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: