You can buy 'All The Things - The Alan's Album Archives Guide To The Byrds' By Clicking
Stephen
Stills/Manassas "Down The Road"
(Atlantic, April 1973)
Isn't It About
Time?/Lies*/Penasamiento/So Many Times*/Business In The Street//Do You Remember
The Americans?/Down The Road/City Junkies/Guaguanco De Vera/Rollin' My Stone
* = Chris Hillman compositions or
co-compositions
"Some people into Jesus, other people into zen, I 'm just into every day, don't
hide where I've been!"
Manassas'
second and final album has always had the reputation as being something of a
terrible album. Made in a rush, with the band tired from the strain of touring
and being pulled in lots of different directons (Stills was approached about a
CSNY reunion and Hillman invited to form Souther-Hillman-Furay during this same
period), there was certainly a sense that something great was coming to an end.
Reports of the band living in the same house, Stills knocking on their doors at
all hours of the night when he had an idea for an overdub, hint at a band that
started off as great fun but was quickly wearing everyone out: perhaps that's
why this album has such a blurred, sluggish feel about it, a million miles away
from the sharpness of the first album. Clearly made in a hurry (and re-done at
Atlantic boss' Ahmet Ertegun's request when a first version was submitted with
lots of songs by all the band and he requested 'more Stephen', leaving many of
the best songs in the can, only a few of them released on 2009's 'outtakes set
'Pieces'), the sheer pleasure of the first album has all too clearly turned
into hard work.
However
that was always going to be inevitable after the electic range and sheer
porlificness of the first double album, whatever the band did: even a second
double album would have been seen as too much of a 'repeat'. Stills is one of
those writers who can never ever replicate a past success no matter how hard he
tries - he has to go somwehere new each time and 'Manassas' covered such ground
he simply had nowhere left. However even though this album is poorer, song for
song, than it's more illustrious elder brother it's a lot better than
reputation suggests. 'Isn't It About Time?' is a cracking song about the latest
in a long line of wordlwide recessions and as ever Stills' most honest and
revealing work is 'hidden' behind his 'Latin' numbers, fans having to reach for
the translator books to find out just how grief-stricken he is on album
highlights 'Pensamiento' and 'Guacango De Vera'
(as a clue, his on-off long-lasting relationship with Judy Collins has
just ended in the worst possible way with her getting married to the first
person she met that wasn't Stephen Stills! Poor Stills enever quite recovered,
despite a fine career rally between 1975 and 1977 when he marries and then
splits from singer Veronique Sanson).
The rest of the album is less interesting: the country 'Do You Remember
The Americans?' sounding like a parody of the 'country' side of the first
Manassas set, while 'City Junkies' was held up by Hillman as an awful song he
really didn't want to go out - the only real argument the pair ever had (it's
ok actually, not that great but certainly not that bad).
Talking
of Chris, he gets two of the album highlights to himself (although sessions
tapes reveal he had both 'Love and Satisfy' and 'Rise and Fall' ready to go,
both of them to be re-recorded by the Souther-Hillman-Furay group). 'Lies' was
cut by the band twice, with a slower even more intense earlier version later
appearing on 'Pieces'. One of many Hillman songs about twists, it's a great
country-rocker with a strong riff and lines about always being let down. We
speculate on our CSNY book to come that, after going through a bad relationship
himself, Hillman is warning Stills away from his new love Veronique, who kept
interrupting rehearsals by appearing out of nowhere to talk to Stills -
something that didn't endear her to the band. It ends with a fascinating verse
that seems to sum up Hillman's feelings that this is a 'goodbye': 'I finally
got mine and now I'm gone, I hpope you get yours 'cause it won't be wrong, what
you see is what you get!" Hillman's other song, a 50:50 co-write with
Stills, may well be his greatest moment with Manassas. 'So Many Times' is a
country ballad that features the best of the two writers: Hillman returns to
his favourite theme of 'rise and fall' while Stills adds his favourite lyrics
about 'hiding behind walls' for a senstitive piece that sounds deeply personal,
reflecting on how both men get by only by hiding their true feelings. A
gorgeous tune, some lovely vocal work (with Chris singing deep and Stills
singing falsetto) plus an exquisite pedal steel guitar break from Al Perkins
makes this one of the real highlights of the album and of Manassas' output as a
whole.
Alas
it wasn't to be. There was no more 'down the road' for Manassas, the size of
the band and the cost on the road as well as offers from other places putting a
premature end to a promising band. However both Stills and Hillman now look
back on the project with great fondness, amazed at how much they were able to
achieve in such a short space of time and how much fun it all was. Manassas
should have lasted longer: even compared to The Byrds, it was the band Hillman
always seemed most comfortable with and made some of his greatest work with, a
band member respected and loved enough for his opinions and country/bluegrass
influences but who didn't have the weight and pressure of running a band as per
The Flying Burrito Brothers and Desert Rose.
"The
History Of The Byrds"
(CBS,
May 1973)
Mr Tambourine Man/Turn! Turn! Turn!/She
Don't Care About Time/Wild Mountain Thyme/Eight Miles High/Mr Spaceman/5D
(Fifth Dimension)//So You Want To Be A Rock and Roll Star?/Time Between/My Back
Pages/Lady Friend/Goin' Back/Old John Robertson/Wasn't Born To Follow//You
Ain't Goin' Nowhere/Hickory Wind/Nashville West/Drug Store Truck Driving
Man/Gunga Din/Jesus Is Just Alright/Ballad Of Easy Rider//Chestnut
Mare/Yesterday's Train/Just A Season/Citizen Kane/Jamaica (Say You
Will)/Tiffamy Queen/America's Great National Past-Times
"From dust to dust, yet nothing dies"
An
interesting double-album set, the first to give a true career overview of The
Byrds' career and no doubt released to cash-in on the fuss caused by the Byrds'
'reunion' album (not to mention CSNY fans curious to see what Crosby's 'first'
band was like). The set is naturally heavy on the most recent era of The Byrds,
given that this would still have been the vision of 'The Byrds' that came to
mind with collectors of the day, but all eras of the band are covered (if
briefly - the Gram Parsons years reduced to two tracks) and the running order
seems to have been compiled with care, with 'natural' breaks between the four
album sides (ie between the folk and psychedelic then post-Crosby then
post-York Byrds). The compilation was largely derived from the release of A and
B sides (and as such includes the first ever album appearance for the B-side
'She Don't Care About Time' and A-side 'Lady Friend') but does feature several
key album tracks as well such as 'Wild Mountain Thyme' 'Time Between' 'Hickory
Wind''Gunga Din' and 'Yesterday's Train' (welcome selections all, which other
later compilations might have done well to include). The Gene Clak era Byrds
seem to be over way too soon (without even 'I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better' on
the set!) but by and large this is an impressive compilation and a neat first
go at trying to sum up who The Byrds were and what they stood for. Certainly
this European compilation is superior to the more bare-bones approach used in
America ('Greatest Hits' I and II) and is a fondly regarded set amongst
collectors. The packaging was nice too, with the same striking 'profile' shot
of the last line-up from 'Greatest Hits II' plus a nice family tree on the back
cover (one of the earliest made by Pete Frame, before he became famous doing
excatly this sort of thing in the 1990s), which proved highly useful for
tracking the ridiculous amount of twists and turns in the band's line-up down
the years. Perhaps surprisingly - and despite strong sales that took it to #47
in the UK charts (not bad for an unpromoted oldies set in 1973) - sadly this
compilation has never appeared on CD.
"Roger
McGuinn"
(Columbia, June 1973)
I'm So Restless/My New Woman/Lost My
Driving Wheel/Draggin'/Time Cube//Bagfull Of Money/Hanoi Hannah/Stone/Heave
Away/M'Linda/The Water Is Wide
"Without no possessions and finding myself a
picture of mental and physical health..."
Roger really hadn't wanted to make a solo
album. Shyer by nature than his louder Byrd colleagues (if stil very much their
leader when it suited him), McGuinn was much keener to be part of a 'band' and
would probably still have been running some form of The Byrds to this day had
events of 1973 not conspired against him. Having effectively disbanded the
'second' band to reunite with the the first, Roger was left with no band to go
back to when the 1972 reunion LP turned into what is generally agreed to be a diaster
area. The obvious thing to have done would be to resurrect the Byrds name with
the one member Roger genuinely loved playing with - Clarence White - but his
sad death in the middle of the year just before** his 27th birthday robbed the
world of an awful lot of great music, including a potential dvelopment for The
Byrds. Anyway, McGuinn had secretly agreed with Crosby on their reunion that
the later Byrds weren't much cop (a surprisingly acquiescent statement given
the crowds who still flocked to see the band and how close 'Untitled' in
particular comes to the excellence of the Byrds' early days) and that he
wouldn't use the name again without the full original line-up present
(something that will have major repercussions when McGuinn, Clark and Hillman
reform and have to call themselves...McGuinn, Clark and Hillman later in the
decade.
No, that first album had to be made. But what
should it be like? McGuinn hadn't been happy with the last couple of Byrds
albums, wanted tomove on from the folk-rock of the early days as his companions
had and without White in the band was reluctant to go back to the country.
Instead he did what the Byrds should have done when Gram Parsons and Chris
Hillman walked in late 1968: become a sort of everyman player, able to tackle
several styles with aplomb (Roger might also have been experienced by Hillman's
role in Manassas, a band who could play anything and segued between genres as
casually as The Spice Girls changed their hair-dos). 'Roger McGuinn' isn't the
best thing the guitarist ever made as some critics and fans believed at the
time - heck in the context of the five albums that come afterwards it's not
even the best McGuinn solo album. But there's something sayisfying about this
record, which promised much but delivered more, showing off several different
facets to McGuinn's character instead of the quarter album he got with The
Byrds each record. While there's nothing as lasting to his legacy as 'Chestnut
Mare' 'Just A Season' Tiffany Lamp' '5D' or even 'Mr Spaceman' here, there is a
general consistency and confidence about this record's many facets that would
have come to a shock to anyone buying this record on the back of the end of the
Byrds' career (when the reunion album contained just two pretty awful generic
McGuinn pieces). The only bad news is that there's barely any Rickenbacker
here, as Roger tries to distance himself from his trademark sound (to be fair
the absence makes more sense here than it did on the reunion record).
Talking of the reunion, Crosby seems to have
considered himself 'guardian angel' of this project. While the two never quite
lost the sense of competition they felt around each other, the reunion album
had given each other a chance to put old issues to bed and pay each other the
odd compliment without sounding as if they were 'after' something. While Crosby
was outspoken about hating the latter-day Byrds, it wasn't with a dismissive
sneer usually because he felt that his old partner had 'more to offer' than the
Battin/White/Parsons line-up could give and that he was selling his talent
short. After the reunion project stalled and failed and McGuinn looked to do
something else, Crosby encouraged - nay, forced - his partner to become a solo
acoustic act, a nerve-racking experience with as many near-missess and success
according to those who were there, but with some reiveting performances of
songs like 'Eight Miles High' that saw Roger soaring again rather than
coasting. Crosby helps out plenty on this record too, and while McGuinn too was
found of challenges and jazzy spiky chords, it speaks volumes that it's this
first Crosby-sponsored album that features the most unusual McGuinn songs of
his solo career: the jazzy 'My New Woman' (with a Crosby scat vocal) and the
mind-bending 'Time Cube' on which McGuinn at last gets the balance between past
and future right (with a duet between a banjo and an early synthesiser). Crosby
also guests on the more 'normal' songs like the world-weary 'I Lost My Driving
Wheel' (a much superior re-make of a song attempted with the Byrds for an
aborted last album in 1972) and the song's one country song 'Bag Full Of Money'
(where their voices have never sounded better together).
'I'm So
Restless'
starts the record with - what else? - a Dylanesque slice of folk, with McGuinn
addressing his very real sense of confusion in this period. 'What do you want
me to be?' he asks the listener, 'A farner, a cowboy, an old country boy?'
McGuinn even starts the song with 'Hey mister...' (so that you half expect him
to say...'Tambourine Man'). I've never found out who the mysterious 'Mr D' and
his friends 'Mr L' and 'Mr J' might be but I'd lay a 'bag full of money' that
Roger's talking about Bob Dylan and the pair's mutual friend and collaborator
Jacques Levy (whose perhaps both 'Mr J' and 'Mr L'?) That twist changes the
song somewhat, especially the lines 'I know what you mean...' Is Roger
defensive about the state The Byrds have fallen into? ('I'm still paying dues
from that Indian trip' he quips, still playing on all meanings of the word
'trip'). Is he excplaining that he had to do something - he just chose the
wrtong thing to do? Whatever your reading of the song, it's nice to hear Roger
back on the acoustic and back to his folk roots.
'My New
Woman' is a song that would have
sounded far more at home on Crosby's 'Id' Swear There Was Somebody There' (his
glorious first album, full of unusual harmonies, rule breaking and jazzy
overtones like this song). Although a fellow fan of John Coltrane (Crosby must
have been releived to talk about jazz agin during the Byrds reunion - it's the
one genre he and soulmate Nash never really agreed on fully), McGuinn is more
out of his depth than Crosby and turns in his weakest voxal on the record,
smothered by his partner as in the days of old. The saxophone - the weak link
across the entire record - soon gets trying too, although full marks for
McGuinn for doing exactly what we wanted him to do during 'Byrdmaniax' and
'Farther Along' - take some risks instead of staying on auto-pilot.
'I Lost My
Driving Wheel'
is the Byrds song that got away. The one highlight of a pretty patchy last
recording session in 1972, it wouldn't have made a fine record on it's own but
just as 'Tiffany Lamp' had at least enabled 'Farther' to start on a high point
so this song might have done. Then again I doubt this song would ever have been
written without The Byrds falling apart - Roger is unusually honest and
revealing here, admitting his lack of drive and his frustration with himself
for losing his way. A second verse widens the story to hint at problems in his
marriage too. A reunion album full of sensitive, maturer, older songs like this
from the five original Byrds would have been a much more interesting record all
round - given that it was first taped in the same sessions as the original
attempt to record the hideous 'Born To Rock and Roll wonder why the band didn't
do excatly that. The best of the
'traditional' songs on this record.
'Draggin' is fun, starting off with
a very atmopsheric sci-fi opening before doing a typically Byrds u-turn back to
country/pop. One of the lighter songs on the album, this song is a gentle Beach
Boys pastiche that's more affectionate than most similar goes and features
lyrical refernces to 'my starboard side' and Roger even sings 'L-aaaaaaay!' in
exactly the way Mike Love does on 'Fun Fun Fun'. Sadly the level of saxophone
playing on this record is about the same level as Mike Love's too! Roger's
vocal is rather poor and quietly mixed too, although the harmonies are well
arranged and show that, in some alternate universe, McGuinn might have made a
fine Beach Boy (he'll become good friends with the band, co-writing the
ridiculously inane piece of fluff 'Ding Dang' for their 1977 'Beach Boys Love
You' album and contributing a Rickenabcker guitar part to the rather better
1986 cover of The Mama and Papas' 'California Dreamin').
'Time Cube' is my favourite track on
the album, the last of McGuinn's great sci-fi songs, taking elements from
'CTA-102' and 'Space Oddysey' but cooking them together inside a song that acts
as more than just a vehicle for fun sound effects. McGuinn's duet for banjo and
synthesiser (the past and the future, back in 1973) is a clever idea and the
pair of very tones blend together rather well - so well you wonder why similar
past/future bands like Pentangle didn't nick it. The song's lyrics are rather
fun too: 'The planet was moulded from great blocks of dust, and molten eruption
would burst through the crust, a new sun was shining and covered the Earth, the
heavens all knowing acknowledged the birth' sings Professor McGuinn with a neat
existential twist at the end of all the scientific jargon. Back writing with
lyricist ** Hippard again after a bit of a break (spent mainly with Jacque
Levy) the break seems to have done the pair good.
'Bag Full Of
Money' is a country song Gram
Parsons would have been proud of. The song may be a tribute to yet another
fallen comrade (1973 was an awful year for members of this band), admitting
that 'in the card game of life I was holding a trump', content to settle for
what he had before 'learning to fly'. Crosby's unusual Wild West harmony - the
only other country song he ever appears on is colleague Nash's 'Cowboy Of
Dreams' - is nicely apt, with some Flying Burrito Brothers pedal steel adding
to the colour too.
'Hanoi
Hannah' is another strange song -
a traditional sounding acoustic song that makes Roger sound like an old blues
singer. He sounds convincing too with his most expressive vocal on the album
and his guitar playing is great too. The only thing holding this song back is
an unusually impenetrable lyrics from Jacques Levy that's a little too complex
for the surroundings.
'Stone' is gospel, a return to
the genre McGuinn had last attempted on 'I Trust', complete with lyrics about
God being a 'rolling stone' and a children's choir. Bodering on twee, this
collaboration between *Penn and Neil Young's sometime sideman Spooner Oldham
just about escapes most of the traps around for songs about God using children's
choir thanks to a sweet melody and sensitive lyrics that compare God entering
your life with a hitch-hiker taking a life on life's long highwayu. It's no
'Let It Be' - and Roger is less able to sing this genre convincingly - but it's
never less than pleasant.
'Heave Away' is a Jack Tarr style sea
shanty, an early example of McGuinn's love of reviving forgotten folk songs
from centuries back. It's a shame he still can't sing like a pirate, though,
whiled the noisy backing (**CRosby/Hillman)*** rather overshadows him
throughout. Still, it's a fine way to spend three minutes Jim lad - no plank
for Jolly Roger this time, arrh-harr-de-harr-arrh!
