The Byrds, Ballad of Easy Rider (1969)

As a rule, albums whose second tracks are written by the new bass player about a dog and feature a mid-song drum solo are to be avoided at all costs. Yet somehow Ballad of Easy Rider proves an (most likely the) exception—and the best late-Byrds LP. McGuinn spends his entire songwriting capital on the lovely opening title track, one of his greatest moments, but the rest of the band steps up admirably, from short-term bassist John York and his aforementioned “Fido,” to co-writers Clarence White and Gene Parsons, whose “Oil in My Lamp” provides another high point. One could read the abundance of covers—there are a lot even by Byrds standards—as a sign of creative exhaustion, but they also reflect curatorial sense and wisdom, with “Tulsa County” and Woody Guthrie’s humane, still sadly relevant “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” delivered with feeling. It’s a soft, understated record, all the better for not striving to be iconic.

Okay, McGuinn can’t hold back from ending things on another of his stupid spaceship songs, but even that brings a loopy charm.

The Byrds, Younger Than Yesterday (1967)

Probably the only album in rock history in which a band recovers from a 3^rd album slump by having the bass player take the lead songwriting role. What’s amazing is that Chris Hillman, for one record and one record only, very nearly fills Gene Clark’s shoes. “Have You Seen Her Face,” “Time Between,” Thought and Words,” they just roll out so seemingly effortlessly, pop-rock manna from four-string heaven. Throw in the slightly lesser (but still wonderful) “The Girl with No Name” and the Hillman/McGuinn co-written opener “So You Wanna Be a Rock ‘N’ Roll Star,” and this is Hillman’s greatest moment, a triumphantly jangly revitalization. Like floating garbage lifted by a rising tide, even David Crosby writes an actual song for once with “Renaissance Fair,” perhaps his finest turn.

This was probably the end of the line for this particular style of music; by the next year, you’d have to up your artistic ambitions or become the Monkees. It’s a delightful departure (I’m just gonna keep pretending Crosby’s “Mind Gardens” never happened).

Gene Clark, Silverado ’75: Live & Unreleased (2008)

In classically Clark-like fashion, I set myself up for a fall here: so excited was I about the idea of No Other tracks rearranged for live performance that I saved this album for a solo drive across upstate New York. Outsized romantic visions of Gene Clark melancholia accompanying the setting sun over Ithaca were just not matched by what often seemed like a honky-tonk one night stand; “Long Black Veil” is a great song, sure, but what is doing as the opening track here, when this guy wrote so many gems?

So I set Silverado ’75 aside for a year, chalking it up as a disappointment. Returning to it now, unburdened of its road-trip duties, it plays better: the thing is a honky-tonk two night stand, after all (sharing a Denver bill with Tom Waits; if only they’d collaborated!), which is about all Clark could hope for after the unjust commercial failure of No Other. The Byrds songs have an added layer of sadness, and the test runs for songs from the next LP fit comfortably alongside the older tracks and some standards--surely credit here goes to his tight touring band of Roger White and Duke Bardwell (trading off between low-rent Clark gigs and huge Elvis ones at the time). And while there are only a bare two songs from the album that theoretically undergirded the tour, both the title track and set closer “Silver Raven” both withstand being stripped down to their core components; shorn of the studio dressing, they’re not necessarily more intimate but they are more revealing of Clark’s songwriting strengths, never lost on record but always jostling for the foreground with the sonic accoutrements.

Ultimately it's mostly a verite documentary of what it was like to be Gene Clark in 1975: constrained to play songs that make folks swing their hips a little rather than the sweeping epics he had just recorded, sounding alternately checked-out and deeply moving, and probably wondering why 1975 seemed so much smaller than 1965.