasn’t happy with the money or he’d gotten a taste of a little success. But for whatever reason he didn’t do it. The Gypsy Angel tracks [released by Evangeline Records in 2001] were literally demos Gene recorded and gave to Carla to learn for the follow up album. Those were songs he was considering for an album that never got recorded.” With substantial royalty checks rolling in from Tom Petty’s cover of “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better”, Gene’s need to gig declined. “Gene had been living pretty much hand to mouth for several years and then the big writing checks came in,” confirms Saul. “Instead of it giving him the ability to reach the next plateau of happiness, success and stability, it probably was detrimental to him in the end.”

The two did, however, perform together at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica on February 3, 1990 in a memorable set unknowingly recorded by the sound engineer. “We weren’t aware that a tape of that performance existed,” recalls Carla. “It was several years later, after Gene had passed away in 1991, that Duane Jarvis mentioned to me that he had a tape of that show. At the end of the evening the person doing the recording asked Duane if he’d like a copy of the show. So Duane put the tape in his guitar case and forgot about it for a couple of years.”

Released in 1992 in the UK by Demon Records, Silhouetted In Light captures an intimate performance by Gene and Carla backed by guitarist Duane Jarvis and bass player David Provost in front of a packed house of 150 patrons. “McCabe’s is the scariest stage in the world,” states Carla, “because when you walk on that stage, if you breathe too hard everybody in that place can hear you. Because it’s so close they’re watching you intensely. Nothing gets past them. It’s a little tiny stage and the audience is practically on top of you.”

Rehearsals at Gene’s Sherman Oaks home earlier in the week had proven problematic with the singer coming off a three day writing binge with no sleep. However on the night, he pulled himself together to present an inspired performance. “He could be so difficult some times,” recalls Carla. “But because you knew that the real Gene was such a sweet person you’d give him some slack. That’s kind of how that gig was. It was ‘Well, we don’t exactly know all these songs that well together but we’re going to do them and we hope you enjoy them as much as we enjoy playing them for you.’ Amidst the audience was a very intimate bunch of friends, a lot of people we both knew, so we had a really good time. Some gigs you just can’t do that; the distance between you and the audience is too great. But this was really a moment to take advantage of how human we are. That’s how I feel about that night, how human Gene was. You can feel all of our vulnerabilities and how close to the edge we all are. Gene was never really a safe person. He had an edge. But even on the bad nights he still sounded beautiful so I guess we were the only ones who kind of knew the difference between tragic and beautiful.”

Besides a number of classic Clark compositions stretching back to the Byrds, as well as songs from So Rebellious A Lover, the set boasts several numbers intended for the follow up studio album, from Gene’s moving “Your Fire Burning” and an earlier composition “Love Wins Again” to Carla’s stunning “Number One Is To Survive” and “Photograph”, the latter a favorite of Gene’s. “It’s funny because I never really felt that strongly about that song but Gene liked it a lot,” remembers Carla, who wrote the song with the Textones’ George Callins. “The Textones never recorded it and Gene and I never cut it in the studio. This is the only recording of that song.” The two also feature four cover songs including “Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness”. Explains Carla, “That was a song Gene always liked. I think he was a John Prine fan. He did that one alone. He preferred to do a few things alone like that one, ‘Here Without You’ and maybe one or two others.” Opening act, folk/country singer/songwriter Steve Young joins the two for set closer “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”, returning a favor after Gene guested on Steve’s debut album Rock, Salt and Nails years earlier.

Although Gene and Carla would appear together again at the Palomino club, and she would join him for “Number One Is To Survive” at his ill-fated Cinegrill gig a month before his death, their McCabe’s set stands as testament to the strength and intensity of their all too brief collaboration.

“You never knew what you were going to get with Gene,” muses Carla. “Sometimes we’d get so silly together that neither one of us could keep a straight face. There were nights where he was a little off, not physically out of it but he would every once in a while get into this mode of wanting to do everything real slow and you’d have to go with it. He had a weathered sound in his voice – all the smoking and other stuff probably didn’t help – but singing with Gene for me was always a joy and a pleasure.

“I’m proud of our performance on this album. I think Gene would be too.”

–John Einarson, author of Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life & Legacy of The Byrds’ Gene Clark (Backbeat Books).

The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark
Gene Clark
Extended Liner Notes by John Einarson

Often the most satisfying and creative musical mergers occur without any master plan. That was certainly the case with The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark, a casual collection of friends and pickers who coalesced into a group around informal jam sessions in the summer of 1968. With each member at loose ends, the attraction was the opportunity to have fun and play some great music. What emerged from this serendipitous situation was a groundbreaking approach to creating a contemporary bluegrass sound that helped define what would become country rock.