'M'Linda' is a love song to Roger's
then m'wife, sung as a rather embarassing reggae. We've said it before on this
site and no doubt we'll be saying it again very soon: white 60s pop stars and
rock music pioneers should never ever be allowed amongst steel drums - it has
nothing to do with colour; it's just that playing songs in 4/4 for a living
over decades means most Western musicians are ill-equipped for the laidback
grooves of Jamaica and surroundings areas. Bob Marley never did any white rock,
did he, or he's have sounded just as embrassing in reverse. McGuinn's attempt
is more feeble than even 10cc's attempts at this and is by far the weakest
moment on the album. Sentence has now been passed on M'Linda M'lord, so let's
move on to final track...
'The Water
Is Wide', another song with
country leanings that sounds not unlike Poco: everyone tries to sound
convincing and deep but all that comes across is the gentle rhythms and
singalong riffs. Less interesting than 'Bag Full Of Money', it's a rather
non-descript way to end the album and Crosby's harmony is far less convincing
than earlier.
Still, until the unhappy ending 'Roger McGuinn'
impresses most of the time: pretty good all round considering this wasx the
first time in his career Roger ever had to fill a whole album himself. The
result is an album that isn't always brilliant but is nearly always trying and
is indeed a lot more credible and worthy of McGuinn's talents than what he'd
been doing the final few years with The Byrds, light years ahead of
'Byrdmaniax' and 'Farther Along' if not quite up to 'Untitled'.
Gene
Parsons "Kindling"
(Warner Brothers, November 1973)
Monument/Long Way Back/Do Not
Disturb/Willin'/On The Spot/Take A City Bride//Sonic Bummer/I Must Be A
Tree/Drunkard's Dream/Banjo Dog/Back Again
"I got a
banjo - and a wife"
The
sleeve of multi-talented Gene Parsons' debut record jokingly suggests that it's
'wood-powered', an oddity from the olden days released in a world that's
becoming progressively nuclear and dangerous. Parsons sits in front of the
biggest pile of logs you've ever seen (unless you keep a beaver as a pet,
anyway), an axe of a quite different sort a swinging in his hand and looking
for all the world like he's a lumberjack whose just walked home after a hard
day at work. Certainly the album sounds like a hard day's work - Gene plays
almost everything here and finally gets the chance to show off not just his
drumming skills and velvet singing voice for a full album but his banjo,
harmonica, guitar and bass playing skill sets too. Of all the ex-Byrds Gene is
the one who seems to have had the most ability to make a truly solo album - and
yet what's fascinating about this record is who he chooses to record with. Gene
must have felt hard done by, pushed out of The Byrds after their three
steadiest years right near the last hurdle and yet their presence is very much
felt - Clarence White plays the few guitar parts that Gene doesn't get round to
performing and Skip, while not a performer, submits a song to his old friend
'Do Not Disturb' (it's one of his better songs of the period and suits Gene's
downhome banjo playing, complete with yodelling solo!) His old mate from
Nashville West Gib Guilbeau guests too on rhythm guitar and fiddle and -
together with Clarence - the full Nashville
West reunion country jam 'On The Spot' is one of the album highlights, with
Parsons on harmonica and Clarence for once struggling to keep up.
Elsewhere
the highlights are many. Parsons finally gets round to recording a studio
version of his moving acoustic cover of Little Feat's 'Willin', played live by
The Byrds and first taped by them right back in 1970 during the sessions for
'Untitled'. While not quite as polished as the earlier band version, this
gentle cover is still a great showcase for Gene's warm voice. There are some
nice country originals here too, many of them inspired by Parsons' family life
now he's back home for the first time and which sound like a warm-up for the
country-roots band Ronnie Lane will form the following year, full of
referrences to pets, chickens and farming as well as family life.Opening song
'Monument', for example, is a moving piece about returning home to the family
dog (presumably the 'Banjo Dog' who has a banjo bluegrass instrumental named
after him!) while 'Long Way Back' is a nice James Taylor-style ballad that
makes the busy Byrds years seem a lifetime away. If there's a complaint about
this album it's that there's a few too many comedy throwaways on this album.
It's as if Gene couldn't decide whether to record an album full of spiritual
odes like 'Yesterday's Train' and 'Gunga
Din' or comedy numbers like 'B B Class Road' and so made a pretty even micture
of both. As a hint to how they work, no Byrds fan has ever claimed 'BB Class
Road' as a favourite (not even the roadies out there), while quite a few fans
loe the former - perhaps Parosn should have left the comedy to Skip Battin? in
fact there's more comedy songs than on Skip Battin's debut - bet you didn't see
that coming!) While none of these songs
are truly awful, they pale in comparison to Parsons' straighter, more serious
songs. Given too how few chances Gene is going to get down the years to show
off his creativity it's a shame that there aren't more true displays of what he
can do here - a fact compounded by this album's famously rididuclously short
running time of just twenty-seven minutes (alas even the CD runs this short,
without any bonus tracks to bulk things out!) However even if 'Kindling' runs
out of steam a few logs too early, I've always had the sneaking suspicion that
there was a lot more talent to Gene Parsons than his few token cameos with The
Byrds ever allowed the world to see and that thought is embellished, not
disgraced, by this rather fine little album, which may be low on budget but
high on melody and playing.
Skip
Battin "Topanga Skyline"
(Sierra, Recorded 1973 Released June
2010)
Salty Dog Blues/Bolts Of Blue/Stoned
Sober/Relax With Me/Willow In The Wind/Don't Go Down The Drain/Roll In My Sweet
Baby's Arms/Hully Gully
CD Bonus TRacks: Roll In My Sweet
Baby's Arms #2/Foggy Mountain Top/Wintergreen/China Moon
"Oh those lonesome pines and those good old
times - I'm on my way back home"
Beating
Brian Wilson's 'Smile' by a mere two years, it took a jaw-dropping 39 revoltuions
of the Earth around the sun before someone finally issued Skip Battin's second
album. What's more Skip sadly wasn't around to see it, the bassist having died
in 2003. Reports about it's dismissal from the record listings ahev varied from
the financial (the Yom Kippur War meant there was less vinyl to go round and
solo spon-offs by cult Byrds bassists simply weren't a pripority for record
labels struggling to survive) to the emotional (Skip's heart was broken after
thew loss of first Clarence White and Gram Parsons in quick succession) to the
purely professional (at nine tracks this album simply wasn't long enough or
good enough for release at the time).
Is
the result worth the long wait? Well, as with 'Skip' the bassist thinks both
deeper and is in ways more accessible on the ear than most of his Byrds career,
his compositions having a certain grandeur underladen with daftness The Byrds
never quite got. Like the debut album, the surprise is just how normal many of
these Battin/Fowley songs are, without quite falling into the hole of being
bland and ordinary either. However the highlights are't the originals but two
fascinating cover versions that reveal the pull-and-tug of country and rock
that lasted most of Skip's life. For instance there's a rocking retro style
re-make of The Olympic's 1950s classic 'Hully Gully'...recut as a traditional
bluegrass song (where the lyrics dound even dafter!) There's also a nice studio
take of Skip's 1972 on-stage Byrds vocal 'Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms' which
sadly did never make it to a proper Byrds record. What's more Skip has a great
team of backing musicians with him including Manassas pedal steel guitarist Al
Perkins and fiddle player Byron Berline, Hillman's future right-hand-man Herb
Pedersen plus Clarence's brother, Roland White. This is the only time the
formerly most famous of the White family guitarists ever played with any of the
other Byrds and the pair are synpathetic colaborators - remarkably so given
that this is the first record made by both men after Clarence's sudden death
mere weeks before recordings started (Roland, remember, was actually there when
his brother died and some reports say Clarence died in Roland's arms). In fact
Clarence himself played on the album's earliest sessions, taped at the end of
1972, as revealed by a series of fascinating CD bonus tracks not intended for
release: an alternate take of 'Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms' and traditional
number 'Mountain Dew', thought to be Clarence's last recorded work. The other
two tracks are less interesting - they're taken from a rare 1981 record of
Skip's named 'Navigator' which only came out in Italy and is still waiting for
a proper release elsewhere - but are stil nice to have as a 'bonus' present,
with 'China Moon' a song that had the potential to be great in a more 60s/70s
setting.
All
in all, the record is a nice find after all these years, embellishing Battin's
often forgotten role in music and boosting his credentials, if not quite up to
the consistency and surprise of the first album. It would have been fascinating
to know just what form this album would have taken when finished: would it have
been bulked out by filler or would two or three excellent new songs have turned
this from a promising set to a great one? The end result is arguably most
interesting because it took so long to be released - had it come out in 1973 it
would no doubt have been buried like the debut album, but given that it went
unheard for so long (and not even bootlegged as far as I know) it's a
fascinating listen today, taking you straight back to the mid-70s era when
country was king (with rockabilly not far behind) and The Byrds knew how to
make it better than anybody. Alas so far few fans seem to have bought this
album or even know that it exists - let's hope that changes soon. Overall, this
record is more than up to the high Byrds standard of the early post-breakup
years and shows that the Byrds estate was still in a strong place in 1973
(perhaps the saddest thing about this whole period was the cancellation of a
fascinating sounding package tour which would have had Skip opening for
Clarence's 'new' band 'Country Gazette' and Gram Parsons, busy promoting his
'Greivous Agel' LP (possibly with Gene Parsons joining them too). The tour was
understandably cancelled when both White and Parsons died within months of each
other).
Gram
Parsons "Grievous Angel"
(Reprise, January 1974)
Return Of The Grievous Angel/Hearts On
Fire/I Can't Dance/Brass Buttons/$1000 Wedding//Cash On The Barrelhead-Hickory
Wind/Love Hurts/Ooh Las Vegas/In My Hour Of Darkness
"It was a dream much too real to be leaned
against too long"
I've
often wondered how Gram Parsons' second and final solo album might have been
received had he lived to see it's release, instead of dying right in the middle
of the time between completeing it and us fans having it out in the shops. For
a start an awful lot of the songs on this album point eerily towards death as a
subject matter, starting with that choice of album title, named after the most
autobiographical song on the record (A
neat mixture of the angelic choir boy with the gorgeous heavenly country voice
and the rock and roll devil with a girl in every port and a drug in every vein,
Gram was no doubt referring to the duality within himself, but his death casts
this choice of words in another light, as if Gram came from the stars for just
a short time on Earth - and that we somehow failed the test by not listening).
Much of this album reads like a confessional as Gram kicks himself for his 'big
mouth' forever getting him into trouble, remembers nights spent with a girl
with 'brass buttons' who was his soulmate but a fact he realised too late and
later a $1000 wedding that never happened because he changed his mind. There's
even a finale to the album that merges one of Gram's early loves (The Everly
Brothers) with his own favourite of his songs ('Hickory Wind') as if waving
goodbye to his own life, before the album ends with the spooky 'In My Hour Of
Darkness' , a song about waiting to die (actually written about good friend and
fellow Byrds Clarence White, but not many people knew that at the time). Taken
together with Gram's mysterious personality and the myth of how he died (alone
in a hotel room in the Joshua Tree desert),
not to mention the great story attached to his death (with his roadies and rock
and roll buddies in conflict with his country-loving family, the way Gram's
life had always been lived in miniature) no wonder people fell in love with
this album the way they did, poring over it for clues and treating it as Gram's
true last will and testament.
I
wonder too how this album would have been seen in the context of the rest of
his work had he lived, for it's arguably the only time in his whole lifetime
that Gram followed up a previous record by recording another that's essentially
the same (the leap from 'Safe At Home' to 'Sweetheart Of The Rodeo' to 'The
Gilded Palace Of Sun' and even 'Burrito Deluxe' is too far for most artists
living until their 70s or 80s). Amazingly, too, Gram 'finished' his work and
submitted it to Reprise before he died (unlike so many others: Janis Joplin,
Otis Redding, George Harrison, Dennis Wilson, etc) so the 'holes' in the record
aren't simply the fact that the album is 'unfinished' and lacking that lasts
pecial touch: this is how it was always meant to be heard (although three songs
were removed by his widow, unreleased till years later, which might account for
why at 36 minutes it's such a short album!) The sad truth is 'Grevious Angel'
also not quite up to it's predecessor: there's nothing as strong as 'She' in
Gram's own songs (although 'Brass Buttons' is another excellent song), with
most of these songs written for but rejected from the last album or in the case
of 'Darkness' and the title track, written hurriedly in a single day to flesh
out the album. There's also a similarly disappointing set of cover material,
that little bit more obvious than the time before. The decision to record a
'fake' mini-concert near the end (with Gram too 'shy' to do it for real, so
they had him and the band play against a 'faked' set of applause) is also
unconvincing and a curiously 'false' move for such a 'truthful' confessional
album, especially Gram's hollow laugh (although that hasn't stopped many fans
petitioning Reprise to ask for the 'rest' of the concert to be released!) The
band are also less 'together' than they were on 'GP', after a largely drunken
shambles of a tour across 1973 with lots of fallings out along the way. Most
unforgivably, Emmylou Harris - the star of the last record and popular with
almost all the critics who heard it - gets far less to do (although conversely
she was set to get co-billing this time around; after Gram's death his widow
Gretchen stepped in and after bad blood between the pair simply took her name
off the cover!) The result is a rather
shoddy and rushed LP, written and recorded without the same levels of
inspiration as 'GP' and would no doubt have come to be seen by Gram himself in
time as a bit of a 'disaster'.
But
of course that's not how this album is viewed today. This LP isn't seen as a
one-off blot, but a last gasp chance to unite the two factions of country and
rock music and on that level alone is a success, this record rocking far more
convincgly than it's predecessor. The weaknesses of the album (the slightly
weaker songs, the lesser performances and the general sense of unfocussed
chaos) have been brushed over in favour of the record's strengths (it's loose
and pertinent concept about regret and nostalgia, the high points like 'Brass
Buttons' and 'In My Darkest Hour' and Gram's still-gorgeous voice, with or
without Emmylou). Much misunderstood in his own lifetime, 'Greivous Angel' was
just about good enough and adventurous enough to convince a whole load of
people who'd never heard 'Sweetheart' 'The Flying Burritos' or 'GP' that they
had been missing out on something - which of course they had. Clearly any album
that's an artist's last comes with some sort of attachment out of scale for
it's strengths (the AAA crew alone include Lennon's 'Double Fantasy',
mercilessly mocked on release and treated as a career highlight once he died
and Janis Joplin's 'Pearl', which even the singer had doubts about). 'Greivous
Angel' is another such case, important more because of what happened next and
what it signifies and ends rather than what it added to an already crammed
catalogue. If I know my perfectionist Gram like I think I do, his last thoughts
that September day would have been 'yippee I'm a gonna be a cult!' together
with a tinge of 'why couldn't I have gone out on a better album' (or something
stronger!) Still, even if this is the
weakest record of Gram's short lifespan, it's still an occasionally pioneering,
often moving album that does much to suggest what a talent the world lost far
far too soon. sadly it's not the last time we'll be saying that in this book...
'Big Mouth Blues' sounds pretty impressive, with a better grasp of
rock-with-country-undercurrents than Ther Flying Burritos generally achieved
and Gram is in impressively fiery mood as he sits in a backward empty town,
desperate to break out to the city. Alas the lyrics don't come with much of a
melody and the chaotic backing which has saxophones, a honky tonk piano and
pedal steel guitar blaring away at random, sounds like confused chaos rather
than a rocker with a message. Emmylou would have sounded good on this track too
and is conspicuous by her absence.
Title
track 'Return Of The Greivous
Angel' is better, though still not all that memorable. Gram and Emmylou
sound good, though, recounting a tale of how they 'met' (largely fictional and
probably about Gretchen, although they did indeed both meet in a bar where
Emmylou was singing). Despite knowing the union won't last and trying to do
everything he can to escape her hold Gram sighs that 'every road returns to
you'. This song also includes my favourite Parsons couplet since 'Hickory
Wind': 'The man on the radio won't leave me alone, he wants to take my money
for something that I've never been shown'.
Walter
Egan cover 'Hearts On Fire'
is more country schmaltz that never really gets going, although Gram's and
Emmylou's dreamy vocals are still impressive. The pair know they're an
unsuitable match and their friends try to tear them apart, but still they vow
to always be together. Hmmmmm, if you say so!
Tom
T Hall's energetic 'I Can't
Dance' is what many country musicians think rock music is all about:
dancing and sex. While that's probably true of
many songs ('Twist and Shout' for one), Gram proves that he doesn't
really 'get' rock music here: drums and a 12 bar blues rhythm sped up are't
enough to breathe life into this unsuitable song, even if Emmylou sounds nicely
at home here.
Thankfully
the gorgeous 'Brass Buttons'
singlehandedly rescues the album. Opening with a lovely piano part from Glenn D
Hardin, this is Gram at his prettiest, finally singing 'full' without that
clipped sound he keeps for his rock and pure country songs. Like 'She' and
'Wild Horses' (the Stones song for which Gram should have gained a writing
credit) it's a passionate ballad that brings out the more interesting, softer
side of Parsons' character. Havinbg fallen in love, he records all the tiny
details of how she looks, the pins and buttons in her hair and on her dress,
although the twist in the last two verses are that he's busy writing all this
down because she's left him forever and he doesn't want to forget anything
about her ('The sun comes up without her - it just doesn't know she's gone').
'$1000 Dollar Wedding' is another album highlight that leads on rather nicely, Gram's
delicate vocal bouyed by Al Prekin's gorgeous pedal steel guitar. Gram's
narrator recalls how a friend was jilted at his own wedding and reacted angrily
to their attempts to placate him, 'the traces of old lies still on their faces'
as he realises they always knew the pair would split. The narrator concludes
that this 'should have been a funeral' not a wedding, the man doomed never to
live in the full bloom of love again- another eerie marker on an album full of
references to death.
