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Gene Clark
Echoes
Columbia Legacy
CK 48523
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1. Boston
(Gene Clark)

2. For Me Again
(Gene Clark)

3. I Knew I'd Want You
(Gene Clark)
Remixed

4. Here Without You
(Gene Clark)

5. Set You Free This Time
(Gene Clark)

6. If You're Gone
(Gene Clark)
Remixed

7. Is Yours Is Mine
(Gene Clark)
Remixed

8. So You Say You Lost Your Baby
(Gene Clark)
Remixed

9. Tried So Hard
(Gene Clark)
Remixed

10. Needing Someone
(Gene Clark)

11. Echoes
(Gene Clark)

12. The Same One
(Gene Clark)
Remixed

13. Couldn't Believe Her
(Gene Clark)
Remixed

14. Keep On Pushin'
(G. Clark - B. Rinehart)
Remixed

15. I Found You
(Gene Clark)

16. Elevator Operator
(G. Clark - B. Rinehart - J. Larson)
Remixed

17. Think I'm Gonna Feel Better
(Gene Clark)
Remixed

18. The French Girl
(Gene Clark)
Remixed
Previously unreleased

19. Only Colombe
(Gene Clark)
Remixed
Previously unreleased

20. So You Say You Lost Your Baby
(Gene Clark)
Remixed
Previously unreleased acoustic demo version
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Gene Clark deserved more than whatever loyal cult status he had at the time of his untimely passing, and he deserves to be remembered for more than his membership in the Byrds on their first two albums. His achingly quixotic vocals, his poetic sixth sense in lyrics and the shifting harmonic surprises in his melodies would guarantee Clark membership in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame even if the Byrds had never existed.

Born in Tipton, Missouri, in 1941 and raised in Kansas in a family of 12 children, the unassuming Clark must’ve known at an early age his sensitivity, fine voice and natural performer’s need to be noticed would result in a career in music. After stumbling through the usual high-school aggregations, Clark received his first break when he joined the New Christy Minstrels upon Randy Sparks’ invitation in 1962. He appeared on several singles and two albums (ironically enough on CBS/Sony), though his picture is only readily identifiable on Merry Christmas, the Minstrels’ 1963 Holiday offering.

On tour in Canada, where the Beatles had broken earlier than in the States, Clark heard “She Loves You” and, later, on a jukebox in Norfolk, Virginia, he found himself compelled to play the song over and over for the better part of several hours. “I might’ve played it 40 times in the two days the Christy Minstrels were playing that town,” he told an English fanzine years later, “I knew, I knew that this was the future, this was where music was going and that I wanted to be a part of it.” And so Clark quit the New Christy Minstrels and headed out to Los Angeles to see who else, if anyone, heard the magic as well.

One Hoot Night at the legendary Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard, Gene Clark found out who else heard the magic. Roger, then known as Jim, McGuinn was performing solo onstage doing folk-tinged version of current Beatles material to a mostly unenthusiastically house. Afterwards, McGuinn was sitting at a table in what was then the Troubadour’s bar, strumming away, when Clark ambled over, introduced himself, complimented McGuinn and suggested the two might get together to try and “do something like Peter and Gordon,” currently high on the charts with “World Without Love.”

A duo, however awkward, in an era soon to be dominated by electric groups, was born. Singing one evening in the Troubadour’s stairwell (the acoustic echo was best there) the duo were startled by a third-part harmony coming from seemingly nowhere. David Crosby had heard the singing and strolled over to sing a harmony, unannounced and uninvited. According to one of the duo, “Can I join our band?” was one of the first phrases out of Crosby’s smiling face when the tune finished.

McGuinn had worked with Crosby before, he told Clark, and he wasn’t certain it would fly, it was Gene Clark who insisted David Crosby join the duo, and so a trio was born, three still conservatively coiffured young men, all on acoustic 12-string. No bass, no drums, no electricity. Yet.

Cut to the chase. The Byrds, after a series of awkward baby steps, are in residence at Ciro’s. The original trio are now augmented by Chris Hillman on bass and Michael Clarke on drums. It is spring 1965 and the word is slowly coming out; not only are young Los Angelenos discovering they’ve got a band, their own real serious band, but they are discovering each other too. And they are discovering just how many young, hip and loose types there really were in the world.

