Gene Clark S/D, C/D

^^^totally agree. the Echoes version is really weird

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMd0XyDE9js&feature=related

holy crap. amazing. thx for posting that, what a great he was

Gene Clark was like the pre-eminent proto cult underdog. Talented and doomed. Anyone heard '84's "Firebyrd?" Is it any good?

This is from Firebyrd, judge for yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X34myQMWuyY

I'm much more partial to the songs I've heard from his record with Carla Olsen, So Rebellious a Lover, which this is from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G68e61fCnaU

Should be noted, btw, that "Mr. Tambourine Man: The Story Of The Byrds' Gene Clark" by John Einarson is a really, really good book on Gene. Lots of insight into his music and his life.

BTW, whatever became of Carla Olsen after that album? We're they planning to collaborate again?

been listening to this guy and only this guy for a week

that's not totally true, but in a way it really is

Just finished Mr. Tambourine man. Great book. Tragic story.

Really excited to learn that he recorded harmony vocals on Going Back and co-wrote Get To You!

What is the book like? Is Gene Clark a likable guy?

Depends on how messed up he is. Everybody said that he was the sweetest, nicest most wonderful person ever, unless he got drunk, which was often, in which case he was the most terrible person ever. But tragic in that most people, even the bridges he burnt, would still say "he was sweet and naive and hollywood chewed him up". Maybe if he was still alive and a bastard those people wouldn't be saying nice things about him.

he died too young but i don't like the tragic and doomed talk. he was an alcoholic which is sad (is it true that it was really tom petty who killed him? cuz he made so much off of the petty cover that he started drinking up a storm) but he made way more great music over a fairly long career than most people will ever make in a long lifetime. i mean its not like people don't still love his songs and music. (hell one gene song is better than most career outputs for regular humans)

i mean don't get me wrong someone drinking themselves to death IS sorta "tragic", i guess. more sad than anything.

But I think there were tragic elements before he even started seriously drinking. His fear of flight was genuine. It was confirmed that as a teenager he witnessed a DC-10 plane crash. He was clearly manic-depressive. He had to put up with Roger McGuinn AND David Crosby, probably two of the biggest assholes to ever grace rock-n-roll.

The Tom Petty story seems true. According to Gene's long-time on and off girlfriend/drug buddy Terri Messina, had he gotten that windfall a year before when they were both together and sober, he could've invested it in real estate. She was really hung up with real estate. But instead he had just fallen off the wagon and it triggered a brutal spiral.

yeah, this is true about being surrounded by a-holes. that is certainly regrettable. people with way less talent bossing you around. reminds me of the whole tortured big brother/little brother stills/young relationship. neil taking shit from one of the most odious men on the planet. stockholm syndrome. or something.

and yeah i get you he had more problems than just booze. i'm just suspicious of the angel/genius/too good for this world/etc mythology stuff. real life is so often more mundane and easy to explain. the MUSIC though. that is majik and bigger than people. mythologize that all you want in my opinion. music is more than us.

i will keep an eye out for that book! i would like to know more.

(speaking of which got a couple of books on bud powell and i want to know more but i know how sad the whole thing is...)

ha, is mcguinn known to be a big asshole? i actually haven't read a good byrds bio (is there a good byrds bio?). [& yeah, bud powell's life is one bummer after the next.]

mcguinn a seriously prickly pear.

Just look at the war of attrition that was being a member of the Byrds!

Mr. Tambourine Man is a pretty good book and obviously has a lot of good stories about the Byrds. It felt shockingly fair and honest. Everybody gets there say, including Crosby and McGuinn, but that doesn't mean they're not disparaged. In fact, to some degree both of them acknowledge their own wrongdoings. Crosby justifies it though, "I was a difficult person to everybody".

But I can't help but mythologize Gene. His music rises so far above and beyond almost everyone else in my book it's unbelievable. And you hear these people talking "the guy never read a book", "he wrote a hundred songs a week". He'd be on stage performing, he'd go backstage for 5 minutes and be writing a new song, then come back on stage to finish his set. To me, clearly a level of genius that's pretty rare. He needed a good manager or better friends.

His songs on Turn Turn Turn have been killing me lately.

yeah but that's what i mean. that's life. you can play the "what if" or "in a perfect world.." game but then he wouldn't have been...him. agreed that everyone can take different paths and get different results, but just the fact that he made what he made, man, what more could you ask from a person or an artist or a life. i certainly wish that people who suffered had suffered less, but...eh, i don't know. but, yes, genius. i agree. and some of his music is as close as i get to church or religion in my life. it IS church and religion to me. and just as good as jeebus or buddha or any of those other cats.

x-post

i'm one of those people who worships art as something bigger than the person who makes it. the result is the cosmic and supernatural to me. not the person making it. they are merely vessels. i never actually think about these things. it's natural for me. please excuse my incoherence.

Revisited No Other on a rainy trip to Seattle recently. I used to have reservations about the production but this time the whole thing slayed me, especially side one.

From a Silver Phial may be my favorite song of all time.

gene really goes bonkers with the alliteration on that one. great song.

Sorry to break the tone this thread is taking, but I have to say Scott's portrait of Tom Petty killing Gene Clark is striking me as some serious R'n'R Oedipal Shit.

According to the official Gene bio and all his friends it's pretty much the case.

let's not drag tom petty's name through the mud here, people! i mean, it was a cool thing for him to do, he didn't know it'd be the nail in gene's coffin!

let's not drag tom petty's name through the mud here, people!
new board decrip?

yeah there's some serious misplaced judgment there in blaming Tom for covering a guy's song, which ended up getting him a bunch of money, which he decided to use to kill himself with drink. It's not like Tom Petty tied him up and forced him to down endless bottles of gin at the barrel of a gun.

Nobody's actually blaming Tom Petty.

no, we might be on to something -- "feel a whole lot better when you're gonnnne -- after i kill you," petty sings on his cover.

lol

if that's not a confession, i don't know what is.

Tom was going to cover one McGuinn and Crosby's classics, like Don't Make Waves, but they were like "c'mon Tom, why don't you do this shitty Gene Clark song, it'll make him tons of money and he'll spend it on cocaine and heroin, which he'll pile up on the backside of this glove compartment and snort from, one, then the other, and back again (true story) then he'll die and we can take all the credit for The Byrds"

and tom was like "I'm in. Let's do this."

i also heard tom cut a version of "time between" but chris hillman begged him not to release it, for fear of his life.

I knew I shouldn't have turned that tom petty documentary off after watching 11 hours of it

Crosby dissuaded Tom from covering "Triad", noting "I don't need the money, I'm making plenty with this lesbian-sperm gig I got goin"

i heard that tom was in joshua tree the same time gram parsons kicked it, too. coincidence?

Tom covered "Artificial Energy" once trying to get Roger, but only got Michael.

i like this ... there was a thread that talked about a horror movie with david crosby murdering people. maybe this can be the sequel, like where crosby is hunted by petty.

'stop draggin' my corpse around'

'Listen To Her Heart, Beating In My Hand'

everybody's been burned to death

'You Wreck Me--I Kill You'

Love this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrI4vSJOuFg

I always thought that Gram Parsons had produced by far the best post-Byrds output, by a fair margin even. Turns out it was this guy all along.

Totally.

It was made official awhile back. Gram Parsons v Gene Clark in an Ex-Byrd Roots Rock Smackdown!!!