Bido Lito!

Gene Clark: The Caged Byrd

Never in the annals of popular music has there existed a band as tempestuous as The Byrds. While the ruthless opportunistic surges of savvy ‘leader’ Roger McGuinn and enfant-terrible David Crosby draw uncomfortable parallels with the social-darwinistic mechanics of the Third Reich, this survival-of-the-fittest power-struggle between The Byrds dominant forces fail to dim the chiming-freedom of their music that in 1965, illuminated the Sunset Strip. Somewhere, trapped in the eye of this bitter whirlwind of ego and jealousy, existed Gene Clark, their most gifted and prolific songwriter. Born on 17 November 1944 in the small farming town of Tipton, Missouri, Harold Eugene Clark suckled on a diet of bluegrass, country and rockabilly, though it was the sensitivity of his egg-shell psyche that seeped both beauty and tragedy into his songs. Evidently, on The Byrds first releases, 1965’s Mr Tambourine Man and Turn Turn Turn, it was Clark’s compositions that stood toe-to-toe with the Dylan covers. Whether they be pools of unabated emotion, syphoned from the catacomb of the soul (Here Without You), or crackling with a charged vibrancy (The World Turns All Around Her), they remained unrivaled by anything that McGuinn and Crosby were bringing to the table.

With the release of their magnum opus Eight Miles High a year later, Clark’s position as The Byrds composer-in-chief seemed to be secured.  Seemed, being the operative word....no thing or nobody was secure within the volatile nest of The Byrds.  If the towering luminosity of his songwriting was evident by all, within the inner sanctum of his own band the vultures were circling, preparing to feed.

The intrigue can be traced as far back as the pre-Byrd days, when rehearsing under the snappy moniker The Jet Set, Crosby began implanting seeds of doubt in Clark’s ability as a rhythm guitarist, a festering unease that led to the eventual seizing of his instrument. Manager Jim Dickson recalls this Machiavellian ploy...“David started telling Gene his timing wasn’t good and shaking his confidence. . . I’d seen it happen in jazz where one bass player shook the confidence of another by just circulating the rumour that his timing was bad. By the time it got around, it was bad. David did that to Gene, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy”. The fact that Clark relinquished his role with nothing more than a nonchalant shrug is testament to his strength of character, however, by 1966 it lay in tatters, broken like a hopeless captive. ‘Just-because-you're-paranoid-don’t-mean-they're-not-after-you’, hushed a sagacious fellow.  For the unassuming farmer’s boy, the maxim became a twisted reality. With his nerves unravelling, his initial absence from duties culminated in an official statement...'Gene Clark was leaving The Byrds'...The press and fans gasped in shock. As for McGuinn and Crosby, they calmly dusted their palms, folded their arms and eyed the prize...

(to be continued in part 2, ‘The Byrds Of Prey’)...