“[Gene] did seem like he had a lot on his
mind and would
often appear distracted. You’d say, ‘Hey, Gene, what are you thinking?’
and he
would go, ‘Huh? Oh,’ like he was being brought back to reality.”
Bernie Leadon, yet another friend and
bandmate of
Gene Clark
In many ways, the Gene Clark story reads a
lot like
the Gram Parsons story. Both were considered by their peers to be among
Did anyone notice anything unusual, by the way, about that last sentence? Probably not, though there is an obvious redundancy on display. If I had written something slightly different, like “drug and heroin abusers” or “drug and cocaine abusers,” you likely would have picked up on it right away. But because I used a phrase that everyone is accustomed to seeing and hearing, “drug and alcohol abusers,” none of you batted an eye. I have no idea though what my point is here, so let’s just move on.
Harold Eugene Clark was born on November 17,
1944,
in
Tipton is a small town – the kind of town
where
everyone knows one another by name. In fact, Tipton is kind of like a
big park where
the same oversized family reunion is held every day of the year. As
Bonnie
Clark Laible told author John Einarson, “When I was in Tipton,
Missouri, the
year my grandfather died, in 1954, I found out I was related to almost
everyone
in the community. Everyone had married people they knew through the
various
families like Faherty and Sommerhauser. I couldn’t throw a stone
without
hitting a family member!”
Tipton was founded by Mr. William Tipton
Seely, a
rather wealthy and influential gent who opened a general store circa
1830. A
community soon sprang up around his store, as tended to happen in those
days,
and Seely named his new little fiefdom Round Hill. A decade or so
later, in the
1840s, a group of German immigrant families arrived in the area – the
Nieuffers, the Lutzs, the Kammerichs, the Schmidts, the Hoens, the
Shrecks and
the Sommerhausers. These families proceeded to intermarry to a rather
extreme
degree.
In the 1850s, Seely lobbied hard to have both
the
Pacific Railroad and the Butterfield Overland Mail route pass through
his
little kingdom. Those efforts proved successful, though the railroad
was routed
a few miles north of Round Hill. Around that new railroad station was
born
Seely’s second town, tiny Tipton, where Gene Clark would spend the
early years
of his life.
Meanwhile, just before 1800, a group of Irish
families led by a Mr. Edmund Faherty settled in southwestern
Oscar Faherty, Gene Clark’s maternal
grandfather,
was born and raised near Tipton, as was the woman who was to be his
wife and
Gene’s grandmother, Rosemary Sommerhauser. Before long, the Fahertys
and the
Sommerhausers were intermarrying at a furious pace. According to Bonnie
Clark,
“The Faherty and Sommerhauser families had double cousins going on.”
I’m not sure what that means exactly, nor do
I
really want to know, but it can’t be a good thing.
On the summer solstice of 1920, Rosemary
Sommerhauser Faherty gave birth to Mary Jeanne Faherty, Gene Clark’s
mother.
After completing elementary school, Mary Jeanne was sent away to work
as a
“domestic servant” for an unnamed wealthy family living near
The other half of Gene Clark’s family tree
is,
curiously enough, shrouded in mystery and secrecy. As chronicler
Einarson
notes, “Unlike Jeanne Faherty Clark’s well-documented family history,
the
lineage of Gene’s father, Kelly George Clark, is far more murky and
mysterious.” Indeed, Einarson’s extensive research turned up little
more than
the fact that Kelly Clark was born on November 11, 1918 in
Or maybe Pop Clark’s history is murky for
other
reasons. Maybe he wasn’t even Gene’s dad. What we do know is that Kelly
Clark
apparently quit high school and went to work for the parks department
as a
groundskeeper. While tending the grounds at the Milburn Country Club,
he met
young Jeanne Faherty, who apparently was taken there fairly frequently
by her
‘employers’ – because most wealthy people, I think we can all agree,
take their
young servants with them to the country club.
After a relatively brief courtship, the two
married
on May 29, 1941 and promptly started a family. Bonnie Clark was born on
March
13, 1942, just 9½ months after the couple exchanged vows. Kelly
Katherine was
to be the couple’s second child, but she was, alas, reportedly
stillborn – on
the summer solstice of 1943. Nothing suspicious about that. Nor
about the
peculiar fact that, while Gene and other members of the family would be
laid to
rest in the Sommerhauser family plot at St. Andrews cemetery in Tipton,
“Kelly
Katherine’s is a solitary stone at the far south end of the cemetery.”
