'No Other'
The late Gene Clark, co-founder of the Byrds, was a unique man and
talent
BRIAN BURNES
* 01/17/99
The Kansas City Star
(Copyright 1999)
On Aug. 4, 1944, Kelly Clark and his wife, Jeanne, several months
pregnant, attended a circus at Camp Bowie, Texas, where Kelly was
stationed.
At one point the audience stood to listen to ``Taps'' and honor
those who had died in the invasion that had begun on the coast of
France almost two months before.
It was a bad moment for Jeanne.
``I just had the feeling that something had happened,'' she
recalls.
It wouldn't be until later that they'd learn how Kelly's brother,
Harold Eugene, an Army paratrooper who had landed in France on or
just after D-Day, had been injured, taken prisoner and finally died
on Aug. 4.
On Nov. 17, 1944, Jeanne Clark was back in her hometown of
Tipton, Mo., near Jefferson City, when she gave birth to a boy.
They named him Harold Eugene Clark.
He grew up in Raytown and Bonner Springs. He left the Kansas
City area in 1963 to pursue a career as a musician in California and
achieved spectacular success. Yet after he died of a heart attack in
May 1991 in his Los Angeles area home, he was buried back in Tipton,
as he had wished, his full name carved on the headstone.
There are also these words: ``No Other.''
That was the title of a record album he released in 1974. It's a
record that, this past summer, a journalist with The Guardian in
London declared ``one of the boldest, most brilliant and ... near
perfect pieces of work in the history of pop music.''
According to authorities such as The Guardian's critic and an
emerging chorus of others, Harold Eugene - known to the larger world
as Gene Clark - changed the sound of modern music.
Genre guru
In 1965, as a co-founder of the Byrds, Gene Clark helped invent
* folk-rock, recording Bob Dylan folk songs like ``Mr. Tambourine Man''
with guitars that plugged into amplifiers. On the Byrds' first album
of the same name, Dylan wrote four of the songs. Clark wrote or
co-wrote five.
In 1966, Clark helped kickstart psychedelia as the principal
author of the Byrds song ``Eight Miles High.''
In 1967, when he released his first solo album, ``Gene Clark With
* the Gosdin Brothers,'' Clark helped create the genre of country rock.
Music historians routinely trace all its permutations and performers
since - including Gram Parsons, the Eagles and Dwight Yoakam - to
Clark.
``Very few musicians had as much influence in creating new styles
of music as Gene Clark,'' according to the All Music Guide, a popular
music reference.
Lately, the din of such admiration has been increasingly loud.
Today, more than seven years after his largely unnoticed death, Gene
Clark is enjoying a sudden, unimagined revival.
He is huge in England. A new two-CD career retrospective, Flying
High, appeared there late last year. This past summer a British
music magazine, Mojo, featured Clark on its cover, with the banner
headline of ``American Giants.'' In an art designer's idea of a rock
Rushmore, Clark appeared on the Mojo cover with Mac ``Dr. John''
Rebennack, Randy Newman, James Brown and even The Artist, formerly
known as Prince.
Clark also lives on in cyberspace. At least two Web sites
(www.GeneClark.com and ps.ket.kth.se/gc/) are devoted to him. The
latter, maintained in Sweden, includes photographs of Clark's grave
site in Tipton as well as photos of his last concerts in Los Angeles
in April 1991. An adjacent bulletin board, a few clicks away, serves
as a campfire for fans who debate Clark's apparent preference for
using ``whom'' rather than ``who'' in his songs; the precise sequence
of guitar chords on his 1969 ballad ``Polly''; and whether Clark is
using the world ``pulsate'' instead of the phrase ``go safe'' in his
1971 song ``Spanish Guitar.''
Last year Scott Page, president of the Tipton Chamber of
Commerce, who also maintains the organization's Web site, noticed an
increasing number of e-mails requesting the precise location of
Clark's grave site.
Now Tipton is preparing to act as host for the first memorial
Gene Clark concert, tentatively scheduled for August with performers
as yet unannounced.
