For those that knew him, there seemed to be two Harold Eugene “Gene” Clarks, each contradicting the other. There was Gene Clark the country boy from Tipton, Missouri and Gene Clark the mid-’60s L.A. rock star and frontman for the Byrds. He had the chiseled looks to earn the nickname “Prince Valiant” and looked every bit the ideal frontman, yet suffered crippling stage fright. While his band took sterling Bob Dylan covers to the top of the charts, Clark penned songs that earned the admiration of Dylan himself. He was humble and quiet, yet since he wrote all the Byrds’ early songs, his first royalty check allowed him to wheel around town in a maroon Ferrari while the rest of the band was still broke. His last songwriting credit for the band during their heyday was “Eight Miles High,” and he departed soon after due to a “fear of flying.” Even with his posthumous cult fandom, Clark’s visionary composite of country and rock doesn’t command the same reverence as erstwhile fellow-Byrd Gram Parsons.
His solo career always seemed snakebit; his albums under-performed while covers of his songs sent the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt towards superstardom. Yes, the Byrds’s 1973 reunion album on David Geffen’s Asylum Records was an all-out critical and commercial disaster, but it was Gene who emerged from the wreckage with the album’s strongest songs and performances, to the point where Geffen gave him a recording budget of $100,000 to realize his masterpiece in 1974.** For one glorious moment, it seemed that Clark’s solo fortunes had finally turned, and you can hear almost every single one of those dollars poured into No Other, a deliriously opulent, rococo work in a decade filled with them. But when it was time to play the album for Geffen, he took one look at the eight songs on the vinyl and yelled at Clark: “Make a proper fucking album!”, throwing the test pressing in the garbage without even listening to it. No money would go to promote the album and No Other tanked, all but ending Clark’s career. One of the most exquisite spiritual seekers in song, Clark was dead by the age of 46, ravaged by alcohol and heroin.
Misunderstood for decades, No Other’s audience slowly emerged. 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell revered the album, and supergroup This Mortal Coil (featuring members of Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance) covered two Clark songs in the ’80s. In 2014, Beach House, Fleet Foxes, the Walkmen, Grizzly Bear, and Wye Oak convened to perform the album in full. While on the surface it seemed like a curious tribute –those bands’ collective discography has less ornamentation than one song on No Other– the emotional weight of it has resonated with a new generation. “Some of the lyrics [...] just destroy you,” Beach House’s Alex Scally told The New York Times. “There’s something really touching about it.” So it makes sense that this gorgeous and profound reissue of No Other now comes in a lavishly detailed and loving box set on 4AD (Geffen never even bothered to release the album on CD), featuring an 80-page hardbound book, extra sessions, a 5.1 surround mix of the album, and a documentary by Paul Kendall.
Perceived at the time as an example of cocaine-fueled excess, No Other was actually written during a reflective, sober, family-oriented time in Clark’s life. Holed up in Mendocino, Clark slowly pieced the songs together while gazing out at the Pacific Ocean then took the songs to L.A. producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye. While his previous album, 1971’s White Light, was a spare and sublime acoustic set, this album featured seemingly infinite layers. By the time you’ve reached the end of the first song, “Life’s Greatest Fool,” you’ve already been walloped by a galloping backbeat, pedal steel, big gospel choirs, and Clark’s voice hitting a previously unheard high register against the backdrop of 16 supporting players. Every moment on the album finds Clark reaching higher and digging deeper, Kaye’s arrangements goading and challenging him at every turn.
Clark took cues from the spiritual uplift of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and the moral squalor of Rolling Stones’s Goat Head’s Soup; fittingly, No Other explores the dichotomy of mankind’s potential for higher consciousness and the luridness of its lower half. Clark hinted that the foreboding slink of “Silver Raven” was about aliens and flying saucers, while the book reveals it was Gene’s nickname for his wife Carlie’s dancing shoes. The delirious “Strength of Strings” is a tug of war between euphoric highs and crippling depressive states, with Clark and backing choir oscillating between the two extremes “on the cosmic range.” Clark was notorious for never picking up a book, and his ideas of the cosmos and Zen philosophy mostly arose in conversation with friends and filtered down into his songs, but they were profound and deeply felt nonetheless.
Throughout, Gene details his struggle to pierce the smog of ‘70s SoCal decadence. The breezy country rock of “The True One” explores the precarity of delusion: “Just walk upstairs and ask/ You’ll be likely directed down/Into the reality/Of what you are doing,” Clark sings, adding: “Sometimes it’s so hard to see/ Which one is the true one.” On the heartbreaking “From A Silver Phial,” his subject is a woman who puts “her faith into the moon and stars” yet finds herself imprisoned in a toxic relationship. By song’s end, her sole means of survival comes from making her master’s “lower self worth while.”
Even soul-seeking has its own perils, as on the album’s eight-minute brooding centerpiece, “Some Misunderstanding.” The lyrics stem from a dream that roused Clark in the middle of the night, meditating on interconnectedness and the dual vision of “every expectation/And...what I realize.” As Kaye erects a mountain of keyboards, acoustic guitars, piano, steel guitar, fiddle, and choir, Clark reaches the summit only to come to the understanding: “If you sell your soul/To brighten your role/You might be disappointed/In the lights.”
The album ends with “Lady of the North,” a sublime ode to Clark’s wife propelled by piano, pedal steel, and an electronically phased violin line that drifts away like a pink cloud at album’s end. But even amid the joyful sounds, there’s a sorrowful undertone, as if Clark himself doesn’t quite believe in the happiness he’s found. When No Other suffered its ignoble fate, Clark never quite recovered; both his career and marriage crumbled soon after. It’s easy to draw a comparison to frustrated country-rock saints like Parsons or Townes Van Zandt. But as Alex Abramovich wrote in London Review of Books about Clark, these songs “carve their own, canyon-sized niche.”
The adoring repackaging covers every facet of the album. No aspect of it goes unexplored, from details on every player to the reason Greta Garbo owned a copy of the album. There are pages devoted to the mansion where the album photo shoot took place, as well as a story explaining how the ruggedly handsome Gene Clark wound up on his own album cover in drag. There are outtakes of all the songs (including a few passes at Clark’s “Train Leaves Here This Morning” that the Eagles had tackled on their first album), but after hundreds of spins of the original, it feels odd to hear these lavish songs strippeddown, like glimpsing the Sistine Chapel through scaffolding or seeing Prince in a pair of sweatpants. The cumulative effect both demystifies No Other while exalting it. Tragically ignored during its time, the album takes its rightful place it alongside Love’s Forever Changes, Judee Sill’s Heart Food, or Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, bringing together the conflicted, clashing aspects of Gene Clark’s art into a cohesive whole.
Buy: Rough Trade
