"...In the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept
Before the deluge ..."
Jackson Browne: "Before The Deluge"
That song is an elegy, a dirge, a lament. For Jackson
Browne,
boy-child of spiralling sixties circumstances - Ciro's where The
Byrds
parcelled light up into musical segments, and Sunset Strip where
the
strange young girls offered their youth on the altar of acid -
it is a
statement on a generation. From an outsider. And, consequently
maybe,
earnest family-man Jackson has presented us with a capsule of
truth. No
matter which flank you choose to attack the song on, superficially
naive
though it is, he has the angle covered. For so many resigned their
colours,
returned to tug at society's skirts that the deluge, the personal
apo-calypse of a generation (whatever a generation is) is now
seen by
Dylan's Mr. Jones as a passing cloud, an aberration, another youthful
media-hyped gangbang. Not so, but why bother to prove it now.
The Byrds
took it to the limit. And The Eagles are goin' back.
Rock is a communications system fallen into disuse, like
smoke
signals. When Love and The Byrds hit the Strip, electric rock
was still as
brand-showroom-new as the dishwasher of the future - maybe rock
will be the
dishwasher of the future - and, as baffling new musical and linguistic
vocabularies hit the West Coast like some pack of outlaw hikers,
a
revolution hit the music industry, if nowhere else. California
dreamin'
became a new parlour game: cigar-chomping hack tunesmiths no longer
poured
their soft-headed conception of teenage life and love over the
radio
landscape and suddenly it seemed everyone from wholemeal highschool
kids
cutting out on Mary Jane-wanna to crawling kingsnake nightpersons
had a
band whose music soundtracked their personal reality.
Then gone in the spin of a wheel; somehow image got a
foot in the
door, maybe never left L.A., where all the world is but a billion-dollar
sensurround movie set ... never quite made it to San Francisco,
Tubes
notwithstanding ... glitter and rouge spread like margarine, Faye
and
Peter, Britt and Rod, Vincent Price and Alice Cooper and everybody
all
moneybound on the Las Vegas Flyer. Goodbye to the kid next door
with the
red Stratocaster and let's have a warm welcome for dry ice, perspex
drums
and leather-look machismo. Frank Zappa once held forth: "A
freak cares what
he looks like, a hippie doesn't". Guess there were a lot
of freaks about.
The humble, bumbling hippie has a financial empire built
on his
shoulders, and, with Vietnam out of the way, teenage America could
lapse
back into the trivial, although it kept the stash and the stereo
and
demanded, "Feed me". Mr. Jones still didn't know what
hit him but, with
hindsight, it seemed harmless enough.
In music, a few people didn't know when to shut up and
behave, which
of course, might help their record companies to shift a few more
units.
And, probably, their audience is confined forever to the few survivors
of
the deluge, to use "Jackson's Metaphor", unless, somehow,
like the
Starship, they can cross upmarket. Like playing Russian Roulette
with five
loaded chambers.
Gene Clark left The Byrds after "Eight Miles High"
and shut up, only
to find himself a unique style of self-expression.
But to hell with sociological background (pause) , ladies
and
gentlemen (fanfare), Gene Clark, Zenmaster. (Applause).
Harold Eugene Clark, born Tipton, Missouri, 1941, a simple
country
boy of a large country family, no doubt spent a lot of nights
listening to
whippoorwills and winds; mournful mountain music is his stock
in trade. He
professes to making surf music in school, graduating to a twelve-string
folk thing on the same circuit as journeymen Brewer and Shipley,
before
being appropriated by the New Crusty Nostrils to play on two albums
and
that monument of disgusting ephemera, "Green Green".
No doubt fully
revolted, Gene cut out in L.A. and hung around the Troubadour
where
Beatlemaniac McGuinn regularly performed select-ions from the
furry four's
song-book. Gene began to sing along, the story goes, as did another
ex
pre-packed folkie casualty, chubby David Crosby. After a few amply
documented false starts and many cigarette butts, The Byrds appeared,
stomping cuban heels and blast-ing ozone all over the airwaves.
Gene was genuinely the moody one, gaunt, rattling tambourine,
supplying their best homegrown material, yearning even then. Witness
"Here
Without You". Like Rothmans, The Byrds became international,
had to go
places, but Gene balked, he'd seem an aircrash first-hand; no
way did he
want to fly, "...the pressure did me in." He rejoined
a couple of times but
couldn't cut it, and decided that solo was the way to be, a personal
singer
wanting to make a personal statement. For The Byrds, "5D"
came and went
while Gene meticulously constructed the world's first country-rock-super
session album, "Gene Clark And The Gosdin Brothers",
with Chris Hillman,
Mike Clarke, Leon Russell, Glen Campbell and Clarence White. It
was finally
released in early '67, the same week as "Younger Than Yesterday".
