Also on board the Expedition was ever-reliable bass player David Jackson, shyly approached one night at the Troubadour by Gene Clark. To this day Jackson recalls the rehearsals as magical. The same epithet could be applied to The Fantastic Expedition, released in October 1967. As much an example of Gram Parsons’s ‘soul-country-cosmic’ hybrid as anything Parsons himself achieved, the album stands time’s test as well as the Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin, which it preceded. It’s certainly a more satisfying record than Sweetheart of the Rodeo. From the Byrdsish ‘Out on the Side’ to the wistfully jaunty Clark–Leadon song ‘Train Leaves Here This Mornin’’ via the heartache melody of ‘The Radio Song’, the Expedition is the missing link between Back Porch Bluegrass and the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty: hippie country rock that’s influenced everybody from R.E.M. to Teenage Fan-club. ‘Doug and Gene did some really good records that nobody paid attention to,’ Chris Hillman told John Einarson. ‘That first album was fabulous, way better than anything the rest of us were doing when you measure it song per song.’
The fact that the Expedition bombed was partly the fault of A&M Records, formed as a pop label by trumpeter Herb Alpert and a company with scant understanding of Dillard & Clark’s musical roots. A&M would expand its country rock roster with the Flying Burritos’ Gilded Palace of Sin, Phil Ochs’s Tape from California and Steve Young’s Rock, Salt and Nails, but if the label’s instincts were right they lacked the underground marketing nous of Warner/Reprise. ‘A&M wanted to become hip, so they brought me in and tried to attract some major talent,’ says Tom Wilkes, who became the label’s art director in 1968. ‘It was all Boyce and Hart, Sergio Mendes, Herb Alpert, and now they were really trying to sign bands. They wanted to get into the mainstream of rock.’
Dillard and Clark themselves hardly helped their own cause. On the cover of The Fantastic Expedition they posed as bikers and smirked like schoolboys as they shared a joint. ‘I was around during that Dillard & Clark period, and all they were doing was drinking and taking drugs,’ recalls Chris Darrow. ‘You’d go in there and hang out for four and a half hours and you wouldn’t play a note.’ Gene and Doug couldn’t even hold it together for their Troubadour debut. When David Jackson showed up for the gig, the club’s doorman advised him to go next door to Tana’s. There the two men sat, olives bobbing in their Martinis, stoned out of their skulls. David hauled them back into the club. When the lights came up on the band, Dillard stood stage-central with his banjo and shitkicker grin. Jackson, Leadon and mandolinist Don Beck flanked him. At the rear of the stage was Harold Eugene Clark, sitting on his amp and facing the back wall. Jackson somehow got Clark turned around for the second song, on which Doug Dillard was playing fiddle. At the end of it, still grinning, Doug placed the fiddle on the ground and jumped on it. ‘That was pretty much the end of that version of Dillard & Clark,’ says Leadon. ‘They didn’t have the discipline or really the desire to be a performing act.’
It wasn’t all mayhem with Dillard & Clark. Some nights they set the Troubadour on fire, especially after going fully electric and bringing ex-Byrd Michael Clarke in on drums. ‘The Eagles will tell you that the Dillard & Clark shows were like fucking revival meetings,’ says LA music historian Domenic Priore. ‘Pogo and Dillard & Clark and Linda Ronstadt were really the seminal events.’ If Through the Morning, Through the Night, the second Dillard & Clark album, was covers-heavy, it still included two Clark classics in the title track and the sublime ‘Polly’. No one ever did waltz-time sadness as tenderly as the guy from Tipton.
‘Gene always seemed unhappy, like there was a cloud over his head,’ said fiddler Byron Berline, who joined Dillard & Clark before the second album. ‘He’d be happy one day, and you’d see him the next day and he would be a bucket of gloom.’ The wonder is that so many extraordinary songs poured out of this melancholy boozehound. For John York, who briefly played bass with Gene before joining the Byrds in 1969, the man was ‘a hillbilly Shakespeare’.
Clark’s melancholia only deepened as he lost whatever grip he’d had on his own group. After Dillard brought in his latest fling, Donna Washburn, as a second singer, Gene quit. Significantly, he also turned his back on Los Angeles. Heading north to the coastal hippie town of Mendocino, Gene Clark would begin a career as one of the greatest if most neglected singer-songwriters of the ’70s.
IV: Big Tit Sue and Bigger Tit Sue
Up on the Strip, the live scene was hurting. Name bands were now too big to play small clubs like the Whisky: they’d be booked into bigger venues like the Kaleidoscope or the Shrine Auditorium. And the Strip itself was hardly the bustling beads-and-bells mecca it had been in 1965–66. It was a different story down on Santa Monica Boulevard, where Doug Weston’s Troubadour was now the de facto clubhouse for LA’s denim in-crowd. ‘The Sunset Strip sort of shut down after Monterey,’ says Domenic Priore. ‘Doug managed to ride the storm out. He had the place, and the people that had been involved with the folk-rock scene on the Strip gravitated to the Troubadour.’
‘When the Troub came along, that was right up our alley,’ says Linda Ronstadt. ‘It was small enough that you could really hear the music well and get close to it. Of course we were all so self-centred that to us it was already the centre of the universe.’ On any given night one might see the angelic Jackson Browne emerging from the kitchen with a bottle of Dos Equis. Arlo Guthrie, newly signed to Reprise by Lenny Waronker, would flirt shamelessly with any girl who worked at the club. In a corner would be comedian/banjo player Steve Martin, who, in the recollection of Troubadour mainstay Eve Babitz, sat with ‘a single glass of white wine in the midst of all that cigarette smoke’, unwilling ‘to look on the bright side of total debauchery’. Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison might be holed up with a small entourage and a bottle of Jim Beam. Later they would be poured into a Red & White cab after becoming belligerent and abusive.
‘If you sold out the Troubadour, that was it,’ says Tom Waits, who played the club early in his career. ‘At the Troub they announced your name and picked you up with a spotlight at the cigarette machine, and then they’d walk you to the stage with the light. Then Doug would go out onstage naked and recite “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.’ At the Troubadour the waitresses – Reina, Black Sylvia, Big Tit Sue – and the bartenders – Ray, Kevin, Gatt, Jim Maxwell, John Barrick – were almost as famous as the entertainers who hung out there. ‘There was Big Tit Sue and Bigger Tit Sue, and there was Black Sylvia behind the bar,’ recalls Robert Marchese, a tough-talking former football player from Pittsburgh who produced Richard Pryor’s first album at the club in September