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Obscure Music - even thought it's hit based

Not sure if anyone has come across the Gene Clark album from 1974 - "No Other". I haven't played it all that much though because I felt the original album was doing too much with Gene Clark (with the exception of a couple of tracks - "Silver Raven" and "From a Silver Phial"), however I've got the Remastered & Expanded edition of "No other" and found that if I substituted the alternative versions of "Life's Greatest Fool", "No Other", "Some Misunderstanding" and "Lady of the North" the album gets interesting. The only really odd track seems to be "Strengths of Strings", though it has it's moments. Unsure if Gene Clark did an alternative version of "Strengths of Strings", the other alternatives basically simplify into a folkier song - it's a pity the CD can only hold 75 minutes of information (or this one does - the songs are quite long particularly "SOS" and "Some Misunderstanding so while some of the alternative songs are shorter than the album version their definitely of reasonible length - the shortest songs are just over 3 minutes!).

CP/M User.
 
carlsson wrote:

Gene Clark thus had nothing to gain from entering the Eurovision Song Contest, as it has a limitation of max 3 minutes per song. :)

Oh well it really depends what Gene had up his sleve, in the 70s Gene perhaps wrote songs which had a little bit more substance, though I can say that Gene also had the tendancy of reviving and/or reproducing a song where the length of it changes. A classic in that sense is a song he first started on in 1967 as featured on the "Gene Clark and the Gosdin Brothers" album is "Tried so Hard" which ran for 2:20 secs. Later Clark revived the song in 1970 and the Flying Burrito Brothers performed it (with Gene on Baking Vocals), the song I feel in both cases is very good, though The Flying Burrito Brothers version has more substance and runs just over 3 minutes.

I feel the real issue with Gene Clark though was travelling around via Aeroplane, a few people I feel dispute this as the true reason for why Clark left the Byrds around 1966, though the music for which he produced and performed I feel is of a high standard though didn't get a lot of reconition at the time because of the way Clark went about his business of being heard. In a way though I feel Clark was quite influential in the way he exploited folk as well as fusing Country and Rock together would have certainally inspired groups like the Byrds to do this as well as bring groups like the Flying Burrito Brothers and The Eagles in existance, though I'd have to say there was probably a process of groups to happen to create future groups.
 
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