'My kid'
All this, meanwhile, is a bit hard for the elder Clarks to grasp.
``He was just my kid,'' Jeanne says.
The recent surge of recognition for their beloved Harold Eugene
compels members of the Clark family to describe the boy and the man
they knew best. To his parents and to the 12 brothers and sisters
who grew up with him there's a vast disconnection between the son or
brother they still miss and the singer about whom so many strangers
are now speaking with such reverence.
It's difficult for them to reconcile Gene Clark, rock icon, with
the vulnerable boy who would wake up from nightmares after the 1957
Ruskin Heights tornado, the kid who wore his hair in a pompadour in
his 1962 Bonner Springs High School graduation photo.
``He talked so often about getting a home and property out here
in the Midwest where he could just get away from it all, but he never
did it,'' Jeanne Clark says.
``There were times,'' adds younger brother Kevin Clark, ``that he
couldn't even come home without having to bring it all with him. In
1966 he just got mobbed, with everybody in town lined up for an
autograph.
``I think that was difficult for him, and it was recollected in
some of the songs he wrote later on, about how much he longed for the
simple life he had when he was young but couldn't come back to
anymore.''
But it's not just all the praise that intrigues the Clarks.
It's the timing.
Since leaving the Byrds in 1966, Gene Clark soldiered on in a
fitful and heroic solo career that today is celebrated by a growing
worldwide, almost cult-like following -but a career that never
achieved the commercial success of former Byrds bandmates David
Crosby or Roger McGuinn.
Aggravating the problem of commercial purgatory was the timing of
his death, May 24, 1991, Bob Dylan's 50th birthday. Meaning that
many of the rock journalists who might otherwise have marked Gene
Clark's passing were otherwise engaged.
His brother would have enjoyed all the recent attention, says
Rick Clark, a younger brother who has pursued his own music career in
California for almost 30 years.
``I think he would be pleasantly surprised, to put it lightly,''
he says.
Living out a dream
Gene Clark loved the rock 'n' roll life. Not long after leaving
Kansas City to tour with the New Christy Minstrels, he called his
parents from Hawaii.
``He was a kid in a candy store,'' Jeanne Clark recalls. ``He
just kept saying, 'I can't believe this.' ''
The dream of many young guitar players in the early 1960s had
become a reality for Gene Clark.
He left Kansas City in the summer of 1963. Two years later, he
was a founding member of the Byrds, an American response to the
so-called British Invasion, which saw the Beatles, the Dave Clark
Five, the Rolling Stones and other English bands raid our shores with
a barrage of hit records. The Byrds single ``Mr. Tambourine Man''
became a No. 1 hit.
With the Byrds, Clark appeared on ``Shindig,'' ``Hullabaloo'' and
``The Ed Sullivan Show.'' At the Los Angeles area nightclub Ciro's,
he shared a microphone with Bob Dylan.
Clark's Byrds-era songs remain inescapable, given the ubiquitous
oldies-oriented baby-boomer radio format. ``You Showed Me'' was a hit
for the Turtles. ``Train Leaves Here This Morning'' (co-written with
Bernie Leadon) appeared on the first Eagles album. Perhaps his most
familiar Byrds song, ``I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better,'' was performed
by the band when it was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
in 1991.
Rock star stuff
Beyond all the songs, Gene Clark lived the life of a prototypical
rock star. He bought a Ferrari. He met the Beatles. He dated
Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.
Yet the success that Clark enjoyed with the Byrds quickly
evaporated when he left the band and embarked on a 25-year mostly
solo career marked mostly by marketplace indifference.
A series of solo albums garnered great reviews and often
unspectacular sales.
Clark occasionally rejoined the Byrds. Many fans consider his
song ``Full Circle'' the best song on the band's 1973 reunion album.
During much of the 1980s, Clark toured with a ``Byrds tribute'' band
that at first featured only himself and drummer Michael Clarke from
the original lineup.
Throughout it all Clark kept his California life separate from
his Bonner Springs life.