There
were few completists, scholars and connoisseurs around then: Gene
was
simply forgotten and the new Byrds album had the same effect on
Gene as
Kryptonite used to have on Superman. No contest.
Gene stepped up the gigging, ran into Doug Dillard and
between them
they collected an amorphous gaggle of musicians to form the Expedition,
a
band woefully out of step with public taste, a true contemporary
country
band in a world that wasn't exactly overjoyed by The Byrds'
perverse-seeming, Parsons-inspired leap into country with "Sweetheart
of
the Rodeo", a move in which Doug had a small picking hand.
It seemed both
Gene and Doug had room to stretch out in their framework and the
first
album seemed to bear this out. (A&M SP4158 1968). For this,
Gene
collaborated heavily with Bernie Leadon, only "Out On The
Side" was written
alone, and that stuck out like a frozen nose. Nevertheless, it's
an
incredible waxing, lively and confident; it's companion piece,
"Through The
Morning Through The Night" (A&M SP 4203) which emerged
in 1969, wasn't so
strong, a diverse conglomeration pushing two ways. Gene was being
forced
into a stylistic corner by ripsnorting bluegrass with which he
was
uncomfortable, although "Polly" is a breathtaking wispy
song in a style he
would later explore, chart and claim, and his readings of the
Everly's "So
Sad" and Lennon-Macca's "Don't let me down" fill
the room with the Clark
primal melancholy. Gene then split; and the Expedition went on
to become
wholly unnecessary as Country Gazette and Pseudo Burritos.
By now Gene had already thrown away the key on two albums
worth of
material recorded before the Expedition, and he now embarked on
another
round of aborted projects: A single with the original Byrds -
"One In A
Hundred" which surfaced on "Roadmaster" (after
the "White Light" cut) - and
a session for the third Burrito's elpee which produced "Here
Tonight" -
variously on "Roadmaster", "Close Up The Honky
Tonks" and "Honky Tonk
Heaven - which would have eclipsed everything else on it; maybe
that's how
it got shelved. More backlogs, brick walls; Gene moved to Mendocino,
where
something happened to Gene; no doubt it was always there, but
communing in
solitude with his twelve-string in '70 and '71 exposed a tradition
to which
Gene Clark belongs, musically unparalleled but with clear literary
and
spiritual precedents. It is apparent. It is there on "White
Light", a
verbal facility once devoted to love songs, turned in on itself,
twisted
into alien blueprints of personal philosophy.
"White Light", produced by Jesse Ed Davis,
released 1971 on A&M SP
4292, is a blazing, multi- faceted statement. Always the unstated
enemy of
the rational, the orthodox, Gene now attacked perception itself;
by the
time "No Other" was made, Gene finally had no need of
even that, but by
this time those who had listened to "White Light" could
make that
transition. However, the white-walled room "out on the end
of time" became
no longer a metaphor but an actuality as Gene emphasised one-ness
with the
universe, the white light once talked of by acid-heads, the living
nirvana
in which all references cease to operate. In fact the way of Zen...
The album opens with "The Virgin", with his
new-found, almost
Shakespearian, use of language directed towards connecting "The
Virgin" - a
virgin only in the abstract - with "wisdom's karmic ocean";
the revelation
that "lifeforms are insane" becomes "the melodies
of meaning/ the sad song
she learned to sing". Like an Old Testament prophet, he pushes
his created
character through a re-birth with which she must come to terms,
and asks,
"was this her revolution, just a child in love's crusade?";
she is pushed
past a point of disillusionment, on the far side of which lies
only
insanity or acceptance. Gene clearly sympathises, and, himself,
accepts.
In "From a Spanish Guitar", Gene, unique for
a rock musician,
presents himself as no more than a mouthpiece for the elements,
for
children and the insane, all of which "flow safe through
my soul and my
brain and a Spanish guitar". By giving voice to these things,
but allowing
them to express no opinions, they make no point but to assert
their
existence ... as in Zen, they must be understood on their own
terms. Later
Gene returned to his obvious belief that music is, in itself,
sometimes one
of the purest everyday forms of the Zen philosophy, (since the
conversion
of sound into meaning is such a subjective process), in "Strength
Of
Strings" only in a purer form, since, there, all that protests
its
existence through Gene is the music itself.
