Riffs & things

Gene Clark

Dillard & Clark

White Light

Roadmaster

Sundazed

Once guitarist-songwriter Gene Clark quit the Byrds in 1966, leaving behind "Eight Miles High," "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" and others (all penned before his 21st birthday), his career was never the same, pop-star wise. Neither were the Byrds, for that matter — the late Clark was their best lyricist and writer.

His great debut solo album, Gene Clark & the Gosdin Brothers (bros who did little more than add backing vocals) showed Clark's love of psyche-era Beatles, Byrdsian pop with hints of country. (The Sundazed 2007 reissue is highly recommended.) The album, released concurrently with the Byrds' Younger Than Yesterday, flopped. 

Clark next signed to A&M Records, teamed with banjoist-songwriter friend Doug Dillard for '68's masterful The Fantastic Exhibition of Dillard & Clark. The LP also featured a future Eagle and Flying Burrito, highlighted by "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow's lovely slide guitar, alongside mandolins, dobros and other stringed things that hummed and plucked below Clark, Dillard and Leadon's open-highway harmonies. 

The album is a sparkly collection of songs stripped country-bare, intimate — as if the musicians' elbows were touching during recording — but reconstructed on Clark's popish melodies, particularly on the heartbreaking "Out on the Side" and the dusty "Train Leaves Here This Morning," a Bernie Leadon co-write the Eagles covered on their debut. The decidedly un-hip record dropped when California was still dropping acid, and it stiffed accordingly, but dovetailed with Hollywood's rising country rock contingent, had a huge hand in defining that genre. (The second Dillard & Clark album, 1969's Through The Morning, Through The Night added even more bluegrass. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss covered that album's title song and lovely "Polly" on their massive 2007 album Raising Sand.)

Lots of influential records flop, so in autumn 1969, Clark, who was no stranger to booze and drugs, split Hollywood and its soul-corruptive vortexes with his wife-to-be and settled on a dozen ocean-adjacent acres in Northern California. Here he basically wrote White Light, an album of gentle power and absolute beauty. 

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