``When he left here and got into all that, it was completely
separate from our family here,'' Jeanne Clark says. ``He very seldom
discussed anything about it when he was here. It was more like 'I'm
home, so let's be a family right now.' ''
Younger brother Rick believes Gene didn't want to bother his
family with the industry's fickle nature.
``There can be a lot of downs in this business, and he didn't
want the family to know what he was going through,'' Rick says.
At the same time, few of his California friends ever learned much
about Clark's Kansas City.
``Gene didn't talk much about his roots,'' recalls Roger McGuinn,
the lead singer on many Byrds hits.
``He never talked to me very much about his younger days,''
agrees Chris Hillman, the Byrds' bassist.
``That was the hidden aspect of Gene Clark.''
Several lifetimes
Much of the mythology surrounding Gene Clark differs slightly
from the reality of his life. But Clark's real bio is eventful
enough for several lifetimes:
The country boy.
Given his birth in Tipton, many sources emphasize Clark's rural
Missouri youth. ``A farmer's boy,'' wrote Michelle Phillips in her
1986 book California Dreamin'.
In fact, as a boy Clark lived on 212 acres owned by the city of
Kansas City.
Clark's father, Kelly, spent much of his career building golf
courses and hired on with the Kansas City Parks and Recreation
Department in 1949. He had been working as a groundskeeper at
Milburn Country Club and was living in Kansas.
``But to be a city employee I had to live in Missouri, so they
furnished me with a house at 79th Street and Oldham Road,'' he says.
``The acreage was there, and it belonged to the city, but there was a
little cow shed and a chicken house. We did have our cows and
chickens.''
The spread was hard by the Kansas City Southern tracks that
paralleled the eastern boundary of Swope Park and that Clark would
later recall in his song ``Kansas City Southern.'' The house was
later demolished to make way for Interstate 435.
The plane crash.
Another legend involves Gene Clark's fear of flight, an
irresistible angle for any member of a band called the Byrds.
The reason for this fear, according to several stories, is that
Clark supposedly witnessed a plane crash as a youth.
That's news to his parents.
However, Clark was terrified, they say, after the tornado of May
1957 that skipped to the south of the Clark home near Swope Park and
burrowed through the Ruskin Heights district.
``He would wake up screaming after that,'' Jeanne Clark
remembers.
Still, fatigue with air travel was a constant during Clark's
career. The song ``Eight Miles High'' had its origins in the Byrds'
first trip to London in 1965 and Clark's apparent relief after the
jet touched down.
``After he had been in Europe he told us about some frightening
things that had happened to a 707 that he was on,'' brother Kevin
says. ``That there had been a downdraft or wind shear and that they
had dropped about 1,000 feet.''
Ken Claybaugh, a Utah Byrds fan who later started his own fan
club, traces the plane crash story to a 1966 article in which Roger
McGuinn relates the anecdote. But in a 1986 Salt Lake City interview
with Claybaugh, Clark shrugged it all off.
``Aw, man, I have to answer that question all the time,'' Clark
said. ``I'm not afraid to fly. I fly all the time. That was just a
good excuse to get out of the Byrds.''
Still, Claybaugh said, Clark had arrived in Salt Lake City by
train.
The voice.
Just where Clark's remarkable voice came from remains a mystery.
He received no formal training, his mother says, outside of being
part of high school choral groups and a choir made up of boys from
the Kansas City-St. Joseph Catholic diocese.
In the late 1950s or early '60s, Clark formed a rock 'n' roll
band with friends from Raytown High School. Among the witnesses to
this event were Jack and David Godden, whose father, Bill, was an
engineer at WDAF-AM and had operated his own Kansas City recording
studio.
One day Clark sat in the Godden living room and sang into a tape
recorder. Although the tape's quality is not the best, what does
come through is a confidence remarkable for a teen-ager.
``We knew he was going to go somewhere because he was that
good,'' states David Godden.
That rings true to Joe Meyers, who first met Clark in the fifth
grade at Our Lady of Lourdes School in Raytown and later went on to
form a band with Clark that they called the Sharks.
