![]() ![]() The plain, folky, largely acoustic album White Light was as close as Clark ever came to sincere flattery of Dylan – and while it wasn’t all that close, it stands among the finest of that era’s many records unmistakably beholden to the master. Clark was always too singular, too idiosyncratic, to be a straight-up Dylan imitator, which is perhaps why Dylan, who unjustly scoffed at Donovan, held him in such high regard. In 1971, Bob Dylan was the elephant in every singer-songwriter’s room, and he was bound to loom particularly large when the room belonged to a former Byrd. ![]() Photograph: Victor Blackman/Getty Images 4. Dillard and Clark’s haunted, gorgeous original is slow, clear, stark and heavy with longing – country music’s primary emotion, for which Clark, with his rich, tempered vibrato and yearning lyricism, had a particular affinity.īyrds of a feather … Gene Clark (second right) with the Byrds in an overliteral London photoshoot in August 1965. One was the title track, the other, this. Their quality and influence would later be acknowledged with the inclusion of two songs from the latter on Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s 2007 Americana hit, Raising Sand. Two years on, he teamed up with bluegrass banjo maestro Doug Dillard, and a band including future Eagle Bernie Leadon plus other leading sidemen of the new country-rock movement, for a splendid pair of rootsy albums, The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark and Through the Morning, Through the Night. As a lyricist, he needed to be heard rather than read his ornate, often mystical and sometimes overwrought writing can fall flat on the page, but it soars on record.Įver ahead of a game he somehow always ended up losing, Clark had included country and bluegrass on his first album, well before the Byrds recruited Gram Parsons and recorded Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Clarke was a superb vocalist, one who merits consideration alongside Scott Walker and Nina Simone. ![]() This hallucinatory stormer, also from his debut LP, is an urgent, pounding, organ-driven (in several senses) account of the tripped-out mind as much as the cracked-open heart. Lost love was Clark’s creative engine his former bandmates had always looked forward to his turbulent personal life going awry, because of the songs they’d get out of it. ![]()
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