Gene Clark's Rough And Rocky Road Towards Cosmic American Music

The story of Gene Clark's ill-fated 1972 album, the follow-up to his classic White Light, is a complicated one. I'll try (and fail) to be brief: After the critical success but lacking sales of White Light A&M gave another shot to Clark, footing the bill for sessions all across the summer of 1972, with cracks like Spooner Oldham and old alumni like Michael Clarke supporting Clark on his new album, which traded the rather spry acoustics of White Light for a more of a full country rock sound. Disaster struck when - during Clark's absence - engineer and producer Chris Hinshaw invited acquaintance and former clients Sly & The Family Stone into the studio. Stone and his entourage ordered food for hundreds of dollars from nearby restaurants, all on the bill of an unsuspecting Clark. With the budget spiralling out of control and Clark only having eight finished tracks in the can - half of them covers or remakes - A & M angrily cancelled the rest of the sessions, the album and for all intents and purposes, their association with Clark. 

Having stayed with him throughout the fantastic and not-so-fantastic expeditions of Dillard & Clark and the critically successful but non-selling White Light, the production problems here were the final straw, as well as a convenient excuse to get rid of Clark. Faced with an album (or rather, two thirds of an album) of country rock without a seeming hit single and an artist who would not go out on the road to promote the album, they decided to cut their losses. Clark's old handler in the Byrds, Jim Dickson, remixed the finished tracks and convinced A&M to license the tracks - together with leftovers of a never released 1970 single including all original Byrds and a track cut with The Flying Burrito Brothers - for a release in Holland only, then Europe's capital of country rock fandom and home of the busiest bootleggers for such fare. The album was called Roadmaster after one of its (cover) songs, and released with cheesy, ill-fitting art work: a green silhouette of a leather-clad biker Clark (from the first Dillard & Clark album) over some bright yellow with motorcycle pictures. The release was done in order to recover some of A&M's investment and beat the bootleggers, but looked like a bootleg itself. 

Interesting, you say (hopefully), but what about the music itself? 

That story is equally complicated, mainly due to Jim Dickson's decision to remix the album. In John Einarson's Gene Clark biography he claims that, not having access to Chris Hinshaw's original mixes, Dickson could only make what is called a ruler mix, putting all settings at about equal. But that theory never seemed convincing, considering Dickson wasn't some sort of rank amateur who didn't know any better ("Gee Whiz, that sure is a lot of knobs and twiddly things - I'd better put them all to the middle. Yessir!"). It sounds even less likely if you listen to the Hinshaw mixes and consider what has changed. Dickinson wilfully buried a ton of instruments and performances in his mix and basically flattened out the sound of the songs for what became Roadmaster. Dickson had a soft spot for Michael Clarke as a person, but not for his drumming here. On Roadmaster's "Full Circle Song" the drums are so deeply buried in the mix as to barely be audible, so at first it's almost distracting to hear the original drum track in the Hinshaw mix. But the drums seem to generally be mixed down, perhaps also due to some, erm, performance issues from Clarke. In the case of "In A Misty Morning", for example, there seem to be some dropped beats in the drumming (though they could be tape imperfections, as some problems elsewhere, that I tried to eliminate as best I can with my limited audio editing skills, sound like record skips). You know who also has vanished in the mix? Clark's old Byrds colleague Roger McGuinn, not even listed on studio logs, he probably also added some guitar and lent his voice for background vocals. On "Rough And Rocky" and "She Don't Care About Time" you can clearly make him out in the background in the Hinshaw mixes. 

