Gene Clark, Firebyrd (1984)

The hurdles here are many: synth-clouded production, apparent songwriting exhaustion on the part of Clark, the somewhat desperate-seeming gambit of opening with a new spin on “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and the album title itself, less effective in invoking his old band than in reminding us that Roger McGuinn had already engaged in low-grade worldplay with the (admittedly even worse) Thunderbyrd several years earlier.

Once he starts singing, none of that matters: weary and sad down to the core, that melancholy Clark voice pierces through the overlay of detritus and delivers a deeply felt album, drum sound be damned. Of the nine tracks, two are reclamations—the aforementioned opener and the Byrds classic “Feel a Whole Lot Better.” The synthetic accoutrements are disorienting at first—hey, this stuff is fine for the Human League, but this is the guy who gave us White Light, cripes—but again, Clark pierces the sonic veil. When he tries to elude the “twisted reach of crazy sorrow” on the Dylan song, it’s as close to an autobiographical thesis statement as other people’s lyrics can come.

Of course, there are other more obvious theses: “Rodeo Rider” uses a pretty thin metaphor of a tired cowboy on the road to express Clark’s own predicament. Again, delivery supersedes the rather facile songwriting. Clark surrounded himself with much of his old No Other crew, overlooked talents from the 70s; if Andy Kandanes hardly revolutionizes the drum kit and seems gratuitous as a co-writer on “Rodeo Rider,” the kind of song Clark would have tossed off in his sleep a decade earlier, their co-written “Rain Song” is one of the most beautiful, aching songs in the entire Clark songbook. Thomas Jefferson Kaye is on-hand for support too, offering up the brooding, ominous “Vanessa,” another highlight.

As a solo songwriter, Clark only has two new turns, one of which, “Made for Love,” is a bit cringe-worthy in its declaration that “most of all, girls are made for boys to love.” But if Gene never took Women’s Studies 101, he can still claim the authoritative take on Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind,” and Firebyrd closes with his other solo composition, “Blue Raven,” an update of the amazing “Silver Raven,” one decade of disappointment later. It leans a bit heavily on a flute melody, which goes from lovely to intrusive by the end, but as the summation of the album’s backward-looking resignation and a cataloging of opportunities lost and destroyed, it’s again sung to perfection. Clark is on a Hank Williams level of high-lonesome here, and no keyboard or drum reverb can stand in his way. Firebyrd is probably too marred to qualify for greatness, but it carries more emotional weight than anything else done by a former Byrd since his own lost classic of a decade prior.

Also, I'm not sure when that cover shot was taken (there are multiple covers for this album, which was poorly and erratically distributed), but for a guy on the verge of drinking himself to death, Clark looks remarkably good, like a cross between an early John Rechy and a proto-emo twink. 

The Byrds, Fifth Dimension (1966)

When Roger (then still Jim) McGuinn explained in a 1965 interview that the Byrds were modifying folk music to “meet the nuclear expansion and jet age,” it sounded like a brilliant summation of the Zeitgeist. It turned out he just wanted to sing songs about airplanes; “2-4-2 Fox Trot (The Lear Jet Song)” here is just the first of many to follow. In its limp lethargy, it’s far from alone; I wouldn’t be the first to call Fifth Dimension a killer single with ten b-sides. If “Eight Miles High” was a departing gift from Gene Clark, his generosity was somewhat wasted. As the most heavily McGuinn-composed Byrds album to date, this reflected the hole at the center of the group. McGuinn has perilously little to say, and even padded out with covers and traditionals from “Hey Joe” to “John Riley,” the strain shows (his opening “5D (Fifth Dimension)” sounds like a Dylan cover, except with mushy roundabout lyrics). It could be worse, though—David Crosby’s debut solo songwriting credit “What’s Happening?!?!” anticipates decades of blathering pseudo-profundity from the insufferable Beat-aping man of boundless ego, but at least someone was smart enough to leave his equally tuneless “Psychodrama City” an outtake.

