Firefall, Undertow (1980)

The 1979-80 season must have been a tough one for Larry Burnett, since he came up with a mere two ditties for this round; subtract one anomalously jaunty Jock Bartley jam buried safely deep on side 2, and this is effectively a Rick Roberts auteurist LP. His vision, of a sort of primordial silky ooze that runs from one song to the next as if discrete units of songwriting were a thing of the past (or possibly future) is nothing if not cohesive; this is probably my vote for Firefall’s best, though it manages to win the dubious honor without a single standout track. “Business is Business,” a Burnett track declares; indeed: the business here is that of polishing off every idiosyncratic edge from lyrical content to studio musicianship (the single proper noun on the entire album is a lone reference to California, and an impersonal one at that). As such, Michael Clarke’s rote 4/4 timekeeping—his recorded swan song before his revived faux-Byrds touring act and sadly early death—can almost be read as masterful; no distracting jazz flourishes here, that’s for sure. Let Steely Dan hire Jeff Porcaro for one verse, an older club veteran for the next; Clarke in some ways embodies the core of the Firefall project, all bland and anonymous and easy to listen to, hard to focus on.

That being said, more gripping and harrowing than any percussive work he offered in life was the graphic, grueling letter Clarke offered in death, detailing his alcoholism and warning children not to follow in his footsteps. Undertow has my favorite Firefall cover art, really some of my favorite 70s-malaise imagery altogether, all dark and brooding and ominous and as fuzzy about identity as Friedkin's Cruising (what any of this had to do with their music, I can't tell). But Clarke's visual decline is even more powerful, a sad and stark trajectory from pop heartbreaker to emaciated leftover. RIP to a guy who chanced into a pretty great run of it, and locked into a tragic one at the same time.

Roger McGuinn (1973)

McGuinn still can’t write, but having Bob Dylan play harmonica on an opening track that sounds like a Dylan cover almost works. Other minor pleasures are to be found: a catchy melody on “M’Linda,” a random children’s chorus popping up on “Stone,” a few traditionals given nice 70s-rock arrangements. But the original five Byrds reunite (again) for “My New Woman” only to be drowned out by a gratuitous sax, and while “Lost My Drivin’ Wheel” fares better, it makes one miss Clarence White and Gram Parsons, who brought more fire to a version inexplicably left off Farther Along. “Hannoi Hannah” is about a mean joke played on a prostitute (typically classy lyrics by Jacques Levy), and the Moog experiment “Time Cube” is a mean joke played on the listener. So things aren’t great here—and on subsequent McGuinn solo efforts, they’d only rarely get better.

Parsons Green, Birds of a Feather (1988)

If you’re going to go the adult contemporary route, you might as well have the courage of your convictions. Closing an album with a four-minute a cappella “Quiet Joys of Brotherhood” (by Richard Farina/Sandy Denny), well, that counts. To get there, we listen through everything from Jimmie Rodgers to Donovan, all flattened into the same politely pleasant folk/country/bluegrass hybrid sway. Gene Parsons allows himself one homespun instrumental as on the solo LPs of old, and Meridian Green keeps herself restrained and kinda dull (her rare almost-guttural moments fall well short of what, say, Alannah Myles was doing at the time; feral, they are not). They seem pretty happy together—if you don’t pick that up from the cover, she’s “cooing like a dove/I’m so in love with you” on track 2 to remind you. Upon the release of this album, Lux Interior and Poison Ivy probably threw up on one another in protest.

McGuinn-Hillman (1980)

I have no idea who opened for Loverboy or Eddie Money in 1980, but I do know, with absolute certainty, that they sounded exactly like this album: crisp ringing trebly guitar chords hanging in the air, faux-anthemic synth climbs to anticlimactic pseudo-crescendos, plenty of open space for live handclaps, and not a song in sight. Drowning out the sad, lazy all-filler tracks is the giant sucking sound of the now-absent Gene Clark, responsible for many of the best moments in the previous McGuinn-Hillman affairs. In his place are a nonsensically sequenced consecutive double whammy of Graham Parker tunes on side 1, a procession of farmed-out hack-written songs neither better nor worse than the former Byrds’s inert originals, and the grinding death throes of the promises of the 1960s. I guess this is what America deserved for electing Reagan.

Capitol seemed to know this one was slated for oblivion; as far as I can tell, between the front and back covers, the target audience for this LP was inattentive bikers impulse-buying based on the logo, sunburn victims, and barefoot survivalists surfacing from their fallout shelters to buy batteries.

Crosby/Nash, Live (1977)

Graham Nash’s “Simple Man” followed by David Crosby’s “Foolish Man” at the start of side 2 here summarizes the intertwined careers of these buffoons better than any belabored snark possibly could. There are probably less essential albums out there—Rednex’s 1994 Sex & Violins comes to mind, though even Whale’s 1995 We Care just barely avoids the classification, “Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe” and all—but few less interesting ones. This just plods along, not even bothering to grab for the duo’s grade-A material, whatever that might be. If four minutes of Nash’s “Mama Lion” seems interminable, that’s only because you haven’t yet reached the epic closer, nearly ten excruciating minutes of Crosby’s orgy-of-idiocy “Déjà Vu.” 