More
proof of how superior Gram's songs are to the cover material comes with the
first of the 'faked' concert recordings. 'Cash On The Barrelhead' by the Louvin husband and wife
songwriting team has lots of flying fiddles, gliding guitars ('James Burton and
his hot guitar!' as Gram puts it during the solo) and Gram and Emmylou trying
to out-scream each other, but not much poise or sophistication. Lyrically this
presumably appealed to Gram for the twist at the end, where the narrator lives
alone and hungry until he comes into a trust fund aged 21. Warning: this song
ends with a yodel.
The
fake 'live' re-make of 'Hickory
Wind' is a better song, but Gram sounds either drunk or tired (or both)
and doesn't do his masterpiece justice. Singing at a slower tempo, the song
drags more than The Byrds original, although on the plus side Emmylou's
gorgeous harmonies are far more suitable to this nostalgic reflection that
McGuinn's attempts at falsetto on the original!
Everyly
Brothers classic 'Love Hurts'
(written, like most of their best songs, by the prolific Broudleaux Bryant) is
a highly suitable choice, given that even before The Byrds the harmony duo were
vageuly aiming at the country-rock hybrid road. Gram repays his dues, singing
one of their loveliest and saddest of songs with Emmylou's lovely support and
of all the songs the pair did together this one 'sounds' the best; with just
Gram's guitar backing them for a lot of the song, you can hear every note and
how well the two complement each other. Easily the best of Gram's solo cover
songs.
The
up-tempo co-write with Rik Grech 'Ooh Las Vegas' sounds like the sort of song that would have gone
down live, even though weirdly we're back to the 'studio' section of the album
now. The narrator is a drunk gambling addict - which isn't too much of a
stretch for Gram's acting skills - but ends rather scarily with lines that ever
so nearly sum up what happened to Gram (with only the chain of hotel
different): 'Spent all night with the dealer tryin' to get ahead, spent all day
at the Holiday Inn, trying to get out of bed'.
The
album - and Gram's career - then ends with 'In My Hour Of Darkness', which reflects on three
very different lives lived in three verses (sadly it's the only song Gram ever
co-wrote with Emmylou and thus her first ever writing credit). The first is a
man whose so heartbroken he drives his car for miles and miles until he dies;
the second - for Clarence - a man with a 'silver guitar' who 'some say was a
star - but was really just a country boy...the music he had in him very few
possess' and the third and final verse a man who lived to a ripe old age, 'kind
and wise with age' but whose death sometime soon is inevitable, an unspoken
thought that hangs between him and the narrator (exactly how Clarence would
have been round about nowe had he lived - is this last verse Gram imgaining
what should have happened?) Understandably, given that Gram died before getting
the chance to talk about this album, many fans assumed he was singing about
himself and the ways Gram himself might die: a car wreck, on stage or of old
age, which makes this an especially spooky closer to an album, even though Gram
probably wrote it without a single thought that he, too, would die. The sound
of this song is rather hard to take, being the purest iof pure country, but
that in itself is a neat nod of the head to Clarence, who would surely have
appreciated the gesture, 'a country boy at heart'.
Gram
is clearly a 'country boy' at heart too, although interestingly this record
finds him slightly further down the rock road than 'GP' (if less than the
Flying Burritos). However you come to this album - as curious fan, passiioonate
country music collector, as a devoted Emmylou Harris groupie curious about her
beginings or as the last release by a man you admire, you're sure to get
something out of 'Grievous Angel' which has several strong moments to
counteract the poor ones. However, I still question whether this album would
have been anywhere near as popular without Gram's death to promote it (sadly
but inevitably, the best thing an artist can do to boost their sales is to die
- and the stranger their death the better). 'Greivous Angel' isn't a bad album
by any means - and would sound better still with the three 'missing' Parsons
originals added instead of the 'live concert' near the end - but by Gram's
standards it's a 'treading water' album while he worked on what big sea change
he wanted to come next. It would have been fascinating to know what that might
have been - or what Gram would have been doing now. But until there's a
'return' of the 'Greivous Angel' this
record will have to do.
"The
Souther-Hillman-Furay Band"
(Asylum, 'Mid' 1974)
Fallin'
In Love/Heavenly Fire*/The Heartbreaker/Believe Me/Border Town//Safe At
Home*/Pretty Goodbyes/Rise and Fall*/Flight Of The Dove/Deep Dark and Dreamless
* =
Chris Hillman compositions
"Can you see where we've been? You know we
can't do that again! Gonna be hard - hard times"
Crosby,
Stills and Nash simply had to exist in 1969 or someone would have invented them-
the world needed them and hard as the trio tried to argue that they hated being
in bands their vocal blend and complementary writing styles were such that they
were clearly destined to be together for all eternity (in between the twice
yearly rows anyway). They were a true meeting of brothers, out to change the
world and each had the other's back (when they weren't sticking knived into
them...) - by contrast The Souther-Hillman-Furay band weren't even friends. You
can see where this is going can't you? As the boss of new record label Asylum
David Geffen was sure that the CSN template was going to bring him riches and
he might have been right had he chosen three people who'd met in similar
circumstances who'd already had one shot at fame in their lives already (10cc
are about the closest, being effectively Stockport's answer to California's
CSN!) So sure was Geffen that there was mileage yet in the Springfield and Byrds
canons that he contacted two of them who'd been having rather a rough time of
it lately: Richie was getting rather bored in Poco and losing faith in the band
after several flop records, while Chris Hillman - once bassist in The Byrds -
was furious that yet again fellow Byrd Gram Parsons had bailed out on him as
part of their spin-off band 'The Flying Burrito Brothers' (long story short:
Chris needed the money but as the privileged son of a millionaire Gram didn't
and he showed up to gigs late, drunk or not at all - occasionally all three,
which is quite some going) and that Stills had ended the career of promising
band Manassas to return to CSN.
Chris
and Richie knew each other - Hillman's enthusiasm had been chiefly responsible
for the Springfield's first shot at fame supporting The Byrds - but they were
hardly bosom buddies and hadn't really talked in eight years. Neither of them
knew Geffen's protégé J D Souther, a writer who will indeed find some form of
fame and notoriety amongst 1970s record buyers as a writer (penning hit songs
for The Eagles and Linda Ronstadt) but for now is effectively a nobody with
just one flop record to his name. The trio really didn't gel - Souther was used
to working alone and both Richie and Chris had fought hard to escape the
'number two supporting role' tag from their first respective bands. Just look
at the cover: J D Souther is looking serious, Richie is giggling his head off,
Chris in the middle doesn't know what to do so goes for an expression somewhere
in between; this is a band who don't even find the same things funny and when
that happens you ain't got a band! Even
finding the backing crew was hard work compared to CSN - Hillman simply
'invited' the remnants of Manassas (the band he'd formed with Stephen Stills)
to work on the album, but this caused tensions because the other two didn't
know any of them and this was in danger of becoming a 'Hillman' solo album. The
band were meant to singing about brave new tomorrows like CSN - instead they
spent most of both records sniping about the shallowness of the music business
and their weariness after having to start a new band all over again. Geffen,
convinced that he was on to a winner, blitzed the media with a campaign strong
enough to get the record all the way to #11 in the American charts, the highest
Hillman had managed since The Byrds' peak years and higher than Richie or J D
had ever managed before in their careers. Clearly there was a fanbase out there
for these albums to work, but even the most generous critics claimed to be
'underwhelmed' by this album, the trio far less than the sum of their parts.
In
the end The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band stayed together long enough to make two
records and despite both records' low reputations some of it is rather good in
a 'coasting California rock' kind of a way. This first album is best, with a
good half of it written when the band were still hopeful this band could be a
long-term investment, although even this one is more like three solo albums in
one with the band rarely having much input on each other's material. Hillman is
on patgticularly bright form and has three of the four highlights of the album
(alongside Furay's 'Believe Me'), all of
them reflecting on the ups and downs of life in a rock and roll band (this is
after allm Chris' fourth in ten years!) 'Heavenly Fire' is one of the better songs on the
album, a cpountry-rock lament from Chris with Al Perkins' pedal steel up nice
and loud in the mix. Like all his songs on the record, this is rather a
depressing song and clearly about Chris' recent divorce, sighing that now alone
again it's 'hard to live, easy to die - makes you want to get on your knees and
cry'.For all that, though, Hillman manges to convey enough emotion into the
song to make it sound more like the average country-rock ballad. 'Safe At Home' is another
album highlight, an energetic rocker that nicks the title from Granm Parsons'
first record and follows an old rocker called Tom who, weary from too much
touring 'promises to quit - but he knows he never will!' While Hillman sings
disaparagingly about the family and friends he has to leave about for long
stretches of the year, he sounds genuinely inspired rocking out here and this
is easily the most 'together' of all the Souther-Hillman-Furay performances on
either record. 'Rise and Fall'
is an even more bitter reflection on the music business and the speed at which
Hillman has gone from zero to hero and back again down the years. This song
finds somewhere near the bottom, keeping his faith alive during a 'long dark
night where we struggle to survive' and sounds ready to throw in the towel with
a weary chorus of 'tell me is it really worth it all?' Again, though, Hillman
sounds even more inspired than he was with Manassas, delivering a great vocal
that's matched by Richie's pure harmonies.
Elsewhere
Furay has a very up and down album, excelleing with the gorgeous ballad first
written for Poco 'Believe Me', the ok-ish 'Fallin' In Love' (the trio's first
single) and the limp 'Flight Of The Dove' which all feature lots of Hillman
harmonies (the pair's voices aren't a natural fit and there's not much
chemistry there, but they're still a nice blend). J D Souther, meanwhile,
growls his way indifferently through his own songs (which all have a habit of
sounding the same) and is audible by his absence on his partner's creations.
The trio must surely have been ready to cut their losses and run once this
album was out, but the fact that it sold so well and the fact that both Hillman
and Furay had burned all their bridges meant they gave this trio idea one last
go.
Roger
McGuinn "Peace On You"
(Columbia, September 1974)
Peace On You/Without You/Going To The
Country/Please Not (One More Time)/Same Old Sound//Do What You Want To
Do/Together/Better Change/Gate Of Horn/The Lady/Rock and Roll Time
"Everywhere I'm bound I love to play the same
old sound"
'Peace On You' is a typical second album: it
restricts all the wonderful directions-at-once feel of the first album for a
style that's much more unified and like the rest of Roger's albums to come -
which is both a good and a bad thing. The good news is that this is the most
'together' album McGuinn has made since 'Untitled' - there are no bad songs
here and no sudden dizzying genre to another. The bad news is that there's less
falling down because there's less oportunity to fail - where 'Roger McGuinn'
tried hard (over-hard sometimes) to reconstruct the wheel, 'Peace On You' is
the chief Byrds at cruising speed. The good news, once again, is that time has
been kind to 'Peace On You': fans and critics alike were disappointed on
release partly because every album in 1974 sounded a little like this: pop with
a slight country bend but not enough to unsewttsle anybody ('Peace On You'
would have made a great Eagles album). After reading some of the harshest
reviews I've ever read about this album I was expecting a catastrophe - in
actual fact it's rather likeable in an I-don't-wish-to-offend kind of a way and
more interesting to hear now that it would have been at the time after the eccentricity
of 'Roger McGuinn' (the record I mean, not the man). The bad news is that I'm
not trying to convince you that this is a five-star record you desperately need
in your collection either: it's just rather good collection filler that fills
you in on a Roger McGuinn B road rather than a road you have to travel.
There are less big name guest stars this time
around, although interestingly McGuinn seems to have gathered together a 'whose
who' of minor California legends real fans will name. Dylan sideman Al Kooper
provides 'Please Not (One More Time)'; Dan Fogelberg writes 'Better Change' and
Stephen Stills' songwriting partner for much of 1975/76 Donnie Dacus co-writes
'Going To The Country' and 'Do What You Want To Do'. All songs are interesting
and nice additions to the album (especially the last song), but you miss Crosby's
zany touch from the first album to spur McGuinn on: while he makes no mistakes
anywhere he doesn't push himself far enough, sliding back to the auto-pilot
we've heard from him a few times down the years with much of this album passing
by without noticing, all ending up a bit the same. However I'm often impressed
when a song from this album turns oup on my mp3 player's 'shuffle' in a way
that I'm not when I sit through the record. While some of the tunes are so
slight they either sound like something else or are so slight they barely seem
like a melody at all, the star of this album is Roger's occasional writing
partner Jacques Levy. Writing more accesibly than on Roger's debut LP, Dylan's
old colleague turns in some of his best poetical writing hereon what often
sounds a deeply personal album. McGuinn's never one for letting his emotions
show of course (he's better writing for charcters - he has a real touch for
people-watching) so this arguably isn't his personal confessional album but
Levy (who co-writes six songs on this album, one more than Roger thanks to a
cover of a song he made with Ahmad Jamal) has clearly got some things to get
off his chest as part of this album. Roger again doesn't play much Rickenbacker
across this album and his vocals, while strong, are often overbalanced by the
sheer size of the instrumentation on top.
Title track 'Peace On You' sets thew scene for much of the
album: deeply personal lyrics, a melody that's close to being a good one but
sounds slightly familiar and a rather sickly sweet production all conspire to
work against a song that would have sounded fine played hard and loud. After a
weary lifetime and a slightly paranoid tone casting around for a new direction
Roger's narrator longs for peace for everyone, even the listener. To be honest
though this track is a mite too peaceful - the rowing Byrds (of any era) would
have great fun spicing up this recording a bit!
Levy and Jamal's 'Without You' (not the Badfinger/Harry Nilsson song)
is a sleepy confession of love and respect that comes too late to do any good.
Going through his usual nightly routine alone the narrator reckons he might
as well turn his lights off permanently
and throw away his door key because there's no point in living when you're
living alone. Roger capturesd the heartbreak of the song well, which just about
gets away with it's generic lyrics of heartbreak thanks to a nicely warm melody
and a rousing chorus.
'Going To
The Country'
, the first of two songs by young Donnie Dacus, sounds like a Gram Parsons
song. McGuinn isn't really going back to country music - just his old homelife
he's almost forgotten about since becoming a city boy - but the country
dressing does make this track 'feel' like a 'roots' song - one Gram (who'd died
not long before the first albu's release) would have been proud of.
Al Kooper's 'Please Not (One More Time)' is a hymn to first
California (where the sun shines 'like honey') and then love (where a new sun
shine in life can blot out rain clouds from the past). Like many of Kooper's
songs it sounds a little unfinished, with clipped melody phrases that might
have sounded even better extended to a full tune and an odd backing track full
of gulping instruments that work together Phil Spector-style but sound a mess
apart. McGuinn isn't quite right of the song, whioch badly misses his guitar -
but it's a likeable track.
Roger and Jacques' 'Same Old Sound' is 'The Same Old Song'
re-written. Seeing through Roger's eyes Levy writes a lyric about travelling
around the world as a music star but restricted to playing the 'same old sounds
going round and round'. Ironically there's more than a touch of 'Mr Tamboruine
Man' about this album, which almost-but-not-quite features the familiar
Rickenbacker guitar part (one of it's few appearances on this record) and a
similar walking pace tempo. The ending, interestingly is lifted directly from
the scene-stealing 'la kla la' harmonies from 'Goin' Back' (the Goffin and King
song covered on 'Notorious Byrd Brothers' and a flop as a single, so quite why
this should be the 'same old sound' is another matter). While there are better
songs around on the same subject matter there is a certain charm about this
track which is less grumpy than most 'tired old rock star' rants.
Dacus and Collins' 'Do What You Want To Do' is my favourite song
on the album, coming at the exact halfway point between rock and country like
the days of old. The song's verses are strong, urging everyone 'not to waste
tomorrow' while an urgent bass/piano/guitar montage tries to push the song
forward as fast as it can. Roger's right at home on songs like these and rises
to the challenge with one of his best vocals on the album.
The Levy/McGuinn song 'Together' is another good 'un. Like many a
McGuinn track its' the interplay between the keyboards and guitar than make the
song, pulling this way and that apart from each other before the chorus
triumphantly pairs them both together. A moody ballad about unity that uses the
metaphor of a musician and poet coming together for harmony in the world that
should be awful and tacky but is really rather sweet.
Dan Fogelberg was a great little writer, now
sadly forgotten, who propped up several 1970s AAA records without ever quite
making the big time. 'Better
Change' isn't his very best song but it's another country-rocker that
really fits McGuinn's style, with a similar airy melody to 'I Trust' and lyrics
about all things having their time and season. Annoyingly though soeone else
(Dacus?) is playing the guitar solo where a Rickenbacker part would have fitted
perfectly.
'Gate Of
Horn' is the most unusual song
here, a Roger-Jacques track that crosses a bar-room honky tonk piano with pure
music hall. The narrator imagines himself 'at seventeen, a little salty and a
little green', in a bar-room world filled by his heroes, with 'Mr Gibson about
to play his guitar' (presumably the inventor of one of McGuinn's favourite
guitar makes). The chorus is especially fun: 'There was Chetty (Atkins?) and
Peter (and Paul and Mary?) and Josh and Odetta...when no one was looking
McGuinn was there too!' A kind of early version of Neil Young's 'Downtown' (his
imaginary hang-out for all his favourite guitarists), all these performers seem
to have some connection with Roger's home state of Chicago. A neat joker in the
pack.
'The Lady' is one of the pair's best
songs, Levy finding himself 'wandering through the dictionary' in a desperate
attempt to find the right words for his lover's beauty - and never quite
finding them. The melody sounds like a real cross between early 70s Dylan and
early 70s Byrd, with a lovely flowing tune and - at last - a truly memorable
chorus.
