Gene Clark

The Dillard & Clark duo was Gene Clark’s most artistically successful post-Byrds collaboration, and his best venture into country-rock as well. With Chris Hillman and Bernie Leadon playing behind the duo throughout the first album, in many ways it is as much an offshoot of the Flying Burrito Brothers’ work as it is of the Byrds, with more of the Burritos’ feel. The standard of playing and singing on both albums is extremely high, but the nine songs on The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark are more impressive, both as recordings and compositions.

The second McGuinn, Clark & Hillman album turned into a McGuinn-Hillman album "featuring Gene Clark" when the latter dropped out of the tour ahead of it and then only contributed to two songs on this record, one of which was ironically called "Won't Let You Down." Apart from Clark's two songs, none of this really sounds much like the Byrds, although the stuff is pleasant late-'70s Byrds-influenced rock, sort of folky at its best moment and driven by McGuinn's mournful lead vocals and the soaring harmonies. "One More Chance" was the most Byrds-like of the non-Gene Clark numbers, and "City" was a good song, but, ironically, the two Gene Clark numbers were the best on the record, as good as anything he ever wrote after leaving the Byrds – and this CD is the only way to get them (they didn't make it onto Edsel's anthology).

When the four-CD Byrds set was first released in 1990, it was something of a landmark in Columbia Records' history on several counts. For starters, it was the first box set ever released by Columbia Records' pop division (as opposed to its jazz division) devoted to a noncurrent act (that is, they'd already issued boxes on Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, but both of them were active artists), and there had been boxes of sorts on Miles Davis and some other jazz figures, but their place in music history was already a given, whereas the Byrds, to Columbia Records' management and a lot of mainstream critics and even most listeners not attuned to their history, were "nothing" but a defunct rock act…

In early 1978, three of the founding members of the Byrds—Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, and Chris Hillman—were touring the West Coast with a show in which they each played short solo sets before concluding the show as a trio, performing a handful of Byrds classics. The shows were so well received that the trio would later land a record deal and record a pair of new albums, but on February 9, 1978, fans who came to see McGuinn, Clark & Hillman at the Boarding House in San Francisco got a special surpris…