Credit where credit is due, though: McGuinn the songwriter ain’t much to marvel at, but his Coltrane-influenced guitar work, tested out a bit on “I See You” and then given full airing on “Eight Miles,” remains mindblowing. If only he had gone into some jazz-wonk underground instead of the bland rock that rendered him inert after this, unto eternity…

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 4 Way Street (1971)

It’s hard not to appreciate the sheer rockstar dickishness of opening this double-live album with a purported “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” that runs 30 seconds, most of it background noise. Plus, it gets the song out of the way right quick to make way for Young’s “On the Way Home.” That Y towers over CSN as always is barely necessary to mention, but the formless bloat of the C songs are handled as gracefully as possible, by lumping a few together early on and dispensing with them thus. Stills, as always on live recordings, absolutely murders his songs—not in the hip-hop style of killing it, but as in, mangles and abuses them until they are lifeless sonic corpses. Truly, the man’s stage presence is nil, and that the album ends with nearly 20 minutes of him would be unbearable if a decent chunk of that were not messy guitar clanging with Young. Nash, always more pretty than smart, at least gets a dig in at Mayor Daley on “Chicago,” and if it’s obvious, well at least it’s not as wrongheaded as some of his songs about Vietnam vets and whatnot. Really this would be best served by extracting the Young songs, appending them to Live at Massey Hall 1971, and leaving the other three to fend for themselves (they’d actually sound better without Young there to put them to shame so constantly)—but all that being said, they do harmonize nicely, and it’s worth it for that.

Gene Parsons, Melodies (1979)

With a title like that, you’d be forgiven for expecting some sort of swirling pop swell, all harmony vocals and lush hummable tunes. Instead, the first half offers the worst of both worlds: songs that are suffocated by the production, but still refuse to die (all four opening tracks crawl, rather interminably, past the four minute mark, and “Melodies of a Bird in Flyght” simply cannot bear the weight of its title--what could?). It sounds like the record label demanded a soft-rock hit, and Parsons didn't know what to do.  

The only surprise on the album comes when, after all that, things take a sharp midpoint swerve for the better. Parsons acquits himself well on a “Hot Burrito #1” rendition that has surely reduced lesser singers to rubble, and a few of his originals (“Little Jewels” especially) come close to qualifying as buried treasure—precisely the sort of thing you’re hoping for when you flip to side two of a record by the Byrds’ late-period (but best) drummer. I haven’t the slightest idea what a Gene Parsons show was like, but I picture him playing dinner clubs in marinas, modest and unassuming but every now and then silencing the house with something pretty. And lest that sound dismissive, let me be clear: his solo albums are better than McGuinn’s or Hillman’s, hands down.  

Crosby, Stills & Nash, Daylight Again (1982)

To be fair, this album is less terrible than one would be justified in fearing; for two tracks in the middle of side 1, it achieves a decent groove (even if Stills strains so hard for anthemic weight on “Southern Cross” that gives himself an REO Speedwagon hernia). I think Nash might be going for some very un-Hollies-like Foreigner-style riffage on “Into the Darkness”; Crosby opens “Delta” with “Waking/Stream of consciousness,” never a promising sign—but fortunately he’s otherwise held in abeyance. Stills largely hijacks side 2 and runs it into the ground with turgid MOR rock; never one to bypass a chance to relive past (pseudo-)glories, he ends things with an idiotic glommed-on revival of “Find the Cost of Freedom” that drags the title track from very-nearly-evocative to sad Cleveland-rock-city-where-are-we-again? medley terrain. As usual, Nash comes off best, even when he writes such an insipid platitudinal greeting-card of a song for his wife that you briefly wonder if it was really some sort of passive-aggressive insult.

I do love the album cover, no kidding.

