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From: "Tipton Chamber of Commerce" <scott@tiptonmo.com>

I'm sorry for the size of this e-mail.  Sunday's Kansas City Star had a
large story on Gene.  I thought you all may be interested it reading it.


'NO OTHER'
The late Gene Clark, co-founder of the Byrds, was a unique man and talent
BY BRIAN BURNES

On Aug. 4, 1944, Kelly Clark and his wife, Jeanne several months pregnant,
attended a circus at Camp Bowie, Texas, where Kelly was stationed.
At one point the audience stood to listen to "Taps" and honor those who had
died in the invasion that had begun on the coast of France almost two months
before.
It was a bad moment for Jeanne.
"I just had the feeling that something had happened," she recalls. It
wouldn't be until later that they'd learn how Kelly's brother, Harold
Eugene, an Army paratrooper who had landed In France on or just after D-Day,
had been injured, taken prisoner and finally died on Aug. 4.
On Nov. 17, 1944,JeanneClark was back in her hometown of Tipton, Mo., near
Jeffer�son City, when she gave birth to a boy.
They named him Harold Eugene Clark. He grew up in Ray�town and Bonner
Springs. He left the Kansas City area in 1963 to pursue a career as a
musician in California and achieved spectacular success.  Yet after he died
of a heart attack in May 1991 in his Los Angeles area home, he was buried
back in Tipton, as he had wished, his full name carved on the headstone.
There are also these words: "No Other."
That was the ti�tle of a record al�bum he re�leased in 1974.It's a record
that, this past summer, a journalist with The Guardian in London de�clared
"one of the boldest, most bril�liant and . . . near per�fect pieces of work
in the history of pop music." According to authorities such as The
Guardian's critic and an emerging chorus of others, Harold Eugene -- known
to the larger world as Gene Clark-- changed the sound of modem music.

Genre guru
In 1965, as a co-founder of the Byrds, Gene Clark helped invent folk-rock,
recording Bob Dylan folk songs like "Mr. Tambourine Man" with guitars that
plugged into amplifiers. On the Byrds' first al�bum of the same name, Dylan
wrote four of the songs. Clark wrote or co-wrote five.
In 1966, Clark helped kick-start psychedelia as the principal author of the
Byrds song "Eight Miles High."
In 1967, when he released his first solo album, "Gene Clark With the Gosdin
Brothers," Clark helped create the genre of country rock. Music historians
routinely trace all its permutations and performers since -- including Gram
Parsons, the Eagles and Dwight Yoakam -- to Clark.
"Very few musicians had as       much influence in creating new styles of
music as Gene Clark," according to the All Music Guide, a popular music
reference.
Lately, the din of such admiration has been increasingly loud.  Today, more
than seven years after his largely unnoticed death, Gene Clark is enjoying a
sudden, unimagined revival.
He is huge in England. A new two-CD career retrospective, Flying High,
appeared there late last year. This past summer a British music magazine,
Mojo, featured� Clark on its cover, with the banner headline of "American
Giants."  In an art designer's idea of a rock Rushmore, Clark appeared on
the Mojo cover with Mac "Dr. John" Rebennack, Randy Newman, James Brown and
even the Artist, formerly known as prince.
Clark also lives on in cyberspace. At least two Web sites (www.GeneClark.com
and ps.ket.kth.se/gc/) are devoted to him.            The latter, maintained
in Sweden, includes photographs of Clark's gravesite in Tipton as well as
photos of his last concerts in Los Angeles in April 1991. An adjacent
bulletin board, a few clicks away serves as a campfire for fans who debate
Clark's apparent preference for using "whom" rather than "who" in his songs;
the precise sequence of guitar chords on his 1969 ballad "Polly''; and
whether Clark is using the world "pulsate" instead of the phrase "go safe"
in his 1971 song "Spanish Guitar."
Last year Scott Page, president of the Tipton Chamber of Commerce, who also
maintains the organization's Web site, noticed an increasing number of
e-mails requesting the precise location of Clark's grave site.
Now Tipton is preparing to act as host for the first memorial Gene
Clark concert, tentatively scheduled for August with performers as yet
unannounced.

