Читать книгу Hotel California: Singer-songwriters and Cocaine Cowboys in the L.A. Canyons 1967–1976 - Barney Hoskyns - Страница 21

Gene Clark, the original ex-Byrd, finally released his first solo album in February 1967. Except that he called it Gene Clark and the Gosdin Brothers, a selfless nod to harmonising vocalists Vern and Rex Gosdin. The album, which also featured Glen Campbell and Van Dyke Parks, blended bluegrass soul (‘Tried So Hard’, ‘Keep on Pushin’’) with baroque orchestral pop (the Leon Russell-arranged ‘Echoes’). Clark, a prolific writer, loved the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and wanted to make a Californian version of that masterpiece. But he was as lacking in confidence as ever. ‘Gene was nervous about doing his first album,’ said the velvet-voiced Vern Gosdin. ‘He was a good fella but he was into drugs too much.’

It was typical somehow that Gene Clark and the Gosdin Brothers was released the same week as the Byrds’ Younger than Yesterday. If Columbia had intended to bury the album they couldn’t have done a better job. Sessions for a second Clark album in April 1967 were canned. Lost and disenchanted, Gene was coaxed back into the Byrds as David Crosby’s replacement in October. Once again his fear of flying led to his departure. After just three weeks, Clark refused to board a flight from Minneapolis to New York, taking a long and lonely train ride back to California. ‘Gene was a really sweet soul who got waylaid by everything negative and the fight just got taken out of him,’ Chris Hillman said. ‘Sometimes I think it would’ve been better if he’d have stayed in Missouri.’

Back in LA, Gene fell into the easy-rolling company of Doug Dillard, who’d played on Gene Clark and the Gosdin Brothers. The two Missourians shared a passion for the bluegrass and country music they’d been raised on. They also shared a passion for alcohol and chemicals. One of their favourite pastimes was to drop acid and then down rows of Martinis at Dan Tana’s, the Italian restaurant next door to the Troubadour. The combination of ersatz sophistication and lysergic fracturing delighted them. In April 1968 Clark drunkenly gatecrashed a farewell party for Derek Taylor, who was returning to England to rejoin his original employers the Beatles at the newly founded Apple Corporation. After stumbling onstage with the Byrds at Ciro’s, Gene was very nearly ejected from the club. ‘He watched the show for a little while and then literally crawled across the dancefloor to the stage,’ says former Byrds groupie Pamela Des Barres. ‘Finally he just wound up curled around a microphone on the floor, and they played the rest of the set with him like that.’

Ironically Doug Dillard accompanied the Byrds on a tour of Europe that summer, rooming with Gram Parsons and tagging along with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a nocturnal visit to Stonehenge. On his return to California, Clark asked Doug to play on a new solo album he was recording for A&M Records. Slowly the project evolved into a joint venture called The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark. The album came together at Dillard’s place in Beachwood Canyon, east of Laurel Canyon. Rooming and jamming with Doug was country/ bluegrass guitarist Bernie Leadon, then nearing the end of a stint with Hearts and Flowers. Living upstairs was Dillard’s tenant – and Leadon’s occasional squeeze – Linda Ronstadt. ‘Doug and I were just sitting around playing this bluegrass stuff,’ remembers Leadon. ‘Gene started turning up in this magnificent V-12 Ferrari, and then he’d come back the next day with a whole set of lyrics for the instrumentals. That’s how a lot of the songs on the Fantastic Expedition album got written.’

