Gene Clark remembered: “Genius and insanity hand in hand…”

The Byrds and beyond! Originally published in Uncut Take 132 (our May 2008 issue), the story of one of the greatest songwriters of his time, a founding father of country-rock, as told by his friends and former bandmates

“I have a really bad feeling about this”

It’s another day in the busy life of one of the biggest bands in America. The Byrds have just recorded “Eight Miles High”, and are heading to New York for a photo shoot and a TV special. Their plane, however, is stuck on the runway of LA International Airport, prevented from taking off by some unexplained technical issues. And Gene Clark, the group’s lead singer and principal songwriter, petrified of flying at the best of times, is not handling the situation very well.

“Gene was standing up in his seat, and he’s in a cold sweat,” remembers his bandmate Roger McGuinn. “He’s shaking. I asked ‘What’s going on, Gene?’ He says [in a terrified voice], ‘I have a really bad feeling about this. I can’t do this.’ He’s in a panic, like he’s got a premonition about the plane crashing. He walks off the plane. He said it was kind of a nervous breakdown, more than just airplanes. He’d just gone through some bad acid trips, and he was breaking up with a girl, or something like that.”

“I didn’t want him to leave The Byrds”

Later, McGuinn asked Clark about the incident, an incident which precipitated Clark’s departure from The Byrds. “It was hard to get a straight answer out of him about it, he didn’t really have a clear understanding of what happened,” says McGuinn today. “And then there were drugs going on later, so it was hard to get anything out of him. I didn’t want him to leave The Byrds, that wasn’t my intention.”

Turning your back on a chart-topping group was tantamount to treachery in 1965. But as his career fluctuated between inspired genius and maddening self-sabotage, it soon became obvious that this was how Gene Clark operated. Sometimes, he was a warm, gracious, artistically committed person – one of the greatest songwriters of his time and a critical founding father of country-rock. Other times, he was paralysed by the vicious drug and alcohol addiction that eventually killed him.

“To this day,” says Duke Bardwell, who toured with Clark in the mid-’70s, “I will never forget watching genius and insanity go hand in hand like they did with Gene Clark.”

CHAPTER ONE: THE FANTASTIC EXPEDITION

“For whatever level of acceptance he had going in the commercial market, Gene was a star,” asserts Roger McGuinn. Still, nothing quite worked out for Gene Clark once he left The Byrds. If his genius, his poetic songcraft, had sometimes been obscured by the cluster of talents within the band, the pressure of a solo career caused him difficulties, too.

“I think he may have been someone who was really scared to death of being a solo guy,” suggests guitarist Stephen Bruton, who befriended Clark in later years. “He had the ego where he wanted to be a solo guy, but he was really full of doubt.”

Nevertheless, he tentatively had a go. In a 1966 interview profiling the Gene Clark Group, the frontman hinted at a revolutionary future: “In the short time we’ve been together, we’ve worked up a lot of material. It’s kind of a strange sound. We’re working on some things, which are a mixture of country, western, and blues combined.”

In 1966, the short-lived Gene Clark Group – featuring Chip Douglas, Joel Larson and Bill Rhinehart – began a summer residency at LA’s Whisky A Go-Go. Though the image proffered by Sid Griffin of “young Doc Hollidays wearing Bolo ties, playing poppy C&W” is intriguing, Clark’s new material sailed right over the audience’s heads.

The seeds of country rock

All the same, back-to-the-roots country influences were creeping into the West Coast. David Jackson, of country/rock pioneers Hearts & Flowers and later a Clark collaborator, was among the scene’s central players: “You’d go to somebody’s house after a gig and sit around and play until three or four in the morning, maybe pass a joint, drink a beer – but that wasn’t the reason everybody was there. The guitars would come out. It was a give and take, like, ‘Let’s do this one.’ As opposed to ‘Let’s make it sound like a cross between Hendrix and Merle Haggard.’”