'My Kid'
All this, meanwhile, is a bit hard for the elder Clarks to grasp.
"He was just my kid," Jeanne says.
The recent surge of recognition for their beloved Harold Eugene compels
members of the Clark family to describe the boy and the man they knew best.
To his parents and to the 12 brothers and sisters who grew up with him
there's a vast disconnection between the son or bother they still miss and
the singer about whom so many strangers are now speaking with such
reverence.
It's difficult for them to reconcile Gene Clark, rock icon, with the
vulnerable boy who would wake up from nightmares after the 1957 Ruskin
Heights tornado, the kid who wore his hair in a pompadour in his 1962 Bonner
Springs High School graduation photo.
"He talked so often about getting a home and property out here in the
Midwest where he could just get away from it all, but he never did it,"
Jeanne Clark says.
"There were times," adds younger brother Kevin Clark, "that he couldn't even
come home without having to bring it all with him.  In 1966 he just got
mobbed, with everybody in town lied up for an autograph.
"I think that was difficult for him, and it was recollected in some of the
songs he wrote later on, about how much he longed for the simple life he had
when he was young but couldn't come back to anymore.
But it's not just all the praise that intrigues the Clarks.
It's the timing.
Since leaving the Byrds in1966, Gene Clark soldiered on in a fitful and
heroic solo career that today is celebrated by a growing worldwide, almost
cult-like following -- but a career that never achieved the commercial
success of former Byrds bandmates David Crosby or Roger McGuinn.
Aggravating the problem of commercial purgatory was the timing of his death,
May24, 1991, Bob Dylan's 50th birthday. Meaning that many of the rock
journal�ists who might otherwise have marked Gene Clark's passing were
otherwise engaged.
His brother would have enjoyed all the recent attention, says Rick Clark, a
younger brother who has pursued his own music career in California for
almost 30 years. "I think he would be pleasantly surprised, to put it
lightly." he says.

Living out a dream
Gene Clark loved the rock 'n' roll life. Not long after leaving Kansas City
to tour with the New Cristy Minstrels, he called his parents from Hawaii.
"He was a kid in a candy store," Jeanne Clark recalls. "He just kept saying,
'I can't believe this.'"
The dream of many young guitar players in the early 1960s had become a
reality for Gene Clark. He left Kansas City in the summer of 1963. Two years
lat�er, he was a founding member of the Byrds, an American response to the
so-called British Inva�sion, which saw the Beat�les, the Dave Clark Five,
the Rolling Stones and other English bands raid our shores with a barrage of
hit records. The Byrds single "Mr. Tambourine Man" became a No.1 hit.
With the Byrds, Clark appeared on "Shindig," "Hullabaloo" and "The Ed
Sullivan Show." the Los Angeles area nightclub Ciros, he shared a microphone
with Bob Dylan.
Clarks Byrds-era songs remain inescapable, given the ubiquitous
oldies-oriented baby-boomer ra�dio format. "You Showed Me" was a hit for the
Turtles. "Train Leaves Here This Morning" (co-written with Bernie Leadon)
appeared on the first Eagles album. Perhaps his most familiar Byrds song,
"I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better," was performed by the band when it was
inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.

Rock star stuff
Beyond all the songs, Gene Clark lived the life of a prototypical rock star.
He bought a Ferrari.  He met the Beatles. He dated Michelle Phillips of the
Mamas and the Pa�pas.
Yet the success that Clark en�joyed with the Byrds quickly evap�orated when
he left the band and embarked on a 25-year mostly solo career marked mostly
by mar�ketplace indifference.
A series of solo albums garnered great reviews and often unspec�tacular
sales.
Clark occasionally rejoined the Byrds. Many fans consider his song "Full
Circle" the best song on the band's 1973 reunion album. During much of the
1980s, Clark toured with a "Byrds tribute" band that at first featured only
himself and drummer Michael Clarke from the original lineup.
Throughout it all Clark kept his California life separate from his Bonner
Springs life. "When he left here and got into all that, it was completely
separate from our family here," Jeanne Clark says. "He very seldom
dis�cussed anything about it when he was here. It was more like 'I'm home,
so let's be a family right now.'"
Younger brother Rick believes Gene didn't want to bother his family with the
industry's fickle nature.
"There can be a lot of downs in this business, and he didn't want the family
to know what he was going through," Rick says. At the same tine, few of his
California friends ever learned much about Clark's Kansas City. "Gene didn't
talk much about his roots," recalls Roger McGuinn, the lead singer on many
Byrds hits.
"He never talked to me very much about his younger days," agrees Chris
Hillman, the Byrds' bassist.
"That was the hidden aspect of Gene Clark."