Overall, then, 'Peace On You' is a typical
album from 1974: everything's laidback, there's not much to get the pulses
racing and all attempts to break new ground have been replaced by a kind of
languid lethargy common to most records of the period. However there are far worse albums around than 'Peace
On You' (it's not even McGuinn's worst album!) and I don't quite understand why
this sweet little album got quite as badly attacked as it did. We say 'peace on
you, 'Peace On You' - your heart is in the right place even if your guitar isn't
plugged in nearly loud enough.
Gene
Clark "No Other"
(Asylum, September 1974)
Life's Greatest Fool/Silver Raven/No
Other/Strength Of Strings//From A Silver Phial/Some Misunderstanding/The True
One/Lady Of The North
"When the
stream of changing days turns around in so many ways, then the pilot of the mind
must find the right direction"
The same month that Roger was getting his slick
and slightly lazy second album together, Gene Clark was going for the big push
and for once had a record company throwing their weight behind him. Asylum had
gone to greatlengths to sing up all the original Byrds for that ill-fated
reunion album and when Gene got the most applause from fans and critics alike
decided to keep him. Compared to the low key folk albums with the Gosdin
Brothers and Doug Dillard, however, this was to be a big budget release, with
songs re-recorded in a sequence of exraordinary elaborate arrangements until
Gene was happy with them. Knowing that this was his big chance, Gene cleaned up
his act, cut down on his drinking and drug-taking and was about as 'clean' as
he ever was after leaving The Byrds, putting his all into a suite of songs that
demonstrated another move forward for his songwriting, with eight compositions
more opaque and lyrical than ever before. There was even a theme running
throughout the record of growing older and wiser, of seeing the world through
different eyes and coming to terms with one's humanity and ability to make
mistakes. 'Silver' is a particular theme of the record, taken perhaps from
Gene's first silver hairs, with this record haunting by silver ravens, silver
phials, even a 'silver shore' up in heaven in which we'll all arrive one day
(the backing band for this record were known as the 'Silverados', a neat mixed
image of hillbilly young desperadoes and maturity). With so much going on in
each song, Gene found he could only fit eight of his songs onto a record (which
at 43 minutes is pushing it for the amount of material that can be 'safely'
stored on a vinyl record without a loss in quality), leaving several songs in
the vaults for 30-odd years. Asylum though were't happy: they'd spent a fortune
on the record (some $100,000 dollars, which back in the 1970s was a lot) and
thought that Gene just hadn't been trying. When Clark announced that under no
circumstances was he going to tour the record (he'd dreaded the 1960s touring
packages and only really returned to the live scene out of necessity in the
1980s), Asylum pulled their losses and decided to simply bury the record,
undergoing very little promotion and deleting it from their catalogue and
causing it to go out of print as early as 1976. In this climate 'No Other' did
well to peak at #146 in America (doing better than Roger's 'Peace On You',
actually), but by then it was too little too late: once again fate had been
cruel to Gene Clark and the moment had passed.
The fact that this is the one and only Gene
Clark solo record not made a) in a hurry or b) on the cheap and it's
unavailability for years (a 1991 CD release had sunk without trace, so it was
only in 2003 that many fans first got to hear the album) meant that word of
mouth among Gene's fan base had grown to the point where this was Clark's best
album ever and the reviews of the album in 2003 were the most glowing Gene ever
got. To this day most Byrds fans tend to consider this album Gene's
masterpiece, for it's unusual sounds, cryptic lyrics and consistency. However
even Gene himself wasn't entirely happy with the album at the time and actually
considered his lighter, less elaborate and even lower selling album 'Two Sides
To Every Story' to be his most successful. The truth, as usual in these books,
is somewhere in the middle: 'No Other' is an extraordinary work that deserved
to restore Gene's reputation, full of some of his greatest work. 'Silver Rain'
and 'From A Silver Phial' especially are amongst his best songs and had Gene's
superior re-recording of 1968 track 'A Train Leaves Here This Morning' made the
album rather than just the CD bonus tracks then my three favourite Clark solo
songs would be in the same place. Had Dylan recorded an album this cryprtic,
challenging and ahead of it's time it would have been hailed as an instant
classic. However in many ways this album is something of a backwards step from
the cleverness-with-commerciality of 'White Light' and Gene's folkier songs for
the reunion LP. At times it seems as if Gene has been spending the money simply
because he knows he'll never have the chance again, rather than emebelssing the
songs because they demand to be heard that way. While the demos and alternate
takes added to the back of 'White Light' wren't all that different (it was,
after all, primarily an acoustic album) the demos and alternate takes for 'No
Other' are sometimes very different - and better, sounding all the grander for
being in such an austere and stark setting. Sometimers the production hinders
more than it helps, especially on 'Strength Of Strings' (which turns a sweet
song about strength in numbers into an overcooked overblown epic, complete with
choir - though surprisngly no strings)
and 'No Other', in wich Gene's artifically enhanced voice makes him sound like
a killer cyborg from the future (The Byrds came up with a better, similar sound
on a much lower budget for 'CTA-102' as long ago as 1967).
For all the debate about whether 'No Other' is
truly Gene's strongest album, however, there's no doubting that it's a strong
album. Gene's ability with words and imagery is at it's best here and despite
occasionally getting carried away with the intelligence of the songs there's
always plenty of heart. Gene starts the record as comedy troubador, calling
himself 'Life's Greatest Fool' before pouring his heart out in an astonishing
sequence of songs about the insecurities that gnaw away at him, the missed
chances, the duckes responsibilities and in 'From A Silver Phial' one of the
world's greatest anti-drug songs, 'a lion in a fall of rolls' that can only
spin downwards. 'Some Misunderstanding' does a similar thing for Gene's love
life, where he admits expecting too much and letting himself and his partner
down, seeing the world through a 'double vision' of reality and hope that
always makes him search for one thing too many. By the time we reach closer
'Lady Of The North' - an exquisite vision of paradise where doubt and
uncertainty over our actions have been eradicated - it's clear that Gene has
led us on quite an adventure. Clark's vocals might not have quite the space
they had on 'White Light' but if you can ignore the effects then they're among
his best, purring or growling as the songs demand and clearly shedding light
into his soul with an emotion that proves how close to him these lyrics are.
The melodies largely take a back seat to the words across this album, but the
best of these ('Silver Raven' and 'Silver Phial' especially) are also amongst
Gene's best, melodic and memorable in the way that only Gene Clark can be. I'm
still not sure if this Gene's best album or even his best set of songs - the
quiet thematic unity of 'White Light' is at least it's equal, the mood piece
that closes ' Two Sides' even more memoerable and arguiably even the unfinished
'Roadmaster' has better songs one-on-one. But that's all by the bye: there is
no other record in The Byrds' canon quite like 'No Other' and it's still a
remarkable achievement, with a croaking yet melodic sound quite unblike any
other record in musical history, however distracting some of the production and
however over-the-top a couple of the songs might go. You do wonder what might
have happened had this record finally proved successful: would Gene have ended
up in another spiral of success into worry into breakdown into obscurity or
would he handled it better the second time round? Would he have been viewed as
a mainstream talent rather than a cult figure? Would he have finally mastered
the next album, made with the budget of this one but more songs and twice the
confidence? Alas, we'll never know.
One other confusing thing about this record is
the cover. 'No Other' is a personal, 'inner' album that sounds like it's been
torn out piece by piece from Gene's inner psyche and only reluctantly sent
blinking into the wider world. In contrast the album cover is glitzy,
artificial and pompous, sharing the record's elaborateness but none of its
feeling that a 'secret' is being told. Asylum presumably commisioned it before
they either decided to hold back on the project or before the album was
completes because it really doesn't fit: a faux 1920s collage of Hollywood
figures and art nouveaux props that would have suited the fashion-conscious
McGuinn-Clark-Hillman records pretty well actually, but not this album at all.
The back cover shot, of a bryl-creamed Gene, is also a definite no-no: this
record cries out for something moody and magnificent, not moronic.
The music, however, is largely excellent. 'Life's Greatest Fool' is one
of the weaker songs, if only because it doesn't fit the sound of the rest of
the record, but even that is better than average. The most Dylanesque song in
Gene's back catalogue, it deals with the thought that 'winners' and 'losers' are
all in the mind-set ('Hard is perception, easier is blame') though even Gene
still wonders about all his bad luck, asking 'Is this the way for everyone, is
it always the same?' This is an older Clark than the one in the 1960s, 'formed
out of pleasure and chiselled by pain', but even so this is a happy sounding
song, with a catchy chorus, a delightful pedal steel part from Jesse Ed Davis
and a nice country-folk lilt.
'Silver
Raven' is gorgeous, a mystical
cryptic song that can be read in many different ways but in my eyes is about
deathand growing old. The raven has long been an image of doom and
traditoonally was seen as a messenger who flew between this world and Hell.
Here the raven has been flying so close to the wind for so long that he's going
grey, his feathers turning silver as he flies across 'changing rivers, waiting
for his turn to die'. Gene then moves on to tackle this theme in a generational
sense, with even the 'brave new world' of the 1960s now the 'old world',
decaying through apathy and errors, the raven's warnings going unheeded once
again. Gene's vocal on this song is spin-etingling, while the understated
backing for once on this album works really well, spread out between a
gradually unfurling organ part, shimmering acoustic guitars and a bouncy Jesse
Ed Davis part that tries to fly away throughout the song but keeps finding
itself chained back to Earth.
Title track 'No Other' doesn't have quite the same impact, being
more of a chance to show off every studio trick under the sun than a properly
defined and thought-out song. Gene's most religious song, this piece reflects
that 'The Lord is love' and that this love is unlike mere earthly love because
it can see and feel everything. Stumbling blindy back on Earth, the best human
beings can hope for is their own personal 'perfection' - but this is down to the individual and
doesn't take into account the bigger picture. Gene is rather buried by a
croaking frog of a fuzz bass which makes the whole album sound other-wordly and
his lead vocal is played through a 'Leslie cabinet' to sound old and paper-thin
(a trick first used by The Beatles, whereby a vocal is recorded through a
speaker revolving very fast, sounding as if its 'not all there'; 'Tomorrow
Never Knows' being the most famous use of it). A gorgeous if brief Jesse Ed
Davis solo is the best thing here, free of all the production shenangians and
bursting through the bass-heavy murk with clarity and composure. Alas the song
isn't the strongest on the album, though, and the production is that little bit
too OTT.
'Strength Of
Strings' is another fascinating
song, though sadly dragged out to the point where it's torutorusly slow.
Lyrically though it's spot on, with Gene using one of his best extended
metaphors as he compares his lonely life to a recording: 'I am always high, I
am always low', a piano riff searching up and down the keys in seacrh of
harmony, like the 'string sections' other songwriters enjoy. Clark may have
been influenced by Dylan here - 'strength of strings' was a phrase used in 'Lay
Down Your Weary Tune' (the song the Byrds covered on 'Turn! Turn! Turn!') and
has a similar extended metaphor about the
act of writing and a difficult life (although if anything Gene out-Dylans Sylan
with his superior choice of words and imagery). Gene has never sounded more
alone, especially with another electronic effect, and sounds in a different
universe to the choir who 'aah' along with him. Many fans love this song best,
for me it's a verse short of a classic (there are only two, the first being
repeated again at the end) and again sounds better in an alternate, lesser
produced take that isn't quite so big or slow.
'From A
Silver Phial'
is my favourite song on the album, a warm aural hug with Gene's voice back in
its proper place front and centre, in contrast to some of the 'colder'
intellectual songs on this album. A Gorgeous 'She Don't Care About Time' style
melody is a nice accompaniment to some of Gene's most expressive lyrics about
addiction and excess. Throughout he sings in the third person, about a female
drug addict, although whether for poetry purposes, that it's loosely based on
someone else or whether it was too hard to write as autobiography is unclear.
There are some gorgeous metaphors here for gradualy losing control, with the hidden
message that no one is safe: even the strongest, most confident of us can fall
prey to something. The character, for instance, is 'fire on the borderline'
whose talent can be used for good or evil, cursed by a restless mind that
'slept inside tomorrow' and whose 'scars' can only be healed by 'time', not
thew quick fix she's after. Even the character's decision to turn from drugs
and put her faith in the 'moon and stars' comes awry because life lets her
down; she only recovers by meeting a 'master' who knows more of life than her
and 'seeing through his eyes of pain', but even here, having seen all another
person has gone through, the adadiction proves too much and she 'falls in the
darkened rain'. An extraordinary set of lyricsa, a beautiful tune and one of
Gene's greatest vocals make this one of the strongest candidates in his entire
canon, a beautifully expressive song that somehow manages to be both clever and
deeply moving.
'Some
Misunderstanding' is a lovely personal reflection on guilt and love from Gene that
sees him vowing to make amends next time, refusing to fall short of what his
partner expects of him whilst similarly promising not to assume she's perfect
and allow for her mistakes. Alas the melody on this one is a little too
o-e-o-e-odd with a surprise return to a Buddy Holly 1950s hiccup and a lack of
variety between the verses and choruses.
Country lament 'The True One' sounds like an outtake from 'White
Light' (although it isn't, as far as anyone knows), with a return to the
country lilt and light production of that album. It's another of the album's
lesser moments reflecting again on Gene's fall from grace and how 'there's a
price you pay for going out too far'. Gene isn't sure which of his methods is
the 'right one', he's too closely involved to make the best business decisions
and finds himself always on the wrong level of his career, 'walking upstairs
when I get invited down'. A welcome chance to hear Gene without any studio
trickery and another superb vocal are the highlight of a pretty song that's
somehow less substantial than most of the rest of the album.
'Lady Of The
North' wraps the album up in
some style, though, with the fluffiest and most ethereal song on the album,
Gene presumably 'eight miles' '...high above the clouds' and imagingin a time
when his soul is free of earthly restrictions. In some more of Gene's cleverest
words 'the Earth was just a pillow for our dreams' and now, in death, his soul
is content to fly away and achieve everything he needs to. Through it all a
'Lady Of The North' (which is an odd description of a place without directions
as we understand them, but perhaps Gene simply means up in heaven, 'The North
Star', rather than down below in Southern Hell) beckons to him, finally made up
of the perfection he's been dreaming of his whole liufe through but never quite
finding.
The result is a moving, well thought out album
that's easy to get wrapped up in. Gene is on strong form throughout lyrically
and vocally, with only a couple of duff songs and a few less than interesting
melodies knocking him back. You have to question whether this album might not
have been better made with a mere half of the $100,000 budget it was given as
the effects do tend to take over from the songds at times, but even this gives
the album a sound that's unlike 'No Other' record I've ever known. Is it a long
lost classic that everyone needs to own and which should appear in all those
'best ever albums' listings we seem to get five times a year these days? Not
quite - it's not even Gene's best work, never mind the single greatest lost
album of the 1970s. But 'No Other' deserved a far better fate than it got at
the time, and even with such an expesnive budget this album would be cheap at
twice the price, an excellent showcase for Gene's many talents that's well
worth hearing for anyone whose even a little bit curious about what Clark went
on to make after leaving The Byrds. Well out of step with every other record of
it's time, perhaps our present age has finallty caught up with this album's
beauty, poise, emotion and imagery. At least we got there in the end, eh, Gene?
But of course, no doubt he knows that already up there somwhere 'above the
clouds' (this reord, more than any other, hints at Gene's spiritual side) and
it doesn't always matter when an album gets there, as long as it gets there in
the end. Gene knew this as early as 1965 and 'She Don't Care About Time':
hopefully 'No Other' will be around at the top of its tree for a long time to
come.
Various
Artists "Banjoman - The Motion Picture Soundtrack"
(Asylum, September 1974)
Lonesome Rubin/Battle Of New
Orleans/You Ain't Goin' Nowhere/Freigh Train Boogie/T For Texas/Roll Over
Beethoven*//Me and Bobby McGee/Mr Tambourine Man*/Black Mluntain Rag/The Night
They Drove Old Dixie Down/Diggy Liggy Lo/Blowin' In The Wind/Foggy Mountain
Breakdown/Billy Fehr
* = The Byrds
"As long
as she got a dime, the music will never stop. Oh it has. That's a shame."
This
entry used to be one of the obscurer released on this list, a concert film
soundtrack capturing featuring one of the last Byrds concerts from 1973
alongside appearances by Joan Baez, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Earl Scuggs and
Rambling Jack Elliott. However the compilers of Byrds box set 'There Is A
Season' sensibly included the two Byrds performances of a rather dodgy sounding
'Mr Tambourine Man' and 'Roll Over Beethoven' there so there isn't actually any
reason why fans should spend a vast fortune buying this various artists set (no
one shines at this tired show). I've never quite understood why The Byrds
insisted on including Chuck Berry's classics in their live set lists for so
long - it needs to be played by a band who love riffs and power; The Byrds
never sounded that comfortable with it really, their McGuinn-led versions
generally sounding about as far away from rock and roll as the Pastoral
Symphony (and thus being rather unfair on poor Beethoven!) As for 'Tambourine
Man', this is the all time worst
officially released Byrds version of the song, which is in danger of
making Dylan's squeaky vocal on the original look good. One thing that you
can't find very easily is the film itself - not that you particularly need to -
which features a very bedraggled Byrds, their beards at their longest, looking
rather bored and grumpy. One to miss, really. Oh and strangely enough only Earl
Scraggs plays a banjo in any of the performances, The Byrds included -
Tambourine Man might have been a better title!
"Roger
McGuinn and Band"
(Columbia, June 1975)
Somebody Loves You/Knockin' On Heaven's
Door/Bull Dog/Painted Lady/Lover Of The Bayou//Lisa/Circle Song/So Long/Easy
Does It/Born To Rock and Roll
"I grow so weary of this masquerade, I'd like
to hide my head and slip away"
'I
prefer to forget it. If I could erase that album I would. I'd love to just
totally wipe it out. I just couldn't see the wood for the trees at that point.