A few months after Kelly Katherine Clark’s
curious
death, Kelly George Clark was called up for radio and gunnery school.
Following
training, he was assigned to a unit that served as General George
Patton’s
mop-up crew. Clark’s crew landed at
Meanwhile, the third
Kelly Clark returned home at the end of World
War II
and promptly impregnated his wife once again; Nancy Patricia Clark was
born on
July 19, 1946. The family would continue to grow until there were no
fewer than
10 Clark siblings, all living in a tiny house far off the beaten path.
As a
former classmate and friend recalled, “You had to take a dirt road up
and it
was the only house back in the woods, way up high. I couldn’t believe
the first
time Gene took me there … It was kind of spooky in a way.”
As Bonnie Clark has acknowledged, the
Gene would have a lifelong fascination with
knives –
and guns. According to friend Joe Larson, after
Has anyone else noticed, by the way, that a
lot of
those peacenik hippie types in
Shockingly enough, most of the members of
that
“strange family” living in the backwoods did not fare so well as they
grew into
adulthood. As of the time of the writing of Einarson’s Mr.
Tambourine Man
(2005), one Clark sibling had been diagnosed as a paranoid
schizophrenic (which
is, in reality, an arbitrary ‘diagnosis,’ but let’s not get into that),
another
suffered from severe bouts of clinical depression, another was homeless
due to
untreated mental illness, another was on psychiatric meds most of her
life
before dying suddenly in 1987, another was bipolar, and yet another was
diagnosed with severe mental retardation.
Even more shockingly, mysterious father Kelly
Clark
was said to be a raging alcoholic who suffered from severe mood swings!
Gene’s formal education began in 1949 at a
strict
Catholic school in
On August 12, 1963, Gene Clark, still a few
months
shy of his nineteenth birthday, was inexplicably offered a spot in the
New
Christy Minstrels vocal group; he was on a plane to
One of the gigs the group played, on January
14,
1964, was at the White House as special guests of Lyndon Johnson, who
had taken
office less than two months earlier following the assassination of John
Kennedy. After the performance, Gene and other Minstrels (including
Barry
McGuire, who, as was discussed in the last chapter, released Eve of
Destruction a couple years later) went out on the town and partied
with
Johnson’s two daughters, Lynda Bird and Luci Baines, who were just
nineteen and
sixteen at the time.
As the story goes, Gene quit the New Christy
Minstrels a couple of weeks later, in February of 1964, after hearing
the first
album released by an obscure British band known as the Beatles.
Clark
immediately headed out to
The two quickly formed a folk duo and began
writing
songs, hoping to soon get bookings at the Troubadour and other local
clubs. But
according to McGuinn, the pair “never got to the stage of performing as
a duo …
According to Vern Gosdin – who, along with
his
brother, Rex, played with many of the Laurel Canyon musicians – it was
Jim
Dickson who “put the Byrds together, you might say. If I’m telling the
truth,
this is what I think: I don’t think the Byrds had any ideas whatsoever,
and Jim
Dickson put it all together for them.” Dickson originally envisioned
the band
as a Beatlesque quartet, with Gene as lead vocalist/rhythm guitarist,
Roger on
lead guitar and vocals, and
This arrangement proved unworkable, however,
since
The five-man band was by then complete: Gene
would
provide most lead vocals and bang the tambourine, Jim/Roger McGuinn
would
provide the band’s signature 12-string guitar sound and harmony vocals,
Crosby
would provide serviceable (at best) rhythm guitar work and harmony
vocals, and
Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke would pretend (initially at least) to
play the
bass guitar and the drums.
The band released its first single as the
Beefeaters. The record was produced by Jim Dickson, who would go on to
guide
the Byrds’ career, and Paul Rothschild, who would go on to guide the
Doors’
career. The single, released by Elektra Records, went nowhere. By
November of
1964 though, the band, renamed the Byrds, was signed with Columbia
Records.
Just two months later they would record Mr. Tambourine Man and
become
huge stars. But there was a hurdle to overcome first; as Einarson
notes,
“[Gene] had received his draft notice. Roger and Michael had already
dodged
that bullet; now it was Gene’s turn.”