Having enjoyed unprecedented success and adulation with folk-rock pioneers the Byrds, Gene Clark had flown the nest by early 1966. As the principal songwriter and the focus of much of the band’s attention, expectations ran high for a sterling solo career. Unfortunately Gene faltered right out of the starting gate. His debut solo album, coming a full year after his exit, failed to garner attention released at the same time as the Byrds’ stunning Younger Than Yesterday. Despite an impressive effort, the year long absence from the public consciousness only served to obscure Gene’s name and accomplishments in the fickle pop music pantheon. Attempts at forming his own bands also faltered. CBS Records dropped Gene in the summer of 1967.

In April of 1968 Gene signed to A&M Records and with assistance from a group of Sacramento, California musicians known as the Fugitives led by Larry (Laramy) Smith, began rehearsing and recording at A&M’s studio on the former Charlie Chaplin film lot in Hollywood. Concurrently, Gene and banjo player extraordinaire Douglas Dillard, recently departed from the Dillards, were jamming daily at Doug’s Beechwood canyon home. As Gene explains, “I had known Doug from before and at that time he was sort of working with Bernie Leadon and we just sat around and jammed a couple of times and then decided we would put together a group. That’s really how it happened. It was really pretty much of a flow. We would sit around and someone would come up with an idea. That was it. We’d have jams almost every evening so things would come out of them. We’d get out the banjos and guitars, David Jackson would come in and play upright bass, and we’d just start pickin’ and that’s how all this stuff came out. I had always loved bluegrass music, but hadn’t had a chance to experiment. I met Doug and Bernie and we got together and started working with it.”

Abandoning the Fugitives sessions, Gene threw in his lot with Doug, Bernie, David Jackson, plus mandolin player Don Beck. “The stuff with Doug and us was really happening,” recalls Bernie, who was between gigs after Hearts & Flowers split up that spring. “I think Gene just thought, ‘Well, this is certainly more fun than what I’m doing with those other guys.’ The next thing was [producer] Larry Marks showed up and said we were going to make a record to basically document what we were doing. It all happened very fast, very organically, so it was a real labor of love and I think you can hear that in the music. And you can also hear how unified the whole album is. It was really exciting. We would be playing that music and laughing. Gene was obviously in a very creative period and writing several great songs a week. He was fulfilled and happy, laughing, smiling, and joking. That was the happiest that I ever saw him.

“Gene may have been a pop star,” Bernie continues, “but don’t forget he was a guy from Missouri who grew up with bluegrass and country music. That’s where Douglas was coming from, as well. Gene responded to the stuff with Douglas and us with his whole heart and soul because it was embracing the totality of who he was, his roots.”Indeed, one song, “Something’s Wrong” found Gene reflecting on his childhood living in the middle of Swope Park, a rural retreat in the middle of Kansas City.

Douglas Dillard was impressed by Gene’s remarkable songwriting skills. “Gene Clark was a very creative-minded person,” he states. “One of the best writers I’ve ever seen, very prolific. I watched him sit down and write a whole song without lifting his pencil from the paper. It just seemed like it came through him all of a sudden. It was really amazing. Gene always loved country music so he just combined all his knowledge of music and that’s basically what he came up with.”

Recording began on June 13 at Annex Studios in Hollywood.”As Bernie remembers, “We knew the songs very well from our jamming everyday so when we went into the studio it was a piece of cake. We recorded in a circle, everybody sitting in a circle facing each other. We played it all acoustically with David on upright bass. I remember only one day where there was a drummer (Joel Larson on “Out on the Side”).” When not playing guitar, Bernie contributed banjo allowing Doug to pick up the fiddle or guitar. “Douglas pushed me to play banjo on a lot of the songs, which shows how selfless he was.”

June 25 saw the group record one of Gene’s most enduring post-Byrds numbers, “Train Leaves Here This Morning,” co-written with Bernie. “It was really easy to write with Gene,” acknowledges Bernie. “He would come in with a piece, he might have the chorus or something, and we’d just play it over and over for two hours without stopping. Then maybe a new part would come into the instrumental thing and the next morning he’d come back with lyrics for that part. Gene would stay up all night and germinate this stuff. He would come back the next day with a completely intact song with a beautiful story, wonderful phrasing, wonderful lines, beautiful melody, the whole thing. I was just amazed. I had no clue how he did it. Gene was a very deep and mystical guy. He would write these vague-sounding lyrics that somehow had this very deep meaning. We were creating the music and Gene was bouncing off of that, reacting to what we were playing, coming back with lyrics, and we’d put harmonies in and a new section if someone had ideas. That’s how I got a writing credit for ‘Train Leaves Here This Morning.’ My actual recollection is that I didn’t do that much writing on the song but I threw a couple of chords in that Gene thought were significant enough to merit a writing credit.”

