4AD
GENE CLARK - No Other LP
$43.95
Includes d/l code.
Highly recommended.
Upon its release in 1974, Gene Clark's No Other was soundly reviled as an exercise in studio and financial excess, a critical and commercial failure -- it was pop music's Heaven's Gate. However, a scant year and a half later, Fleetwood Mac's self-titled album and its successor, Rumours, utilizing similar performance and production techniques, were adored by critics and the record-buying public, and have become cultural mainstays. The appearance of No Other on CD in America some 26 years after its release offers the opportunity to hear this record for what it was: a solidly visionary recording that decided to use every available means to illustrate Gene Clark's razor-sharp songwriting that lent itself to open-ended performance and production -- often in the same song (one listen to the title track bears this out in spades). Clark and producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye entered Village Recorders in L.A. having assembled a cast of players that included Clark veterans such as Michael Utley and Jesse Ed Davis, the Allman Brothers' Butch Trucks, Lee Sklar, Russ Kunkel, Joe Lala, Chris Hillman, Danny "Kooch" Kortchmar, Howard Buzzy Feiten, and Stephen Bruton. Backing vocalists such as Clydie King, Venetta Field, and Shirley Matthews -- who would appear on Bob Dylan's Street Legal two years later -- and including Cindy Bullens, Carlena Williams, Ronnie Barron, Claudia Lennear, and the Eagles' Timothy B. Schmidt were also in the house. What it adds up to is a sprawling, ambitious work that brought elements of country, folk, jazzed-out gospel, blues, and trippy rock to bear on a song cycle that reflects the mid-'70s better than anything from that time, yet sounds hauntingly timely even now.
Highly recommended.
Upon its release in 1974, Gene Clark's No Other was soundly reviled as an exercise in studio and financial excess, a critical and commercial failure -- it was pop music's Heaven's Gate. However, a scant year and a half later, Fleetwood Mac's self-titled album and its successor, Rumours, utilizing similar performance and production techniques, were adored by critics and the record-buying public, and have become cultural mainstays. The appearance of No Other on CD in America some 26 years after its release offers the opportunity to hear this record for what it was: a solidly visionary recording that decided to use every available means to illustrate Gene Clark's razor-sharp songwriting that lent itself to open-ended performance and production -- often in the same song (one listen to the title track bears this out in spades). Clark and producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye entered Village Recorders in L.A. having assembled a cast of players that included Clark veterans such as Michael Utley and Jesse Ed Davis, the Allman Brothers' Butch Trucks, Lee Sklar, Russ Kunkel, Joe Lala, Chris Hillman, Danny "Kooch" Kortchmar, Howard Buzzy Feiten, and Stephen Bruton. Backing vocalists such as Clydie King, Venetta Field, and Shirley Matthews -- who would appear on Bob Dylan's Street Legal two years later -- and including Cindy Bullens, Carlena Williams, Ronnie Barron, Claudia Lennear, and the Eagles' Timothy B. Schmidt were also in the house. What it adds up to is a sprawling, ambitious work that brought elements of country, folk, jazzed-out gospel, blues, and trippy rock to bear on a song cycle that reflects the mid-'70s better than anything from that time, yet sounds hauntingly timely even now.