``Gene was just like that,'' Meyers says. ``He would just get up
and sing.''
Still others found themselves taken aback by Clark's confidence
on stage.
``He had a magnificent voice,'' recalls Jim Glover, today a
Mexico, Mo., real estate loan officer. In 1963, Glover was one of
three voices in the Surf Riders, the band that would be Clark's last
Kansas City gig before heading for California.
``The voice just came from within,'' Glover says. ``Where your
voice is supposed to come from.''
Among those startled by the quality of Clark's voice was Michael
Crowley, who had formed the Surf Riders in the early 1960s and hired
Glover and Clark as replacements in 1963.
``Gene had a big, booming voice, a very nice polished sound for
such a young kid,'' says Crowley, today a musician in Denver. He
first encountered Clark when he showed up one summer afternoon at the
Castaways lounge at 4334 Main St.
Every Saturday the club hosted a hootenanny that offered a stage
for anyone who had the nerve to get out on it. Clark told Crowley
that he was spending the summer helping his father build golf
courses.
``So I think we introduced him as 'Straight from the bulldozer in
Bonner Springs, we bring you Gene Clark,' '' Crowley recalls.
``Then he began singing, and I guess our mouths dropped open. We
didn't expect such a professional sound. Everybody usually had 15
minutes at those hootenannies. I think Gene was up there for 45
minutes.''
Clark was a Surf Rider within a week.
The big break.
If there was a moment in Gene Clark's life that was more
important than others, it was when Randy Sparks, the entrepreneur
behind the New Christy Minstrels, stopped off at the Castaways to
hear the Surf Riders and hired all three members of the group.
The Surf Riders, like a lot of folk acts at the time, were
modeled after the three voices of the Kingston Trio. It was also the
era of Harry Belafonte's calypso music. Accordingly, the motif of
the Castaways was something like Disneyland's ``Pirates of the
Caribbean'' ride, to the point where papier-mache palm trees
decorated the interior, and beach sand was spread here and there.
``We dressed up in three-quarter-length cutoff pants and Hawaiian
shirts, just to go with the decor,'' Crowley says. ``We had people
wrapped around the Castaways waiting to get in.''
Enter Randy Sparks.
Sparks, a Leavenworth native, founded the New Christy Minstrels
* in 1961. His idea was to take folk music out of the confines of duos
and trios and embrace a large variety-show approach. During an April
1963 engagement at the Latin Quarter in New York, the act was billed
* as the ``big band of folk music.''
Forgoing the more politically oriented protest music offered by
young folkies such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, the New Christy
Minstrels instead focused on Americana themes such as overland
migration or pioneer California. In the summer of 1963, they had
their first hit, ``Green, Green.''
The group played Kansas City's Starlight Theatre in August 1963,
and one night its members visited the Castaways club.
``The whole bunch of 'em comes in,'' remembers Crowley.
``Gene said, 'Who's that?' I said, 'Green, Green.'
``He said, 'Oh yeah.'
``We stayed up all night and by breakfast the next morning, we
all had money to go to Los Angeles,'' Crowley says, recalling Sparks'
offer to hire the Surf Riders, lock, stock and barrel.
Sparks picked Clark to go immediately to the New Christy
Minstrels. Crowley and Glover, meanwhile, were to go to the
Minstrels farm team called the Back Porch Majority.
Sparks operated a club in Los Angeles' Westwood district, where
his many musicians performed. One problem: the local liquor laws.
``We had beer and wine at our club, so you had to be 21 years old to
walk out on stage,'' Sparks said recently from California.
When Sparks met Clark, he was 18. That's perhaps why some Byrds
sources list Clark's birthdate as 1941, not 1944.
There was little doubt that he was going to leave Kansas City,
his family said recently.
``We knew he was going to go,'' Jeanne says. ``He had already
moved out of the house a couple of months before. We knew if we put
our foot down and said no, that he would do it anyhow. So he joined
the world.''
Gene Clark left for California just after a Clark family picnic.
