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.
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