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.