Rare Byrd

Forgotten and discarded gems from The Byrds’ great, overlooked songwriter. By Andrew Male.

IN THE spring of 1970, Gene Clark went into Los Angeles’ Liberty Custom Recorders to cut demos for his second solo recording, Gene Clark (aka White Light). Three numbers, The Virgin, 1975 and One In A Hundred, ended up on that 1971 A&M LP, while a fourth, She’s The Kind Of Girl, appeared on Clark’s Europe-only 1973 release, Roadmaster. As for the rest, the recording went undocumented. For years no one knew of its existence. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the decades-long work of archivist, engineer and No. 1 Byrds fan, John Delgatto, they might never have surfaced at all. Written while Clark was contentedly married, and living on the California coast in Mendocino, and imbued with a late-night mood of red wine introspection, these eight minor-key acoustic marvels form the hushed poetic centrepiece of the recordings Clark cut, lost, forgot about or abandoned during 20 years of working with producer and mentor Jim Dickson. The collection begins in innocence, a wideeyed 20-year-old, fresh out of The New Christy Minstrels, singing folk rock ballads in earnest vibrato. Far better are two multitrack recordings from January 1967. Cut just prior to his solo debut, they abandon that album’s country rock harmonies for sneering Stax soul on Don’t Let It Fall Through (plus Hugh Masekela horn arrangement) and Back Street Mirror’s baroque Dylanesque labyrinths, orchestrated by Leon Russell. Clark’s version of …Mirror was long thought lost after Dickson overdubbed it with David Hemmings’ vocals, for the British actor’s 1967 folk rock LP Happens. The melancholy subtext here is that The Lost Studio Sessions are as much a document of failure as of achievement: albums abandoned, naivety exploited, hopes thwarted. Of four 1972 session tracks here, two – Bars Have Made A Prisoner Out Of Me and Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms – were inexcusably overdubbed by Terry Melcher for his own 1974 solo LP, while Clark’s forlorn cover of Flatt & Scruggs’ Don’t This Road Look Rough And Rocky, was simply discarded. Often, the glimpses of what could have been are heartbreaking. 1970 track She Darked The Sun finds Clark singing with Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman and Bernie Leadon, Burritos harmonies soaring like a ghostly broadcast from some blissful counterfactual past. The final five tracks, from 1982, find a lifestyle-weakened Clark again reunited with Hillman and Byrds/Burritos drummer Michael Clarke. They feel like too little too late, yet one track, Clark’s worn, desolate cover of Rodney Crowell’s No Memories Hangin’ Round, points to new country sounds just around the corner. As such, The Lost Studio Sessions merely confirms what many Gene Clark fans know, that the sadness at what might have been never fully overwhelms the wonders of what came to pass.