Several lifetimes
Much of the mythology sur�rounding Gene Clark differs slightly from the
reality of his life. But Clark's real bio is eventful enough for several
lifetimes:
The country boy.
Given his birth in Tipton, many sources emphasize Clark's rural Missouri
youth. "A farmer's boy," wrote Michelle Phillips in her 1986 book California
Dreamin'.
In fact, as a boy, Clark lived on 212 acres owned by the city of Kansas
City.
Clark's father, Kelly; spent much of his career building golf courses and
hired on with the Kansas City Parks and Recreation Department in 1949. He
had been working as a  groundskeeper at Milburn Coun�try Club and was living
in Kansas. "But to be a city employee I had to live in Missouri, so they
fur�nished me with a house at 79th Street and Oldham Road," he says. "The
acreage was there, and it be�longed to the city, but there was a little cow
shed and a chicken house. We did have our cows and chickens."
The spread was hard by the Kansas City Southern tracks that paralleled the
eastern boundary of Swope Park and that Clark would later recall in his song
"Kansas City Southern." The house was later demolished to make way for
Interstate 435.

The plane crash.
Another legend involves Gene Clark's fear of flight, an irresistible angle
for any member of a band called the Byrds.
The reason for this fear, accord�ing to several stories, is that Clark
supposed witnessed a plane crash as a youth.
That's news to his parents.
However, Clark was terrified, they say, after the tornado of May 1957 that
skipped to the south of the Clark home near Swope Park and burrowed through
the Ruskin Heights district.
"He would wake up screaming after that," Jeanne Clark remem�bers.
Still, fatigue with air travel was a constant during Clark's career. The
song "Eight Miles High" had its origins in the Byrds' first trip to London
in 1965 and Clarks appar�ent relief after the jet touched down.
"After he had been in Europe he told us about some frightening things that
had happened to a 707 that he was on," brother Kevin says. "That there had
been a downdraft or wind shear and that they had dropped about 1,000 feet."
Ken Claybaugh, a Utah Byrds fan who later started his own fan club, traces
the plane crash story to a 1966 article in which Roger McGuinn relates the
anecdote. But in a1986 Salt Lake City inter�view with Claybaugh, Clark
shrugged it all off.
"Aw, man, I have to answer that question all the time," Clark said. I'm not
afraid to fly.  I fly all the time. That was just a good excuse to get out
of the Byrds." Still, Claybaugh said, Clark had arrived in Salt lake City by
train.