"White Light" itself is a difficult riddle;
seemingly too personal to
penetrate, it paints pictures of a village and its people "enlightened
by
the land", but also seems to encapsulate Gene philosophy.
Anyone familiar
with Zen will be familiar with the precept: "Those who know
do not speak,
those who speak do not know". I, as the writer of this would
find this
insoluble if it wasn't for the facts that, through Zen, I need
not examine
it ... nevertheless; in "White Light" that maxim is
interpreted: "The
communion of the forces take delight with the theory that no tongues
can
read or write ... white light." Indeed.
But, like all creations, Gene's songs need an audience;
one
acclimatised to the oblique and the metaphorical ... once there
was a spate
of extravagant claims that rock lyrics were capable of standing
as poetry,
mostly confined to the hysterical drivellings of indulgent jazz
critics.
Not so, poetry is dehydrated, disciplined ideas, economy is necessary;
rock
lyrics have a tendency to dissipate, to fall apart in the mind
- if they
haven't done so in transit from speaker to ear. In between these
poles are
the media of print, sources, texts. We have to cast an eye over
what are
ref erred to as "cult" books, things that, in conventional
terms, hit the
impressionable reader right between the frontal lobes and which
he is
conventionally supposed to grow out of: like bluegrass, rock,
dope, and
sassafras tea. Mixed blessings come of them, secretaries gobbling
Von
Daniken, active lives reduced to infinite indecision by overdoses
of I
Ching, Manson taking "Stranger In A Strange Land" as
a blueprint and an
excuse ... but also the permanent redirection of aimless lives
through "The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", "On The Road", or
Guthrie's "Bound For
Glory", and the rediscovery of a sense of wonder and sensory
excitement
through Brautigan, Tom Robbins or even the catch-all "Zen
And The Art Of
Motor-Cycle Maintenance". That word again. Read through a
cross-section,
and, ultimately, depending on where your ethics come from, you
will find
strong traces of what could be called "Nihilism" - lack
of responsibility -
but which I prefer to term Zen - a sense of continuity; of what
is relevant
and what is ephemeral, dead wood.
On the psychotropically-steeped West Coast of America,
cults
regenerate infinitely, and the biggest, brightest, five-star legend
is that
of Don Juan, brujo (medicine man, wizard, sorcerer, shaman, choose
one),
the great brown hope of the acid generation as it sits around
debilitated,
thirsting for new texts. Don Juan, new readers start here, is
the hero of a
series of four books by Carlos Castaneda, who supposedly met the
old Hopi
Indian at an Arizona bus depot while researching for his PhD and
became his
pupil, embarking on a decade-long struggle to become a brujo himself,
through learning to "See". Castaneda has now admitted
Don Juan to be a
figment of his fertile imagination, confirming the suspicions
of many who
found Castaneda's stupidity and credulousness (in the books) to
be
literally, too much to be true. Nevertheless, the teachings of
this
fictional ultimate guru represent an extraordinarily clever and
successful
attempt to recycle whole fertile areas of Western and Eastern
thought into
one hybrid discipline and philosophical system. Castaneda, with
one
sustained metaphor, kept millions dreaming in the wake of the
soured
Alternative American Dream, stopping off along the way at Nietzsche,
Sufi
Tales, Tim Leary, the Bhagavad-gita, the I Ching, Crowley and
the Tarot,
Vonnegut, and, particularly, Zen. A priceless con; and one that
loses
nothing from the fact, because that metaphor has created a new
vocabulary
for others to communicate with. The ends justify the means; Don
Juan
enables Castaneda to fly and refuses point blank to categorise
whether this
is fact or an illusion; as far as he is concerned it is ir-relevant,
the
distinction means doodly-squat. This is Zen thinking. It's also
a good
commentary on the value of the books. The Eagles wrote "Journey
Of The
Sorcerer" and "Visions" about Don Juan and announce
them from stages
everywhere as "for all you Castaneda freaks". Garcia
sings "I was blind all
the time, I was learning to see" ("Help On The Way")
with an inflection
that leaves no doubt about its meaning. And Gene Clark wrote "Silver
Raven"
- a creature with origins in Don Juanology - and sang it on tour
with Roger
McGuinn, a year before it came to rest on "No Other",
the album which gives
Castaneda's Folly a practical expression. Castaneda gave Gene
Clark,
Zeamaster, a framework to work in.