I've had highs and ows in my career and that was just a low point. You have to
give me some leeway!' So runs Roger McGuinn (some 30 years post band)
discussing 'Roger McGuinn and Band', generally regarded as one of the
guitarist's lesser ideas. Distracted by a divorce to wife Linda, a cocaine
problem (though nowhere near Crosby's massive scale, still a worry for a
generally level-headed man like Roger who'd never done that sort of thing
heavily before)and a feeling that his solo career was running away with him,
McGuinn has more than enough reasons to be given leeway. 'Peace On You', while
a generally impressive album, had been an unhappy experience for him to make
and he felt like an 'extra' on his own album. Roger had to re-take control so
he did the only thing he knew how to do: he formed a band, but a backing band
this time rather than one like the later Byrds that was a sort of 'failed
democracy' (with McGuinn hating some of the material given him by the others,
but keen not to take control of them). Moving to Los Angeles, McGuinn put
together a new cast of players (on the suggestion of new producer John
Boylan) who'd never worked with Roger or
indeed each other before: Richard Bowden on second guitar, Stephen A Love on
bass, David Lovelace on keyboards and Greg Attaway on drums. Whilst respectable
musicians in their own right seperately, with a fair bit of experience between
them playing for anyone recording Los Angeles, the band just never quite mixed
and this album comes out sounding a couple months short of rehearsal time for
them to have gelled.
Things
would have been alright had McGuinn been able to write a strong set of songs -
but after a third solo album in as many years and after eight heavy years
making thirteen albums with The Byrds (and perhaps losing confidence after Bill
Halversen's dismissal of his own material), Roger found he couldn't write.
Jacuqes Levy, his go-to writing partner for most of the past six years, was
busy with old inspiror Bob Dylan, co-writing all but one of the songs on his
1976 ;comeback' album 'Desire'. Jacques was also living in New York, too far
away from McGuinn's new base in L.A. to simply drop in on his old friend and
swap ideas like before. Roger should perhaps have slowed down, booked some time
off to write material and properly drilled his new band qith a quick tour. But
for once Roger's trust that 'somehow I know everything will turn out alright'
was misplaced: before he quite knew what was happening he was back in the
studio again, desperately trying to cut songs he didn't have. Roger only gets
four songs on his own album and two of those are re-makes of past successes: a
good idea when it comes to a slower, more spacious 'Lover Of The Bayou' but
completely misguided with an even worse rendering of 'Born To Rock and Roll'
than on the Byrds reunion album (yes, honest you really did read that right
-the other version was abysmal and one of the lowerst points in this book, but
the re-make is even worse!) Alas the new songs for the record are almost as
bad: the trite and oddly teenage 'Lisa' ('Oh Lisa all the boys are talking
about you, oh Lisa on the telephone!') and 'Easy Does It' tries to talk about
Roger's recent split with his wife, although the chorus 'Don't try to force it
or you might just divorce it' is surely grounds for divorce in it's own right.
Not
that the rest of the album is much better. What would you do in Roger's shoes
with an album to make in a hurry? Record some rock and roll standards? Perhaps
some folk standards (as per Roger's later 'Folk Den' set?) Atone for the
wooden-ness of the rest of the set with some fierce jamming songs? Re-record some Byrds standards you didn't
write? Or hire Gene Clark to replace you for two weeks again while you have a
nice holiday? That's what Roger should probably have done - but what he did do
set the seal on this album's reputation forever in the eyes of fans. He
recorded five songs that the band had written - even though none of them had
ever pretended to be a songwriter before! Yes that's right - after years
complaining in The Byrds about the low forms of songwriting brought by the rest
of the band (who were on the whole writers even before The Byrds formed in
1965) and even rejecting Crosby's songs, here he is basically handing his
pencils over to four hapless youngsters who suddenly have to deliver songs on a
level to McGuinn's (albeit a disintegrating McGuinn). What on earth must they
have felt? To their credit the band comply, coming up with five songs between
them (the best of which, David Lovelace's 'Circle Song', is a direct steal
wholesale from Gene Clark's reunion song and yet still comes out sounding the
best thing here aside from 'Bayou'). Considering the circumstances they're not
that bad actually for first writers, but why on earth was Roger's idea of
'taking control' after a difficult record he felt he had no say on simply
handing the keys over to the asylum? The blame doesn't rest entirely on Roger
either: someone should have said 'no' or 'are you sure we're ready?' or 'I
think you need help!' But Roger was alone, cut off from every single one of his
collagues and friends and a lot of his family to boot, isolated in LA and
trying to be something he wasn't. The result is the nadir of McGuinn's
catalogue for all sorts of reasons and a record many longterm fans prefer to
skip. Help is at hand, though, in the unexpected form of Bob Dylan, whose
invitation (no doubt through a worried Levy) to have Roger play as Bob's
guitarist on a 1976 tour gave him a great way of breaking up the band, ignoring
the record and going back into an arena where he was loved without any loss of
face (Bob clearly hadn't heard the painful elongated rendition of 'Knockin' On heaven's
Door' from this record, then - the single worst McGuinn Dylan cover - or he might have had second thoughts).
Perhaps McGuinn was right after all: somehow everything will turn out alright -
or then again perhaps Bob Dylan just works in mysterious ways sometimes.
At
least the front cover - Roger smiling in front of a collection of impressive
looking state-of-the-art-for-1975 tape decks - is a good one.
The
Souther-Hillman-Furay Band "Trouble In Paradise"
(Asylum, 'Mid' 1975)
Trouble In Paradise/Move Me Real Slow/For
Someone I Love/Mexico/Love and Satisfy//On The Line/Prisoner In Disguise/Follow
Me Through/Somebody Must Be Wrong
* = Chris Hillman compositions
"There's trouble in paradise, the story don't
sound too nice, and you just can't sleep at night in a solid gold room"
The general
consensus is that the second Souther-Hillman-Furay record is even more of a
disaster than the first and this time the record bombed badly, missing the
charts completely. However, while the trio still sound far from telepathic (and yet again
Richie looks cheerful on the cover while the other two look glum), I find this
second album much of a team effort - even J D Souther sounds like he's getting
involved this time around (writing dfour of the nine songs here) and Richie
and Chris do their usual capable job of backing him and each other up. The mood
is still anger, bordering on bitterness, with all three men spending yet more
time reflecting on their respective flop bands and wondering where their career
goes from here, trapped together in a band none of them want but where none of
them can think of anything better. However this is a much more upbeat album,
with Souther's country honk title track (the album highlight this time around)
setting the tone: it reads like a tragedy but sounds like a comedy, with Richie
having fun adding some 'yeehas' and enjoying the 50s rock groove. Manassas
pal Stephen Stills turned up to the sessions but was alledgedly too 'wasted' to
record anythung usable, satying up late one night alone to 'add some ideas' and
discovered the next morning asleep in the control room having emptied the
studio mini-bar! Stills was probably far from the only excessive on this album,
though, despite Richie Furay's recent conversion to Christianity and his and Al
Perkins' growing interest in their faith in this period (Hillman too will
convert to Christianity with Perkins' help, though not for a few years yet).
While there's
probably even more weak songs here than the first LP, there are better ones
too, with Hillman on particularly bright form - which is odd because this
album moves ever further away from his natural country-rock feel, dividing
itself pretty neatly between soppy pop and funky rock. That said,
Hillman's first track 'Move Me Real Slow'
is the odd one out on the album, a honky tonk grunge song of all things, with a
bar-room piano backed up by a 'burping' bass and some heavy rhythms. I like
this song a lot, actually, despite being arguably the least well known Hillman
song of the 1970s: there's a pretty tune, a dynamic change between the
verses and choruses that catch the hear and Chris and Richie's harmonies
suddenly make sense, the pair going together surprisingly well. The slinky
'Love and Satisfy' is even better, a Hillman song intended
for the second Manassas album 'Down The Road' but abandoned when Atlantic
requested more Stills songs (their version later appeared on outtakes set
'Pieces' in 2009). While it was the right one of the three Hillman songs from
that record to get the push, it's still an excellent song and returns to
the favourite Hillman theme of the crooks in the record business: just when he
thinks he has it 'made', someone turns his head and 'sopins it around' and
suddenly he's so trapped by the fame game he's after everything he can get -
whether he needs it or not. This version is less interesting than the Manassas
version, going for wide open spaces that give it the feeling of an overweight
waddle when the original had the sleek physqiue of a panther, but it's still a
worthy recording, with Richie's harmonies again particularly spot-on. Finally, 'Follow
Me Through' is an even heavier rocker-treated-as-a-ballad. Sadly the
song is rather weak, certainly the most anonymous of the three Hillman tracks
here, but the recording salvages the song to some extent with some excellent
playing from keyboardist Paul Harris (another ex-Manassas man) and arguably the
best three-part vocals the S-H-F Band ever come up with.
The result is
an album that's not exactly a lost classic but is arguably rather better than
it's reputation has long suggested. The brotherhood in the band
seemed to be arriving in the studio, at just the point when the band were
writing about how it was 'missing' in their songs, with Hillman's contribution
on vocals and guitar particularly strong here. The song even ends on a nicely
jammed 'salsa' which could have done with lasting a bit longer rather than fading
so quick - did Chris pick this techqniue upo from his old friend Stills (who
used it all the time?!) With this second record disappearing much quicker
than the first and all three members keen to go their own ways before the band
became a long-term rather than a short-term affair, the trio quietly folded - a
shame given the promise on the best of this record, although in truth there's
maybe only two-thirds of a good record between the pair of them. Suddenly, with
the dissolution of his fourth band in ten years, Chris was suddenly out on his
own for the first time and uncomfortably thrust into the spotlight as a solo
artist for the first time. For now, Asylum are keen to keep him and hire him as
a 'solo' straight after the trio's dissolution, although for the moment at
least Chris won't be quite as sure about his abilities as a frontman as his
record company are...
‘Roger McGuinn and Band’ (1975).
Truly awful. The band sound decidedly pedestrian and their domination of the
writing credits – leaving Roger just four songs (two of them re-makes) – is not
funny. Especially when one of the recycled tracks, ‘Born To Rock ‘n’ Roll’, was
already pretty much the worst Byrds song ever and certainly the weakest on
their 1973 reunion LP. However there are two highlights: ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s
Door’ was never my favourite Dylan track but this ambling version does have its
moments, whilst the re-make of ‘Untitled’s ‘Lover Of The Bayou’ is nicely raw
and dangerous, even if its not up to the Byrds’ original. Still give it a miss
though – my ears are still hurting and I haven’t played this album in three
years!
Gene
Clark "Silverado: Live and Unreleased"
(Bar Ieg, Recorded February 1975, Released February
2010)
Long Black Veil/Kansas City
Southern/For A Spanish Guitar/Home Run King/Here Without You/No Other/Daylight
Line/Sewt You Free This Time/She Darkened The Sun/In Thde Pines/Train Leaves
Here This Morning/Silver Raven
"I got 12 points just for being in the right
place at exactly the wrong time"
The
mid-1970s were clearly a key time for Gene Clark fans with the appearance of
'Roadmaster' and 'No Other' and the similarly stunning yet under-rated 'Two
Sides To Every Story' waiting in the wings. While Gene's records were still
selling poorly he had a strong and very loyal following and finally seemed to
have overcome some of the 'demons' that had plagued his live work his Byrds
days. This popular bootleg, taped at Coloradpo's Ebbet's Field' in 1975 by an
enterprisising fan and sadly in rather poor sound throughout, captures a
surprisngly relaxed Gene on good form at the peak of this spike in his interest
despite the ignominy of having just been dropped by yet another record company.
His fully acoustic set, backed by his new band with the very Gene Clark name
'Silverado' (guitarist Roger White and bassist Duke Bardwell and no drummer for
the first time!) is on the one hand a light and stripped down rendition of his
back catalogue, clearly done on the cheap, but on the other a fascinating
example of Gene's confidence that two guitars, a bass and a harmonica was all
he needed to tell a story. There are none of the nerves of his Byrds or even his
McGuinn-Clark-Hillman days, Gene pleased to have the spotlight shinging
somewhere near him but not squarely on him.
The
show starts with the first of three exclusive tracks, the country standard
'Long Black Veil' and Gene's version is surprisingly upbeat and strident,
despite the fact that nearly every cover version of this classic song about
tragedy, murder and regret sounds downright depressing. Thereafter in the set
we get the original 'Daylight Line', which is surprisingly poppy with Gene yet
again talking about leaving a city 'because it's gro-a-woah-ing cold' and
Gene's collaboration with Bernie Leadon 'She Darked The Sun' which returns to
another favourite theme of the 'sun' and 'moon' being celestail 'inspirors',
with yet another lover walking out the door and taking Gene's faith in life
with her (although like the rest of the set this naturally sad song sounds
upbeat and happy here). Elsewhere we get two stunning versions of Byrds songs
that sound even more open and vulnerable with the backing of a band (a funky
yet spooky 'Here Without You' that sounds not unlike David Crosby's jazzy 'Deja
Vu' and a slow and tortured 'Set You Free This Time'). Gene is clearly between
projects, with only two tracks from 'No Other' (the album he's meant to be plugging!)
including a sublime 'Silver Raven' and an ok version of the title track which
sounds quite different without all the effects, plus the two cover songs from
his next album 'Story': a fun 'Home Run King' and a bouncier 'In The Pines'. Elsewhere it's back to Gene's early solo days
with a ragged 'Train Leaves Here This Morning', a rather flat 'For A Spanish
Guitar' and a sadly rather wet version of rocker 'Kansas City Southern'. Ah
well, most of this set is good and if you can get past the tape hiss and the
equally lo-fi arrangements of some of these songs then you have a live set
that's a joy to behold, the sound of a creative giant on a high, oblivious to
the obstacles that have been coming his way the past few years and certain he's
onto the right thing. The record company might not have thought it, his
audience may not have bought into it and his own band seems to have been
chopped in half, but Gene is right - he is onto a good thing here, and how! An
unexpectedly excellent live release from a man who at one stage would have done
anything to get out of live performances - including quitting the single
hottest American band on the planet (that's The Byrds, by the way, if you
hadn't guessed!)
Roger
McGuinn "Cardiff Rose"
(Columbia, May 1976)
Take Me Away/Jolly Roger/Rock and Roll
Time/Friend//Partners In Crime/Up To Me/Round Table/Pretty Polly/Dreamland
"If it seems that sometimes I've fallen
behind, remember I'm running on rock and roll time"
Dissatisfied with his last two records - which
were respectively a bit bland and a bit too democractically slanted towards
less interedting colleagues - Roger tried hard to bounce back with an album
that sounds make him sound cobtemporary once again. If you'd have laid odds on
Roger McGuinn becoming the first AAA member to makea punk record - the very
year that music changed and a full year before most people realised it - I'd
have laughed. Yet here we are two years before the Stones' 'Some Girls' and three
before Neil Young's 'Rust Never Sleeps'and The Kinks' 'Low Budget' with as punk
an album as a 35-year-old could ever have made in 1976, with vocals that rarely
raise beyond a sneer and a texture best described as 'brittle'. This being
Roger there's still time for one of his beloved sea shanties, a revisiting of a
folk song first tried out on 'Sweethearts Of The Rodeo', the rather over-lush
folk song 'Friend' and a Joni Mitchell cover - all of which are the highlights
of the record, if only for changing the album's default setting that little
bit. The fact remains however - this is an album that's tough and at least
loosely in tune with what was going on in music circles (the way The Byrds
always used to be) which sound like they would have eaten all of Roger's first
three comparatively timid records for breakfast.
Roger's still writing mainly with Jacques Levy
for this album (four songs out of nine), although it's the one song he writes
on his own that seems like the 'heart' of this troubled record. 'Friend' is a
tribute to fallen comrades unknown which is vague enough to be about either
Gram or Clarence (the only two fallen Byrds by this time, both of whom died in
1973) or could be about someone cpompletely un-connected with the music
business. The song is clearly abpout someone though - while most of 'Peace On
You' and 'McGuinn and Band' didn't really care what it said as long as the
tunes and production was good, Roger's first full lyric since ***'Tiffany Lamp'
rather sets the tone for an album that's more personal than normal. 'Partners
In Crime', for instance, painfully reflects on friends who were once so close
losing touch, McGuinn sitting down to write a long letter and realising he
doesn't have his friend's new address, so he turns it into a song instead.
Shiver me timbers if 'Jolly Roger' isn't
a gentle parody song, too, full of all the things McGuinn used to do regularly
on Byrds albums and with a title hinting that ev went along with all this to
keep his colleague happy! 'Round Table' also pushes further down a road McGuinn
has travelled before and will got further down in the future: old folk tales,
lovingly restored to resonate in the present day. 'Round Table' (even if this
one is an original dressed up to sound like an old song) and the previously
attempted 'Pretty Polly' can be considered the start of McGuinn's 'folk den'
project that will occupy him for most of the 1990s and 2000s. The choice of
cover versions are surprising too: one of Joni Mitchell's better songs makes a
riveting closer (interesting that Roger should choose a song by a folk singer his
old colleague David Crosby not only discovered but went out with in his last
days with The Byrds) , McGuinn reaches out for a Dylan song for ther first time
in his solo career (the newer song 'Up To Me', which ironically enough sounds
like the anonymous style McGuinn had fallen into during 'Peace On You') and
during the album sessions even tried a David Bowie song, 'Soul Love' (one of
his least repellant but not really suitable for McGuinn - it appears as a bonus
track on the CD re-issue but was probably the right one of these ten to have
dropped). The end result is an album not quite as pioneering as the first or as
consistent as the second, although there are several excellernt songs and the
album marks a major improvement all round on 'Roger McGuinn and Band',
ironically featuring much more of the 'real' McGuinn (and a better and more
sympathetic band).