The biggest loss in the Roadmaster mix, though, is the disappearance of Clarence White's spacey guitar lines. White's work here is marvelous and immediately identifiable. Those notes could have only come from White's string-bender, the innovation he and Gene Parsons were responsible for. In the Hinshaw mix, White's twangy guitar stands out, whereas in Dickinson's Roadmaster mix you can hardly tell he's there. And this is where the reasoning of Dickinson's remix becomes obvious. In the Hinshaw mixes, Clark's songs sound a lot trippier, with some of them having an almost psychedelic 'swirling' sound to them, notably "In A Misty Morning", "I Remember The Railroad" and "Shooting Star". Clark is already hinting at the adventurous nature and the cosmic american music of No Other on this album. So when Dickinson got his hands on the tapes he minimized the extravagant backing vocals and trippy guitar lines. The Hinshaw mixes sure sound more adventurous, and that seems to be what Dickson wanted to get rid of. He made the recordings sound more traditional - and duller. In comparison, it turns out that the 1972 recordings in their original version really were the missing link between the austere acoustic folk-country of White Light and the heavily enriched, ornamental sound of No Other. 

So, is there an album coming you ask, along with all of this info? 

Most assuredly, there is! 

The first idea for Shooting Star was that it should be an album as imagined in 1972, meaning the three tracks of recycled material are gone. (They will show up in appropriate alternate albums). Also, when The Lost Studio Sessions was published in 2017, it unearthed two other songs from the sessions: The traditional "Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms" was thought lost after Clark's vocals were erased to give the instrumental track to Terry Melcher (!) to sing over. The discovery of the track was most welcome, as it's possibly Clark's finest vocal performance from the period. The second track, however, didn't beg for inclusion. Clark's cover of "Bars Have Made A Prisoner Out Of Me" sees him working the country humor vein, something he was notoriously bad at (see: Dillard & Clark's country vaudeville "Corner Car", that absolute rarity: a truly bad Clark song). So, that one definitely wouldn't find its way on the new album I decided to retitle, firstly because it seems more appropriate to name it after one of Clark's own tracks and secondly, because the new title tracks seems to be woefully underappreciated. But, we'll get to that... [He says vaguely threateningly, as this post is about to enters its sixth paragraph]

I then tried to sequence the album, which admittedly is a little high on slow numbers , to spread out the mid-tempo numbers. This bumped the clear choice for a good album opener, "Full Circle Song", to second place, replaced by "In A Misty Morning", with its first introduction to the epic, semi-psychedelic sound the Hinshaw mix permits. At six minutes long, it would have seemed risky to open with that, but it really lets the project's proggy country rock sound fly (or rather swirl), setting up what to expect from this album.  After the aforementioned "Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms" we get to would have been the closer of the a-side, "Rough and Rocky". It's the track I reworked the most. In the original Roadmaster version it's slow and has a mournful violin hanging over it, turning it into a dirge on an album that arguably has too many of them. The original Hinshaw mix with more of a rock arrangement is much more lively, yet the forlorn piano-led version of the song unearthed on The Lost Studio Sessions is also fantastic. So, unable to choose between them I voted for - both, putting them together as a sort of Part I and II. Tell me whether you think this works or not, it does for me. 

Side B would then start with an uptempo number, due to no other contenders, it had to be "Roadmaster", slightly rowdier in sound and with much clearer instruments including some horns you've never heard before in Dickson's mix, followed by the mini-classic "I Remember The Railroad" and his slow, cosmic country remake of "She Don't Care About Time", longer and more elaborate-sounding than the released Roadmaster version. Clark's take on the old country weeper "I Really Don't Want To Know", arguably the album's weakest song, had to be placed somewhere, so here it is, followed by the new title song as the album closer. 

"Shooting Star" is a weirdly underrated song in Clark's songbook, no one seems to have it as a favorite or even a song worth mentioning. Which, I feel, is a great injustice. It follows a tradition on Clark albums that also seems to be weirdly ignored. Like Jackson Browne, whose tendency to put his philosophical stances in the last songs of his albums is always remarked on, the same tends to be true for Clark, starting with White Light. "1975", "Shooting Star", "Lady Of The North" and "Silent Crusade" are a fantastic quartet of Clark at his most philosophical. "Shooting Star" also, again, clearly presages the sound of No Other, floating off into the sky on a string of wondrous notes. 

Wow, if you've made it all the way down here, you probably now know more than you ever wanted to about Roadmaster, about Shooting Star, and about what I try to do when constructing alternate albums. So, now the only thing left to do is - ahem, sorry Tom Johnston - let the music play...