After a brief hiatus, recording resumed in mid August through into September. In total, the album was completed in a mere seven studio sessions. Although the direction of the album was most definitely within the bluegrass idiom, the final track recorded, “Out on the Side,” represented a departure. The arrangement and instrumentation (drums, electric guitar and bass, organ) was decidedly rock-oriented, sounding much like The Band whose Music From Big Pink had recently set the music world on its ear. Recalls David Jackson, “‘Out on the Side’ came from an entirely different session. Larry Marks was the producer and had a lot of input on that one. I think it came from what the Beatles were doing at the time.”

Released in late November, The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark was a breath of fresh country air amid the cluttered rock/pop scene. Los Angeles Herald-Examiner reporter Michael Etchison observed that Gene’s voice was “even more lonesome than it was with the Byrds. Dillard and Leadon join him in a mix of high hill and flatland harmonies. They have the best country sound of any ex-rock group around.” In an interview with Etchison at the time, Doug Dillard commented, “There has to be something besides loud music and a lot of people are finding out they can listen to country music.” Added Gene, “There’s something else happening. Country music is changing a lot. The young people, especially the ones that don’t come from Nashville, are trying to change. They’re bringing in a whole new kind of fan.”

The album cover sported a photo of the two on a motorcycle, Gene straddling the bike while Douglas sits in the sidecar, passing something between them. “They had that bad boy image on the motorcycles, passing that cigarette that everyone thought was a joint,” laughs Rodney Dillard, Douglas’s brother. “I got a big kick out of that.” “That was who those guys were,” laughs David Jackson. “There were some pretty wild times.”

Dillard & Clark made their live debut at the Troubadour as the album was released. But while the album tracks eschewed electric instruments for a more traditional bluegrass approach, by the time the group hit the Troubadour stage that November they had transformed into an electric bluegrass/country rock group. Recruiting ex-Byrd Michael Clarke on drums, Gene, Bernie and David swapped their acoustic instruments for electric ones. Even Douglas brought out his Rickenbacker electric “Bantar” banjo. Following a disastrous debut where both Gene and Doug went off the rails after taking too many drugs, the group managed to impress the crowds and complete the weeklong engagement. “Dillard & Clark was not a very good live band,” muses Bernie. “We had no ability to actually rehearse and be focused and organized about anything. We walked onstage without a prepared set list, without having properly figured out how we would begin and end songs. Without having really rehearsed the harmonies on microphone and be in some kind of balance. The result was complete confusion; to come out looking cool and proceed to make absolute idiots of ourselves.” Following a few scattered dates the band folded, emerging in a different configuration for a follow up album in early 1969 that leaned more towards traditional bluegrass cover tunes and less on redefining bluegrass music in a contemporary context as their debut album had so effectively accomplished.

Despite disappointing sales (the recording-buying public wouldn’t catch on to country rock or a contemporary bluegrass until the Eagles), The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark album remains among a handful of seminal 1960s country-rock experiments. “I think we made our mark in country rock,” offers Douglas. “We didn’t make the charts but we sure influenced a lot of people.”

–John Einarson, author of Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life & Legacy of The Byrds’ Gene Clark (Backbeat Books, 2005)

Silverado’75
Gene Clark
Extended Liner Notes by John Einarson

For former Byrds singer/ songwriter/ front man Gene Clark, 1974 should have been a banner year. After all, he had been the only member of that pioneering sixties folk-rock group to emerge from their flawed 1973 Byrds reunion album with his reputation not only intact but on the rise. His performances were universally lauded by critics who otherwise panned the group’s attempt at recapturing old glories. On the heels of his stellar contributions, Asylum Records head honcho David Geffen offered Gene a solo contract with a staggering $100,000 budget to produce what was anticipated to be his commercial breakthrough album after years of career doldrums since leaving the Byrds in 1966. No one doubted Gene’s intrinsic ability to craft melancholy lyrics and minor key masterpieces.

Retreating to his secluded home base up in Mendocino along the Pacific north coast, Gene set about writing a body of songs that explored spirituality and the human condition. “Gene had a kind of moral and ethical viewpoint that wasn’t religious or anything like that but he had a sense of right and wrong and he stuck pretty much close to that,” notes close friend Philip O’Leno. “Reality was very important to Gene, getting through the bullshit and down to what is meaningful, what is the truth. To me it seemed as if he had an old soul, an innate wisdom beyond his being.”

Enlisting the services of producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye, the two set about wrapping Gene’s deeply insightful songs in elaborate arrangements that framed his exquisite poetry in musical mini-operas of wailing gospel choruses, screaming electric violins, swirling organs, and funky bass. Released in the fall of 1974, No Other was Gene Clark’s masterwork. Reviewers were staggered by the grandiloquence of the arrangements, heaping praise on both Gene and Tommy. Geffen, on the other hand, was furious that all he got for $100,000 was a mere eight tracks. Following an altercation with Gene in a Hollywood restaurant Geffen left No Other to twist in the wind with little promotion or support. The album rose to #86 before disappearing. Gene has devastated.