The voice.
Just where Clark's remarkable voice came from remains a mys�tery.
He received no formal training, his mother says, outside of being part of
high school choral groups and a choir made up of boys from the Kansas
City-St. Joseph Catholic diocese.
In the late l950s or early '60s, Clark formed a rock 'n' roll band with
friends from Raytown High School.  Among the witnesses to this event were
Jack and David Godden, whose father, Bill, was an engineer at WDAF-AM and
had operated his own Kansas City recording studio.
One day Clark sat in the Godden living room and sang into a tape recorder.
Although the tape's qual�ity is not the best, what does come through is a
confidence remark�able for a teenager.
"We knew he was going to go somewhere because he was that good," states
David Godden,
That rings true to Joe Meyers, who first met Clark in the fifth grade at Our
Lady of Lourdes School in Raytown and later went on to form a band with
Clark that they called the Sharks. "Gene was just like that," Meyers says.
"He would just getup and sing."
Still others found themselves taken aback by Clark's confidence on stage.
"He had a magnificent voice," recalls Jim Glower, today a Mexico, Mo., real
estate loan officer. In 1963, Glover was one of three voic�es in the Surf
Riders, the band that would be Clark's last Kansas City gig before heading
for California.
"The voice just came from within," Glover says. "Where your voice is
supposed to come from." Among those startled by the quality of Clark's voice
was Michael Crowley, who had formed the Surf Riders in the early 1960s and
hired Glover and Clark as re�placements in 1963.
"Gene had a big, booming voice, a very nice polished sound for such a young
kid," says Crowley, today a musician in Denver. He first encountered Clark
when he showed up one sum�mer afternoon at the Castaways lounge at 4334 Main
St.
Every Saturday the club hosted a hootenanny that offered a stage for anyone
who had the nerve to get out on it. Clark told Crowley that he was spending
the summer helping his father build golf courses.
"So I think we introduced him as 'Straight from the bulldozer in Bon�ner
Springs, we bring you Gene Clark,' "Crowley recalls.
"Then he began singing, and I guess our mouths dropped open. We didn't
expect such a professional sound. Everybody usually had 15 minutes at those
hootenannies. I think Gene was up there for 45 minutes."
Clark was a Surf Rider within a week.

The big break.
If there was a moment in Gene Clark's life that was more important than
others, it was when Randy Sparks, the entrepreneur behind the New Christy
Minstrels, stopped off at the Castaways to hear the Surf Riders and hired
all three members of the group.
The Surf Riders, like a lot of folk acts at the time, were modeled after the
three voices of the Kingston Trio. It was also the era of Harry Belafonte's
calypso music. Accordingly, the motif of the Castaways was something like
Disneyland's "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride, to the point where
papier-mache palm trees decorated the interior, and beach sand was spread
here and there.
"We dressed up in three-quarter-length cutoff pants and Hawaiian shirts,
just to go with the decor," Crowley says. "We had people wrapped around the
Castaways wait�ing to get in."
Enter Randy Sparks.
Sparks, a Leavenworth native, founded the New Christy Minstrels in 1961 His
idea was to take folk music out of the confines of duos and trios and
embrace a large variety-show ap�proach. During an April 1963 engage�ment at
the Latin Quarter in New York, the act was billed as the "big band of fold
music.
Forgoing the more politically ori�ented protest music offered by young
folkies such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, the New Christy Minstrels in-stead
focused on Americana themes such as overland migration or pioneer
California. In the summer of 1963, they had their first hit, "Green, Green."
The group played Kansas City's Starlight Theatre in August 1963, and one
night its members visited the Castaways club.
"The whole bunch of 'em comes in," remembers Crowley.
"Gene said, 'Who's that?' I said, 'Green, Green.'
"He said, 'Oh yeah.'
"We stayed up all night and by breakfast the next morning, we all had money
to go to Los Angeles," Crowley says, recalling Sparks' offer to hire the
Surf Riders, lock, stock and barrel.
Sparks picked Clark to go immedi�ately to the New Christy Minstrels. Crowley
and Glover, meanwhile, were to go to the Minstrels farm team called the Back
Porch Majority. Sparks operated a club in Los Angeles' Westwood district,
where his many musicians performed. One problem: the local liquor laws. "We
had beer and wine at our club, so you had to be 21 years old to walkout on
stage," Sparks said recently from California.
When Sparks met Clark, he was 18. That's perhaps why some Byrds sources list
Clark's birth date as 1941, not 1944.
There was little doubt that he was going to leave Kansas City, his family
said recently.
"We knew he was going to go," Jeanne says. "He had already moved out of the
house a couple of months before. We knew if we put our foot down and said
no, that he would do it anyhow. So he joined the world." Gene Clark left for
California just af�ter a Clark family picnic. Jeanne Clark remembers that
date, too: Aug.12, 1963.