Established Hollywood took notice too; Mickey Rooney, the Fonda family, Sean Connery, Lenny Bruce, Joey Bishop, Jayne Mansfield, Michael Caine … all at ringside tables checking it all out, watching the dancers mill about with that odd free-form two-step that would later become the Fillmore West shuffle. All the rock ‘n’ rollers were there too, the young ones and the old ones; Major Lance, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, the Grassroots, Love (whose Brian MacLean was the first Byrds’ roadie ever), the Leaves, the Palace Guard (featuring a teenage Emmit Rhodes), Sonny & Cher, Phil Spector and the entire Gold Star studio crowd. And the young dancers with their Robin Hood motif of long straight hair, buckskin, boots or moccasins, striped shirts and wide belts, looking almost exactly like each other and almost exactly like the Byrds up there onstage before all and sundry called it a night and raced their motorcycles up Laurel Canyon to peaceful homes before doing it all again the next evening.

At the literal center of it all was Gene Clark. Writing most of the original material for the band in those early days, singing lead and gorgeous double-leads with McGuinn while Crosby harmonized beautifully. Standing center stage between McGuinn and Crosby, banding one and sometimes two tambourines on his long legs, looking every bit the handsome, introspective, somewhat moody rock ‘n’ roll star he was. Clark played acoustic guitar on the records, was responsible for whatever harmonica work appeared on those first two albums (he was a wonderful player) and was as integral a part of the band as anyone.

Although it was issued much later, in 1969 on a small label, Preflyte contains nine Clark originals, two of which were co-written with McGuinn. The album, consisting of studio demos from the band earliest days, predates the two official CBS/Sony Byrds LPs: Mr. Tambourine Man and Turn, Turn, Turn. On Preflyte the Byrds can be heard using Clark’s material as a pendulum, changing from novices on electric instruments to professionals with their own fresh style, from Dylan fans who also dug the Beatles into something else entirely which had its own American sound and California cool. Two of Preflyte’s selections, “Boston” and “For Me Again,” are represented on this package.

Five Clark originals, two written with McGuinn, appear on the first proper CBS album Mr. Tambourine Man, released in 1965. Two Gene Clark tunes, “I Knew I’d Want You” (the flip of the hit single) and “Here Without You,” are found on this compilation. The album was a big hit and was the first large-scale media signal of a new American counterculture. It helped spread the Gospel of Bob Dylan while illustrating how folk music and Dylan material could be commercial without being diluted, spawned a worldwide number one single along with some sharp follow-ups and even had its fisheye cover photograph imitated by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Rolling Stone, the Small Faces, the Illusion and several others.

Clark’s material of the era can only be considered classic, contributions to a generation and an era: “Eight Miles High” at the top of the list, “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better,” “Here Without you,” “Set You Free This Time,” “The World Turns All Around Her” and that astonishing wedding of Bach and Beatles, “She Don’t Care About Time.” It was during this heady period Clark and company were acknowledged by no less than the Beatles themselves as being the best American group, period.

The second Byrd album was Clark’s last with the band before leaving the group. Turn, Turn, Turn appeared at Christmas 1965 and featured three Clark originals with “Set You Free This Time” as the second single. The number showed Gene for the first time in the musical manner he’d most be remembered, mid-tempo and melancholy with that poignant sense of just what relationships in life can really mean. A fine song, a good vocal, dominating acoustic guitar and even some Clark countryesque harmonica. “If You’re Gone,” is included here too, another brooding Clark ballad with sparkling 12-string and featuring another great Clark-McGuinn-Crosby droning harmonies.

Still, Clark’s ace-in-the-hole was next. After dinner with Rolling Stone Brian Jones, Clark hastily retreated to his hotel room with a cocktail napkin upon which he’d hurriedly scribbled some lyrical ideas. By morning he’d come up with what would be his most enduring classic, “Eight Miles High.” According to a videotaped interview with archivist Domenic Priore, Clark stated he wrote the song on his own with David Crosby coming up with one key line and McGuinn arranging the song with help from Crosby in a manner similar to one of the band’s great heroes, John Coltrane.

Suffice to say the song is and will forever be a classic. Covered any number of times and a staple of classic rock radio formats today, “Eight Miles High” is to the Byrds what “Good Vibrations” is to the Beach Boy s, the one grand artistic achievement, which in three minutes establishes forever the band’s claim to musical immortality. It remains the greatest original song in the Byrds’ canon and one of their tow or three most popular pieces.

Ironically enough, due to exhaustion, artistic frustration and/or fear of flying (!) Gene Clark left the band. By spring 1966 he was a Byrd no more.

Initially Gene rested and collected his thoughts about what he wanted to do. There was no doubt he wanted to be a solo artist but how best to go about it was another matter. Vern and Rex Gosdin were managed by the Byrds’ management team of Eddie Tickner and Jim Dickson, the Gosdins having been in the bluegrass band with Chris Hillman before rock and electricity freed them all.

