Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before: Three ex-Byrds walk into a recording studio...

 

The whole McGuinn-Clark-Hillman adventure (or: misadventure, as it largely turned out to be),was pretty much doomed from the start, and then the protagonists proceeded to bravely walk towards the inevitable. Coming out of McGuinn and Clark being booked as an acoustic duo in 1977 due to them both having nothing going on after their respective solo careers had petered out with the disappointing Thunderbyrd and Two Sides To Every Story, respectively. A well-received impromptu on-stage reunion with David Crosby and Chris Hillman on December 7 in San Francisco’s Boarding House (which isn’t the same concert that is heavily bootlegged, that one would come about three months later) reset the course for the modest adventure that two men and their acoustic guitars were on. McGuinn’s manager Ron Rainey was looking for labels to shop the McGuinn-Clark duo to, then after the first Boarding House concert reunion approached Hillman. With three ex-Byrds seemingly on board, Capitol struck. Hillman was reticent to work with his ex-colleagues again , but a 25,000 dollar signing bonus quickly convinced him. Which, really, pretty much sums up the entire MCH adventure. They were in it for the money, and it showed. Really badly. Personal or emotional ties were secondary, if even that. 

McGuinn and Hillman didn’t get along at that stage, everyone was suspicious of Clark and his unpredictable behavior and Hillman’s short fuse at this time meant backstage confrontations, sometimes devolving into fist fights, were frequent. Most of the time, the three ex-Byrds wouldn’t talk to each other, doing their own parts in the studio when the others weren’t there. And then, of course, the drugs. Cocaine was everywhere during the whole MCH adventure, with all of them – including the side men and tour band – indulging in the white powder. As usual, Gene Clark got it worst on his never-ending road of self-sabotage. The drugs and alcohol-abuse worsened his by then well-documented fear of traveling and bouts of stage fright. After having weathered reasonably well the first tours before and after the release of their debut album, Clark started to miss tour dates, then studio dates, then simply stopped showing up whatsoever, relegated to ancillary member in the title and packaging of the second album. McGuinn and Hillman limped on for another year and another album before the plug on the whole misadventure was pulled.

It's okay, Geno, I know the guy, he's not a cop...

But what about the music? Well, considering the circumstances it’s amazing that any worthwhile music came out of this at all. But if ever there was a band where you have to be really picky, it’s this one. Their first album was by far the most succesful, making the Top 50 and even giving them a Top 30 hit with "Don't You Write Her Off". But musically, the whole thing was a disaster. As a matter of fact, it was a disaster on all levels, including the packaging. Having a glossy picture of the three men in a competition of who could open his shirt wider open, coupled with the worst, most hyperbolic sleeve notes I've ever read. That might've and should've turned some people off, but not as much as when they actually put the record on. 

Weak to so-so songwriting mixed with atrocious production choices almost killed the MCH adventure right off the bat artistically (if not commercially). Fans who had been privy to the genuinely well-done McGuinn & Clark solo shows probably couldn’t believe their ears when they heard that self-titled first record. Slicker than a greased up bowling lane, the album carried the contemporaneous production by Ron and Howard Albert, riding high on the success of their Criteria studio in the success of the Bee Gees during their saturday night fever heydays. Disco strings handicapped Gene Clark’s “Backstage Pass” and a relentless and incongruous disco beat all but destroyed “Release Me Girl”, a melancholy ballad when heard at McGuinn & Clark shows back in 1977. 

Strong compositions were few and far between. Hillman contributed mediocre AOR material, while McGuinn’s stuff was extremely lightweight. Clark had the best songs of the bunch, but the aforementioned production choices were disastrous. Even the UFO-sighting inspired “Feeling Higher” sounded better in a robust live performance, whereas the ultra-slick studio cut started to bukle under  under the weight of all the bells and whistles and turns Clark's philosophical musings into cocktail music. Even a reasonably impressive percussive coda was too little, too late - dragging a repetitive number out even longer. When played straight in concert, some of these songs do posess their modest charms that almost completely disappeared behind the Albert brothers’ ill-fitting production. Sure, McGuinn, Clark & Hillman, but especially the Alberts, wanted to avoid the classic Byrds sound, but why sound like second-rate Gibb brothers?