'Overwhelmed'?
The rest of the Gene Clark story is familiar to Byrds fans.
He toured with the New Christy Minstrels from mid-1963 through early 1964,
on one occasion perform�ing at the White House for new presi�dent Lyndon
Johnson. But Clark grew weary of the travel as well as his minor role in the
act.
While touring with the group in Canada he heard the Beatles on a jukebox.
After he left the Minstrels he went to California, where he heard Jim (1ater
known as Roger) McGuinn playing Beatle songs at the Trouba�dour, a Los
Angeles area club. The two later recruited David Crosby, and soon Clark was
again part of a three�-voice band.
Yet even at the height of the Byrds' success, Clark seemed somehow sep�arate
from the other members of the group.
One reason might have been that after the Byrds bought instruments with a
$5,000 loan, Crosby convinced Clark to give up his guitar because Crosby
himself felt self-conscious performing without one. The result was that
Clark usually just sang while banging a tambourine, sometimes up front and
sometimes off to the side. "Gene was quite confident at first," Roger
McGuinn says. "It wasn't until David Crosby undermined Gene's confidence
that he began to question his ability as a guitar player. His singing was
always strong."
Hillman, meanwhile, wonders if the Byrds' sudden success startled Clark.
''Gene was very confident singing and writing at the onset," he says.
"However, his confidence wavered a bit as we became more popular."
Jeanne Clark also has considered that possibility.
"When he got to being big I think he was overwhelmed by it," she says.
"Like, 'How did I get here and do I be�long here?"'
Clark apparently both endured and enjoyed the spotlight in 1965 and after.
"Gene did have a tendency to be self-conscious about what he did," says Rick
Clark

'Cage full of tigers'
It's difficult to know whether it could have started with the New Christy
Minstrels, when Randy Sparks picked Clark to replace the an�imated singer
Dolan Ellis.
"Dolan was like the mechanical man," Sparks says. "He went out every night
in the third slot and was such a performer, with so much ener�gy and with
such thick skin, that it didn't matter what the audience gave back.
"Gene Clark was not that kind of personality He was a very good singer who
played the guitar adequately, but there was no flash.
"You must understand, I was in a cage full of tigers when I ran this group.
I had purposely formed a group of nine egos, in addition to mine. We would
open with a couple of up-tempo songs, then I would do the opening ballad,
then I would turn around to the boys and say, 'OK, fol�low that.'
"The idea was that their testos�terone level would rise to the occa�sion. I
came from old-fashioned show business, where you walked out and killed
them."
Clark did not "kill them," Sparks says.
"Gene was thrown in with people who had worked together for a num�ber of
years, and I think he was just a little bombarded," he says. "He didn't
evolve like I expected him to." Crowley saw the same problem. "Gene didn't
have much shtick, and the New Christy Minstrels were all seasoned
performers," he says. "They had all been working the LA scene and that was a
long way from the KC scene. They were looking for some�thing from Gene that
he couldn't give them."
Clark's stage demeanor was more suited to the Byrds.
"In early video clips of the Byrds, Crosby and Hillman look wooden, even
scared, while Gene looks right at home," Ken Claybaugh says. "He was a
bundle of incongruity. Confident of his talent and at ease onstage, he was
nevertheless amazed that anyone would pay attention."