With no label support, Gene set out in a battered old Dodge van (he hated flying) on a low key tour of clubs across the country in an effort to promote the album. Accompanying him were the Silverados: Roger White on Telecaster guitar and vocals and Duke Bardwell on electric bass, banjo and vocals. Duke had recently been a member of Elvis Presley’s band and had backed Loggins & Messina yet jumped at the opportunity to work with the former Byrd. “I was fascinated by his poetry,” offers Duke. “He showed me that you could really take the language and bend it, twist it, mould it and brush it like paint. It was like he was standing before a canvas and would create that canvas. I had never seen anything like that before.”

For the next two years Gene Clark and the Silverados toured relentlessly yet never rose much above B-circuit club gigs. It was a tough slog and a humbling experience for an ex-Byrd who had scaled the heights of pop superstardom. “There was no money involved in this thing,” laughs Duke. “Shit no, we were making minimum wage for what we were doing. I have no idea what they were booking him for but there were some times when I felt it really wasn’t anywhere near enough. I would come off of Elvis’s airplane and get into Gene’s broken down old van. He didn’t have product; he didn’t a record label; he didn’t have anything if he didn’t have us.”

Together the trio took material from Gene’s existing catalog including numbers from No Other, stripped them down to basics and redefined them in Appalachian Mountain triad harmonies and country-flavored arrangements. In many respects the sound of Gene with the Silverados represented a logical progression from his bluegrass and country experiments on 1968’s groundbreaking The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark. Songs like the haunting minor key “Here Without You” from the first Byrds album, the exquisite “Spanish Guitar”, No Other’s ethereal centrepiece “Silver Raven”, and Gene’s Byrds classic “Set You Free This Time” all took on an entirely distinctive hue with the Silverados. In addition, Gene was inspired to write a collection of new songs in a country-rock vein including “Home Run King” and “Daylight Line.” Traditional country numbers like “In the Pines” and “Long Black Veil” were also given new life in the able hands of the trio.

While there were times when Gene’s drinking hampered his ability to perform, on a good night Gene, Roger and Duke were capable of transcending time and space leaving those often too few who witnessed their shows more than satisfied. “The audiences knew there was some serious poetry going on,” Duke insists. “Like when he did something like ‘Silver Raven’. He would take some liberties with his voice, start throwing his voice around, and it didn’t always match the notes but you had to accept Gene Clark for who he was at the moment and how he was performing. If you came in with some preconceived notion of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ you were screwed. The effect of his poetry on the listening public was incredible.

“I remember the show at Ebbets Field in Denver. That was a good show. The intimacy of that room is what absolutely blew me away. You were totally exposed to the audience and couldn’t get away with anything. They were sitting right up close so the scrutiny was undeniable. If you were up to it it could be an incredible experience. When Gene was not over the line like he sometimes was, when he was on and focusing and performing his poetry it was simply awesome. And Gene was up to it at Ebbets Field, as I recall. It was the perfect venue for Gene’s poetry. He would always have to drink some before he could go on stage but as good as it got may have been at Ebbets Field.”

In the fall of 1975 Gene expanded the Silverados with the addition of drums and piano working up full-band arrangements of the songs he’d been road testing over the previous year with Duke and Roger in anticipation of another album with Tommy Kaye. In early 1976, accompanied by the Silverados, Gene laid down demos of his new songs including “Daylight Line”, “Wheel of Time”, “Home Run King”, and “What Is Meant Will Be” at ex-Monkee Mike Nesmith’s Countryside Studios in Los Angeles. When it came time for the album sessions, however, Tommy Kaye abruptly dismissed the Silverados after just two days of recording. “Gene had been out there working with us for two years and had developed a certain delivery on the material,” explains Duke. “But it was going to be too much trouble for Tommy to change it so he fired us.”

The Silverados do not appear on Gene’s subsequent album Two Sides To Every Story released the following year. Several of the songs on the album were first conceived, shaped and refined on the road with the Silverados and their versions remain definitive. “The stuff we had developed over that time period was raw and good and rhythmical and suited the poetry well,” Duke attests. “And then they brought in all these slick players and just cleaned it all up.”

Gene never again worked with the Silverados. Following the release of Two Sides To Every Story he assembled the short lived KC Southern Band. Yet the Silverados are more than a mere footnote in Gene Clark’s career and this live release, recorded in early 1975, attests to the sheer quality and artistry of that liaison.

“When you were with Gene you never knew where it was going to go,” muses Duke. “There was always this cloudy, dark thing about him. He was more dark than bright. We put in two very difficult years traveling and performing together and it wasn’t always easy. But Gene had a profound effect on me, that kind of creative depth of poetry. His was a mystical, spiritual and lyrical kind of poetry that I didn’t know before. Gene could dial into these other places. He surprised me with that stuff.

“I have been blessed in my musical career,” concludes Duke, “and part of that blessing, even though it was frustrating at times, was playing with Gene Clark and being exposed to the man, the poet, and the musician.”

