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/jmT7M

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/psohNHVx

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.