It was decided in summer 1966 that Gene should record the solo album which as so obviously in him. Hillman and Michael Clarke were drafted for a rhythm section, though New Orleans R&B vet Earl Palmer did drum on some cuts. Clark himself would strum along, as would the Gosdins, and the same trio would do the harmonies to Gene’s lead vocal.

No less than Van Dyke Parks and Leon Russell would perform keyboard chores, Russell writing the orchestration for “Echoes,” the albums’ firs single. On lead guitar were ace session men Glen Campbell (still a year away from his real fame), Clarence White and Jerry Cole augmented ex-Leaves Bill Rinehart on the frets; White later joining Rinehart in a venture called Gene Clark and the Group a few months after this album was done. Doug Dillard, with whom Clark would later form Dillard and Clark (natch) in 1968, played banjo and on one cut played electric Rickenbacker banjo.

Gene Clark and The Gosdin Bros. was recorded in late 1966 at the Columbia Recording Studio at 6121 Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood where the Byrds, Paul Revere and the Raiders, and all the West Coast CBS acts then recorded. CBS bands also had to use CBS staff producers, so Larry Marks started the production before Gary Usher finished it up, with no little help from Leon Russell and even co-manager Jim Dickson (who of course produced Preflyte).

Clark later told anthologist Bruce Elder, “It was all very intense. I remember telling people I was doing an album with Leon, Clarence White, Glen Campbell, Chris Hillman, Chip Douglas (later in Gene Clark and the Group as bassist with Rinehart and White and ex-Merry-Go-Round drummer Joel Larson on skins, he was also Douglas Farthling Hatlelid in real life and producer of the Monkee’s third album Headquarters) and Vern and Rex Gosdin and they thought I was crazy. It was like, ‘you’re going to make a record with them, what a weird combination of people.”

But make a record they did. “It was time to make an album of my own,” said Clark years later. “I wanted to write all the material and do more with my own musical ideas. With the Byrds, most of the ideas had been developed more or less cooperatively. What I had in mind was closely related but more personal. My inspirations, as I remember, were Rubber Soul and early Mamas and Papas.”

“Echoes,” the beautifully orchestrated track done by Leon Russell for 32-piece orchestra, was the first single from the album, backed with the more rock oriented “I Found You.” It wasn’t a hit but it deserved to be. No national tour was forthcoming and since Gene Clark was only playing around southern California in the late fall of 1966 (backed by the Gosdins and Clarence White, not the Group just yet) only southern California radio gave him any real airplay. Still, the track was imaginative, different, full of Clark’s Dylan-inspired lyrical evocativeness, and Columbia took out trade paper ads stating in effect, “People ask whether Gene Clark will be rejoining the Byrds. Here’s the answer.”

Gene Clark and The Gosdin Bros. was mainly knocked together instrumentally by a nucleus of Hillman and Michael Clarke for the rhythm section, while Clark and Bill Rinehart played guitars and the Gosdins harmonized. The lion’s share of the tracks were a powerful, introspective, thinking man’s version of what later would be known as country-rock, though that genre hadn’t been invented yet. It is interesting to note while the credit for birthing folk-rock largely went to Roger McGuinn and country-rock to Gram Parsons, only Gene Clark was a principal player at both genres beginnings in addition to jumpstarting psychedelia with, of course, “Eight Miles High.”

Even though it was released in1967 Gene Clark And The Gosdin Bros.’ psychedelia is more muted than other contemporary examples of the genre. The sparkling bounce of “Think I’m Gonna Feel Better” perhaps summed up the album as much as any one track could. Full of optimism and pep on the surface, scratch a little deeper and the Clark sense of abstract and emotional desire is felt, dragging the song into the reality of an early morning swim in cold water. “Tried So Hard,” later covered by a variety of artists, contains all the aspects later found in Dillard and Clark and in many ways was and is no less a blueprint for the uptempo classic Clark style than “Set You Free This Time” was and is for the slower Clark ballad style.

“Is Yours Is Mine,” a guitar hook-laden track, may be the one song on the album where McGuinn’s 12-string and Crosby’s ethereal harmonies are most sorely missed. The melancholy melody and catchy string bending is tailor-made for the Byrds circa 1966, and such material must’ve been composed after Gene left the band because it is impossible to imagine the tune being passed over by McGuinn and his cohorts.

Dillard and Clark later made a concert staple out of both “Keep On Pushin’” and “Couldn’t Believe Her” for almost three years after the release of this album, years when their own partnership was cemented after the Byrds let Doug Dillard and his merry banjo slip out of their hands, Dillard begin a touring Byrd of all of their shows in Europe in spring 1968.