Nevertheless, "White Light" sold like umbrellas
in the Sahara, in
spite of favourable critical action, although these plaudits were
more
directed to the honest grainy sound than actual content, and '72
saw Gene
clearing the air for his no doubt rather nebulous new direction.
He
assembled a stalwart band of faithfuls - Clarence White, Sneeky
Pete,
Spooner Oldham, Mike Clarke and Byron Berline - and in April to
June cut
eight tracks for a projected album which eventually metamorphosed
into the
Dutch semi-compilation "Roadmaster" (A&M 87 584
IT). The reasons behind
Gene dropping the whole project like a hot burrito are uncertain,
certainly
the character of the songs, with the exception of the ugly,
out-of-character "Roadmaster" and the oblique, post-apocalyptic
"Shooting
Star" (obviously a "White Light" holdover), suggest
a man working through
an old catalogue of songs which he had by then, outgrown. This
obsession
with setting business in order led Gene and Jim Dickson to enter
Columbia's
L.A. studios that year to re-mix and re-record vocals for Columbia's
projected re-release of the Clark/Gosdins album. In the space
of a week
they transformed the thing into "Early L.A. Sessions"
(Columbia KC31123), a
lovingly documented artefact, but minus "Elevator Operator"
which
supposedly did not stand the test of time and brought the playing
time down
to a ludicrous 23 minutes. Essential seminal stuff nevertheless,
particularly "Tried So Hard", "Keep On Pushing"
- to which the label
enigmatically appends "Doug Dillard on electric banjo"
for some obscure
reason - "So You Lost Your Baby" and the eerie "Echoes":
This was Gene's
first foray into the human psyche, and one which once frightened
your
commentator truly rigid for a deeply personal reason, because
"Echoes"
reflects the fact that lovers reach points from which they can
no longer
continue together, but for no nameable reason, and with no loss
to the
forces that held them together, as I was finding out, regretfully,
at the
time I first heard the song.
'72-'73 also saw the renowned re-formed Byrds debacle
on Asylum SYLA
8754, the label to which Gene had recently signed. To some it
seemed that
the album was to be used as a vehicle to shoot Gene to stardom
status, but
he wasn't having any, content to dredge up "Full Circle Song"
(also on
"Roadmaster" and probably dating, therefore, from as
early as '68) and
"Changing Heart" which neither adds nor subtracts anything
from Gene's
philosophies, unlike "Full Circle" which is his expression
of the Eastern
notion of a cyclical universe, as portrayed in the I Ching and
Tao Tse
Ching. Gene also paid tribute to Neil Young by recording "Cowgirl
In The
Sand" and "See The Sky About To Rain". both sensitive,
if detached,
readings; the best that can be said for the album is that Gene
fared better
in the ego-centric paws of producer Crosby than did McGuinn and
Hillman.
However, deByrded McGuinn was now truly out on the side along
with Gene,
who left his North California eyrie to share a house with him
in '73, and,
during this time, to sit in on the "Adventures Of Roger McGuinn"
tour,
where he per-formed "Silver Raven" to a few select,
but disinterested
audiences. And with that, Gene Clark left the musical community
to its own
devices.
The facts pertaining to the release of a record album
by Gene Clark
on Asylum SYL 9020 late in the year 1974 are plain and clear enough;
fifteen musicians, eight back-up singers and producer Thomas Jefferson
Kaye
helped him make it in L.A. and San Francisco over a period of
six months.
The cardboard, paper and plastic object they spawned is conversely,
something that over-reaches itself and becomes impossible to rationalise
or
focus on. The cover is deliberately and monstrously inappropriate;
every
image, the whole conception, is totally dislocated from the content
of the
music. And so it becomes irrelevant, and, mocking the whole concept
of
record sleeves as it goes, winks out of existence slowly, leaving
the
listener no clues to help deal with what it contains.
The lyrics are printed on the inner sleeve, and that's another
red herring.
These lyrics should not, and cannot, stand that sort of scrutiny
since most
don't make any conventional sort of sense; they are inseparable
from the
music and must not be approached, it would be like trying to read
the
maker's name on a rainbow. And Zen teaches that words are a clumsy
vehicle
for communication, since they can only present ideas as tiny particles
of
information, and not as totalities. So ignore it, and there's
only the
music left.