The Flying Burrito Bros, s/t (1971)

The post-Parsons FBB fills his gap with future soft-rock maestro Rick Roberts—yet, instead of the expected sharp decline, it coalesces around a remarkably organic mellow cohesion that the first two lacked. Was Parsons a better songwriter? Yeah, probably (though Roberts offers more competition than you might expect based on his later Firefall sleepwalking). But Parsons always strained to cultivate his proto-urban-cowboy affect, whereas the lower-stakes Roberts songbook sounds like he’s actually been to Colorado on the song of that title. Chris Hillman takes a performing backseat, relegated to bass, but the four songs he co-wrote with Roberts have precisely the low-key appeal that Parsons, whatever his other merits, rarely achieved. Michael Clarke drums with the usual rote disinterest, but ghosts of Byrds past appear more vividly with the Gene Clark cover “Tried So Hard”—not first-class Clark material, but perfect for this album’s drowsy charm. If these guys had stepped out of the GP-shadows with a new band name, this one might be remembered for the soft gem it is, instead of being unfairly relegated to an imaginary aftermath. 

Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, featuring Gene Clark, City (1980)

The group has been realigned to McGuinn and Hillman, featuring Gene Clark, with the latter turning in one-per-side songwriting duties. Plenty of the other songwriting is farmed out, and you need not be a rockist all invested in authenticity and whatnot to find that a little perverse (or telling). The album actually benefits from its atrocious artwork (with the two leads clean-cut and business-dressed as yuppies in a set of photos plastered against a Wall Street backdrop; the Byrds as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman?)—expectations are so low that, when the bland pleasantries begin, they’re surprisingly refreshing. Anyone expecting incisive commentary on the urban crisis will be let down by McGuinn’s “The City,” but “Skate Date” is a song where he seems to embrace his banality and run with it for three silly enjoyable minutes; I hum this song so much that my partner, who may not ever have heard it, now hums it too, second-hand. Clark’s “Won’t Let You Down” is more Byrdsian classicism filtered through questionable 70s production, a high point of the album and the latter part of his sad career, while Hillman’s songs are marginally more lively than his solo LPs from this era. 

Overall, some of the best utter mediocrity of the late 70s. 

The Hillmen, s/t (1969)

“The planet earth was not ready for BLUE GRASS,” Chris Hillman’s liner notes explain of the quartet he snuck into as a mere high-school age mandolin picker, “so into the vault went our story … I put down the mandolin, picked up the bass and became a byrdie.” The group never secured a record deal, which is why its 1962-63 recordings emerged only at the end of the decade, but not for lack of effort—notions of purity be damned, they covered Dylan like every other young person with a guitar between JFK and the internet. Though Vern and Rex Gosdin (later affiliated with another Byrd on Gene Clark’s first solo LP) run the show, Hillman sang lead on the “When the Ship Comes In” cover, and the whole affair is sprightly, enjoyable, and of sheerly archival value. It helps stake Hillman’s claim to being the true OG of L.A. country-folk rock, but probably few will confuse this for Bill Monroe.

I do wish I had more to say, since I violated dollar-bin protocol and spent a somewhat unconscionable twelve bucks on this at the Princeton Record Exchange, but it's, y'know, some young guys with stringed instruments doing their thing. With all due respect, I'm pretty sure the world's readiness was not the reason they never took off. 

Crosby, Stills & Nash, CSN (1977)

Truly, would it trouble Stills or Crosby so much to write actual songs? Their formless, lifeless tunelesscapes drone on interminably, then crawl away without leaving much but the sticky residue of their insufferable smugness; park bench mutations, indeed. The beneficiary here is Nash, whose trite simpleton songs at least bother to gesture at things like melody (though dropping acid in Winchester cathedral, however personally transformative it may have been, hardly makes for compelling song fodder; way to go, Graham, nobody did anything that wild and crazy in the 70s). At least it ends with Stills riff-rocking a bit on “I Give You Give Blind”; it would be better as a Neil Young jam, but generally speaking, the more and/or louder guitar, the relative less overt Stills presence--always for the better.

Still, you could listen to this album, vote for Gerald Ford, and feel no cognitive dissonance. 

Firefall, Elan (1978)

Both lead singles are Rick Roberts jams, but Larry Burnett’s songs have a marginally more human feel, maybe just because of the dirty harmonica on “Wrong Side of Town,” maybe just because he oozes such sleaze that the stench of the organic finds its way into his songs, their insipid blandness failing to provide sufficient antiseptic measures. They also have a guy named Jock onboard (he'd been there from the start, and later he'd steal the group).