Not to worry though; Gene was able to dodge
that
bullet as well. According to Einarson, Gene was deemed unfit for
military
service due to an “old football disease,” which is identified as
“Osgood
Schlatter’s Disease.” For the record, Osgood Schlatter’s is not a
“football
disease.” I’m not at all convinced, to be perfectly honest, that Osgood
Schlatter’s is a disease at all. I was diagnosed with the same thing
when I was
a kid and the only difference between me and other kids was that I had
a
‘disease’ while they had ‘growing pains.’ According to the medical
community
though, it is a real childhood disease with no known treatment that one
‘outgrows’ as one approaches adulthood.
Luckily for Gene, it apparently didn’t
prevent him
from playing football, but it did keep him out of the service – which
was
probably a good thing, because, after all, what use does the military
have for
a big, strong, powerfully-built former athlete who knew his way around
a
variety of weapons?
And now, with that out of the way, a
correction is
in order; regrettably, I claimed in an earlier chapter that Clark was a
very
good but not a terribly prolific songwriter. That is actually far from
the
truth (the fact that no one has alerted me to that egregious error, by
the way,
illustrates how little-known Clark is today). Without question, Gene
was an
astoundingly prolific songwriter. I had assumed otherwise due to the
fact that
relatively few of his compositions appear on Byrds’ albums, which
instead
feature a lot of covers.
The truth though is that Gene had more than
enough
songs – and reportedly good songs – to fill the early Byrds’ albums.
Even
Crosby has acknowledged that Clark “was prolific. He would show up
every week
with new songs and they were great songs.” Crosby wasn’t so generous
though
with his assessments of Gene’s talents back in the day. According to
most
accounts, it was the jealousy of Crosby and McGuinn that kept Gene’s
tracks off
the records.
In those days, there wasn’t a lot of money to
be
made by performing and recording music. The real money was in song
royalties,
so Clark was paid considerably more than the rest of the band. As
McGuinn put
it, “Gene was into Ferraris and we were still starving.” That
disproportionate
compensation quickly drove a wedge between Clark and the other 2/3 of
the
original trio. At times, Gene even shared writing credits on his songs
just to
get them onto albums. The classic Eight Miles High, for
example, was
written by Gene but credited to Crosby and McGuinn as well (Crosby
reportedly
contributed just one line of lyrics and McGuinn handled the arrangement
of
Gene’s composition).
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
“There was this persona and the rest of
Gene was
somewhere in there. He was hard to get to know … He could be very warm
and
loving, but that could change in a heartbeat.”
Bonnie Clark, Gene’s sister
“In later years, toward
the end, he would have really bad
nightmares. He would wake up in the middle of the night screaming …”
Kai Clark, Gene’s son
“It is often difficult for those who
knew him – even
family members – to reconcile the two Gene Clarks: the cheerful,
engaging yet
shy loner with the vibrant imagination, and the frustrated, moody
recluse who
was sometimes prone to violence.”
Chronicler John Einarson
As has been noted previously, Vito Paulekas
played a
key role in the early days of the Byrds. And so it is that we find
references
to Vito and his entourage in Einarson’s telling of the Gene Clark
story: “Vito
and Carl were legendary hipsters on the
When the band launched its first national
tour in
July 1965, “Along for the trip were
As troupe dancer Lizzie Donohue would later
recall,
many of those in
When the band followed up its first national
tour
with a tour of the
Sometime after that tour, members of the
Byrds
famously met with members of the Beatles and they all dropped acid
together.
Some accounts hold that this meeting took place in the
In March of 1966, a press release announced
Gene
Clark’s departure from the Byrds. McGuinn has alleged that Dickson and
co-manager Eddie Ticknor encouraged Gene to split from the band so that
they
could exploit his solo potential. If so, then they must have been
greatly
disappointed, as
One of the first offers Gene received upon
his
departure from the Byrds was from drummer Dewey Martin, who invited
Around that same time,
Following what were reportedly unproductive
recording sessions, Gene’s first post-Byrds formation broke up. On July
10, he
was signed as a solo artist and he entered the studio the next month
accompanied by doomed guitarist Clarence White, Brian Wilson handler
Van Dyke
Parks, our old friend Glen Campbell, the ubiquitous Chris Hillman, and
Vern and
Rex Gosdin, who had gotten their start alongside – who else? – Chris
Hillman in
the formation known as the Hillmen.