–John Einarson is author of Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life & Legacy of The Byrds’ Gene Clark (Backbeat Books, 2005)

White Light
Gene Clark
Extended Liner Notes by John Einarson

The stark portrait on the untitled album cover, Gene Clark silhouetted against the setting Northern California sun, was more than a mere eye-catching design. It was emblematic of the stark back-to-basics approach to a collection of songs born from a period of inner peace, personal contentment and stability for the often troubled singer/songwriter.

By late 1969, Gene Clark had grown weary of the Hollywood lifestyle. As a founding member of the Byrds, America’s answer to the Beatles and British Invasion and kings of the Sunset Strip, he was held in exaltation in and around Los Angeles. The five Byrds presided over the Strip like Greek gods living high above on their own Mt. Olympus in the Hollywood Hills. Despite leaving the group in 1966 Gene was still subject to all the accouterments that came with that kind of adulation.

With the commercial failure of The Dillard & Clark Expedition, his country/bluegrass/rock hybrid formed with buddy Douglas Dillard in 1968, Gene was looking for a change. While Dillard & Clark had brought him back to his musical roots, what he longed for was a lifestyle that reflected those simply rural values. Born and raised in Missouri and Kansas, Gene and his twelve siblings spent their formative years secluded from the hustle and bustle of Kansas City in a tiny four-room former trolley shed in the middle of Swope Park, a rural oasis. Here he and his brothers and sisters lived out their Davy Crockett and Robin Hood fantasies in a forest all their own. What could be more idyllic?

Driving up the Northern California coast that fall, Gene stopped at Little River, a picturesque spot three miles south of Mendocino and bordering Van Damme State Park. Captivated by the tiny seaside community with its casual pace, Gene booked a room at the Lazy Eye Motel. The pastoral experience remained with him and he continued to visit Little River often, making the winding drive up the Pacific Coast Highway in his 1964 Porsche. It was a place where he could simply be Harold Eugene Clark and not ‘Gene Clark, Rock Star.’ On one such visit, Gene rented a cabin across from the Andiron Lodge. Inspired by his rustic surroundings, he begin writing a body of songs that embodied a more basic, rootsy, stripped down approach to his muse—just acoustic guitar and voice. Those songs would inform his next album.

Back in Los Angeles, Gene’s life took another turn when he met Carlie McCummings, a slender blonde former dancer and employee at Bell Records. In late 1969 the two bid farewell to LA and set out for Little River, ultimately purchasing a stately two-story former coach house built in the 1800s on twelve acres of land on Middle Ridge Road nearby Albion. The house was surrounded by redwoods; behind it were the Mendocino Headlands spreading out westward before dropping off to the ocean. This would remain Gene’s home for the next six years. “He’d just sit by a window on the ocean and write music,” Carlie recalls. “I spent many hours sitting up with him while he was composing, which was quite interesting.” As neighbor and friend Philip O’Leno suggests, “I think this area appealed to him because he grew up in the country and had strong country roots. It was his way of getting back to the land. He was more than a country boy at heart.”

“Dad was into that lifestyle,” recalls youngest son Kai. “He was definitely a mountain man in the old west. I kind of see my dad then with a smile on his face. He loved using his hands and getting his hands in the dirt. They cooked over a woodstove and had a well for water. In Mendocino it was as if time stood still. My father was probably recognized everywhere he went in LA but in Mendocino, it was such a small place even if they did recognize you, it wasn’t a big deal. He loved it there.”

On March 12, 1970, Gene and Carlie were married in the front yard of Philip and Ea O’Leno’s rustic Albion home. While the couple settled into rural domesticity, Gene still had unfinished business. “Jerry Moss from A&M and his wife were our first visitors from LA,” Carlie remembers. “He came up to tell Gene, ‘Okay, you have a contract.’ We had been up there about a year by then and he hadn’t recorded or anything. Jerry loved Gene. He told him, ‘You need to come to LA. It’ll be okay. Bring Carlie.’ And we said, ‘Okay, we’ll come.’”

When recording sessions commenced in March 1971 at the Village Recorder in Los Angeles, Jesse Ed Davis had been installed as producer. A Native American Kiowa born in Norman, Oklahoma, Jesse Ed had come out to Los Angeles in the 1960s with fellow Oklahomans Leon Russell, Carl Radle, and J.J. Cale and earned a reputation as an innovative guitar player. As a record producer he was untried. Nonetheless, the camaraderie between Gene and Jesse Ed led the former to entrust the latter to the producer’s role. “I think Jesse and Gene made some pretty awesome music together,” states Carlie. Jesse Ed knew guitar like Gene never dreamed of. I think that’s the first time Gene really aspired or felt the confidence to really play guitar, when he was with Jesse Ed.”

