By 12th August 1963 the eighteen-year-old Gene was recruited into the wholesome hit-making New Christy Minstrels alongside Barry McGuire. During his fresher year he joined high-school band Joe Meyer & the Sharks, moving from there into the ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’ coffeehouse folk-thing with a doctored ID. His sister Bonnie recalls how his music began, ‘after Gene saw Elvis, all he wanted to be was a Rock star’. A complex, insecure, troubled man, prone to swings in temperament that Einarson’s investigations now interpret as evidence of a bipolar condition. Coming from a thirteen-kid Catholic family with Irish and Cree Native American blood, Gene was rugged and athletic, but also intense and wired.
EIGHT MILES HIGH COVER FREE
But “Feel A Whole Lot Better” – later peerlessly covered by the Flamin’ Groovies, and by Tom Petty, “I Knew I’d Want You”, “Set You Free This Time” and the rest, are class compositions. But Gene’s were slow-burn songs, initially relegated to ‘B’-sides in favour of Dylan or Pete Seeger covers, because they lacked radio immediacy, revealing their beauty only through repeated plays the airwaves couldn’t afford. Talking at the Leeds ‘City Varieties’ he admits how ‘blessed’ the group was to have so fine a writer aboard. The strongest original songs on the first three Byrds albums – the finest debut trilogy in Rock, were by Harold Eugene Clark. ‘In 1965 Gene Clark was the Byrds’ writes John Einarson in this excellent rigorously detailed biography.
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