In January of 1967,
By March of 1967,
When Gene had left the Byrds, by the way, he
had
done so empty handed. Not so with
Following his brief reunion with the Byrds,
By this time Gene had married and his wife,
Carlie,
was an avid reader of occult literature, particularly, as she recalled,
“this
lady named Madame Blavatsky.”
Circa 1971,
According to authors such as Craig
Heimbichner (Blood
on the Altar), Martin P. Starr (The Unknown God), and John
Carter (Sex
and Rockets), Dennis Hopper and David’s dad, John Carradine, were
both
members of the infamous Agape Lodge of the OTO, alongside doomed rocket
scientist Jack Parsons, actor Dean Stockwell, and doppelgangers L. Ron
Hubbard
and Robert Heinlein (who was also, it will be recalled, a Laurel Canyon
resident). According to Gregory Mank (Hollywood’s Hellfire Club),
John
Carradine and John Barrymore were also members of the so-called “Bundy
Drive
Boys,” a group that engaged in such practices as incest, rape and
cannibalism.
And according to Ed Sanders (The Family), among the upscale
homes
visited by a
Of course, just because Clark’s inner circle
seems
to have been drawn from various nefarious occult groups doesn’t mean
that we
should leap to any conclusions about Gene himself, even if his wife was
an avid
occultist, and even if he was the product of a multi-generational cult
town, and even if his sibling was sacrificed stillborn on a
major occult
holiday, and even if his first home was right across the street from a body
drop funeral home.
Moving on then, the year 1972 saw yet another
brief
Byrds reunion, with another record released in February of 1973. Gene
next
began recording sessions for a new solo project, financed by his friend
Gary
Legon, the husband of porn star and Ivory Soap model Marilyn Chambers.
Joining
Gene on some of the tracks was Emmylou Harris, whose hubby Tom Slocum –
a
descendant of famed explorer Joshua Slocum – was a member of Gene’s
inner
circle.
After relocating to
She and Gene moved in together in the summer
of
1977. According to Einarson,
Canyon resident Ken Mansfield recalled those
dark
years: “That particular point in my life, and most of us, was the
craziest time
of all, when we were all into drugs the most. Tommy’s (Kaye) house was
one of
the houses we hung out at a lot. David Carradine was my neighbor in
There seems to have been a little bit of a
problem
with little kids in the ‘60s and ‘70s dying in “unfortunate accidents”
in
Circa 1978,
Following the release of the second reunion
album,
Clark and a close friend, guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, left LA for
Gene’s solo career sputtered on for another
decade,
though no one really paid much attention. In January 1991, the original
members
of the Byrds came together for their induction into the Rock and Roll
Hall of
Fame.
The circumstances of
According to Einarson, Clark had been
fighting to
stay sober, but it “is agreed that he began drinking again on the
evening of
Wednesday, May 22 … What happened next depends entirely on who is
telling the
story. [One witness] claims he searched the house for drugs and did not
find
any – contrary to claims by others that drugs and drug paraphernalia
were
present in the house … there are those conspiracy theorists who
continue to
insinuate that drugs and certain characters were, indeed, present that
night,
and that Gene’s death was a result of misadventure, necessitating a
panicked
clean-up campaign that morning.”
There were apparently numerous people present
at
Days later, David Carradine caused quite a
stir at
Gene’s open-casket memorial service. Former bandmate Pat Robinson
remembered it
well: “When Carradine came up, he wasn’t as much drunk as he was on
acid, I
think, and his girlfriend and business manager at the time was there
with him.
And we’re standing there and Carradine says, ‘You cocksucker …’ and
grabs Gene
by the lapels. When you pull somebody up from a coffin and they have
nothing
inside for guts they bend higher up. It was really shocking to see
that. And
Carradine goes, ‘You pissed on my daughter when she was thirteen.’ And
he said
it pretty loud and then he says, ‘I saw him snicker, boys, heh heh.’
Oh, man,
that was weird.”
You think so? Perhaps weirder still is that
many of
those who were in attendance remember hearing something a little
different:
“You fucked my daughter when she was thirteen.” Maybe Carradine
had
mistaken