Clark’s first attempts to fuse country and rock came when he teamed up with banjoist Douglas Dillard and guitarist Clarence White (ironically, a future Byrd) for 196??’s Gene Clark With The Gosdin Brothers. Clark, a Midwestern farmboy turned pop aristocrat, hardly threw himself full force into the world of steel guitars and Nudie suits, but in among the baroque/pop brilliance of “Echoes” and Rubber Soul-isms of “I Found You” are several twangy nuggets – “Tried So Hard” and “Keep on Pushin’” – that became the seeds of country rock.

“We were all just a little bit ahead of our time,” reflected Clark in 1972, when a revamped version of the album was released. “No country-rock sold well until after 1969. The public was still more ready for ‘Marrakesh Express.’”

“Gene was a country boy,” says McGuinn. “He had a love for that kind of music. I could see that country streak, although he was enamoured of The Beatles.”

LA was soon crawling with longhaired roots-rockers

With Clarence White in tow, Clark played a few gigs around LA. One lucky soul – WHO IS THIS? – who witnessed a rare appearance at the Ash Grove recalls: “The entire night was three-part harmonies, and it knocked me out. It was also the first time I’d ever seen Clarence with a Telecaster. Prior to that, he’d simply been that amazing flatpicker from the Kentucky Colonels, who played straight bluegrass. They did some Everly Brothers stuff that was stunning.”

Coincidence or synchronicity, LA was soon crawling with longhaired roots-rockers. Gram Parsons’ International Submarine Band arrived from New York. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Stone Poneys, not to mention Michael Nesmith and Gary Paxton’s stable of insurgent country hopefuls, were gathering steam.

Clark, meanwhile, was rapidly working his way through bandmates and abandoning endless album. Eventually, he and Doug Dillard (just back from a touring stint with, yes, The Byrds) hooked up with future Eagle Bernie Leadon and David Jackson of Hearts & Flowers. Calling themselves the Dillard & Clark Expedition, they sought to mix up country, folk, rock and, especially, bluegrass.

“Gene and Dillard just went all over the place together,” says Jackson, the Expedition’s bassist. “Douglas, being the bluegrass textbook that he is, inundated Gene with everything bluegrass. Gene synthesised that into his style, which had not been bluegrass at all. I thought it really kind of reached a new plateau with the collaboration of Dillard and Clark, at a poetic level.”

“The first album was not planned”

Released in Autumn 1968, the band’s A&M debut, The Fantastic Expedition Of Dillard & Clark, was a startling mix of mandolin, dobro, banjo, guitar, harpsichord and plentiful mountain harmonies, anchored by Clark’s silkily soulful baritone.

“Bernie, Doug, and Gene and I just sort of showed up every day, and started playing,” Jackson remembers. “And Gene would be sitting on the couch, not saying much – maybe ‘Hand me a donut’ – he’d have a guitar in his lap… he’d have a melody and some chords maybe, and an hour would go by, and I’d have my bass out, and Bernie would be tuned, and maybe he’d have some lines. That’s how it would go. The first album was not planned, really.”

“Gene responded to the stuff with Douglas and us with his whole heart and soul,” Leadon told Clark’s biographer, John Einarson. “It was embracing the totality of who Gene Clark was, his [Missouri] roots, and [he] got to use his extraordinary lyric and writing ability but without having to try to invent a whole new music, which was what you were sort of expected [to do] in the pop world.”

Things tended to become problematic, though, once the troupe moved out of the living room and onto the stage.

“Gene was not a demonstrative performer,” says Jackson. “He just stood there. In fact, his demeanour was very guarded, and he probably thought that you were not going to like this shit anyway.”

“They both dropped acid, and they’re sitting in there drinking martinis”

Whether it was stage fright, or another combination of demons, the Expedition’s public unveiling – at West Hollywood’s Troubadour in December 1968 – was a disaster.

