Circles Past The Sun:
The Strange Odyssey of Gene Clark’s No Other

BY SEAN MURPHY

No Other is a 1974 album by Gene Clark, best remembered for being The Byrds' main songwriter between 1964 and 1966. Now, generally considered by most critics to be a lost masterpiece, the album was dismissed upon its release as being overly indulgent. Recording costs had exceeded $100,000, a considerable investment at the time for a performer who had seen his last Top 40 hit in 1966. David Geffen, the head of Asylum Records, was dismayed by the dearth of songs and the uncommercial nature of the material. Due to a lack of support from label—in part—the record was a commercial failure upon its release. 

In an era where virtually every significant album of the pop era is available and widely disseminated (either legally or illicitly) through the internet, Gene Clark’s No Other has retained its numinous power. As Gram Parsons is belatedly canonized by Nashville and Vashti Bunyan attains near-household recognition as the progenitor of Joanna Newsom—we will save any divagations about David Crosby’s long-maligned If I Could Only Remember My Name recently joining usual mainstays Revolver, Dark Side…, and Rumours on the Vatican’s “semi-serious” list of the ten greatest pop albums for another article—Clark remains the eminence grise of what Robert Christgau blithely mocked as El Lay, always a bridesmaid (he was a Byrd, remember?) but never a bride.

Too magniloquent and portentous for Eagles adherents (depending on his mood, the guy either wrote some of the most aching love ballads this side of Arlen and Mercer or strange UFO paeans worthy of a filk hootenanny at a sci-fi convention; “taking it easy” simply was not in his métier), too wistful and recondite for hipster kids (unlike Parsons and Arthur Russell, he refused to subsume his rural upbringing into louche, urbane cynicism, viz. “Train Leaves Here This Morning” and “Kansas City Southern”), Clark—whose estate recently profited from the inclusion of two late 60s compositions on Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s Raising Sand—is the last of the peripheral Sixties figures to resist reification and retain the coveted underground élan that Parsons still claimed as late as ten years ago. Of course, it all comes into focus when one places their respective deaths into perspective: for Gram, celebrating his imminent divorce and the recording of his magnum opus, it was one toke over the proverbial line one debauched Saturday night in the psychedelic desert; for Gene, torn and frayed from years of chronic alcoholism and the allure of the crack pipe, it only took a royalty check generated from a Tom Petty re-recording to send him off the wagon and back into the abyss. He had always managed to come back and coalesce around the music—the honky-tonk neo-traditionalism of 1987’s So Rebellious a Lover isn’t his most palatable effort, but his lucent charisma still resonated through the twang—yet this time, well into 1991 and the throes of a new decade, it was a different story.

Released seventeen years earlier, No Other was Clark’s last true shot at the brass ring, and it’s no surprise that the beginning of his precipitous decline is juxtaposed with the chimerical album’s beguiling reception in post-Watergate America. After the country-tinged minimalism of his work with Doug Dillard and the muted ambience of White Line in 1971, No Other was, indeed, like no other; suffused with the maximalist equipoise of the epoch’s leading background vocalists, controlled yet discursive arrangements (gotta heart the decontextualized wah-wahs on “Lady from the North,” which should actually be titled Shaft Goes to the Prarie), lyrical koans influenced by no less of a luminary than drinking buddy David Carradine (as Clark’s lyrical profligacy was belied by his odd reticence to actually pick up a book, the once and future Kwai Chang Caine’s secondhand renderings of Alan Watts and D.T. Suzuki were a formative influence on the singer throughout the early 70s), and maybe—just maybe—Sly Stone (urban legend holds that the polymathic composer contributed in some fashion to the light funk of the title track; as Sly’s extracurricular excursions, namely Parliament-Funkadelic’s “Funk Gets Stronger”, tend to be more overt and obsequious, this one is for the listeners to decide), this album is the pre-punk mid-70s zeitgeist set to tape, much as the 20th Century (as per the redoubtable Gertrude Stein) began and ended in Paris in 1922.