No short answer
Clark's departure from the Byrds is an early example of a Los Angeles
singer-songwriter leaving a triumphant band to pursue a successful solo
career. Only in Clark's case, he left success behind. The big hits that Neil
Young and Don Henley enjoyed in the l970sand l980s when they left their
bands never came Clark's way.
There seems no short answer as to why.
Instead of embracing a single rec�ognizable rock style, Clark was known
chiefly for a mercurial style. His two albums recorded with blue-grass banjo
player Doug Dillard in 1968 and 1969 included up-tempo performances like
"Kansas City Southern." Yet his 1971 "Gene Clark" album was a collection of
stark acoustic originals. Then again, his 1974 album, "No Other," startled
listeners with its cou�pling of country and gospel music with dense,
difficult lyrics that summoned up the metaphysical.
Significant commercial success eluded Clark through it all. Though Clark
recorded "No Other" for Asylum Records, the same chic stable that housed
rising star Jackson Browne, Asylum president David Geffen re�portedly
declined to promote the record. Clark didn't help himself. There were
episodes of unpredictable be�havior. In the late 1970s he angered McGuinn
and Hillman when, after the three of them recorded an album that received
considerable airplay, Clark failed to show for some sched�uled concerts.
Further aggravating his circumstances, Clark's health grew increasingly
precarious.  He had much of his stomach removed in a 1988 operation.  And
for most of the rest of his life he struggled with alcohol abuse.
"He turned to alcohol when he was frustrated by the music's business end,"
states brother Rick.  "It was a place for him to hide."
Considered in that light, Clark's occasional successes may be seen as
courageous.  One significant example was Clark's collaboration with vocalist
Carla Olson, with whom he recorded the 1987 album, "So Rebellious a Lover."

Why we still care
There are several reasons for the current Clark revival.
The Byrds, 25 years after their last new album, remain contemporary, Tom
Petty induded a remake of Clark's "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" on his 1989
"Full Moon Fever" album. The Byrds' 1990 boxed set was a criti�cal success.
Many writers insisted they could hear the Byrds in the mu�sic of many newer,
younger bands, most importantly R.E.M.
The recent reissuing of all the Byrds' early albums, with additional tracks,
only enhanced Clark's status as the early band's guiding force and composer
Finally, though he died in 1991, Clark's estate was only recently settled.
The settlement helped clear the way to his "Flying High" anthology, released
in England last year, with perhaps more reissues still to come. And as for
his prominence overseas, Clark was always popular in Eu�rope. In 1971, his
"Gene Clark" album was voted album of the year by Dutch critics. His light
has never really dimmed in Europe.

The end
Clark's body was found in his Sher�man Oaks, Calif., home by one of his band
members. He had died of a heart attack.
It was May24, 1991. His death occurred one day before the Clarks were to
celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary with a service at Sacred Heart
Catholic Church in Bonner Springs and a reception at the nearby Eagles hall.
Three hundred invitations had been mailed.
It was too late to cancel. "We got the word at 2 p.m. the day before,"
Jeanne says. "I felt we should just go ahead and do it.
"I feel today like I wasn't even there. We went through this church ceremony
and everything.  It was almost like I slammed a door so I could go through
with it."
The invitation to the event, now framed in the Clarks' home, repre�sents
what maybe Gene Clark's last composition. "Mr. and Mrs. Kelly Clark invite
you to join them on his Spiritual Harvest," it reads.  "And to bear witness
to the Wisdom that can only be gained by respect and understanding."
Over the several years since Gene's death, some of the pain the Clark family
has felt has been replaced by perspective.
"We knew he was talented," Jeanne says. "But we never dreamed that it would
grow to what it did. I watched the Byrds on television but still I just
couldn't quite grasp it I still have trouble grasping that, truthfully. My
kid"
"It's chilling," adds Kevin. Clark.
"He was very young when he first started, and I'm not sure he knew how
important it was at that time -- that in the mid-1960s he was sharing a
microphone with Bob Dylan. Maybe even Bob Dylan didn't know how im�portant
it was going to be, or how much of an influence it would have on music."
This past Christmas Kelly Clark, Gene's father, received several of his
son's albums on compact disc.  On a recent day, Jeanne Clark pulled them out
and read their tides aloud.
"'Gene Clark With the Gosdin Brothers,' "she said.
"'Roadmaster.' 'Flying High.' 'This Byrd Has Flown.'"
There was an unexpected conse�quence of all these compact discs given to
Gene Clark's father, Jeanne says.
"We had to buy him a CD player."

Brian Burnes is a writer for The Star. He can be reached (816) 234-7804 or
by e-mail at bburnes@kcstar.com



__________________________
Scott L. Page, President
Tipton Chamber of Commerce
401 Prospect
P.O. Box 307
Tipton, MO  65081
http://www.tiptonmo.com


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