“We went down to the Troubadour that Tuesday at 2 o’clock,” Jackson recalls. “We load in, soundcheck. About 3:30 I left, went back to take a nap, had something to eat, took a shower. When I got back, the doorman says ‘You better go next door to Dan Tana’s, get Gene and Doug. They both dropped acid, and they’re sitting in there drinking martinis.’”

“So I go next door, and sure enough, they’re just grinning ear to ear. I just remember a kind of haze occurring, instantly, and going ‘We’re in serious trouble.’”

Jackson remembers the club being packed with fellow musicians, old Byrds freaks, the rock press. “So the lights go down, [Troubadour light man] Dickie Davis says, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Dillard & Clark!’ When the lights come on, all of us are facing out, but Gene is sitting on his amp, facing the back wall. We make it through the first song, and Dillard picks up the fiddle for the second song.

“Somehow or another I guess we got Gene off the amp, and standing in front of the mike. We get to the end of the second song, Doug puts his fiddle down on the floor, jumps up in the air, and lands on the fiddle, breaking it. Don Beck, who is our multi-instrumentalist, and a devout Christian, was playing the mandolin. He just looked up at me, and said, ‘Well, that’s enough for me,’ and he walked off stage, never to return.”

“He had a lack of confidence”

The Expedition survived, but the damage was done. There was a second, slightly less dazzling album (Through the Morning, Through the Night), and a stunning non-album single (“Why Not Your Baby”), but the group quickly unravelled. Fiddler Byron Berline, who joined during the group’s latter days, and played with Clark sporadically thereafter, traces their decline: “The biggest problem with that group was Doug and I were wanting to pick more and I think Gene felt sort of left out. He didn’t seem to be happy most of the time but he was very difficult to read, at least for me. Around November 1969 we were invited to play on the Hee Haw TV show. This was their first season and a nice break for any group to get on national TV. Gene didn’t want to go [because of flying] and eventually left the band right after that.”

“Gene had a lack of confidence right from the very first time I ever saw him,” says Jackson. “And then there was heroin later on. You know, obviously, that’s not an end in itself. It’s a symbol of a symptom.”

CHAPTER TWO: THE TRUE ONE

By the early ’70s, Clark had abandoned LA for the rustic confines of Mendocino in Northern California. Country living stabilised him, resulting in a visionary trilogy: 1971’s White Light, 1972’s Roadmaster, and 1974’s No Other.

“There was no panic, no pressure, it was kind of a golden era,” says Gary Mallaber, the Steve Miller Band drummer who played on White Light. “We listened, we arranged, we performed until we all felt that was the take.”

“I don’t know how to rightly explain this,” Clark later mused about his songwriting, “except that there was philosophy involved. Dylan in a way is a philosopher, he’s a deep thinker, John [Lennon] too. I consider Lennon and Dylan two of the best minds that we had, or have, in the 20th century… And they weren’t what you would call religious guys. They were spiritually connected. That vibration came across very strongly from The Beatles to us [The Byrds].”

Success, though, was not forthcoming. He only toured the White Light album and, with perfect Clark-ian irony, his most straightforward country/rock effort, Roadmaster, only made it to American record shops as a Dutch import. By 1974, though, on the back of an ill-fated Byrds reunion, he was somehow ready to unleash No Other. Producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye gave the album a Spectorian wall of sound, and the dense mix of keyboards, strings, percussion, chorale vocals, and layered guitars stands as Clark’s masterpiece.

“It was always pretty wild”

“There were some boundaries being broken on every level,” observes Jackson. “Gene brought a seriousness to this thing that not even Gram brought. There was a nobility to Gene, one that I just kinda took to be a natural part of his personality.”

“The album was written when I had a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Northern California,” said Clark. “I would sit in the living room, which had a huge bay window, and stare at the ocean for hours. I would have a pen and paper, and a guitar or piano, and pretty soon a thought would come and I’d write it down or put it on tape. In most instances, after a day of meditation looking at a very natural force, I’d come up with something.”

