byrdsongs, xxxiv

Dillard and Clark’s second and last record together, Through the Morning, through the Night is not as good as The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark, but this sets the bar unfairly high. Some close followers of Clark’s career downgrade Through the Morning because it supposedly features too many cover tunes.  Personally, I don’t have a problem with this. Covers can admittedly be problematic, but Clark has great taste and is a first-rate interpreter of the music he loves.  His rendition of the Everly Brothers’ So Sad is a rare example of the cover surpassing the original. Clark slows things down, gives the song a c&W vibe, and basically makes it his own… The details of Clark’s post-Byrds odyssey are blurry to me. I know it was a rocky road for him, with repeated bouts of drug and alcohol abuse along the way, until he finally drank himself into oblivion and passed away in 1991 at the tender age of 46… What makes the two Dillard and Clark albums so moving to me is that you can really tell that Clark has a broken heart. But what was the cause? Did his breakup with Michelle Phillips leave him forever changed?  Or was it more that he recognized that the mass adulation of 1965-66 were long gone, a mere pit stop on the highway of life, never to return? Perhaps it was all this and other things as well. He may also have had that thing, common among us pop lifers, a part of him way down inside that wanted/needed to remain broken hearted.  It’s sad to think about this stuff, and yet it comprised the emotional landscape that made Gene Clark such a beautiful soul. Well, put it this way: Without having ever known or met the man personally, his music has always seemed to me to be the work of a beautiful soul. And his legacy constantly reminds me that passion and pain are fundamental to so much of the music I cherish most, music that endures well after the artist has been put out of his misery…