Like "Astral Weeks", "No Other" comprises
only one multi faceted
song. Play it, and the twin speakers become twin facing mirrors,
endlessly
regenerating, a link with infinity; its subjects are reality and
time and
spirituality and dreams and how to come to terms with the world.
And for
this it is a totally unique work; rock has always had its intellectuals
with palpitatingly eager audiences ready and willing to snarf
up their
ephemeral pap as significant. Maybe I do Gene Clark a disservice
to treat
his music this way, as heavy duty profundity. At least I am convinced
this
record should be taken seriously. It's not merely entertainment.
Side one opens with "Life's Greatest Fool",
a mid-tempo rocker
building slowly to piledriver level, Gene declaiming a long series
of
dislocated images and observations, some obvious, some mysterious
cats-cradles, asking, "Could these be reasons why man is
life's greatest
fool?" The term "fool" is ambiguous anyway, since
it could be taken to mean
"innocent" as in the Tarot, and, paraphrased, the song
asks whether man is
misguided to continually question and attempt to explain what
he perceives.
The alternative is the Zen outlook ... and Don Juan tells Castaneda
that he
must cut down on the internal dialogue if he is to "See".
Gene Clark
re-affirms this, and gives a model for this point in the image
of the
"Silver Raven", the next track, and a creature from
out of Castaneda's back
pages. In this song, the raven contemplates a coming, nebulous,
apocalypse.
Four times Gene asks whether he has seen (Seen?) these things,
seen "the
old world dying". "Silver Raven" celebrates the
insularity of man's view
that he is in control of his world, and advises spiritual unity
with the
elements.
"No Other" follows. and sets these conclusions
out again almost in
the form of an I Ching hexagram: "Then the pilot of the mind
must find the
right direction". Distilled, the song says that to personify
love as "God"
and to commune with him alone, is to Deny "the tide of life
that flows in
each direction". Gene sees God as a form of human collective
consciousness;
"All alone we must be part of one another", and the
side closes with
"Strength of Strings" in which Gene claims that music
works through him
rather than vice-versa. "Strength Of Strings" is a vast,
elegaic, panoramic
hymn and everyone performs as if posessed. It is its own explanation,
a
self contained world, in which "I am always high, I am always
low, There is
always change" - the Eastern notion of a cyclical universe
again, first
explored in "Full Circle Song".
"From A Silver Phial" leads off the second
side and is essentially a
love song, the first of two. "Phial" is a highly explicit
song about a
particular woman and communicates nothing at all, except for a
lingering
impression strong enough to make you feel that you know her from
somewhere.
The virgin? Visionary use of words "... said she saw the
sword of sorrow
sunken in the sand of searching souls" more use of the universal
symbolism
of the Tarot. A Zen love song. Like love, it is beyond rational
thought,
and contrasts well with "Some Misunderstanding" which
follows, in which
Gene talks directly to the listener about fate and the future.
He seems to
be exposing his fallibility as a philosopher, examining his position
in
detail and expressing his human fears, but returns to a basic
philosophy -
"We all need a fix at a time like this but doesn't it feel
good to stay
alive". "Fix" is used for its ambiguity, its overtones
of smack, but
primarily in the sense of a bearing, a direction. The rest of
the album
acts out the directions ... The penultimate song, "The True
One" is lighter
in sound and context than the rest, a throw-back to simpler times
in its
construction, a recollection lyrically of Gene's rock star past,
which he
plainly regards as mis-spent - presumably because of its emphasis
on the
material - and presented as a long stream of mottoes and aphor-isms,
like a
Sufi tale. It also contains an observation of reality; he plainly
believes
himself to have evolved into a different reality, separate and
distinct,
the true one.
And finally, in "Lady Of The North", the second
love song, he sings
of his alternative reality as a change in the wind that must come,
natural
and destined. The song has an immense rhapsodic grandeur, an illusion
of
free flight. "Ah, fine lady of the North, like silver on
the ocean shore
"No Other" is now deleted. Gene Clark has no
recordings currently
available in this country.
The album he has been working on for the past year, reputedly
a
"Country-Motown" synthesis, does not appear. Asylum
have no release
scheduled.
Gene Clark was "pretty happy" with "No
Other". "You could call this a
transition for me. I'm moving into another, bigger arena."
Good grief, some of us think "No Other" is
one of the finest albums
ever cut. Where can he take us to next? Trust the man who knows
the
Strength of Strings.
STEVE BURGESS
DARK STAR #3
DARK STAR PUBLISHING 1976