You know, you could say Gene Clark was bigger than the Byrds, or the Eagles, or the Hot Burritos Brothers, maybe Gram Parsons, but these guys were all brothers under the skin. These musicians in the late 60s through the soft rock California 70s, were all playing and fighting, swaggering, swearing and drugging around each other. So it is not quite that Gene Clark was better than the Byrds, but rather he was the Byrd and he helped event invent country rock and along with Gram and Roger, Crosby and Leadon, he made Cali rock what it became, even as he got left behind in it.
In 1977, as the first wave of punk took over the world, Gene Clark and a band of California aces, including Emmylou Harris on back up vocals Blood Sweat And Tears’ Jim Fielder on bass, and journey man and sometime Flying Burrito Brother Al Perkins and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter on guitar came together for one of the great divorce albums, a Here My Dear or Imperial Bedroom for country fans, a damaged heartbreaker sadly trailing in sadly stained soulful tears, the aptly named Two Sides To Every Story.
At the time the album was out of fashion and out of time, and stiffed. After his death in 1991, Gene Clark moved beyond the immediate former Byrd wrote “8 Miles High” story to place his legacy up there with Gram Parsons. All those albums ignored in 70s and 80s found their audience again and lived on, including Two Sides to Every Story, long out of print and now remastered with a live album, per Rolling Stone: “The majority of the live tracks were recorded in Denver in October 1975, and four were captured in Dallas in May of that year. One bonus track, “I Saw A Dream Come True” – a Clark original that he never put to tape in a studio – was recorded in 1984.”
The rockers on the ten track album, the fiddly dee “Home Run King” were little gems, no less than the gorgeous steel guitar on “Lonely Saturday”. It sounds like Gene is channeling Jim Reeves. The album is an aching beautiful and sad thing. The live album sounds a helluva lot like the Hot Burritos Brothers, and it has a country soulfulness and swing the Eagles never came close to.
Altogether, it is a lost country rock nugget, an album that should have hit big, and a heartbreaker of the first order, with a lead singer who could give Roger and Gram a run for their money.
On November 16, Gene would have been 70 years old if…
Grade: A