Jeanne Clark remembers that date, too: Aug. 12, 1963.
'Overwhelmed'?
The rest of the Gene Clark story is familiar to Byrds fans.
He toured with the New Christy Minstrels from mid-1963 through
early 1964, on one occasion performing at the White House for new
president Lyndon Johnson. But Clark grew weary of the travel as well
as his minor role in the act.
While touring with the group in Canada he heard the Beatles on a
jukebox. After he left the Minstrels he went to California, where he
heard Jim (later known as Roger) McGuinn playing Beatle songs at the
Troubadour, a Los Angeles area club. The two later recruited David
Crosby, and soon Clark was again part of a three-voice band.
Yet even at the height of the Byrds' success, Clark seemed
somehow separate from the other members of the group.
One reason might have been that after the Byrds bought
instruments with a $5,000 loan, Crosby convinced Clark to give up his
guitar because Crosby himself felt self-conscious performing without
one. The result was that Clark usually just sang while banging a
tambourine, sometimes up front and sometimes off to the side.
``Gene was quite confident at first,'' Roger McGuinn says. ``It
wasn't until David Crosby undermined Gene's confidence that he began
to question his ability as a guitar player. His singing was always
strong.''
Hillman, meanwhile, wonders if the Byrds' sudden success startled
Clark.
``Gene was very confident singing and writing at the onset,'' he
says. ``However, his confidence wavered a bit as we became more
popular.''
Jeanne Clark also has considered that possibility.
``When he got to being big I think he was overwhelmed by it,''
she says. ``Like, 'How did I get here and do I belong here?' ''
Clark apparently both endured and enjoyed the spotlight in 1965
and after. ``Gene did have a tendency to be self-conscious about what
he did,'' says Rick Clark.
'Cage full of tigers'
It's difficult to know whether it could have started with the New
Christy Minstrels, when Randy Sparks picked Clark to replace the
animated singer Dolan Ellis.
``Dolan was like the mechanical man,'' Sparks says. ``He went out
every night in the third slot and was such a performer, with so much
energy and with such thick skin, that it didn't matter what the
audience gave back.
``Gene Clark was not that kind of personality. He was a very
good singer who played the guitar adequately, but there was no flash.
``You must understand, I was in a cage full of tigers when I ran
this group. I had purposely formed a group of nine egos, in addition
to mine. We would open with a couple of uptempo songs, then I would
do the opening ballad, then I would turn around to the boys and say,
'OK, follow that.'
``The idea was that their testosterone level would rise to the
occasion. I came from old-fashioned show business, where you walked
out and killed them.''
Clark did not ``kill them,'' Sparks says.
``Gene was thrown in with people who had worked together for a
number of years, and I think he was just a little bombarded,'' he
says. ``He didn't evolve like I expected him to.''
Crowley saw the same problem.
``Gene didn't have much shtick, and the New Christy Minstrels
were all seasoned performers,'' he says. ``They had all been working
the L.A. scene and that was a long way from the KC scene. They were
looking for something from Gene that he couldn't give them.''
Clark's stage demeanor was more suited to the Byrds.
``In early video clips of the Byrds, Crosby and Hillman look
wooden, even scared, while Gene looks right at home,'' Ken Claybaugh
says. ``He was a bundle of incongruity. Confident of his talent and
at ease onstage, he was nevertheless amazed that anyone would pay
attention.''
No short answer
Clark's departure from the Byrds is an early example of a Los
Angeles singer-songwriter leaving a triumphant band to pursue a
successful solo career. Only in Clark's case, he left success
behind. The big hits that Neil Young and Don Henley enjoyed in the
1970s and 1980s when they left their bands never came Clark's way.
There seems no short answer as to why.
Instead of embracing a single recognizable rock style, Clark was
known chiefly for a mercurial style. His two albums recorded with
* bluegrass banjo player Doug Dillard in 1968 and 1969 included uptempo
performances like ``Kansas City Southern.'' Yet his 1971 ``Gene
Clark'' album was a collection of stark acoustic originals.
Then again, his 1974 album, ``No Other,'' startled listeners with
its coupling of country and gospel music with dense, difficult lyrics
that summoned up the metaphysical.
Significant commercial success eluded Clark through it all.
Though Clark recorded ``No Other'' for Asylum Records, the same chic
stable that housed rising star Jackson Browne, Asylum president David
Geffen reportedly declined to promote the record.
Clark didn't help himself. There were episodes of unpredictable
behavior. In the late 1970s he angered McGuinn and Hillman when,
after the three of them recorded an album that received considerable
airplay, Clark failed to show for some scheduled concerts.
Further aggravating his circumstances, Clark's health grew
increasingly precarious. He had much of his stomach removed in a
1988 operation. And for most of the rest of his life he struggled
with alcohol abuse.
``He turned to alcohol when he was frustrated by the music's
business end,'' states brother Rick. ``It was a place for him to
hide.''
Considered in that light, Clark's occasional successes may be
seen as courageous. One significant example was Clark's
collaboration with vocalist Carla Olson, with whom he recorded the
1987 album ``So Rebellious a Lover.''
Why we still care
There are several reasons for the current Clark revival.
The Byrds, 25 years after their last new album, remain
contemporary. Tom Petty included a remake of Clark's ``I'll Feel a
Whole Lot Better'' on his 1989 ``Full Moon Fever'' album. The Byrds'
1990 boxed set was a critical success. Many writers insisted they
could hear the Byrds in the music of many newer, younger bands, most
importantly R.E.M.
The recent reissuing of all the Byrds' early albums, with
additional tracks, only enhanced Clark's status as the early band's
guiding force and composer.
Finally, though he died in 1991, Clark's estate was only recently
settled. The settlement helped clear the way to his ``Flying High''
anthology, released in England last year, with perhaps more reissues
still to come.
And as for his prominence overseas, Clark was always popular in
Europe. In 1971 his ``Gene Clark'' album was voted album of the year
by Dutch critics. His light has never really dimmed in Europe.
The end
Clark's body was found in his Sherman Oaks, Calif., home by one
of his band members. He had died of a heart attack.
It was May 24, 1991. His death occurred one day before the
Clarks were to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary with a
service at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Bonner Springs and a
reception at the nearby Eagles hall.
Three hundred invitations had been mailed.
It was too late to cancel.
``We got the word at 2 p.m. the day before,'' Jeanne says. ``I
felt we should just go ahead and do it.
``I feel today like I wasn't even there. We went through this
church ceremony and everything. It was almost like I slammed a door
so I could go through with it.''
The invitation to the event, now framed in the Clarks' home,
represents what may be Gene Clark's last composition. ``Mr. and Mrs.
Kelly Clark invite you to join them in this Spiritual Harvest,'' it
reads. ``And to bear witness to the Wisdom that can only be gained by
respect and understanding.''
Over the several years since Gene's death, some of the pain the
Clark family has felt has been replaced by perspective.
``We knew he was talented,'' Jeanne says. ``But we never dreamed
that it would grow to what it did. I watched the Byrds on television
but still I just couldn't quite grasp it. I still have trouble
grasping that, truthfully. My kid.''
``It's chilling,'' adds Kevin Clark.
``He was very young when he first started, and I'm not sure he
knew how important it was at that time - that in the mid-1960s he was
sharing a microphone with Bob Dylan. Maybe even Bob Dylan didn't
know how important it was going to be, or how much of an influence it
would have on music.''
This past Christmas Kelly Clark, Gene's father, received several
of his son's albums on compact disc. On a recent day, Jeanne Clark
pulled them out and read their titles aloud.
`` 'Gene Clark With the Gosdin Brothers,' '' she said.
`` 'Roadmaster.' 'Flying High.' 'This Byrd Has Flown.' ''
There was an unexpected consequence of all these compact discs
given to Gene Clark's father, Jeanne says.
``We had to go buy him a CD player.''
Brian Burnes is a writer for The Star. He can be reached at
(816) 234-7804 or by e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