Naturally, as inculcated to the listener by the Gatsbyian album cover, Clark was more preoccupied with the Roaring Twenties—and by proxy, the likes of Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound—than the affected, noxious selfishness of his peers. As citybillys like Detroit’s own Glenn Frey sang of “taking it easy” and even John Cale deigned to feature Lowell George’s slide guitar as an anachronistic feature of Paris 1919, the veritable hick of the bunch developed a feeling for the baroque.

“Took her magic master’s words and sung and made his lowest self worthwhile,” Clark intones on “From a Silver Phial” in one of the best vocal performances of the past forty years. The words suggest all the pretentious boredom of Anne Kavanaugh “sitting in her garden playing solitaire” in Robert Lowell’s The Mills of the Kavanaughs (shortly before mental illness and an nominal infatuation with the Beats would take him down unexpected roads, a career direction that Clark probably should have emulated on the cusp of punk) or Lawrence Durrell’s hoary Avignon Quartet, but here the equally endemic splendor of El Lay takes no more than four minutes to unfold. Which may only be indicative of brevity in the greater scheme of things, but the imagistic alacrity of Clark’s singular vision is something to behold here. In his lucent 2005 study of Clark, biographer John Einarson finally divulged that “Silver Raven”—perhaps Clark’s most mystical and allusive opus and certainly the most enduring of his solo oeuvre; the one fell swoop of a post-CSN, pre-Fleetwood cocaine blitz (sinewy guitars meet jaundiced background harmonies) where he threatened to usurp Dylan once and for all—was most likely written in tribute to his then-wife’s penchant for gauche platform shoes worthy of a night at Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco. Her “silver ravens”, if one must. But just as the promise of Continental deconstruction threatened to overturn the New Critics’ forty year hegemony over the interpretation of culture, Clark stretches the gilded apex of literary modernism, the lamentably ahistorical objective correlative, to new and unforeseen heights. Hermetic Native American symbology? Automatic writings gleaned from an alien civilization? “Boots of Spanish Leather” for amyled-out glitter children? Retrospectively, No Other’s failure can be ascribed to its modernist propensities: Parsons and the Eagles were ultimately avatars of regurgitation (even if the latter specialized in tasteful regurgitation), while Clark was still resisting atrophy and “making it new”.

Widely regarded as the album’s centerpiece, the eight-minute “Some Misunderstanding”—written after an intense dream in the early hours of a dewey Mendocino morning—is the only track that lives up to the album’s reputation of largesse; a velvet fog of overwrought strings and plaintive vocals, it’s the only point where Clark sacrifices Zen interlocution for the saccharine spiritualism of the White Light period. By the same token, “The True One”, an inoffensive bridge to the sprawling “Lady from the North”, Buddhist honky-tonk bubblegum that would have been sandwiched well between “Old 55” and “For Everyman” in an alternative universe far, far removed from our own. What we can glean from this is that by 1974, the man who earned three chart-topping hits in the space of little more than a year in the previous decade was more of a cultish figure than Iggy Pop, then on the brink of his Kill City/mental institution phase. A staggering thought, and yet another testament to No Other’s staggering weirdness.

Primal Scream reportedly discovered No Other while in the midst of recording the acidic epistolaries of Screamadelica, and vestigial elements of Thomas Jefferson Kaye’s “louder than God” wall of sound do surface in such tracks as “Movin’ On Up” and “Come Together”, even if they are ultimately indebted to Jimmy Miller’s verdantly stoned work with Traffic and the Glimmer Twins. The melancholy late nineties school of British indie that begat Urban Hymns and Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space is another reference point. But as a mutation of literary modernism and Brian Wilson at his Smile apogee, the album has remarkably few followers, and perhaps that is a good thing when so much of contemporary indie is predicated on pastiche. Like the seasons and salsa, it will endure, a strange brew of El Lay penicillin for these dolorous times.


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Homages to Gene Clark, you can listen to his music and read more about him
at the addresses below:

(Semi) Official Website
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