byrdsongs, xiv

Gene Clark’s music has always hit me on a very personal level.  He’s not a great lyricist, but he doesn’t have to be because his voice does so much in conveying his inner anguish.  After a brief stint with the New Christy Minstrels, he had a fleeting taste of stardom and the good life with the Byrds before things seem to have taken a permanent turn for the worse.  He continued making good music, some of it great, but it was more or less ignored. His story suggests that he was beaten down by life itself. Perhaps only in hindsight can we say that it was all probably inevitable.  So much of Clark’s music with the Byrds had a tragic vibe about it, a sense of the ominous.  Something was bound to go wrong.  Maybe there was a part of him that needed things to go bad because that’s what he responded to as an artist.  I’m just pop psyching here. It’s my blog and I’ll do what I want...

Without knowing for sure, the narrative I impose on Clark’s trajectory is that he was never quite the same after his break up with Michelle Phillips in 1966 or ’67.  I can understand why.  In her heyday, Phillips could easily cast a spell over even the most emotionally steeled-over man.  Never underestimate the power of physical beauty, or simply of a pretty face.  To have Michelle Phillips and then lose her…you’re better off to have never had her.  But Clark possessed the ability to turn romantic torment into two-minute bursts of simple pop perfection.  His first post-Byrds album, Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, is patchy but well worth spending time with. The record is definitely an early country rock template, but Clark’s pop instincts are always in the foreground, helped along by a cast of session players – including Glenn Campbell, Clarence White and Leon Russell – that reads like the quintessential Hollywood-style hoedown. Tried So Hard to Please Her has been covered at least twice that I know of (Yo La Tengo, Fairport Convention), but nobody can match Gene Clark when it comes to the sweet pain of a happy/sad love song…