Assembling a skeleton crew of supporting musicians including Gary Malabar on drums, John Selk on acoustic guitar, Bobbye Hall Porter on percussion, and bassist Chris Ethridge, the focus was on the simplicity of the songs with the accompaniment kept subtly supportive without becoming obtrusive so as not to distract from Gene’s performances. Keyboardists Ben Sidran and Mike Utley were brought in near the end of the sessions to overdub piano and organ respectively. Jesse Ed added his guitar throughout.

The recordings went smoothly, Gene and Jesse very much in sync over the sound and direction that the album was to take. The solo acoustic singer-songwriter era of the likes of James Taylor and Neil Young was just beginning so Gene was at the cutting edge of this phenomenon. The only interruption came from an act of God in the form of the Los Angeles earthquake of 1971 which temporarily disrupted sessions. “When the earthquake hit,” Carlie points out, “Gene was in the recording studio and the echo chambers shook with the quake and you could hear it on the track just at the point where Gene sings, ‘and the earth came trembling down.’ That was not synthetic. It was the real earthquake.”

The songs themselves drew inspiration from the tranquility Gene found around him. “The song ‘White Light’ was a description of our property,” confirms Philip O’Leno. “My forge was just out here in back. I was pounding a lot of iron in those days. It was a song for us.” Philip witnessed the genesis of many of the songs that would appear on the album. “It was kind of tedious the way he wrote songs because he would go over and over them. Gene wrote on legal pads and he would write then scratch out lyrics. He would just compose lyrics as he went, he didn’t note the music. He would just keep track of the lyrics. He was writing all the time, pages of lyrics, and the song was in his head.” Adds wife Ea, “You never knew where Gene was sometimes. He would go out walking in the dark for hours composing songs. He would just disappear writing songs.”

With its emphasis on Gene’s intensely personal poetry, White Light was a stunning work of genius and Gene’s high watermark to that point. His voice stands strong and prominent and his poetry in songs like the exquisite “For A Spanish Guitar,” “With Tomorrow,” and “Where My Love Lies Asleep” are delicately evocative. The album was Gene’s most Dylan-influenced to date. As Rolling Stone magazine’s review suggested “‘Spanish Guitar’ is a first cousin to ‘Visions of Johanna’ mixed with ‘Tom Thumb’s Blues,’ harmonica riff and all. ‘Where My Love Lies Asleep’ is even more Dylanesque, with bits of ‘Girl from the North Country’ penetrating it. Clark’s use of word symbols is uncanny and invites many flattering comparisons to another side of Dylan prior to Nashville Skyline days.” The review concludes that the album is “a fresh and innovative look at what came before in a new framework . . . to create one of the most interesting and exciting records of 1971.”

Release that August, the front cover photo was taken on the roof of a building in Mendocino while the back cover shot of Gene peering through a window was from Philip’s house in Albion. Overall, the album reveals Gene Clark at the top of his game, buoyed by his new surroundings, friendships, marriage, and the imminent birth of his first child. The album garnered unanimous praise from critics and reviewers, going on to top several Best Album of the Year lists and earn top honors in the Netherlands. While some detractors insist the album was under-produced and bare bones, no one could deny the quality of the songwriting and performances from Gene.

Nevertheless, despite rave reviews however, White Light sold poorly. Once again, Gene presented his record label with an exceptional effort only to refuse to tour or perform in support of it. “They didn’t have any way to market Gene,” insists his fellow Byrd Chris Hillman. “How do you market him if you don’t have him capable of being the public person to back that record up? Gene made some great records but you can’t put a record out and go back to your cabin in the woods. Going on the road is what I’m talking about. He had to be a performer.” But Gene did not want to play the game and his career suffered the consequences. “You have to understand that one of the reasons he left the Byrds was that he would not get on a plane again,” cites Carlie Clark, explaining Gene’s aversion to touring. “It took four and a half years of our being together to get him on a plane.”

In the intervening years White Light has come to be regarded as Gene Clark’s most personal albums and a particular favorite among his legion of fans. In spite of the stark simplicity of the arrangements, his songwriting reflects an optimism not generally associated with his extraordinary body of work, an inner peace since leaving Los Angeles. “At night we would lay in bed and we could see the ships going up to Seattle out on the horizon,” Carlie remembers. “It was idyllic. Gene was like a little boy. We were totally innocent, living this reality that was ours.”

–John Einarson, author of Mr. Tambourine Man: The Life & Legacy of The Byrds’ Gene Clark (Backbeat Books, 2005)

From the Inside
Poco
Extended Liner Notes by John Einarson

In assessing country-rock pioneers Poco’s lengthy and impressive discography, the band’s fourth album, 1971’s From The Inside, marks the point where the band transitioned to a rockier approach while still embracing their infectiously effervescent country-flavoured pop sound. For that alone, the album is significant. Yet it is more than that. From The Inside boasts some of the band’s finest songwriting and playing. Initially regarded as somewhat of a flawed diamond, in retrospect, there is much to recommend on From The Inside.