Also on board the Expedition was ever-reliable bass player David Jackson, shyly approached one night at the Troubadour by Gene Clark. To this day Jackson recalls the rehearsals as magical. The same epithet could be applied to The Fantastic Expedition, released in October 1967. As much an example of Gram Parsons’s ‘soul-country-cosmic’ hybrid as anything Parsons himself achieved, the album stands time’s test as well as the Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin, which it preceded. It’s certainly a more satisfying record than Sweetheart of the Rodeo. From the Byrdsish ‘Out on the Side’ to the wistfully jaunty Clark–Leadon song ‘Train Leaves Here This Mornin’’ via the heartache melody of ‘The Radio Song’, the Expedition is the missing link between Back Porch Bluegrass and the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty: hippie country rock that’s influenced everybody from R.E.M. to Teenage Fan-club. ‘Doug and Gene did some really good records that nobody paid attention to,’ Chris Hillman told John Einarson. ‘That first album was fabulous, way better than anything the rest of us were doing when you measure it song per song.’

The fact that the Expedition bombed was partly the fault of A&M Records, formed as a pop label by trumpeter Herb Alpert and a company with scant understanding of Dillard & Clark’s musical roots. A&M would expand its country rock roster with the Flying Burritos’ Gilded Palace of Sin, Phil Ochs’s Tape from California and Steve Young’s Rock, Salt and Nails, but if the label’s instincts were right they lacked the underground marketing nous of Warner/Reprise. ‘A&M wanted to become hip, so they brought me in and tried to attract some major talent,’ says Tom Wilkes, who became the label’s art director in 1968. ‘It was all Boyce and Hart, Sergio Mendes, Herb Alpert, and now they were really trying to sign bands. They wanted to get into the mainstream of rock.’

Dillard and Clark themselves hardly helped their own cause. On the cover of The Fantastic Expedition they posed as bikers and smirked like schoolboys as they shared a joint. ‘I was around during that Dillard & Clark period, and all they were doing was drinking and taking drugs,’ recalls Chris Darrow. ‘You’d go in there and hang out for four and a half hours and you wouldn’t play a note.’ Gene and Doug couldn’t even hold it together for their Troubadour debut. When David Jackson showed up for the gig, the club’s doorman advised him to go next door to Tana’s. There the two men sat, olives bobbing in their Martinis, stoned out of their skulls. David hauled them back into the club. When the lights came up on the band, Dillard stood stage-central with his banjo and shitkicker grin. Jackson, Leadon and mandolinist Don Beck flanked him. At the rear of the stage was Harold Eugene Clark, sitting on his amp and facing the back wall. Jackson somehow got Clark turned around for the second song, on which Doug Dillard was playing fiddle. At the end of it, still grinning, Doug placed the fiddle on the ground and jumped on it. ‘That was pretty much the end of that version of Dillard & Clark,’ says Leadon. ‘They didn’t have the discipline or really the desire to be a performing act.’

It wasn’t all mayhem with Dillard & Clark. Some nights they set the Troubadour on fire, especially after going fully electric and bringing ex-Byrd Michael Clarke in on drums. ‘The Eagles will tell you that the Dillard & Clark shows were like fucking revival meetings,’ says LA music historian Domenic Priore. ‘Pogo and Dillard & Clark and Linda Ronstadt were really the seminal events.’ If Through the Morning, Through the Night, the second Dillard & Clark album, was covers-heavy, it still included two Clark classics in the title track and the sublime ‘Polly’. No one ever did waltz-time sadness as tenderly as the guy from Tipton.

‘Gene always seemed unhappy, like there was a cloud over his head,’ said fiddler Byron Berline, who joined Dillard & Clark before the second album. ‘He’d be happy one day, and you’d see him the next day and he would be a bucket of gloom.’ The wonder is that so many extraordinary songs poured out of this melancholy boozehound. For John York, who briefly played bass with Gene before joining the Byrds in 1969, the man was ‘a hillbilly Shakespeare’.

Clark’s melancholia only deepened as he lost whatever grip he’d had on his own group. After Dillard brought in his latest fling, Donna Washburn, as a second singer, Gene quit. Significantly, he also turned his back on Los Angeles. Heading north to the coastal hippie town of Mendocino, Gene Clark would begin a career as one of the greatest if most neglected singer-songwriters of the ’70s.