'Take Me
Away' is an odd and rather
shuddery beginning to the record, with McGuinn sounding like a young punk
against a background of screaming guitars and tough drumming but singing lines
more akin to an old codger (with a chorus of 'oh, you should have been there!')
'Jolly
Roger' is much more interesting
- a sea shanty that enables Roger to unleash his inner pirate and soemhow
manages to sound like a worthy song in it's own right despite having more
piratical cliches than 'Treasure Island'. The song easily improves on 'Jack
Tarr' by virtue of a tougher take-no-prisoners backing and a grittier McGuinn
vocal. Roger and Jacques reportedly installed a 'hammock' into the room they
used for writing to get them in the mood to write this song!
'Rock and
Roll Time'
is a much more successful love story to rock than 'Born To Rock and Roll' and
the most 'punk' moment on the record (althoug ironically enough the first
version of this song - taped during the making of 'Peace On You' and a bonus
track on that album's CD re-issue) was a country song that coudln't have
soudned more different! I quite like the original version of this song - this
'new' one is a valid attempt to sound young that nearly comes off, but isn't
built for repeated listens. You can't hear the lyrics for a start, which is a
shame: the song isn't so much 'it's time to rock and roll' as the idea that
when Roger the rocker gets back home he can't switch off or unwind, finding
himself 'outside' of normal life, 'running on rock and roll time'. For some
reason Jacques Levy loses his co-writing credit from the original version but
Kris Kristoffersen gets one instead!
The solo 'Friend' admits 'we're gonna miss you round here'
but far from a teary goodbye sounds more like angry denial that the 'Friend'
has gone at all. As we said above, I'd love to know who this song was about: my
guess is that it is Clarence, who was indeed one of the most careful and cautious
rock and roll musicians in the business but who lost his live in a careless
accident all the same. The opening lines about a friend owing 'big money' don't
fit though: that sounds more like Gram. While not the best eulogy ever written
and with an overtly lush fiddle part that literally sounds like the moment a
weepy story gets the violins out, 'Friend' is still a good song and one of the
album highlights.
'Partners In
Crime' is a McGuinn/Levy song
that hops around all over the place, starring off as a sweet country-rock
numbeer before turning into an infantile bar room saloon number with an 'oh ho
ho ho' chorus. Typical of Levy's style but less usual of Roger's, it's an
uneasy mix that never quite comes off although there's a good song in there
somewhere about the narrator pining for his girlfriend to come out of prison.
‘Up To Me’ is one of Bob Dylan’s
less cerebral and rockier songs. A rare case of a 1970s song with a lyric fully
by Dylan it came out on ** Roger’s vocal is
his closest mimic yet to his hero’s style and is in truth a little too
‘Dylanesque’ for my tastes. The song is an oddball one too – it sounds like the
good beginning to a song that never makes it to the full song, getting stuck
over and over in the same groove, the result of which is quite disconcerting.
‘Round Table’ is much more interesting, with McGuinn the historian
returning to the days when men were men, before Byrds were Byrds even, during
the time of King Arthur. A slow-burning folk-rocker, this is more like
something Pentangle would do, drawing on the storybook democracy and valour of
the past and asking why we don’t have it in the present (Was it really all just
a myth? Could it ever really happen?)
Sadly the music isn’t quite up to the lyrics and Roger sounds on
auto-pilot throughout, but at least it’s an interesting glimpse at doing
something different – and what other middle aged rock and roller could possibly
spend his ‘punk’ comeback album singing about a subject matter most prog
rockers would think twice about?
‘Pretty Polly’ has already turned up in
this book once: a favourite folk song of McGuinn’s from the days before the
Byrds existed, the band recorded it for ‘Sweethearts Of The Rodeo’ where it was
passed over despite being one of the better performances from the sessions
(pure folk wouldn’t have fitted on a country-rock album though). Ironically
this solo album version features much more of a band performance, with McGuinn
on banjo joined by fiddle players, acoustic guitarists and all sorts. Roger
turns story-teller for the vocal which is terribly hammy by the end (having
started at Robert Newton levels, poor Roger has nowhere to go when the drama
gets fuller by the end of the song and ends up Robin Williams at the end). The
result isn’t as satisfying as the original – somehow by taking the song more
‘seriously’ the fun of fair maiden Polly who isn’t as fair as she makes out
gets lost somehow.
The album then ends with ‘Dreamland’, a better than
average Joni Mitchell song from her fairly obscure 'Don Juan's Restless Daughter'
album released near-enough contemporaneoudsly with this record (did McGuinn
hear an advance copy?) Roger's version
loses Joni's typically jazzy rule-breaking song structure for something a bit
more rock (and roll) solid. One of the better tracks on the album, a Clarence
White-style feedback drone and some neat production touches makes everything
sound suitably hazy while McGuinn copes well with a vocal about the short lines
between reality and fantasy that’s well out of his usual comfort zone.
Overall, ‘Cardiff Rose’ is a stranger album
than it first appears. A harder-edged album with some of the sappiest moments
of McGuinn’s career, it finds him casting around for a new direction after two
bland albums but not quite knowing which extreme of the spectrum to go in. Few
people who bought this record, with its sea shanty song titles and pretty album
cover (a beautiful portrait of a ship at harbour) can have guessed at just how
contemporary this record would be and it speaks volumes that after this experiment
all is quietly forgotten about sounding ‘fresh’ and McGuinn goes back to his
usual country/pop/folk/jazz style. I’m still not sure whether that’s a good
thing or not...
The
Flying Burrito Brothers "Airborne"
(Columbia, June 1976)
Out Of Control/Waiting For Love To
Begin/Toe Tappin' Music/Quiet Man/Northbound Bus/Big Bayou/Walk On The
Water/Linda Lu/Border Town/She's A Sailor/Jesus Broke The Wild Horse
"You drove all the wolves from my door and
showed me a love I'd never saeen before"
After Chris Hillman left the band in 1971 a
year after Gram Parsons, the resurrection of The Flying Burrito Brothers seemed
even less likely than a Byrds reunion. However Gram's much publicised death in
1973 changed everything, turning his legacy in one fell swoop from a cult few
people heard at the time to the preachings of an important rock icon. The
Flying Burritos especially benefitted from this turn of events and inevitably
reformed from 1975 with a pretty underwhelming record 'Flying Again'. In total,
counting all the various Burritos spin-offs like 'The Burito Brothers'
(1981/1982), 'Sierra' (1977) 'Burrito Deluxe (2002-2007) and 'The Burritos'
(2011) there are 26 of their albums around to collect. Given that this would
considerably lengthen an already fairly major book we've elected to include
only those Burritos albums where more than one Byrd appears. That way we cover
the only three Burritos albums you need to own (the first three, featuring
Chris Hillman alongside first Gram Parsons, then Michael Clarke) and albums
five and six (which effectively reunite the most stable of Byrds line-ups and
featuring Gene Parsons - on guitar this time not drums - and bassist Skip
Battin), although it's founder members Chris Ethridge and 'Sneaky' Pete Klienow
who really give these albums the 'Burritos' flavour. Both men are logical
replacementsa, though, given The Byrds' close links with the Burritos and Gene
on his own had already contributed the only songs worth hearing from 'Flying
Again' (the strangely Scottish sounding ballad 'Wind and Rain' featuring Joe
Scott Hill on lead vocals) and the James Taylor-ish 'Sweet Desert Childhood'
(which features Gene doing just about everything). The whole band also write
their own self-made ending to Parsons' trilogy with 'Hot Burrito #3', although
nlost fans agree it sounds more like a pastiche than the heartbreak of the
originals. As far as the rest of the album goes, though, this is mere mid-70s
schlock which failed to gain new fans and insulted those who'd been around the
first time. You dread to think what Gram would have made it of it all - and
even the more polite Hillman seems to have treated the album with scorn.
'Airborne', Burritos studio album number five,
is a little better. The band still don't sound much like they used to but the
addition of Skip Battin to the line-up (instead of founder member Chris
Ethridge, who jumped ship after all the bad reviews) helps considerably,
offering the band a bigger louder instrumental sound and another vocalist. Gene
too is on good form, coming up with another song that might not match up to his
best songs with The Byrds ('Yesterday's Train' and 'Gunga Din') but is clearly
head and shoulders above everything else here and more closely related to the
Gram Parsons/Hillman days.That song is 'Out Of Control'in more ways than one,
bringing some rock and roll to the band's sound and features Gene trying to do
his best to sound like his name-sake on a tale about a wayward woman who could
be the sister of 'Christine'. Elsewhere Gene gets to sing more leads than
normal and still sounds in good voice. It's actually the band's other new
recruit, fiddle player Gib Gilbeaux (another refugee from Gene's and Clarence
White's band 'Nashville West' who guested on that song and Skip's 'You All Look
Alike' during The Byrds' years) who comes off best, though, with a full five
co-writes across the album including the pretty 'Waiting For Love To Begin' and
the rather Roger McGuinn-like reggae-calypso hybrid 'Quiet Man'. Overall
'Airborne' might not be up to the Flying Burritos' band name still, with
clearly lowered horizons from the 'good 'ol' days' when the band still wanted
to unite the rock and country genres and go where no other band had gone
before. However it is at least a superior middle-of-the-road album which is of
much interest to fans of The Byrds' later years curious as to where the Gene
Parsons-Skip Battin friendship went after both were thrown out of the band.
Dare I say it, the result is a lot more interesting than either of the McGuinn
or Hillman records out that year...
Chris
Hillman "Slippin' Away"
(Asylum, 'Late' 1976)
Step On Out/Slippin' Away/Falling
Again/Take It On The Run/Blue Morning//Witching Hour/Down In The
Churchyard/Amnesty/Midnight Again/(Take Me In Your) Lifeboat
"It's times like this when it's so hard to
see"
A curious mixture of all sorts of elements
from Hillman's past with The Byrds (country-psychedelia and rock), Flying
Burrito Brothers (country-tonk rock), Souther-Hillman-Furay Band (country-pop)
and Manassas (plum everything), I've always come away
from Hillman's first record having enjoyed myself whilst feeling slightly
underwhelmed. Goodness a lot of time, effort, money and love was thrown at this
record and with good reason: after the death of Gram Parsons in 1973 and with
CSNY. McGuinn and Gene Clark all currently
going through one of their 'unpopular' turns, this was truly Hillman's turn
in the spotlight: he'd pushed The Byrds to their creative peak in the mid-60s and had formed one of
the cult bands who were growing in stature every year after Gram Parsons' death
in the early 70s. Asylum wanted success, so did Hillman and the
large and impressive cast of characters he brought in to play on this record: Poco/Eagles
star Timothy B Schmidt, Booker T guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist
Donald 'Duck' Dunn, future Desert Rose Band star
Herb Pedersen, Manassas' Al Perkins, Flying Burrito Rick Roberts and
fiddle player Byron Berline.
The record sounds amazing, with the Albert Brothers
(Howard and Ron) - who'd
engineered the Manassas records - offering a typically glittering crystal clear sound
despite the dense surroundings on the tracks. Stick this record on at any
point and you'll be impressed with the sheer listenability and consistency of
it all, after two inconsistent years with the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band.
Chris clearly has a lot on his mind after a second failed marriage in five
years and is in self-discussion mode, wondering where things went wrong and
whether the trouble lies with his wives or him. In other circumstances this
album's set of lyrics could have been a sort of loose 'John Lennon/Plastic Ono
band' album, crying out from the heart about bad personal circumstances, but
Hillman is too guarded and vulnerable for that, choosing to record his personal
songs with as anonymous a backing as possible. Ironically the only song that
sounds emotional is 'Witching Hour', on which Hillman channels a similar dark
night of the soul from old partner Stephen Stills.
Certain songs are good then and almost every
track has a certain something to recommend, even if it tends to be music or
lyrics rather than both. The trouble is, if you play it back to back with
anything earlier from Hillman's career and it seems obvious that he's playing
it all a little too safe, too content to rest on his laurels. Even when The
Flying Burrito Brothers (and The Byrds to some extent) fell down and messed up,
they did so in an interesting manner, over-reaching themselves with an idea so
grand and audacious nobody could have rightfully pulled it off. For many of
their reviews in this book they get marks for trying, even when the results
aren't quite there. 'Slippin' Away' is the opposite of this: it does work as an
album and often a very pretty album, but it loses marks for not even
recognising there is a box to think out of and tends to work much better
when heard in bits and pieces rather than across 35 odd minutes. At least
Hillman and Knobler were prolific across this album, writing every song bar
two. Unfortunately for them these are the highlights, simply for breaking up
the sound and style of the album so much: the first is a terrific cover of a
leftover (and painfully honest) Stephen Stills song from the Manassas era
'Witching Hour'; the second a striking and rather raw reading of traditional
song 'Take Me In Your Lifeboat' . Had the album
been more like this it might have been an excellent record indeed - but
otherwise middle of the road country is about as daring as this record gets.
Remember, 'The Notorious Byrd Brothers' album was only eight years ago...
First up is 'Step On Out', a pleasant enough rocker that
sounds like the femme fatale of 'Christine's Tune', now married and a housewife
but still ken to 'step on out' on the town every now and again. Some clever
lyrics from Knobler ('Seems like she's seen it all before - and what she ain't
seen she's heard of!') are offset by a rather anonymous Hillman melody.
Title track 'Slippin' Away' is one of the album highlights, a
sleepy Hillman song about his latest marital breakup and his gradual
realisation that it's over. Contrasring the happy times of yesteryear with the
uncomfortable present, it's a curious song whose laidback quiet charm on the
surface is in heavy contrast to the lyrics of angst when you analyse the song
fully. A lovely pedal steel solo from Al Perkins is the song highlight.
'Falling
Again' is alsopretty but pretty
unspectacular, this time with a lovely see-sawing melody let down by some
rather anonymous words about 'being blind to the truth, lost and alone' as
another lover dances her way out of the narrator's life without even a
backwards glance.
'Take It On
The Run' shares the same slinky
groove of many of the 'Trouble In Paradise' songs, with several funky Hillmans
competing with each other in the chorus. In truth though this is a riff not a
song, with some lame bland lyrics about politicians, lovers and friends all
conspiring to let the narrator down despite ';working like a dog the last 15
years' - the length of time Hillman had been a professional musician at the
time.
'Blue
Morning' maintains the theme of
travel from the Souther-Hillman-Furay days, a weary Chris imagining his life as
a long and winding road with nothing to keep him going but his 'dreams'. He
knows his way of living is hard on his loved ones, leaving him away from home
for long periods of time, but he still believes that a happier future can be
theirs soon. Sadly a rather bland country backing doesn't do this fine set of
words the justice it deserves.
'Witching
Hour' is what a stunning,
poignant song sounds like and is head and shoulders above everything else here.
Written by Stephen Stills towards the end of the 'Manassas' first album
sessions, it was rejected by it's author after a Manassas rehearsal (as heard
on 2009 outtakes set 'Pieces') for being 'too personal' and revealing. Given
the amount of heartbreaking Stills has given us down the years that's quite a
claim, but it's true: this is the 'bag of nerves' at Stills' heart, not the
confident musician we all see in charge on stage. Stills admits that he always
pours his heart into his songs, that 'some people love him for it - while
others say he ain't got no right' and that something odd always happens to him
past Midnight, when everyone is asleep and he's left with his own nervy
company, reminded of all his doubts and fears. The song is clearly too good to
waste and Stills must have been pleased when Hillman offered to sing it, thus
directing attention away from the author. However Hillman's version lacks the
mystery and fear of Manassas' version and only the addition of a dramatic
string section really adds anything to the song, which is still best heard on
'Pieces'.
'Down By The
Churchyard'
is another song from Hillman's past, having been first recorded for 1970 album
'Burrito Deluxe'. It sounds rather anonymous here, after both the power of the
last song and rather soppy 'white reggae' arrangement Hillman gives it here.
That's a shame because the song itself deserves a second hearing, telling the
tale of a broken elderly man somwhow forcing his way to the graveside of one of
his friends, knowing he'll be joining him soon (by contrast the music makes it
sound like a summer holiday outing!)
Doumas' lovely song 'Amnesty' is something of an AAA standard, also
covered by The Hollies on their 'A Crazy Steal' album two years later. Figuring
that love can bring peace to the worst of situations and that the knowledge
that two warring factions can be united by their belief in another would
clearly have a powerful effect for someone at the end of their second marriage,
but once again the song floats along slowly rather than soaring the way that
such a powerful statement should.
'Midnight
Again' is the last Hillman
original on the album and one of the better songs here. Chris' narrator finds
himself alone again, pounding the streets 'in search of a good friend' and
lamenting at one stage that 'this loneliness is killing me!' While it's sad to
hear the naturally bouncy Hillman so unhappy, it does wonders for his
songwritng craft with his vocal on this song full of the passion and energy we
could have done with more elsewhere. The slow chugging blues nature of the song
isn't the best vehicle for such a tough, brittle set of words however.
The albums ends with the spoof-traditional folk
song 'Take Me In Your
Lifeboat', where Hillman puts all his Flying Burritos and Manassas
background to good use. The song starts as an acapella folk traditional before
going into heavy country, Hillman pleading for a rescue from 'this raging
storm'. Once again, though, this very real emotion is diverted thanks to the
yee-ha hoedown natue of the backing, although it's still highly memorable with
Hillman's mandolin and Byron Berline's fiddle bouncing off each other nicely.