Gene Clark, No Other (1974)

Visionary maximalist psychedelic country-rock albums are hardly in abundance, with good ones more rare yet. So it wouldn’t seem like Gene Clark was tapping a goldmine here—nor did the immediate results vindicate him, with the album flopping and meeting critical disinterest.

Gene Clark was right, and everyone else was wrong. More than just the great lost Byrds-member album (and let’s face it, it doesn’t take much to rank high in this particular canon), this is one of the great lost 70s albums, period. Thomas Jefferson Kaye’s production is bombastic but genuinely exploratory, slithering funk bass and constant keyboard hum and even Chris Hillman stopping by with his mandolin all contributing to rather than distracting from Clark’s grasp for transcendence. On the lyric sheet some of it reads as mystical babbling, but the delivery sells it—when he asks, “Have you seen the old world dying,” you don’t doubt that he has, and when "Some Misunderstanding" briefly totters toward formlessness, that voice, all yearning and longing and reminding that "we all need a fix," pierces the fog and pulls it together. Even if that old world for Clark might have been his sobriety—while “Life’s Greatest Fool” and “The True One” might have fit in on his earlier solo albums (high praise indeed), closer “Lady of the North,” co-written with Doug Dillard and the only shared songwriting on the record, shows how far things have moved from the Dillard & Clark albums. This is what they might have sounded like with a symphony and a mountain of blow—accoutrements that might crush a lesser talent, and which couldn’t possibly be sustained even by Clark, but which coalesce here into eight long songs (with no conceivable radio single in sight--oh, how David Geffen must have fumed) that form one unbroken, nearly perfect, suite. No Byrd ever put out, or even played on, a better album than this.

Too bad about the cover art, though. As much as I endorse the destabilization of gender roles, the strikingly attractive Clark looks terrible in bad makeup and (I think?) drag on the back:

The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band, Trouble in Paradise (1975)

Writing bland MOR rock must be more exhausting than it seems, because all these guys can squeeze their muses for is an average of three songs apiece, which really bleed together into one unbroken procession of musical, lyrical, and performance banality. Apparently Richie Furay was born again in the interim since the first SHF LP, so imagining the recording or the backstage of a show is vastly more entertaining than listening to the damn thing. Hillman nearly comes to life on “Follow Me Through,” buried deep on side two, but the arguable keeper is (as on round one) Souther’s “Mexico,” whose half-assed, shrugged-off tale of infidelity is an apotheosis of this scene’s darkness-free easy-sleazin’—not to mention a perfect embodiment of what Steely Dan was mocking in “Deacon Blues.”

The Byrds, Farther Along (1971)

Timing and production, they matter: I could see this ramshackle album recorded on a four-track in 1996 getting some underground traction, and I could see it slathered in Byrdsmaniax overdubs, coming out in 2007 on Sub Pop as a Fleet Foxes opening act. Recorded near-live in 1971, right after the aforementioned flop, it too wilted on the vine. If not a lost masterpiece, it still deserved better, as Gene Parsons and Clarence White really showed themselves the center of the group, Roger McGuinn overcame his lifelong songwriting stupor to kick things off with the self-penned chugging 50s-style riffage of “Tiffany Queen” (one of the most overlooked Byrds gems, with even modestly clever lyrics from Our Man of the Norman Vincent Peale Reading Club), and the wretched Skit Battin/Kim Fowley songwriting duo pushed their obnoxiousness into relative remission here. We even get a moving dead-dog tribute.

Probably this was all they had in them and it’s just as well the road ended here (it’s the final LP in the organically continuous life of the Byrds, with the 1973 original-lineup return a reunion rather than a next-album). But the thing deserved better than the critical and commercial neglect it received—even the bonus tracks on the CD reissue kinda kill it.  

The Byrds, Byrdmaniax (1971)

The near-universal consensus is that producer Terry Melcher killed this album by drowning it in sickly sweet strings and horns. Which gives him both too much and too little credit; okay, he lays it on thick, no question, but this was bound for mediocrity no matter who tweaked the knobs. Nothing could polish these tunes into gold, nor does Melcher entirely stifle what is there; McGuinn’s gentle but simple “Kathleen’s Song” was going to be endearing but forgettable whether or not swirling symphonic fills were crammed into its open spaces.

That and the Gene Parsons co-write “Pale Blue” are the fearless leader’s most—only—valuable contributions (the less said about his faltering stab at political commentary, “I Wanna Grow Up To Be a Politician,” the better; on his go-to co-composer Jacques Levy, let even less be said). Team Battin/Fowley can’t compete with even that, turning in more of the lazy pap that marked Battin’s Byrdsian contributions. Clarence White moves behind the mic for a few songs, credibly enough, though surely even the young Jackson Browne had better offerings for him to cover than “Jamaica Say You Will.”

At least they were smart enough to leave off the once-requisite Dylan cover that traded in and simplified the complicated sneer/sorrow combo of “Just Like a Woman” for a more straightforwardly sentimental version that thus missed the point.  Otherwise, all the markings of a slapdash contract filler are here, including the goofy, unappealing cover and title. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what uninspired journeyman rock music feels like.