I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better

My one and only reader informed me that the Cars tune was called simply, You Might Think and the I'm crazy bit is part of the lyric but not in the title. We can sleep more soundly knowing that, I'm sure.
I know I'm not keeping up my end of the bargain here but I'm back, for the time being anyway. It occurs to me that most of my recommendations thus far have been from bands and artists from the other side of the pond. This is only natural for me since, as far as I'm concerned, it all began with the Beatles, the Kinks, the Who etc... I'm fully aware of the American contribution to the genre. We invented it for God's sake. A bit ironic that. We invented the Devil's music for God's sake.
I hate it when people refer to Rock 'n Roll as the Devil's music. That's another topic I'll try to tackle but not in this post.
Anyway. Even though Rock 'n Roll was an American invention, I think the Brits took it much further and made it far more interesting. I'll take the Beatles over Chuck Berry any day. Or the Who over Jerry Lee Lewis or the Animals over Little Richard or the Kinks over just about anybody.
The closest we Americans came to having any serious competition for the first wave of British rockers was the Byrds who, without Gene Clark, were just a bunch of guys who sang Bob Dylan and Pete Seger songs. Which brings me to my subject today. The brilliant Gene Clark.
Although Gene left the Byrds before they released their third LP 5th Dimension his influence on the band remained with them throughout the remainder of their respective careers. For one thing he taught them that in order to make any money in the rock 'n roll game you need to write your own songs. The big money was in publishing, not the few pennies you got for units of your records sold. The story goes that Gene was the target of the bands collective green eyed monster as he was tooling around Benedict Canyon in a Porsche while the rest of the band were driving old beat up Chevys.
But, more importantly, his influence was stylistic. Genes lyrics were a syntactical nightmare at times but they always worked within the confines of his songs. The blame for such lame constructions as Americas, "in the desert you can remember your name 'cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain." falls squarely on the shoulders of Harold Eugene Clark. Without his, "the way she tells me of her love and never is she tryin' she don't have to be assured of many good things to find" from the classic She Don't Care About Time the Horse With No Name lyric would not have been possible. Looked at objectively written out on the page these lyrics might make one cringe but sung along to the bouyant melodies that carry each lyric along they seem to be quite correct, or correct enough anyway, and even linguistically beautiful in a stream of consciousness type of fashion.
The Byrds have been credited with inventing Folk Rock, Country Rock and even Psychedlic Rock, Eight Miles High being the reason for the third accreditation. And while many writers cite Gram Parsons (who joined the band in 1968) with being the catalyst for these meldings of styles, it was clearly Gene who was at the vanguard. Gram may have been responsible for Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the best Country rock album ever, Gene was testing the Country Rock waters as early as 1966 with tunes such as Tried So Hard.
As great as his output with the Byrds was, Feel A whole Lot Better, Set You Free This Time, You Showed Me, Here Without You, The World Turns All Around Her, the list goes on and on and that's from just two LPs, Gene really came into his own as a writer and a singer during his mostly unheard of and certainly unheralded solo career.
We'll pick up on Gene later, but see, I'm not a total anglophile.