Liner Notes After Dark / NO. 005
Gene Clark found a home on the Mendocino coast while writing some of his most ambitious songs. Years later, his son Kai learned those songs alongside memories of the father he’d missed.
By Margin Tone
As a founding singer and songwriter, Gene Clark had helped put the Byrds at the centre of American pop before he went looking for quiet on the Mendocino coast. In 1965, the Los Angeles band took Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!” to number one in the United States. Their ringing electric twelve-string guitar and close harmonies brought folk songs into the world of pop radio. Guitarist Roger McGuinn’s description was simple: “Dylan meets the Beatles.”
The Beatles connection ran both ways. McGuinn had wanted an electric twelve-string after seeing George Harrison play one in A Hard Day’s Night. Later, he recalled receiving word through publicist Derek Taylor that Harrison had based “If I Needed Someone” on the Byrds’ arrangement of “The Bells of Rhymney.” Clark supplied originals of his own, including “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” and “Here Without You.” His own songs were part of the band’s expanding repertoire.
He left in early 1966. His fear of flying made the touring difficult, but biographer John Einarson’s account also describes the sudden loss of privacy, arguments over power within the group and resentment of Clark’s larger songwriting royalties. A solo career followed; Einarson disputes the idea that a calculated bid for solo stardom explains his departure. Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, his first album after leaving, appeared in 1967.
When Clark took Carlie McCummings to the Northern California coast, they went in separate cars. His was a Porsche, hers a Ford Cortina; a friend followed with the U-Haul. He had already found a place where he liked to disappear and write. Now he wanted her to see it. Carlie remembered him saying he had been saving it for the woman he wanted to be with.
They married in June 1970, according to Einarson. After their first son, Kelly, was born, they bought an old coach house on Middle Ridge Road in Albion. In Carlie’s recollection, fog gathered on either side of the ridge. From bed, they could watch ships on the horizon. She cooked on a woodstove; making coffee could take an hour and a half. She remembered Gene loving it. That is a wonderfully impractical thing to enjoy about a house.
The songs for No Other came out of those Mendocino years. Einarson describes Clark borrowing his friend Andy Kandanes’s coastal cottage near the lighthouse to write them.
The Byrds’ 1973 reunion album brought him back within reach of a major opportunity. David Geffen offered him a solo deal with his record label, Asylum Records, after hearing his contributions. Asylum was also home to Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt. It offered Clark a chance to reach a wider audience under his own name.
He wanted a bigger sound, too. Talking to Zigzag in 1977, Clark identified two records he had concentrated on while writing: Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup. He heard a spiritual ascent in one and darker impulses in the other. He wanted to bring those directions together.
At the Village Recorder in Los Angeles, producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye helped him pursue it. Clark’s explanation for the time they spent was straightforward: “It took a lot of time in the studio before we could actually get the songs to the point we wanted them.”
Clark sang and played while the arrangements developed around him. As Kieron Tyler documented in his review of the surviving session material, “Some Misunderstanding” moved from an acoustic-guitar-led performance in early April 1974 toward a more rhythmically grounded version later that month. “Silver Raven” also passed through substantially different takes. The songs were changing as Clark and the musicians played them.
The Arts Desk puts the budget at $100,000. Kaye later remembered Geffen objecting that the money had produced only eight tracks. He defended their quality and said Asylum had failed to support the record. Released in 1974, No Other sold poorly and went out of print. The work Clark had taken such care over became something a listener could have trouble buying.
By 1976, according to Einarson, Gene and Carlie were arguing frequently. He had gone back on the road to meet the costs of a mortgage and a family of four, and the strain followed him home. Carlie’s recollection, quoted in Hans Olofsson’s account of his life, was of a loving man whose behaviour changed when he drank. She left for Hawaii with the boys, and the marriage ended. Their son Kai later recalled living with his mother in Mendocino and visiting his father during some summers, when touring and other circumstances allowed it. Often his parents weren’t speaking.
In a 2019 interview with Tom Sandford, Kai remembered arriving at the Greyhound station in downtown Los Angeles around one in the morning in the late 1980s. His father hadn’t been told he was coming. When Kai phoned for a pickup, Gene had no idea what bus station he meant. “What do you mean you’re at the bus station?” Kai remembered him asking. He told it as a funny story about a father unprepared for his arrival.
He remembered his father’s humour and kindness to fans, too. People could pester him for an autograph, and Gene would be patient. Kai had seen a man who laughed and joked, someone the magazine accounts often missed. “He did have a lot of joy in his life,” he told Flatland in 2019. Kai had also spent a great deal of time without him.
Gene’s songwriting was still bringing in money. Einarson reports that Tom Petty’s 1989 recording of “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” earned Clark a six-figure royalty windfall in the early 1990s. The same catalogue had helped pay for the family’s early years in Mendocino. Poor sales of his solo records tell only part of the financial story.
His health, however, was failing. He had undergone surgery for ulcers in 1988 and died at his Los Angeles home on May 24, 1991, aged 46. Mark Deming’s AllMusic biography attributes his death to a bleeding ulcer; contemporary reporting described apparent natural causes, with no autopsy planned. Kai was seventeen.
Speaking to Sandford in 2011, he described the anger he had felt when he was younger and the love and admiration that followed. Learning Two Sides to Every Story for a performance of the whole album had deepened that appreciation. “Past Addresses” was difficult to pull off; “Sister Moon” had a high vocal part. Even being Gene Clark’s son hadn’t prepared him for everything in a Gene Clark song.
Kai wanted a musical life of his own, with a workable amount of touring and time at home to raise his son. He said plainly that he had missed that time with his father. He loved travelling and playing live, too.
The 2019 reassessment of No Other returned to the work Clark had done before the disappointment. When the record label 4AD reissued the album, Sid Griffin and John Wood went back to the studio tapes and presented performances before overdubbing, without stitching together composite takes. Griffin described radically different tempos, a slow keyboard-led “Some Misunderstanding,” and funkier approaches to “Silver Raven” and the title track.
“Silver Raven” had already found its way into Kai’s hands during high school. In that 2019 conversation, he remembered escaping to a house full of guitars. An older cowboy named Chuck, a former rodeo rider, kept asking for the song. It was among the first of his father’s that Kai learned, helped by its three chords. Whenever he picked up a guitar there, Chuck wanted to hear it again.
Previously: Liner Notes After Dark No. 004 — Syd Barrett After the Band Went On →
