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Title: Gene Clark – White Light (1971) [Reissue 2018]
Genre: Folk Rock, Country Rock
Format: SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

Gene Clark’s 1971 classic “White Light” is a bittersweet and knowing statement from a singer/songwriter at the peak at his creative powers. Having fronted The Byrds, Clark on his own here is stripped down in guitarist Jesse Ed Davis’ stark production. The lyrics, singing and guitar playing are so powerful that less production here is immeasurably more musically. The album art is beautifully restored by IR’s Tom Vadakan.

Gene Clark’s 1971 platter, with its stark black cover featuring his silhouette illuminated by the sun, was dubbed White Light – though the words never appear on the cover – and if ever a title fit a record, it’s this one. Over its nine original tracks, it has established itself as one of the greatest singer/songwriter albums ever made. After leaving the Byrds in 1966, recording with the Gosdin Brothers, and breaking up the Dillard & Clark group that was a pioneering country-rock outfit, Clark took time to hone his songwriting to its barest essentials. The focus on these tracks is intense, they are taut and reflect his growing obsession with country music. Produced by the late guitarist Jesse Ed Davis (who also worked with Taj Mahal, Leon Russell, Link Wray, and poet John Trudell, among others), Clark took his songs to his new label with confidence and they supported him. The band is comprised of Flying Burrito Brothers’ bassist Chris Ethridge, the then-Steve Miller Band-pianist (and future jazz great) Ben Sidran, organist Michael Utley, and drummer Gary Mallaber. Clark’s writing, as evidenced on “The Virgin,” the title cut, “For a Spanish Guitar,” “One in a Hundred,” and “With Tomorrow,” reveals a stark kind of simplicity in his lines. Using melodies mutated out of country, and revealing that he was the original poet and architect of the Byrds’ sound on White Light, Clark created a wide open set of tracks that are at once full of space, a rugged gentility, and are harrowingly intimate in places. His reading of Bob Dylan’s “Tears of Rage,” towards the end of the record rivals, if not eclipses, the Band’s. Less wrecked and ravaged, Clark’s song is more a bewildered tome of resignation to a present and future in the abyss. Now this is classic rock.

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Title: Gene Clark – No Other (1974) [Deluxe Box Set 2019]
Genre: Folk Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Pop Rock, Country Rock
Format: MCH SACD ISO + DSF DSD64 + Hi-Res FLAC

Gene Clarks 1974 masterpiece gets the reappraisal its long overdue. One of the greatest albums ever made. Initially celebrated for its obscurity, No Other is now celebrated for its magnificence. It was in every way a magnum opus: epic, sprawling, poetic, choral, rococo. 45 years on and recently remastered at Abbey Road, 4AD are giving No Other the reappraisal it deserves. As stated on 4AD’s website, the original tapes were remastered at Abbey Road Studios, featuring a 5.1 surround mix of the album created for the first time. All the studio tapes were forensically worked on and mixed by the duo of Gene Clark aficionado Sid Griffin and producer John Wood; the extra tracks have not been edited or composited in any way, “allowing for everything to be heard exactly as it went down in the studio and before any overdubbing took place”.

Upon its 1974 release, Gene Clark’s No Other was rejected by most critics as an exercise in bloated studio excess. It was also ignored by Asylum, that had invested $100,000 in recording it. A considerable sum at the time, it was intended as a double album, but the label refused to release it as such. Ultimately, it proved a commercial failure that literally devastated Clark; he never recovered. Though Clark didn’t live to see it, No Other has attained cult status as a visionary recording that employs every available studio means to illustrate the power in Clark’s mercurial songwriting. He and producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye entered Village Recorders in L.A. with an elite cast that included Michael Utley and Jesse Ed Davis, Butch Trucks, Lee Sklar, Russ Kunkel, Joe Lala, Chris Hillman, Danny “Kooch” Kortchmar, Howard Buzzy Feiten, and Stephen Bruton. Clark’s vocalists included: Clydie King, Venetta Fields, Shirley Matthews, the Eagles’ Timothy B. Schmidt, and Claudia Lennear among them. These musicians all brought their best to the material. As a whole, No Other is a sprawling, ambitious work that seamlessly melds country, folk, jazz-inflected-gospel, urban blues, and breezy L.A. rock in a song cycle that reflects the mid-’70s better than anything from the time, yet continues to haunt the present with its relevance. There are no edges on the set, even in the labyrinthine, multi-tracked title track that juxtaposes guitar-driven psychedelia and out jazz saxophones and flutes with lush vocal harmonies. Even its tougher tracks, such as “Strength of Strings,” that echoes Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand,” melodically, delivers an alluring, modal, Eastern-tinged bridge adorned by slide guitar wizardry. In the textured darkness of “Silver Raven,” Clark’s falsetto vocal is framed by an alluring synth, and muted bassline and is embraced by a chorus that rivals CSNY’s, making for a heartbreaking, yet blissed-out country-folk song. “From a Silver Phial,” as haunting and beautiful as it is, is one of the strangest songs Clark ever penned. Its anti-drug references are especially odd as this is one of the more coked-out recordings to come from L.A. during the era. The final two cuts, “The True One” and “Lady of the North” (the latter co-written with Doug Dillard), are the only two pieces on the disc that mirror where Clark had come from musically, but as they wind around the listener, even these are far bigger than mere country-rock tunes, offering glissando passages of pedal steel and piano ostinatos that actually create narrative movement for the lyrics to turn on. No Other’s songs lend themselves to open-ended performances in the studio. Because of his spacious, yet always beautifully centered compositional style, they are well-suited to Kaye’s use of the multi-tracked instruments and vocals, ambient sonic echoes, and textures that surround them. Clark’s unlikely classic, No Other is continually continued rediscovered by succeeding generations.

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