The result is an interesting album, offering
much insight into Chris'character on the one hand - and taking it away with the
rather bland backing with the other. As the titrle suggests, this could have
been a great album - but there's a sense of that greatness 'slippin' away'
across the record as one track sounds like another. Not that this is a truly
bads record; having never filled a whole album before it's impressive that
there's at most two 'filler' tracks on this album and Hillman is in good voice
throughout. The trouble is it's just so mid-1970s soft rock that this record
could be by anyone and Hillman's distinctive stamp from his Byrds, Burritos and
Manassas days is rather lacking. Thankfully Hillman's second attempt at this
same style will largely put this right, with a similar sense of commercial
style along with some rather more passionate performances...
Roger
McGuinn "Thunderbyrd"
(Columbia, March 1977)
All Night Long/It's Gone/Dixie
Highway/American Girl/We Can Do It All Over Again//Why Baby Why?/I'm Not Lonely
Anymore/Golden Loom/Russian Hill
"Why did it end so soon?"
In 1977 three Byrds got together for a tour,
together with the inevitable and inevitably brief reunion at the end of their
three sets. Although McGuinn Clark and Hillman had clearly undertaken the tour
for financial reasons - why play to smaller audiences when you can draw bigger
crowds simply by putting up with 20 minutes of forced smiles every night -
there was a sense that it was the best thing most of the trio had done in
years. Gene Clark, fresh from 'No Other' and the unfinished rarities set
'Roadmaster' was on top form as the opening act, winning fans over with his
surprisngly rocky and covers-filled set. Chris Hillman was next and wowed the
crowds even further, having just completed work on his solo masterpiece 'Clear
Sailin' (out near the end of the tour) and with the Manassas set lists still
the centrepiece of his show. Hopes were high that chief Byrd Roger McGuinn, due
to appear last, would wow the fans even further - but Roger had fallen into a
bit of a slump. Frustrated with how all his solo albums since the first had
turned out, you get the sense that Roger had has admitted defeat for album
number five and is merely recording material as easily and simply as possible.
Had Roger toured this album on his own fans might not have noticed quite so much,
but heard back to back with Gene's and Chris' work (and the glorious 'Lover Of
The Bayou', Roger's one sop to the past in his solo spot) 'Thunderbyrd' seemed
weaker than it usually would have done. Despite the title, the first time any
of the Byrds actively looked back to the past on a solo project (though not the
last) this is still a terribly un-Byrds like album, almost as if Roger is
refusing to go back to his strengths simply because he's tired of his Byrds
past. This is a terribly anonymous record that could have been made by
anybody, again without even the use of
the Ricknebacker to differentiate it from what other people were up to 1977.
Roger's mixture of folk and country has been replaced by mind-numbing synthetic
pop played at different speeds and there's even less original material here
than on the other records (with Roger getting just four co-writes this time
around). Not until the unusual closing number 'Russian Hill' does McGuinn
actually push himself at all and record a song that fans can honestly, hand on
heart, say they remember after the record has stopped playing. Even promising
material like Tom Petty's 'American Girl' and 'Golden Loom', one of Dylan's
best songs for a long time**, all but disappear in their new anodyne settings.
The good news is that this album is both more
'normal' and more consistent than 'Cardiff Rose'. There are no sea shanties
this time around, no traditional folk tales re-told with a dramamtic leer and
no mid-life crisis attempt to become a punk. In many ways, though, you wish
there was: it's not that 'Thunderbyrd' is a bad LP so much as a lifeless one.
As an extreely general rule the better AAA albums tend to be the ones that have
wildly varied tempos, sounds and settings (the very best ones coming with an
extra level of 'unity' that hang such disaparate spounds together). There's
veery little change across 'Tunderbyrd' from the first note to the last:
everything is at walking pace, i.e. not charging ahead with power and fury and
things to say or breaking down in the middle of the road with a sob. There's no
real urgency here or sense of development. Roger could and should have done
betterand this record's 'failure' will be the last straw for him, causing a 13
year gap in his discography as he turns to heavy touring and re-thinks his next
move.
The album starts with a cover of Peter
Frampton's 'All Night Long'.
A wild and woolly rocker designed to be sung to a pack of baying fans in
stadiums, the original is empty-headed but compelling fun. Roger's version
sounds like it was made by Frampton's granny - a relic from yesteryear that
doesn't quite understand what it means to rock 'all night long'. Not quite as
bad as 'Born To Rock and Roll' but not that far behind, it's a mistake the
record never quite recoveres from.
McGuinn's own 'It's Gone' is much more interesting, with some fine
guitar work and some lively drumming. Jacques Levy's lyrics talk about
loneliness in touching clipped sentences ('No more you in my empty bed') and
while there's as little urgency and drama in this song as in the last track the
song rattles along quite nicely. Worryingly this average track is the second
best thing on the entire record.
Roger and Jacques also wrote 'Dixie Highway', a bar room
rocker with a nice riff but ridiculously cliched lyrics: from the title alone
you at home could probably write a better set of words than the ones the
usually reliable Levy came up with. A driving song without much drive, it's
another curiously low key effort.
Tom Petty's 'American Girl' is at last a decent song. The
fututre Travelling Wilbury was, in 1977, a young buck only just beginning to
make his name. Petty wore his love for The Byrds on his sleeve, though, and the
choice is one of the better fits for Roger on this album. However the wall of
chiming ringing guitars on the original has been replaced by something that bit
more ordinary and this cover version while accurately re-created somehow misses
out on all the fun of Petty's version even while all the boxes have been
ticked: the difference between re-twlling a joke because it made you giggle and
re-telling it because someone in the room laughed.
'Why Baby
Why?' is at least a song well
suited to the low key no frills arrangements of the album. A retro George Jones
song that doesn't say much, it's slightly preferable to 'So Fine' from 'Farther
Along', but only just.
Roger's third song 'I'm Not Lonely Anymore' is a slight
improvement though, featuring a proper tune, some nice guitar playing (but
slide, not Rickenbacker) and some witty lyrics ('I can sing like a Byrd!'
McGuinn chuckles to any fans who get the joke). Alas this song is missing the
hook and the strong chorus it needs to tie everything together and like much of
the album tends to drift past not doing much.
'Golden
Loom' is an oddball Bob Dylan
song (is there any other kind?) , first released on his'Bootleg Series Volume
1-3'. A slight return to McGuinn's early blues days, it features a nicely
gritty vocal and an almost Dire Straits-ish guitar line. Like many a Dylan
lyric, though, much of it is incomprehensible: what's the signifigance of the
golden loom the narrator's beloved keeps in her room? If you didn't know better
you'd think it was just in the lyric because it happened to rhyme...
Closing number 'Russian Hill' finally adds a bit of emotion and
class to the record. Roger and Jacques' clever song pushes McGuinn to his
limits, singing an unusual stream-of-consciousness lyric about a dream using a
vocal that's close to falsetto. A slow burning epic, it seems like a 'proper
meal' compared to the other bite-size chunks even though you're not quite sure
what it means (no wonder Bob and Jacques worked together so closely - their
styles are highly similar!) One reading of the lyric though is that Roger is
looking back over his career, puncturing his celebrity status for the first
time since 'Rock and Roll Star', with the odd announcement 'it's the singer -
not the tune'.
Overall, then, 'Thunderbyrd' is worth owning
just for this one song if you can find it cheaply enough - although the album
sold poorly and is quite difficult to find. Whether the record is worth the
effortt searching out depends on how much of a 'McGuinndian' you are and
whether you enjoyed the other LPs. What's more this rather good return to form
somehow manages to buck the trend and become the worst of three BYrds solo
albums released in the magical year of 1977 (four if youc count the 'CSN'
record with several Crosby classics). I bet you didn't see that coming!
Gene
Clark "Two Sides To Every Story"
(RSO,
June 1977)
Home Run King/Lonely Saturday/In The
Pines/Kansas City Southern/Give My Love To Marie//Sister Moon/MaryLou/Hear The
Wind/Past Addresses/Silent Crusade
"We talk and hear about loneliness, the cold
blue hunger of the soul"
When
are record buyers going to learn, Gene was always right. Dismissed at the time
as something of a let down after the hugeness of 'No Other' and selling even
fewer copies, Clark held out to his dying day that his lowest of low budget
sequels 'Two Sides' was his solo masterpiece. The album has had a similarly
chequered career to it's predecessor: ignored on release, buried by RSO and
long deleted it's had to wait even more years to be properly released on CD
(2014 to be exact, three years after it wad girst announced - it's one of the
last twenty or so AAA albums to come out on compact disc) and yet seems to have
gathered only about a hundredth of the praise. Like Gene, though, I consider
this album the closest to a truly great work which might not stretch music
boundaries quite as far but is easily his prettiest, loveliest solo work. Yes a
lot of the first side is filler, full of cover songs and re-treads of old songs
- disappointing for an artist who hadn't made anything in three years (back
when this was a lifetime for working musicians, not the poncy gap Bono has
between songwriting sessions) and who once wrote a song every week - but oh
that second side is one of the most haunting, poignant, under-rated twenty
minutes in all Byrds-dom. Two Sides To Every Story indeed - Gene even got the
title spot on.
Even
more than his other albums, 'Two Sides' reveals Gene to be a master singer as
well as songwriter. With so many slow ballads and so much space for vocals,
Clark blossoms here as a vocalist like never before, finally giving in to the
tender tendencies he's largely hidden during his other projects (where he was
too busy acting 'cool' for The Byrds or developing a proper solo career - by
contrast you get the feeling Gene has all but given his dreams of stardom after
the 'failure' of 'No Other'). There's been one major development in Gene's life
in this period - the return to his life of Terri Messina, one of the many
girlfriends he'd dated in the mid-60s but had been 'frightened off' by the
other Byrds. Having largely given in to his worst excesses since 1974 (Gene
turned to the booze and drugs heavily rather than recreationally, slowed down
his writing and put on a lot of weight), Messina gave him something to get well
again for and most importantly someone who seemed to be there for him no matter
what (although a decade of relapses on the pair do split, Gene pining for her
effecticvely the rest of his life in song). For now, though, Gene is love for
the first time in years (at least judging by his songs) and it's interesting
how so many of Gene's songs written for this album manage to go from being
largely about himself and his inner cosmic debates to the world turning all
around her. As usual Gene takes his inspiration from the weather, sounding not
unlike Michael Fish at times across his albums (substitute for your local
weatherman for the joke to work!) as he ponders the sun, the stars and the
'white light' that drive him on. This time Gene relates the inspiration from
the 'moon' and the 'wind' to the new love in his life, with the album also full
of sound effects more common to a 'meditation' CD (or one of Crosby's nautical
themed solo albums). Most beautifully Gene ends the album with two out and out
classics, acknowledging his often wayward past and vowing to be better, his
heart 'the ruler of my mind' and 'my dreams the wings of a spirit' trying to
overcome his earthly bonds. Gene was always a poet but he excels himself with
'Past Addresses' and 'Silent Crusade', his last published songs for another
seven years or so.
Of
course, this being a Gene Clark album, 'Two Sides' is far from perfect. At
times the album is so light on sound and instruments that it makes 'White
Light' souynd overproduced and the whole run-out-of-money look is quite
brilliantly, if sadly, summed up by the cover where a near hobo-looking bearded
Gene leans un-naturally against a park bench, as only Gene can. (Incidentally,
what is the signifigance of the chuildren's spinning top to his right - is it a
clue as to how his life has gotten out of control? A coment on his feelings of
being in love? A reference to his newly found domesticity? His metaphor for an
unstoppable force that runs through all of mankind? Or was it simply left there
by whoever was sitting on the bench before him?!) The rockers on this album
suffer in particular - 'Kansas City Southern' is a pale re-make of the version
from the second Dillard/Clark album and 'Home Run King' is unconvincing
country-rock better suited to the Flying Burritos. But enough of this albu
works to make hearing it a joyous and moving experience that far from sounding
like 'No Other' without the budget may even beat it in terms of song-on-song
brilliance.
As
discussed, 'Home Run King'
is a rather disappointing place to start even if there's a nice similie in the
chorus (Gene dividing the world into 'newspaper boy' wannabes or famous
baseball player 'Babe Ruth', doomed to change the world or not depending on
their lot in life). The hoky bluegrass playing really doesn't suit Gene though,
especially when played with all the attack and subtlety of a rock song.
'Lonely Staurday' is fairly full-on country too, although at least gene has the
voice for a full on weepy complete with pedal steel guitar from Al Perkins
(making this the third exc-Byrd he'd worked with after Chris and Gram). In this
song Gene gets a note that his lover is saying goodbye, finding 'time on my
hands' for the first time in his life and not knowing how to fill a lonely
weekend. A little anonymous by Clark standards, but still nicely done.
Most
fans are'nt keen on Gene's uptempo yee-hah version of traditional sob story 'In The Pines' either, but
for me iyt's the best subversion of what a song used to stand for since Neil
Young turned 'Oh! Lonesome Me' into a ballad. Gene reunites with Doug Dillard
who steals the show with a jaw-dropping banjo part but it's Clark's voice that
gets the atmopshere just right.
'Kansas City Southern' tries to pose and allow gene to strut his stuff in true rock God
style, but somehow the heavier harder-edged sound make this track more parody
than heartfelt powerplay. The lighter version on 'Through The Morning, Through
The Night' seems much better suited to this tale of nostalgia and heading back
home (Gene was indeed born in Kansas State).
Thankfully
a mixed first side ends on a classic with the gorgeous six minute weepie 'Give My Love To Marie'. The
first Byrds song about coal miners since 'The Bells Of Rhymney', this old
contemporary piece by folk singer James Talley sounds like it should have been
around for at least a century. Doomed to an early grave, with his six children
doomed to follow him there, the narrator is feeling sorry for himself and has
little to show for his efforts. He still loves his wife dearly, though and
promises to out a light in her window so she knows he's safe, finally dying of
'black lung' in the last verse. While the effect is a little OTT with a full
orchestra accompaniment Clark is rarely better, emoting without exaggerating.
From
hereon in we get a near unbroken stretch of Clark classics. 'Sister Moon' is one of the
best, a heartfelt song for Messina whose clearly his soulmate: a moon that
shines with inspiration and purpose to complement his sunshine like 'white
light' (though everyone hears the line as 'I am your son' Gene actually means
'sun' here). It's a joy to hear Clark this happy and the melody is one of his
most gorgeous, growing from tender delicate ballad to powerr pop chorus by the
middle, Gene promising that from now o their lives are intwined - that 'you
never need to be back home' (actually that's a bit rich - in real life Gene had
no plaxce to stay so moved in with her!)
Many
fans dislike the rather shouty cover of Obie Jessie's 'Marylou' too, but while it sounds rather out of
place on this otherwise peaceful second side I prefer this recording to 'Kansas
City Southern'. Gene is convincing as the hard done by narrator, ruined by 'the
kind of woman who loves making a fool out of you'. By the end of the song she's
robbed him blind, much to Gene's horror!
'Hear The Wind' returns to the discussion of love as a meterology forecast, Gene
claiming to be 'your reflection' as two soulmates sit discussing their
respective 'hungers' for everything in life they never got to have. There are
worries about not being compatible here already, with the sun setting never a
happy Clark metaphor however pretty it seems, but Gene brushes them aside as
he's happy in the here and now - he can already hear the wind driving him on to
happiness. Perhaps slightly less original than 'Sister Moon', this is still
another very pretty track with some mor eexcellent pedal steel playing and a
gorgeous hum of a Gene Clark vocal.
'Past Addresses' is one of the most beautiful expressions of guilt in the AAA
canon. Having gone too far in an argument the narrator is pained to see his
loved ones hurt because of him - 'in the pains of fear'. Gene admits that he'll
probablyu do it again, that 'the tomorrow the trial of life is going to fall'
and that based on 'past addresses' rehabilitation doesn't look good. But by God
he'll try, his life force now inextricably lionked to the bitter tears that
fall from her eyes. Gene's Dylanesque lyrics are rarely better than here,
saying so much in such a detailed way (sample line: 'The shadows of your
motions lingered way beyond the statements I intended, timed').
The
album then drifts away with 'Silent Crusade' , a beautiful song ushered in by
the noises of the sea as Gene compares his life to a journey at sea, tossed
about by waves he doesn't understand (weirdly this album came out the exact
same month as 'CSN' with it's opening Crosby tale 'Shadow Captain', where a
darker subconsciousness takes over David's quto-pilot control almost without
him knowing; compare that song's 'who guides this ship?' with this song's 'Who
can guide that ship about?' Spooky!) Gene's back in mystical mode again,
claiming that the truth that's hidden behind people's eyes say much more than
words ever can and that all human vessels need inspiration to lift their sails
and angel wings to let them fly. Once again he's more than happy to have found
someone who can do both but leaves the end of the tale left unspoken, 'casting
away from the shore'...drifting far away from the wordy and worldly
explanations'. The result is a song even more powerful than 'No Other' closer
'Lady Of The North' full of sumputous Gene Clark poetry and more of his voice
at it's finest.
The
end result is an album of two halves, then. 'Two Sides' doesn't have the
consistency of 'White Light' and song by song doesn't quite match 'No Other' or
even outtakes set 'Roadmaster'. But when this album is at it's peak, as on
'Sister Moon' 'Past Addresses' and 'Silent Crusade' even the least supportive
fan will be struck by how much more beauty there is in the world when you own a
Gene Clark album. The man who gave us suns and moons and winds as examples of
his inspirations and drives ends up creating an album that tugs both ways, full
of aching sadness and regret and full of the sunniest, loveliest moments in his
canon. taken together, 'Two Sides' ends up a magical rainbow, a promise hanging
in the sky not that the worlds will never be flooded with tears again (he knows
that sadness and grief stalk him even at it's happiest) but that he has a
second chance at happiness. The result may be temporary (Messina is already
gone by the time of next album 'Firebyrd'
although much of that record is still clearly written for her) and Gene may be
a mere 14 years away from dying a sadly predictably lonely and needless death,
exaggerated by if not caused by his heavy living and substance abuses. But that
doesn't prevent this magical moment of clarity and happiness from representing
Gene experiencing that white light at it's fullest, with 'Two Sides' his most
dazzling - if at times his most ordinary - album. More people deserve to hear
this record, a beautiful work that might not quite be Gene's masterpiece but is
certainly one of them.