Whatever: third time at bat is neither better nor worse than the two before, though I liked it better when they reserved the band photo for the back cover. As always, the album slides in one ear, out the other, leaving little but a burnt-coke aftertaste. One does hope Michael Clarke was reading a good novel while nominally keeping time, because good Christ, my grandmother could do this. 

Manassas (1972)

When a double-album of adventurous but fundamentally genre-bound country-folk rock music involves distinct titles for all four sides of vinyl, we are facing some vastly over-conceptualized work here. The first side is called “The Raven”; does Stephen Stills think he’s Edgar Allan Poe? Don’t answer that.

Such qualms notwithstanding, Manassas is so easily the best things Stills ever did that it would be hard to reconcile it with the case study in Narcissistic Personality Disorder he so helpfully offered on his previous solo albums, were it not for the obvious explanation: he’s partially drowned out by the six other dudes in the group. Okay, the rhythm section gets a little redundant, but these guys do a pretty good job of holding Stills in check. The sections aren’t as thematically cohesive as he’d like, maybe because what in the history of American iconography wouldn’t fit under “The Wilderness,” but the songs hold tight for a remarkable 70 minutes—that’s at least 65 minutes longer than any other continuous quality run in the Stills oeuvre—and he has the good sense to bury the ridiculous “Love Gangster” at the back of side 3—or, excuse me, “Consider” (co-written by Rolling Stones bassist Bill Wyman, it’s really more an anticipation of the lecherous-caveman shtick on his gloriously goofy solo album Monkey Grip a few years later).

When the band stretches out, it’s wholly in the pocket; when Stills claims the spotlight, he’s uncharacteristically tuneful and bearable. Chris Hillman doesn’t quite literally play second fiddle—there’s only one, technically—but acts as consigliere, from guitar to mandolin to occasional lead vocal. He only gets two songwriting credits (one of which, “It Doesn’t Matter,” apparently excluded co-writer and Hillman Burrito-brother Rick Roberts, who later reclaimed it as he began his soft rock descent in Firefall—whose inclusion of Michael Clarke on drums brings some sort of bizarre Byrdsian symmetry to the entirety of 1970s corporate rock), but his presence is felt throughout. Whenever he took the lead, as his later solo albums showed, things swung toward the MOR with haste. But as sidekick, Hillman was impeccable—reining in Stills being a case in point.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Deja Vu (1970)

My theory as to why this album towers so high above most everything else C, S, and N ever did: the gravitational pull of four gigantic egos held everyone down to earth for once (more or less: Crosby can’t resist one aimless pseudometaphysical sonic quagmire on the title track) and the competitive spirit when each one only got a few songwriting at-bats meant all killer, no filler—there’s no space on the record for the latter. Crosby might think almost cutting his hair is an event as important as the civil rights movement, but it’s better that he sticks to the smaller topic, and the musicians around him burn and slash through his self-absorption anyway. Nash spends his two tracks on domesticity, but for once his vapidity took on topicality in the historical moment, and the buoyant melodies help. Stills seems to have tried revising his songs for once instead of just thought-vomiting them straight out; it helps, too. And Young, who could never be contained by these milquetoast clowns for long, delivers some quivering beauty on “Helpless” and then pretends Crazy Horse is around with some garage-stomp to close things out. It all holds together better than it could ever deserve to.

Firefall, Luna Sea (1977)

It's easy to sound interesting about interesting things, they carry you along. And it's easy to rail compellingly against awful things, because who doesn't love a rant? But faceless mediocrity, that's always a challenge. I have this fantasy of editing an anthology in which I round up a bunch of my favorite authors and have them each compose an essay on Firefall's second album. Quite possibly nobody in the universe except me would be into this, but imagine: Civil War/Reconstruction historian Eric Foner, novelist Tim O'Brien, queer activist Sarah Schulman, hell, since it's a fantasy anyway, James Baldwin and Andrea Dworkin (content of arguments notwithstanding, she writes with fire and I'd love to see her tackle this, a paragon of the banality of patriarchal crooning), all really putting themselves to the test, because this LP gives you so very, very little to work with. Could they thrive so far outside their comfort zones? Or would they draw it inevitably back: Foner to the futility of Gettysburg, O'Brien to the postwar numbness, Schulman to pervasive heteronormativity, Baldwin to the fact that there is no fire this time?