From The Inside introduced former Illinois Speed Press guitarist Paul Cotton into the lineup as replacement for Jimmy Messina. Where Jimmy was a country picker, Paul came from a rock ‘n’ roll background. It was a sound that founding member, singer/songwriter Richie Furay, wanted for the band. “We chose Paul because we agreed that we needed to go for more of a rock feel rather than the country-rock feel,” states Richie. “I thought that approach would make us more successful with the radio audience which we were lacking. Paul brought a rock & roller’s instinct to the band.” Those instincts proved to be exactly what the band needed, as From The Inside admirably demonstrated.

“On the road, we were touring with a lot of bands who were far more rock than country,” notes pedal steel guitarist Rusty Young “and that rubbed off on us. We got the sense that we needed to be more rock ‘n’ roll. A lot of our country-rock buddies were starting to move more into rock at the time.”

Rising from the ashes of the much loved Buffalo Springfield, Furay and Messina recruited Young, drummer/singer George Grantham and bass player/singer Randy Meisner to form Pogo, soon after changing to Poco, in the summer of 1968. The group sought to blend both country and rock music in a distinctively fresh and exciting original sound making them arguably the first true country-rock band. Meisner quit during sessions for their debut album the following year (and would ultimately become an original Eagles member), replaced by Timothy B. Schmit. While the band enjoyed critical and audience acclaim, by 1971 they had yet to translate that into commercial success.

Coming off a lengthy tour in support of their live album Deliverin’, Poco went straight into a Memphis studio in June 1971 to record a follow up. A spirited album capturing the band’s high energy live show, Deliverin’ had breached the Billboard Top 30. Now with Cotton onboard expectations ran high for the all-important commercial breakthrough. Unfortunately, despite an exceptional cache of new songs, the choice of studio and producer were ill-chosen.

The band was booked into Trans Maximus Studios with Booker T. & The MGs guitarist Steve Cropper assigned production duties. Unfortunately, neither the studio nor Cropper proved suitable for the task. “Our vocal sound needed a lot of tracks and there just weren’t enough for the instruments and our vocals,” Young claims. “Steve was producing but he personal problems and wouldn’t be there at the studio some times. We didn’t really connect with him and he didn’t connect with us. Overall it was not a pleasant experience recording that album but we did the best we could under the circumstances.” The layout of the studio was further problematic. The sound booth with the recording console was located up a lengthy flight of stairs from the recording floor. “Those stairs wore me out after a while,” chuckles Cotton. “Take after take up and down the stairs.”

Compounding the already challenging circumstances, Furay’s focus was distracted by personal issues. “It was a difficult album for me because my wife Nancy and I were really struggling at the time in our relationship. Lyrically that came out on the album. I felt distanced from the whole project. It was hard for me to identify with what was going on. That may be why some of the album may have had a darker mood. I was in a dark place in my life.” While songs like opening track Hoedown, You Are The One (dating back to 1969) and Just For Me And You bring to mind the upbeat country-rock style of earlier Poco, What Am I Gonna Do and What If I Should Say I Love You evoke a more sombre sentiment uncharacteristic of the band. “Those songs I find difficult to comment on even today,” muses Furay. “They are very personal. I was a very mixed-up young man.” Despite the underlying motivation behind Furay’s contributions, the playing remains outstanding, especially Young’s dobro and pedal steel guitar. “At the time we had three great singers and three writers in the band,” he notes, “so my role was to be the instrumentalist and work on the arrangements.” Young would later emerge as a powerhouse songwriter in his own right.

Do You Feel It Too was a song Furay composed back in 1965 under the title Can’t Keep Me Down while a scuffling folk performer in New York. The song had been cut as a demo with the Buffalo Springfield and later recorded by Poco for their 1969 debut album, ending up as an outtake. “The Dirt Band had recorded that song in a very country-rock way so I was looking for a different way to express myself,” explains Furay on giving the song another try. “I don’t know where I came up with that real grungy guitar intro and funky arrangement for it on From The Inside but it gave me a chance to express my frustrations at that time and to bring it down to a different feel. It was an experiment.”

New kid Cotton was encouraged to contribute songs to the group. His first, Bad Weather, would become a Poco classic. “When I auditioned for the band at Richie’s house, I played Bad Weather and got the gig,” recalls the affable guitarist. “I think that song had a lot to do with it. It was inspired by the dissolution of the Illinois Speed Press. I remember playing the Whisky-a-Go Go one night and after our set Jimi Hendrix came over and gave me a hug and told me, ‘Don’t ever stop writing songs like that’. He was talking about Bad Weather. Man, did that make my day!” The combination of Cotton’s husky voice, Young’s mellifluous pedal steel guitar, and the band’s lush harmonies elevate the track. “I think ‘Bad Weather’ is probably one of the best songs I’d heard,” acknowledges Furay, who also played the delicate acoustic guitar solo. “I love that song. It was a way of showing we could complement Paul as he enhanced us.” Steve Cropper was also impressed, getting singer Yvonne Elliman to cover the song on her debut album.