“So You Say You Lost Your Baby” is represented here twice, once in its original, albeit remixed form and lastly with Gene’s acoustic demo. Clark’s demo makes one realize upon first hearing just how great a songwriter he was, as the listener can hear all the chord changes, all the possibilities and where the song was going even though the track is only Clark vocal and guitar. In much the same way as Van Morrison’s acoustic demo of “The Smile You Smile” neatly encapsulates the reissue of Van’s first album sessions while showing the power and emotion of Morrison’s vision. “So You Say You Lost Your Baby” does that here, and one is either deaf or evil to disagree.

The Gosdin harmonic sense steps into the limelight on “Elevator Operator” and “The Same One.” Listen how loudly they are mixed up in the track, someone must’ve liked them … they vie with the lead vocal for attention. More worldly than Everly Brothers harmonies, not British like Lennon and McCartney and smoother an McGuinn/Crosby, the Gosdins and their own brand of singing never really got their due in the sixties. Later on, when performing in the C&W field, they grabbed more of the public’s attention, and Vern Gosdin is still out there today racking up country hits, including a 1984 remake of “Turn, Turn, Turn,” with McGuinn on backing vocals and guitar. Rex passed away several years ago.

“Needing Someone,” with a band featuring Clark, Clarke, Hillman, Clarence White and Bill Rinehart, is practically the Younger Than Yesterday Byrds, as at least three of them appeared on the album, and this would’ve been a grand track to close out the album. The aforementioned Byrds’ album was released the very same week as Clark’s recording (February 10, 1967, to be exact), and this assured Gene Clark of being buried somewhat at CBS and subsequently in the eyes of the Byrd-watching public. Publicity went to the Byrds and much of Clark’s strong effort went for naught, the album not selling well, as expected.

Clark, his management team and CBS all sought to keep the ball rolling, however, and the second week in May saw Gene back in CBS Recording Studio D to cut a new single, the legendary and till-now unreleased “Only Colombe,” backed with “The French Girl.” The sessions went smoothly (Clark claimed he recorded an entire solo album later on in 1967 after this single was done), the Gosdins were elsewhere, orchestration a la “Echoes” was again used; such 1967 treats as backwards guitar and harpsichords were utilized, and the feel was much akin to Dylan singing in front of the Left Banke.

The eight-track recordings were completed and mixed down to a mono master tape on May 17, 1967, and then went to the vault, presumably to await a release date for their appearance as a single, but in reality to remain in the can until today, where they finally appear remixed and in glorious stereo. Produced, like much of the album before them, by the late Gary Usher, they how proudly enter the Clark canon. Why on God’s green earth they were not released is beyond comprehension as they were a breath of clean pop air at a time when arrangements more often than not meant clutter and lyrics too often recycled Eastern jibberish.

The reissue of Gene Clark And The Gosdin Bros., the six Clark-penned Byrd songs included here and the three unreleased cuts may give Clark some small share of the spotlight his talents so richly deserved. This compilation collects not merely the first solo album from any ex-Byrd but one of the best albums ever from an ex—Byrd. It well illustrates Clark’s transition from a pop star who felt trapped by rock ‘n’ roll to a cult musician whose experiments in country and folk continue to yield fruit to this very day.

Even if the career of Gene Clark was a mere blink in the public eye, then it should be remembered that his landmark achievements were exactly that: landmarks which future generations of rocks, country-pickers, post-punk/roots bands and songwriters alike found previously cleared by the tambourine Byrd. His songs were covered by Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey, Spanky and Our Gang, Willie Nelson, Fairport Convention, the Moff’s, the Eagles, Yo Lo Tengo, Country Gazette, the Thought, the Three O’Clock, Golden Earring, Tom Petty, the Flamin’ Groovies, the Cryan Shames, Dinosaur Jr., Roxy Music and Thin White Rope. He lived long enough to see the very sounds he helped originate be embraced by such post-modern “alternative’ chart-toppers of the mid-eighties. His music is played daily on college, country, oldies and classic rock radio. His influence was far reaching.

Gene Clark is no longer with us but the magic of his music is. His memory will glow and come alive with the playing of any track on this compilation, his voice will continue to be heard as long as there is rock music played on radio, and his songs will continue to be performed as long as there are rock singers. He’s with us still.

- Sid Griffin
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Digital Producer: Bob Irwin
Digitally remixed and remastered by Vic Anesini, Sony Music Studios, New York
Product Manager: Penny Armstrong
Art Director: Jim de Barros
Packaging Coordinator: Hope Chasin
Special thanks to Gary Pacheco and Bob Brainen

© 1991 Sony Music Entertainment Inc. (P) 1991 Sony Music Entertainment Inc./Manufactured by Columbia Records, 666 Fifth Avenue, P.O. Box 4455, New York, New York 10101-4455