Sunday, March 5, 2023

Gene Clark - Dingwall's, London, Britain, 4-4-1985

Gene Clark was one of the founding members of the Byrds. For the band's first couple of years, he was their most prolific singer and songwriter, writing or co-writing great songs like "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" and "Eight Miles High." Unfortunately though, he quit in 1966. Then he had a long solo career before dying young in 1991. However, he never had any solo hits and his solo career tends to get ignored, even by many Byrds fans. I really need to post some of his solo material to try to bring it more attention. Here's a start.

Because Clark wasn't a big name as a solo artist, he didn't get bootlegged that often, and there are very few bootlegs with excellent sound quality. This is one of the best, but it's only an audience bootleg, not a soundboard. However, it's unusually good as far as audience boots go. I rather bother with those at all, but there are plenty of soundboards that actually sound worse than this. It's a long concert done in solo acoustic format, with lots of interesting song choices. Clark had ups and downs in his career, due to drug use, medical issues, and so on. But this was from a time when he was sounding very good.

Although this recording sounded very good, it had many, many problems. But I spent a lot of work fixing them, and I think I got most of them. One problem is that whoever was recording this often turned off their recording device between songs in order to save tape. Thankfully it didn't happen between every song, but many of them. As a result, the applause was sometimes cut off, or there was no time for any applause at all. A couple of songs had their beginnings cut off too, as the person probably was a bit slow hitting the record button again. I'm sure there is a lot of between song banter that was lost due to this.

Happily, there were enough instances of applause that did survive that allowed me to fix this. I was able to patch in cheering after one song to another song. I had to do tricks like that probably for a majority of the songs. But when you listen, hopefully the applause will sound totally normal and complete. I also boosted the lead vocals for some songs. I made so many changes like that that I only reserved adding "[Edit]" to the songs where I made even more significant edits on top of those.

One example of a more significant edit is "Satisfied Mind." Clark started the song, got through part of the first verse, but then realized one of the guitar strings was way off. So he stopped, fixed the string, then started again. Unfortunately when he started again, the taper was slow to resume recording. But as luck would have it, the aborted beginning and the missed part covered about the same amount. So I was able to merge the two takes into one that sounds complete. I got very lucky there. :)

A similar problem happened with "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" - the beginning is missing. In that case, I got lucky again, because the first verse was repeated near the end of the song. So I was able to patch in the first two lines, making it complete.

For "Eight Miles High," the first five seconds or so sounded out of key, no doubt due to tape distortion. Luckily, that was an instrumental part that was repeated later, so I was able to patch that up too. 

In the case of "One in a Hundred," there was a section in the middle where Clark forgot the chords, stopped the song, remembered, then started the song again. That annoyed me, so I was able to fix that section so it sounded like he never made the mistake. Unfortunately though, he forgot the lyrics later in the song and stopped it early. There was nothing I could do about that. There also were a couple other songs where he had notable trouble forgetting the lyrics or the chords. I kept those mistakes in. He was stretching out, taking requests and thus trying some songs he didn't remember that well.

Most of the songs are originals, but there are some exceptions, like "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," "Gates of Eden," "The Bells of Rhymney," "Mr. Tambourine Man," and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," all of them written by Bob Dylan, or in the case of "The Bells of Rhymney," closely associated with him. Other covers were: "Satisfied Mind," "In the Pines," "Fair and Tender Ladies," and "Long Black Veil."

This album is an hour and 52 minutes long.

01 Kansas City Southern (Gene Clark)
02 It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Gene Clark)
03 talk (Gene Clark)
04 No Other (Gene Clark)
05 She Darked the Sun (Gene Clark)
06 talk (Gene Clark)
07 Here without You (Gene Clark)
08 Gates of Eden (Gene Clark)
09 The World Turns All Around Her (Gene Clark)
10 Silver Raven (Gene Clark)
11 talk (Gene Clark)
12 Spanish Guitar (Gene Clark)
13 talk (Gene Clark)
14 The Bells of Rhymney (Gene Clark)
15 Satisfied Mind [Edit] (Gene Clark)
16 Full Circle (Gene Clark)
17 American Dreamer (Gene Clark)
18 Why Did You Leave (Gene Clark)
19 Crazy Ladies (Gene Clark)
20 talk (Gene Clark)
21 Hear the Wind (Gene Clark)
22 In the Pines (Gene Clark)
23 talk (Gene Clark)
24 One in a Hundred [Edit] (Gene Clark)
25 talk (Gene Clark)
26 Gypsy Rider (Gene Clark)
27 talk (Gene Clark)
28 Rodeo Rider (Gene Clark)
29 I Don't Have You (Gene Clark)
30 talk (Gene Clark)
31 Fair and Tender Ladies (Gene Clark)
32 Mr. Tambourine Man (Gene Clark)
33 Eight Miles High [Edit] (Gene Clark)
34 Knockin' on Heaven's Door [Edit] (Gene Clark)
35 Long Black Veil (Gene Clark)

https://www.imagenetz.de/fFWxS

Because Clark's solo career wasn't very commercially successful, there are very few good photos of him from the 1980s. I wanted to use a photo of him in concert from 1985 or thereabouts, but couldn't find one. However, I found a good close up of his head from 1986, which is pretty close, so I used that. The original had some issues, such as the colors being too strong, but I made some adjustments in Photoshop.

21 comments:

  1. Many thanks. Gene Clark deserves to be remembered.

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    1. Yeah, he does. I've read a little about his life. It seems he had more trouble handling success than most. Whenever he'd get money and fame, he'd go overboard with drugs and excess until the success was gone. Thus, his music career never soared like it should have, based on the musical merit alone.