Chris
Hillman "Clear Sailin'"
(Asylum, 'Late' 1977)
Nothin' Gets Through/Fallen
Favourite/Quits/Hot Dusty Roads/Heartbreaker//Playin' The Fool/Lucky In
Love/Rollin' and Tumblin'/Ain't That Peculiar?/Clear Sailin'
"Seems like everybody's got an answer - and
nobody's got a plan"
Traditonally
Hillman's second solo album is dismissed as much as his first - bland versions
of bland songs and with an inspid and slick production to the point where I
don't think I've ever read a good review of this LP. To some extent that's
right - this is another very uneven LP that occasionally falls flat on it's
face in the need to sound like everybody else no matter how boring that makes
it. However when this album is at it's best - as on the three big ballads at
the heart of this album - Hillman has rarely been more moving or more truthful.
In a way this is Hillman's version of the 'Manassas' album without the
genre-dancing but with the same outpouring of grief over yet another broken
heart and a flagging career. Yes the disco tunes suck big time and the very
mid-70s production tries hard to make this the anonymous sell-out LP everyone
is telling Chris to make. But in those three songs ('Fallen Favourite' 'Rollin'
and Tumblin' and 'Clear sailin' itself) Hillman makes easily the most moving
recordings of his career full of quotable lyrics and moving melody lines. This
is a vulnerable side of the generally upbeat Hillman we've never really seen
before, a world full of 'faded denim and broken dreams', of crying in the night
'when there's nobody there' and 'feeling buried alive...makes me want to
shrivel up and die'. For these three songs Hillman records an album easily the
match of McGuinn's and Clark's returns to form in 1977 (heck, let's throw in 1977's
'CSN' album too)and in it's own way 'Clear Sailin' is a more powerful record
than any of these three already pretty powerful records (this was a great year
to be a Byrds fan and not just because of the McGuinn-Clark-Hillman reunion!)
The difference is that unlike Roger (whose bravely trying out a new sound),
Crosby (whose bravely returning to an old one he's been avoiding for years) or
Gene (whose been desperately trying to make an album for years that no one
wanted to put out) Hillman follows his major songwriting breakthrough with a
slick pop song and a random Carole Bayer Sager tune.
To
be fair, though, even these lesser moments only sound lesser because of their
surroundings. Heard back to back with 'Slippin' Away' (a record which played it
so safe it hurt) even these cover songs have a depth and a certain
'strangeness' to them that 'Slippin' only had at the very end (with
'Lifeboat'). That Bayer Sager tune 'Heartbreaker' for instance does exactly
what you'd expect it too - but then adds a powerful guitar-led tagline that
hints at the deeper primordial howling only sketched out on the surface. Danny
O' Keefe's song 'Quits' is rather thrown away with all those swirling harmonies
and all but is actually just a soft touch on a tough version. Even Hillman (and co-writer Peter Knobler)'s
lesser songs for this album like 'Play The Fool' and 'Nothin' Gets Through',
while bland pop songs, are at least more memorable than the bland pop songs
written for the Souther-Hillman-Furay or the McGuinn-Clark-Hillman years. Even
the one happy tune here, 'Hot Dusty Roads' is a miscast pretty singalong rather
than the cringing odd-one-out track it ought to appear. Somehow even the album
cover - a simple shot of Hillman flying a kite - seems brave, or at least
braver than it might have been: flying kites isn't exactly a 'cool' rock and
roll past-time and yet it fits Hillman's who - partly through the influence of
Gram Parsons - has often written about wind currents buffeting his characters
about and blowing them onto new directions. The difference here is that, while
Parsons was content to stay maudlin and nostalgic, the bouncier Hillman can't
keep himself down for too long, ready to sail every nasty breeze that comes his
way. Even so, it's for those three gorgeous heart-felt ballads that this album
should be remembered for and the main reason that I for one cherish this record
which sits right up there with 'White Light' 'Roger McGuinn' and 'If Only I
Could Remember My Name' in my affections despite being lesser known and more
ridiculed than any of them. Ain't that peculiar?
Hillman
and Knobler's 'Nothin' Gets
Through' features a sorrowful set of lyrics ('As lonely as a
minesweeper' is the arresting first line) set to a bouncy tune with a power-pop
chorus about how every emotion and feeling the narrator tries to get across to
his girlfriend fails. Alas the song soon turns into a list rather than a song
but there are some good lines and the feeling of frustration comes over loud
and clear.
The
classy 'Fallen Favourite'
is a fascimating song. Laidback and lazy on the verses before the tension of
the chorus hits, most songwriters would have settled for making this two
separate songs but sticking both different parts together gives this tune added
depth. Claiming that his loved one is merely 'living', not 'living and
learning' and that her 'sharpshooter eyes have gone aimless', ignoring the pain
he's in, the song is filled with heartbreaking metaphors from empty stages to
the lover's dance that's dying down as the music fades.
Danny
O'Keefe's 'Quits' may
be dressed up to sound like a cute puppy but it's a wolf behind all that gloss.
You can see why Hillman would have reached out for it at this point in his life
and the lyrics - if not the twee production - suit him well: 'This isn't
marriage any more, call it new call it different - it's not how it was before'.
The
joyous 'Hot Dusty Roads'
may well be Hillman trying to sit down and sound like old pal Stephen Stills
(who'd written a song of the same name for the first Buffalo Springfield record
in 1966). Both songs use the tried and tested metaphor of a road representing a
lifespan but this one also uses Stills' usual trick of trying to keep busy to
avoid the pain of something the narrator doesn't want to focus on. The song
tries hard to be happy but even this song's dreams of freedom are ultimately
short-lived.
'Heartbreaker' is a Carole Bayer Sager song better lnown from Dolly Parton's
cover version from the following year (it's the title track of her
'Heartbreaker' album in fact, one of her bigger sellers). Hillman's version is
less gauche yet still artificial, hardly in keeping with the honest
confessional tone of the rest of the album. The song does take off near the
end, though, thanks to a false ending and a nice Latyin style fadeout with lots
of guitar solo-ing, Hillman clearly learning from his Manassas days.
'Playin' The Fool' is a bouncy Hillman/Knobler original that's ,musically upbeat
but lyrically ready to throw in the towel. She's not only thinkling of going in
this song, she's out the door with her bags packed so Hillman tries to plead
with her to stay one last time. Alas the comedy chorus doesn't reallty fit this
song of heartbreak and result is more than a loittle disjointed.The riff's a
good one though.
'Lucky In Love' repeats the same formula but with a little more garce this time
around. The narrator thinks he's lucky, claiming he can 'take' the amount of
hartbreak he's gone through unlike some poor people out there. However this
soon proves to be an 'I'm Not In Love' style piuece of denial, with a lot of
unexpfressed anger bursting through the chorus
('You ruined the chances that I just wasn't taking!')
The
classy 'Rollin' and Tumblin'
is the clear album highlight, as the title suggests rising and falling between
several different sections as if reflecting on the many stages of Hillman's
marriage (it ends suddenly just as things are sliding downhill again,
suggesting that there's still some slight hope). Veering between light, shade
and overpowering darkness, the song seems doomed to this vicious cycle, Hillman
'crying at night when there's nobody there' and looking back over 'love letters
hidden from no one', wondering how it all got so wrong so quickly. A stunning
performance from Hillman's assembled cast of session musicians and a sensitive orchestral arrangement make
this easily Hillman's prettiest composition and a highlight of his live show
for many years to come.
Obscure
Smokey Robinson cover 'Ain't
That Peculiar?' tries hard to lighten proceddings but this nod forward
to the sort of thing Hillman will be doing on the 'McGuinn/Hillman' album of
1981 is pretty average stuff. At least it's nicely played averager stuff
though, with the playing a cut above most of the 'Slippin' Away' album, but
while this tale of heartbreak fits the album mood Hillman writes much better
songs himself.
The
album then ends with one final autobiographical lament with title track 'Clear Sailin'. Reflecting
that 'everybody's got an answer, but nobody's got a plan' Hillman vows to carry
on, looking forward to the next 'Hickory Wind' style lifechange to come his
way. That said, Hillman still sounds very down here, adding honestly that this
new alien experience in his life has left him feeling 'buried alive' and that
even religoion won't help. Still a good decade or so from his conversion (and
perhaps with half an eye on Roger McGuinn's and Richie Furay's) Hillman says
'I'm turning my back on you Jesus' before adding sorrowfully 'and I hope that
you understand', claiming to see 'Satan's sign' in his current predicament. The
result would have made a fabulous Flying Burrito Brothers song, with it's
country-rock lament and lyrics of heartbreak, but the song is also as heartfelt
as the best of the rest of the album, a testament to Hillman's writing skills.
Overall,
then, 'Clear Sailin' is a mixed LP but still represents a major leap forward from
Hillman's first record, with a good half album of excellent original songs that
emotionally explore Hillman's yurbulent personal life. Far from being another
one of those disposable mid-70s country-prog-rock albums, the slick and
polished production can't mask the sheer grit and realism of many of the best
songs. Hillman and writing partner Peter
Knobler are at their peak as songwriters here and of all pof Hillman's many
post-Byrds albums this is the one that's most satisfying; not on every track
perhaps but on enough songs to count. Now that Gene Clark's ouevre has
(thankfully) been re-appraised and better celebrated following his sad death
that leaves 'Clear Sailin' as the Byrd solo album that has been most unfairly
underlooked and over-valued.
Roger
McGuinn, Gene Clark and Chris Hillman "Three Byrds Land In London"
(Strange Fruit, Recorded 1977, Released
February 1997)
Gene Clark's K C Southern Band: Kansas
City Southern/Denver Or Wherever/Release Me Girl/Hula Bula Man
Chris Hillman: Hot Burrito #2/Rise and
Fall (Unlisted)/Nothing Gets Through/Rollin' and Tumblin'/Play The
Fool/Quits/Witching Hour/It Doesn't Matter - Both Of Us (Bound To Lose)
Roger McGuinn's Thunderbyrds: Lover Of
The Bayou/American Girl/Mr Spaceman/Why Baby Why? -Tiffany Queen/ Golden
Loom/It's Gone/Chestnut Mare/Dixie Highway/Shoot 'Em
McGuinn-Clark-Hillman: So You Want To
Be A Rock and Roll Star?/Mr Tambourine Man/Eight Miles High
"Through the long dark night we kept our hopes
held high, hoping to hear what we'd all been praying for...After all these
years of trying, tell me is it really worth it all to rise and fall?"
The first stirrings of what became the
McGuinn-Clark-Hillman reunions took place in 1977 when three foundig members of
The Byrds played together on stage for the first time in public since 1968
(when, for a six week spell, Clsrk was Cropsby's replacement). I still can't
decide whether the reunion was a big con designed to extract money as
shamelessly as possible or a brave but doomed attempt at three old friends trying
to bury the past while proving they still had a relevence in the 1970s. The sad
truth was that all three men's stock had fallen to the point where a joint tour
appealing to old fans was the only financially viable option. The happy
accident was that two of the three men couldn't have been in better form: Gene
Clark sounds revitalised, off the booze (temporarily) and back to owning the
stage, a brilliant front-man as well as a great singer and writer currently
plugging a rather good rarities set of outtakes ('Roadmaster'). Clark's backing
crew, The KC Southern Band, back him up neatly too, with a nice mix of being
well drilled but not overpolished. Chris Hillman too is on top form: his second
solo album 'Clear Sailin' is arguably his best solo record: accessible yet
deep, poignant and sad yet with a bite and the recent songs from Manassas and
the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band are pretty essential to curious Byrds fans too.
His band are pretty special too, mainly made up of the session musicians who
helped him out on 'Sailin' and they play Hillman's mixture of rock, pop,
country and bluegrass with almost as much aplomb as Manassas. Chris and Gene
really shine with the camera on them for a change instead of McGuinn or Crosby
and by and ;large they have the material to prove it, making the first disc of
this two-CD set a much happier ride than
you might have been expecting.
Unfortunately there are three things that
prevent this first ever fully live Byrds release (half of 'Untitled' doesn't
count!) being truly superb. The first is that Roger McGuinn sounds out of
sorts, The Byrds' original leader finding himself blown off the stage every
night by partners he still considered his juniors. His latest record,
'Thunderbyrd', is an awful mess of styles and sounds and he chooses the worst
material from it here: the lacklustre 'Why Baby Why?', Tom Petty cover
'American Girl' and one of his least interesting Bob Dylan covers 'The Golden
Loom'. McGuinn's band are bordering on hopeless: sauntering when they shoudl
rock ('Tiffany Queen' is truly limp) and turning most everything into 'pub
rock'. Secondly - and what's worse - is that the track listing is uneven, the
promoters clearly considering McGuinn the 'catch' of the three and giving him
around 40 minutes as opposed to Hillman's 30 and Clark's mere 20 (given that
Clark had released more or less triple the amount of songs as McGuinn on
leaving The Byrds this seems deeply unfair). The very worst thing about this
album, though - and something that must have seemed like a rip-off to crowds at
the time - is that the entire three sets are a warm-up for a reunion
concert...lasting just three songs. Gene wasn't even in the band when 'Rock and
Roll Star' was written and sounds very lost on it (the acerbicness the polar
opposite of his own poetic style). A shaky 'Mr Tambourine Man' makes McGuin
sound as if he's sitting on a washing machine. A closing five minute 'Eight
MIles High' (the first time Gene would ever have sung this song live) is
better, but even this is a pale facimilie of both the 'Untitled' era's 20
minute psychedelic jamming sessions or McGuinn's recent superb acoustic solo
versions (where his Rickenbacker was made to ring like a sitar!) After sitting
through the interminable McGuinn set you feel as if you deserve a bigger reward
somehow than three songs that have clearly been under-rehearsed compared to all
three men's solo shows.
Our advice is to stick with the first disc,
which is genuinely riveting. Gene's set includes a driving 'Kanasas City
Southern' (the ** track his band were named after), the cowboy drama 'Denver Or
Wherever', a smoky sultry preview of 'Release Me Girl' (to be re-recorded for
the first McGuinn-Clark-Hillman LP) with Clark in gorgeous voice and the sily
rock cover 'Hula Bula Man'. Chris is in reflective mood, opening with a jazzed
up version of the Flying Burrito Brother's 'Hot Burrito '#2' (Gram Parsons
would have been turning in his grave at the jazz lounge saxophone, but actually
this rockier arrangement works rather well), a terrific atmospheric 'Rise and
Fall', a punchy 'Nothing Gets Through', his solo masterpiece 'Rollin' and
Tumblin' (which doesn't quite come off live but still knocks spots off anything
else here - even Gene's songs), a cute 'Play The Fool', the odd cover 'Quits',
Stephen Stills' towering autobiography 'Witching Hour' (never released by
Stills until as late as 2009) and a glorious closing Manassas medley of 'It
Doesn't Matter' and 'Both Of Us (Bound To Lose)' (never played live by the band
except for on the record and easily the second CD highlight). Roger, meanwhile,
is coasting, with the highlights of his set a funky 'Lover Of The Bayou'
(although it's hideously overplayed compared to the Byrds' more subtle
version), a fun romp through 'Mr Spaceman', a rather off key 'Chestnut Mare'
and - the best of the solo songs - a rather oddball murder/drug song that
features Roger uncharacteristically demanding the audience to 'shoot 'em up!' A
new song exclusive to this set, it would have made a fine addition to the first
McGuinn-Clark-Hillman record (which was decidedly low on the 'McGuinn'). The
rest, though, is junk.
So, a soaring flight or a mid-air crash? Like
most Byrds projects there's enough brilliance in 'Three Byrds Land In London'
to prove what a talented band they were and how much life there was left in all
three on a good day. Gene shines as well as he can in 20 minutes and Chris
plays the set of his life, but The Byrds always struggled to translate their
sound onto the stage and that's sadly as true here as ever at times. This
second reunion, on stage this time, is as much of an insult to the band's
legend as the studio-bound first, with Crosby (twiddling his thumbs at the end
of a CSN studio project but no resulting tour) conspicuous by his absence. What
could have been the show of a lifetime is only part of the way there - with a
professional release sensibly delayed for another 20 years where, with no hope
of at least two of the Byrds ever joining another reunion, it sounded like both
a more interesting relic than it seemed at the time - and even more of a
frustratedly lost opportunity, with Clark badly sidelined yet again in
inter-band politics.
'Byrdmaniax' (1971) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-byrds-byrdmaniax-1971-album-review.html
'The Byrds' (1973) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-byrds-1973.html
Surviving TV Appearances http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-byrds-surviving-tv-appearance-1965.html
Unreleased Songs http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-unreleased-songs-1965-72.html
Non-Album Songs
(1964-1990) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-non-album-songs-1964-90.html
A Guide To Pre-Fame Byrds
Recordings http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-pre-fame-recordings-in.html
Solo/Live/Compilation
Albums Part One (1964-1972) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums.html
Solo/Live/Compilation
Albums Part Two (1973-1977) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums.html
Solo/Live/Compilation Albums Part Three (1978-1991) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums_9.html
Solo/Live/Compilation
Albums Part Four (1992-2013) http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/the-byrds-sololivecompilation-albums_16.html
Essay: Why This Band Were Made For Turn! Turn! Turn!ing https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/byrds-essay-why-this-band-were-made-for.html
Five
Landmark Concerts and Three Key Cover Versions https://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/the-byrds-five-landmark-concerts-and.html