Hey you guys, I think we got the whole hip disco look down...

Production aside, the disappointment of fans, who had seen McGuinn, Clark & Hillman on the road in the run up to that first album would be understandable in terms of song choices. Where in the hell was the fabulous "Crazy Ladies", a Gene-co-write with Thomas Jefferson Kaye?  And why wasn't "Here She Comes Again", an extremely fun 60s-throwback composed and sung by McGuinn and Hillman in a rare moment of collaboration included? So, the One Buck Guy tries to make an album, that is much better and truer to the sound of its three members. What if, instead of protesting and complaining about the Alberts' production choices afterwards, the three protagonists had voiced opposition during the recording and forced Capitol to rethink their high-gloss product? What if they had insisted not only on including a couple of numbers from their live repertoire, but include them in less glammed up versions that were closer to the Byrds sound? What if Capitol insisted on keeping a bunch of the commercial material, but conceded an album side to the group's songs in a more down home style? 

This is the idea behind Two Worlds. Each album side presents a different world. Side a, the 'rural side' includes the band's more classic sound, built around McGuinn's Rickenbacker guitar and the group's harmony singing. Side b, the 'urban side' keeps the Albert's high-gloss production. Having set up this dichotomy it was time to replace the worst production excesses of the Albert's by different, better versions. Considering that Clark's songs came out worst out of the Albert disco machine, we'd start there. The insufferable disco version of "Release Me Girl" and the glammed-up version of "Feelin' Higher" were replaced by live versions from a Clark & McGuinn concert from March 1978 at The Bottom Line, though to keep enough Clark on the b-side, I created a short reprise of the album version of "Feelin' Higher" with its percussive coda. To set up that second part of the song, I added a couple of seconds of that calypso beat to the song on the a-side. Considering that "Backsstage Pass" - disco string arrangement apart - suffered the least from the Albert's production, I kept that one intact for the 'urban' side of the album.

Yo Chris, this isn't a pyjama party...

With Chris Hillman's tracks I had the exact opposite problem compared to Clark. While Clark's songs actively suffered from the overproduction, Hillman took to writing shallow, but catchy AOR-rock numbers like a fish to water and the Alberts' choices feel much more logical for his songs. But I still needed some Hillman on side one, so the demo version of "Surrender To Me" would do quite nicely. Plus he's front and center on his co-lead vocals on the reinstated "Here She Comes Again". And of course the first course of action was to reinstate "Crazy Ladies", one of the great lost Clark tunes. I love the version of the song from the heavily bootlegged 1978 Boarding House concert and especially its interplay of McGuinn's "Eight Miles High"-like raga guitar work juctaposed with Hillman's mandolin playing. But that version had a lot of audience noise in the beginning and some feedback on one of Clark's lines in the first stanza. So I created a hybrid version in which the first 45 seconds are from The Bottom Line and then give way to the great version from The Boarding House.  

These changes all help to establish a more distinctively Byrds-ian sound, especially on the 'rural' side, helped also by a heavily augmented presence of Roger McGuinn's presence on this improved version of the album. While he still only has the two lead vocals on the two numbers from the finished album, the new versions of "Release Me Girl", "Feelin' Higher", "Surrender To Me", "Crazy Ladies" and "Here She Comes Again" have him essentially sing co-lead vocals on five additional songs, giving him a much higher profile. 

This is the kind of album the reunion of McGuinn, Clark & Hillman always should have been. It might've sold, but people didn't want a Bee Gees-lite out of this group. They did good work on the road, playing these songs, and now on Two Worlds these songs have a better, more fitting home. So, enter into the two worlds of McGuinn, Clark & Hillman...