Gene Clark No Other The Byrds Asylum UK 1974 psyche LP

	£		16
	$		21

  GENE CLARK - NO OTHER
..UK PRESSING 1974 -   Asylum  SYL 9020 -
The 1974 "No Other" album is a real 'grower' of the best kind by this ex-(original) Byrds guitar/vocalist's scarce solo album... written while he 'tripped' on hallucinogenics...

But ended up in the Mojo ultimate collection top LP's guide

By the time  the Byrds’ best songwriter was hitting his stride artistically at the dawn of the 70s when Gene Clark recorded his Asylum debut No Other in late 1973. He had recorded the magnificent double A-side “She’s the Kind of Girl” and “One In a Hundred” with his former bandmates in 1970, following up the effort with a post-Dylan tour de force, White Light, a year later.

The 'No Other' album, was recorded right around the same time as the disappointing Byrds reunion album and Clark would be the only member to come out with his dignity in tact. Clark’s contributions showcased on that Byrds reunion album delivered the singer-songwriter’s emerging style: a pensive, melancholy, but melodic rural-rock flow delivered in Clark’s deeply Midwestern yearn of a tenor and graced with a lyrical preoccupation with imagery derived from his interest in Native American symbolism. The Byrds reunion album was followed by Clarks solo No Other and turned out to be one of the great lost albums of the decade.

On first listen, though, you’d be forgiven if you thought No Other sounds less like a masterpiece than after a few spins - the which allows the listener to get settled into the material with its mid-tempo rural edge-rock Crosby Stills & Nash -styled harmonies...and just beneath No Other’s rural-rock veneer is a one-of-a-kind record: building on the endless, infinite exploration of sound and space of Tim Buckley’s Starsailor and Skip Spence’s Oar.

A mere perusal of the lyrics gives the listener an idea of where Clark was going with No Other; more than any of his records, No Other posits Clark as a Deep Meta-Thinker, which is really saying something for someone who once wrote of “vessels” floating on “wisdom’s karmic ocean.” Witness the record’s melodic opener, “Life’s Greatest Fool”:

Words can be empty/ Though filled with sound
Stoned numb and/Drifting hard to be profound
Formed out of pleasure/Chiseled by pain
Never the highest/And not the last one to gain

Or “Strength of Strings,” its title a line from Dylan’s “Lay Down Your Weary Tune,” its bridge sung in ghostly a capella:

I am always high
I am always low
There is always change
Hear the strings are bending in harmony
Not so far from the breaking on the cosmic range

Every song on No Other illustrates the metaphysical frame of mind Clark was in during their composition – how he was exploring the meaning and purpose of music itself (a theme that reared its head in his classic and Dylan-admired “Spanish Guitar” three years earlier). And so it’s hardly surprising to learn that No Other was largely composed under the influence of peyote while staying in the coastal home of one of his girlfriends, holed up in a room adorned with a massive picture window high above the Pacific. There, he would sit, tripping and writing for hours on end overlooking the sea as the ocean waves crashed below.

More than any other Gene Clark album, No Other’s songs served as mere sketches. Indeed, what gives the record its singular potency is the marriage of such open-ended, ponderous imagery with music and a production that aspires to the equally cosmic, brilliantly showcased on the epic progressive folk of side closers “Strength of Strings” and “Lady of the North” and the swampy murk of the title track. Here, credit must be given to producer Kaye, who was inspired to create a soundscape for Clark’s quirky, formally-complex songs that was largely grounded in rural music (or what was passing for it at the time) but emblazoned with a massive grab bag of harmonies, psychedelic guitars, wah-wah violins and honky tonk piano. Such arrangements touches stretch even the poppier songs here, like the snappy “The True One,” well into the stratosphere. All of which served to make No Other an entirely unique entry in the Gene Clark catalog and like the work of Tim Buckley, Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue or Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers, No Other is a record that no fan of seventies cosmic exploration should do without. It’s true to its title – bold, experimental and utterly one of a kind.

"Life's Greatest Fool" – 4:44
"Silver Raven" – 4:53
"No Other" – 5:08
"Strength of Strings" – 6:31
"From a Silver Phial" – 3:40
"Some Misunderstanding" – 8:09
"The True One" – 3:58
"Lady of the North" – 6:04
 

CONDITION: The cover is very clean and sharp NM/ EX .. slight ding on the spine -

The vinyl is very glossy clean on both sides M- TOP LEVEL