Cotton’s further contributions Railroad Days and Ol’ Forgiver offered further confirmation of his songwriting strength. “Railroad Days was my ode to Creedence Clearwater Revival,” he points out. “Steve Cropper really liked that one.” The track was probably the heaviest rock song Poco had recorded to date. “That was exactly the sound we were looking for in bringing Paul into the band,” states Furay. “It had that good rock ‘n’ roll feel and was a fun song to play live.” The countrified Ol’ Forgiver was inspired by Cotton’s terrier named Poco. “He lived to be 20 years old and only ate avocados. He was a good friend.”

While not as prolific as Furay or Cotton, bassist/singer Tim Schmit nonetheless could always be counted on to contribute a song or two and his lone track From The Inside is an introspective gem. “That’s one of Tim’s best songs,” affirms Furay. “Tim, too, was struggling with different directions in his life and poured his heart out in that song.” Cotton insists it’s the best recorded track on the album. “That song had such a nice positive vibe and was the perfect choice for the album’s title track. I think it’s probably my best guitar work on the album. We added compression on my guitar and it sounded really good.”

Released in September 1971, despite a collection of first-rate songs and exceptional playing, From The Inside garnered lukewarm reviews. Many cited Cropper’s production deficiencies in capturing Poco’s characteristically vibrant sound. The band’s hallmark harmonies didn’t quite sparkle although the instruments sounded clear and present. “We weren’t in any position to say ‘No, this isn’t what we expected so we’re not going to record’,” reflects Young, on the critical response. “We had a contract with Columbia and we had a deadline so we were locked in to a release date already set for the album and a tour booked to coincide with the release. All these factors were already in place. We had no choice but to make the best of it.” In hindsight, all three agree that Cropper was not up for the challenge of recording the band.

If Steve Cropper was the wrong choice to produce Poco, Richie Podolor was. A few months after the From The Inside sessions the group assembled in American Recorders studio in Los Angeles to cut two songs for an intended single release. Both songs – C’mon and A Man Like Me – had first appeared on the live Deliverin’ album the year before. Convinced that these songs had potential if recorded under the right circumstances, Furay enlisted Podolor and his partner Bill Cooper to produce studio versions. Podolor’s track record was impressive having produced hits for Three Dog Night, Blues Image and Steppenwolf among others. “I wanted Richie Podolor to record Poco’s next album in the worst way,” states Furay. “We were looking for that hit record sound and he had all that going for him.”

The combination proved fruitful. Both tracks boast a driving rock sound propelled by Cotton’s Les Paul guitar. As Cotton recalls, “For C’mon, Richie and Bill had me in the studio, just the three of us, for 12 hours just on the guitar parts and solo. It was hard work. We worked through the night and I was catching naps on a cot in the studio. When I walked out the sun was coming up. That song sure sounded like a hit single. It was a very simple studio, very low tech but he got such a great sound out of it. I loved working with Richie.”

But why revisit a couple of earlier songs? As Richie explains it, “Since these were two songs that were never recorded in the studio, we chose them for that reason. Those two songs were only recorded live up to that point and because of their success in the live shows and Richie Podolor’s success at capturing a live sound in the studio we went with them. Both those songs had radio appeal. That’s why we chose them to record with Richie. We were still entertaining that ‘What would be good for AM radio?’ idea and felt those songs had the potential for that outlet. When we came out of Richie’s studio, I just felt that we had finally got it and that there was no way CBS would refuse to release these or refuse Richie Podolor as a producer for us. I don’t recall there being any explanation from CBS. They just said no. That was very frustrating for me. It made me think that if CBS was going to stand in our way we had to get off the label or it just wasn’t going to happen for us.” Both tracks are superb rockers that remained in studio vaults until now.

Podolor later recruited Young to add pedal steel guitar to Three Dog Night’s Never Been To Spain. Furay worked with Podolor again when he produced the 1974 debut album from Souther, Hillman & Furay.

Remastered with input from Richie Furay and with the addition of two of the most sought-after Poco bonus tracks, From The Inside deserves a place among the band’s finest recorded efforts. “Overall, I think the songs are fine and the playing is good,” Furay asserts. Indeed, the ten songs stand among Poco’s best and, newly remastered, can be appreciated in the way the band members originally envisioned them. Many, such as Hoedown, Just For Me And You, Railroad Days, and You Are The One would go on to become longtime concert and fan favorites while Bad Weather came to define Poco’s sound.

“The Poco that really stays in my heart as being most representative of what the band was about was this lineup with Paul and Tim,” claims Furay. “We became more accessible during that period.”

– John Einarson, author of Desperados: The Roots Of Country Rock (Cooper Square Press)