That would be fascinating. Luna Sea, not so much. Somewhere inside its polished aural product Michael Clarke keeps time, thus the Byrds connection. But I played it four times back to back, and I already can't recall a single detail. Because there are none; this is what sonic airbrushing sounds like.

Maybe there's some culture-of-narcissism or deep-70s-malaise or even posthuman allegory to be worked out here, but I'm lazy and settled for Christgau-aping, having come up with this before surrender:
The diminishing returns begin with the title, and never stop. If the debut was Reheated Burrito Brothers, this is Grounded Burrito Bros.

Yeah, well, turns out Christgau himself took a stab at it, and flailed too (though well played at the end). Really the only thing I will ever remember about this album is my mental image of an aggravated Bob Christgau listening to it in 1977, walking in circles around his apartment, and cursing to himself.

Crosby, Stills & Nash, Allies (1983)

While the early 80s fell like an asteroid on most classic-rock dinosaurs, I’m kind of partial to Stills' “War Games,” perhaps because at 2:18 it’s a nice zippy respite from the crushing bloat of these guys’ typical songs. Mostly-live Allies has almost nothing else to offer—Graham Nash doesn’t like nuclear weapons or pollution, and wrote some bad songs to prove it—but at least the drugs keep Crosby largely sidelined. Nash’s “Wasted on the Way” is a pretty self-satisfied taking-stock song from a guy who can’t keep his asshole bandmate off the smack and has to resort to padding albums out with half-decade-old live cover songs, but remains more forgivable than Stills’s lumbering closing rendition of “For What It’s Worth,” beaten and battered into arena-rock mush, and just horrid. Neil Young flopped this year too, but not this much; even at his goofy worst, he still towers over these gasbags.   

Gene Parsons, Kindling (1973)

Surely I am not the only one who spent several years listening to the Byrds entirely unaware of Gene Parsons's existence on the presumable grounds that it subconsciously registered as a typographical error conflating Gene Clark and Gram Parsons. I'm not even sure I was entirely disavailed of that slip until side 2 of this record, his solo debut. It was in the Byrds bin for two bucks, that was as much reflection as I gave it.

Parsons drummed for the post-Sweethearts Byrds, and while skepticism toward solo albums by drummers is generally well warranted (and toward late-period Byrds even more so), damned if the other GP doesn’t deliver a winner, a smartly understated, often lovely folk excursion, largely self-penned and –played. He opts for consistency over standout moments, so the absence of big songs is testament not to failure but success; that said, the side-two opening sequence of “Sonic Bummer” and “I Must Be a Tree” trumps pretty much anything other non-Clark/that-GP ex-Byrds were doing in 1973. A hidden gem of the Byrds catalog, though he may be overplaying the rustic card on that cover.

Chris Hillman, Clear Sailin' (1977)

I am utterly unable to distinguish this from the prior album, except that he’s sailing a kite on the beach on the cover. The second-tier soft-rock trenches of the 1970s seem like a pleasant place to reside. Songwriting clearly optional.

Roger McGuinn, Cardiff Rose (1976)

Bringing in Mick Ronson on guitar is perhaps the only brilliant move in McGuinn’s entire lackluster solo career. His songwriting remains abysmal—the solo-writing-credit “Friend” relies on rhyme schemes that a fifth grader might come up with—but Ronson brings some pizzazz, raunching up even the closing Joni Mitchell cover “Dreamland.” McGuinn occasionally rises to the challenge—zone out a little (easy to do, as it’s still a McGuinn solo LP) and “Rock and Roll Time” sounds like the Clash. “Partners in Crime” is a wince-inducing survey of New Left heroes, but the Blood on the Tracks outtake “Up to Me” is a really smart pick for the requisite Dylan material, since it was the only version available at the time. For all this, the album only rates as decent—but that’s enough to qualify as McGuinn’s peak to date.