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    2. I've heard that David Crosby played a lot of mind games with him when they were in the Byrds--like making him play tambourine when he was the better guitarist and pushing for his own (less quality in my opinion songs) to be on albums in lieu of Clark's. But yeah, the excess was his downfall. Just wonder how he got there...

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    3. I didn't know about that. But it's well known that Crosby was an asshole, so I'm not surprised about stuff like the tambourine thing. Although I do like Crosby's songs from that time just as much, and I don't think that was the problem. The Byrds included covers like "We'll Meet Again" and "Oh Susannah" on their early albums because they didn't have enough originals. Only after Clark left, in 1967, did the others start writing more songs.

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  2. Holy crap--you do sooooo much work on some of these albums. It's really appreciated, especially when it's Gene Clark. Which for some reason makes me wonder if you ever run into any Tim Hardin rare cuts/live stuff?

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    1. Thanks. I've wanted to post something from Tim Hardin, but I can't think of anything worthy. I was going to post his Woodstock performance, but I noticed that's been officially released.

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    2. He's got an official live album (I think it's called Misty Roses or Tim Hardin 3) that's really good.

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    3. Yeah, but I generally try to avoid posting officially released stuff unless I'm reorganizing it in a useful way or its out of print or something like that.

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    4. Oh I only meant for you to listen to it--not post it! :)

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  3. Thanks for this Gene Clark upload. He's one of my favorites, and you are right; he very underrated. I see some Dillard& Clark songs here and the fabulous song "Spanish guitar ". So; thanksyou very much for alll the wonderful uploads you do (and... I'll be checking for more Gene Clark (and BBC series)

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  4. Thanks for doing this and bringing some well-deserved attention to Gene Clark. Nice job with the editing. Just a couple things: the Byrds had plenty of Gene's originals to put on their albums, but jealousy of Gene making more money publishing kept them off in lieu of some of the crap (Oh Susannah for instance) they put on the records. The Bells Of Rhymney was not a Dylan song: it was a Welsh song arranged by Pete Seeger. Again, nice work and thanks. Although I have a huge collection of live and unreleased Gene stuff, I'd love to see what you with more Gene Clark in the future.

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    1. Thanks. If you have suggestions for more Clark stuff for me to post, I'm all ears. One thing I'd like to do someday is a collection of his best solo material, maybe a multi-volume one, because his songs are scattered all over, and some good ones still unreleased. But I don't know his material yet well enough to make that.

      There are very few Clark boots I know of with good sound quality, song selection, and performance. The only other ones I'm considering are a band show from Denver in 1975 and a solo show from the Old Vienna Kaffehaus in 1988. If you know of others that you think are worthy, please let me know. Maybe you have some stuff that doesn't get circulated much?

      By the way, I didn't say "The Bells of Rhymney" was a Dylan original. I said: "or in the case of "The Bells of Rhymney," closely associated with him [Dylan]."

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    2. Also, if either you or echopk want to make a "best of" Clark's solo career collection, I think that would be great. The "Flying High" collection does an okay job, but it doesn't include rare or unreleased stuff, and there's no need to put the Byrds stuff there too. I think a big Clark fan could do a lot better.

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    3. That would be fun to do, but unfortunately, be somewhat subjective by anyone who would do it. BTW, which Old Vienna tape are you referring to? There's a SB done the the club, and the two audience tapes ( 88 and 89 ) that were recorded by me. There's actually a lot of good soundboard Gene Clark shows out there, and some really good audience ones as well.

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  5. Gene had plenty of material in his Byrds years but jealousy kept more of his songs off Byrds albums...he gave songs to other bands who had hits with them in the '60's, like the Turtles and the Rose Garden... look them up they are great...these songs could have been hits for the Byrds...even on their '73 reunion album, he was forced to do covers instead of his own material, and the best original stuff on that album was his...Gene was never without original material and I wished that he did more of his own stuff instead of covers...oh well, he is my all time favorite...thanks for your hard work.

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    1. Based on your comment and David's it seems the other Byrds did work to limit the number of Clark originals. Less not for their own songs, since they didn't have many of those yet, but for other songs like "Oh Susannah." In fact, one weird thing I don't understand is why Crosby's "Everybody's Been Burner" wasn't put on a Byrds album until 1967, when there's a similar demo of him doing it way back in 1964! I think that may be his best song done by the Byrds, if one doesn't count his input into "Eight Miles High."

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    2. Strange how id didn't get recorded earlier but ends up being the highlight of the album it does appear on. After Gene Clark left, Croz ended up writing some of the best material in the band. For some reason, early on, the producers, management, and McGuinn always sought to downplay Croz's contributions. They didn't think him a lead singer. Lots of bad decisions made in that band that hurt their career. I've always thought next to Gene, Croz was the best singer, certainly much better than McGuinn. Croz's contribution to Eight Miles High was the "Rain grey town" line, that was it. Basically, a Gene Clark composition, no matter what JRM says today. Sorry about Rhymney, Paul, sometimes I read through stuff too quickly. My apologies.

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    3. Yeah, some really bad decisions. For instance, one of the biggest ones in my opinion, is they could have easily released another album of original material in 1965. Basically what I've posted here:
      https://albumsthatshouldexist.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-byrds-you-showed-me-various-songs.html
      It even had a likely big hit with "You Showed Me." Strange.

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    1. Sure. That would be great.

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    2. My email is: thompson22 @ runbox.com (remove the spaces)

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