Life as a 23 year old aspiring lifelong-’60s-music-junkie was impossibly tough. Having feverishly devoured every proper Bealtes, Stones, Kinks, Byrds, Band, Allmans, Zombies, etc., etc. album I could get my hands on, I hastily moved on to pissing away now-embarrassing gobs of time wondering if I would eventually run out of things to listen to. The solo careers of the respective band members seemed the next obvious step, but, for the most part, that left me with a bunch of second tier works (at least compared to what these wunderkinds had done as part of their collectives). Even my ever-vigorous affection for John Lennon’s uniquely rewarding post-fab four output saw something less clever and classless and free in his lone years…
Then it happened… cue Gene Clark, ex-Byrd and lyric/vocal/music magnifico, possessed of a talent somehow surpassing even his unsung hero status… and action! He ripped my tiny Byrd-brain completely apart. Not only did The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark not sound anything like The Byrds he’d flown with, it didn’t sound like anything the other ’60s heavyweights were doing on their own. This was a goddamn country record! I’d soon discover the album’s hillbilly-heft was actually more a product of his short-lived collaboration with Doug Dillard (of stellar bluegrass-progressives, The Dillards) than it was Clark’s doing and that the rest of Gene’s solo work was far less banjo and mandolin driven, but the seed had been sewn. I was eternally smitten: I bought Echoes, White Light, Roadmaster, No Other, but no time was quite like my first time. In or out of The Byrds, this fantastic 1968 expedition is Gene Clark’s professional apex. The masterwork.
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