Stephen Bruton, a Texan who’d recently backed Dylan, played guitar on No Other: “Gene was really talented. He was a kind of a loner guy. He had a cool voice, but it was also kind of a fragile voice, he was a fragile guy. I played with Gene several different times. It was always pretty wild. We were pretty crazy.”

The culmination of Cosmic American Music

In recent years, No Other has been routinely – and justifiably – acclaimed as a Smile for the ’70s, arguably the culmination of Gram Parsons’ Cosmic American Music. But at the time, the reception was less warm. Asylum’s David Geffen had been taken by Clark’s songs on The Byrds’ reunion album. But upset that his $100,000 budget for No Other had produced only eight measly songs, Geffen cut promotion, snuffing hopes for Clark’s commercial renaissance.

Unable to reproduce the lavish sound of No Other live, with no record label support, Clark was now forced back onto the road out of financial necessity. The 1975 Silverado tour (a live album from the tour is planned for summer 2008) saw the songs redefined by Appalachian triad harmonies and country arrangements. But conditions were spartan – the singer, his band and no roadies stuffed into the back of a Dodge van. And while Clark’s ego was battered by the ignominious conditions, he was still suffering from chronic stage fright. The only thing for him to do, it seemed, was to drink more and take more drugs.

CHAPTER THREE: FEEL A WHOLE LOT WORSE

In 1987, after underwhelming records, weary partial reunions of The Byrds, and apparently innumerable doomed projects, Clark finally managed to stage a credible comeback. So Rebellious A Lover sent a jolt through LA’s burgeoning cowpunk scene, an echo traceable back to country rock’s nascent beginnings.

“That album came about as a result of singalong sessions Gene and I had at his house,” partner Carla Olson recalls. “It all evolved naturally. It was that sparse acoustic approach that we sought to duplicate in the studio. Atmospheric, western, stark and voices, voices, voices. People tell me to this day that it inspired the alt-country generation.”

Any momentum, though, was short-lived. The excesses were beginning to catch up with Clark: stricken with ulcers, the result of years of heavy drinking, he had his stomach and much of his intestines removed during surgery in 1988. A year later, when Tom Petty repaid his debt to The Byrds by covering “Feel A Whole Lot Better” on Full Moon Fever, Clark suddenly started receiving the sort of royalty cheques he hadn’t seen in years.

“Everybody thinks they’re immortal”

Rather than capitalising on his renaissance, Clark immediately slipped back into his worst ways. He cancelled what could have been a momentous comeback UK tour, and set about partying in LA like it was 1966 all over again.

“Gene, when he was doing that shit, it was black,” remembers Bruton. “When he’d call me during the daytime, everything would be cool: ‘Hey I’ll be playing McCabe’s, wanna come down and sit in?’ ‘Oh yeah, Gene, I’ll be down there no problem.’ Everything was fine. Then I’d call and on the phone he’d [whisper, in a husky voice], ‘I’ll call you back.’ I’d just be saying to myself, ‘Gene, please don’t do this.’”

“Gene had an aversion to doctors,” observes Einarson, his biographer, “and having grown up in a family that dealt with mental illness and bipolar disorder by self-medicating with alcohol, always believed he could cure himself. He would go on and off that wagon frequently. In his last year or so, he would binge then cleanse himself by going cold turkey and go on a fitness jag for three weeks. The trouble was that in his mid-40s, and after decades of abuse to his system, his constitution could no longer stand these routines.”

Gene Clark died at his Sherman Oaks apartment on May 24, 1991 – Bob Dylan’s 50th birthday. “He got a bunch of success,” reflects Bruton. “I think he started thinking that he could live that same way again – that somehow he was an exception to the rule. Everybody thinks they’re immortal. He stopped, and turned around, and stared back at the sun. Whatever you wanna call it…”