Alcoholic from an early age, Clark was a troubled soul. In contrast to McGuinn’s and Crosby’s songs his folk-throwback ballads sounded grave and timeless, closer to the soulful grandeur of a Roy Orbison than to the amphetamine poetics of a Bob Dylan. The bittersweet ‘Set You Free This Time’, a failed single from Turn! Turn! Turn!, was the template for several folk-country masterpieces Clark would record. Crosby recognised that Gene was ‘an emotional projector on a huge and powerful level’, but it didn’t stop him and McGuinn preying on his insecurities. ‘In the beginning, David was very musically intimidated, so he tried to intimidate others,’ said Jim Dickson. ‘He shook [Gene’s] sense of time by telling him he was off.’ Early in 1966, Clark decided he’d had enough – enough of the sudden fame, enough of the tensions.
‘After “Eight Miles High” I felt we had a direction to go in that might have been absolutely incredible,’ Clark said in 1977. ‘We could have taken it from there, but I felt because of the confusion and egos – the young, successful egos – we were headed in a direction that wouldn’t have that importance or impact.’ One afternoon in March 1966, Barry Friedman and drummer friend Denny Bruce went to score some pot from a friend named Jeannie ‘Butchie’ Cho. Sitting in her Laurel Canyon living room was none other than Clark. He had black bags under his eyes and looked ravaged.
Clark was in crisis, pouring out his heart to Butchie. He said he was due to go on tour with the Byrds the next day. ‘I can’t do it,’ he kept repeating. ‘I can’t see myself on that airplane tomorrow.’ Butchie said that nobody left a successful group. ‘I don’t give a shit,’ Gene insisted. ‘I don’t like what it’s doing to my head.’ Clark did make it to LAX but started screaming as the plane taxied to the runway. The Byrds flew to New York as a quartet. The official announcement of Clark’s exit came in July.
The departure only increased the tension between McGuinn and Crosby, even as the Byrds propelled folk-rock into a new psychedelic realm with Fifth Dimension. By the summer of 1967, relations between the two were severely strained. McGuinn approached the Byrds’ music with what Derek Taylor described as ‘a fussy school-marm attitude’. Crosby, enamoured of the wild new scene up in San Francisco, felt the Byrds had become square. He wanted to be in a dynamic band like the Buffalo Springfield or the Jefferson Airplane. He was seeing an increasing amount of Stephen Stills, whose sheer appetite for playing and jamming thrilled him. ‘I remember hearing all these horror stories about what an arrogant asshole David was,’ said Stills, often accused of the same trait. ‘But when I met him I found he was basically just as shy as I was and making up for it with a lot of aggressive behaviour.’
Crosby had interests besides music. One was hanging out with scenesters like Cass Elliott. The other, despite the shame he felt about his roly-poly physique, was sleeping with any fetching nymphette who offered herself to him. ‘David was charming around chicks,’ says Nurit Wilde, who lived around the corner from Crosby in Laurel Canyon. ‘But there was a revolving door with him – one girl in, one girl out. And if a girl got pregnant, he was mean to her and dumped her.’ By the summer of 1967 Crosby had become so obnoxious that McGuinn and Hillman could take no more of him. After he used the Byrds’ appearance at the Monterey Pop Festival to launch into a tirade about the Warren Report on the Kennedy assassination – and then compounded that by appearing onstage with the Buffalo Springfield – the decision was made to axe him.
In October, McGuinn and Hillman drove in their Porsches to Crosby’s new place on Lisbon Lane in Beverly Glen. ‘They drove up,’ Crosby said in a 1971 radio interview, ‘and said that I was terrible and crazy and unsociable and a bad writer and a terrible singer and I made horrible records and that they would do much better without me.’ Shaken as he was, the firing came as a relief. Accepting a $10,000 payoff from the Byrds, he was ready to cut loose and take time out. An obsession with sailing got him thinking about boats. He hung with Mama Cass, now holding court in a funky new abode on Summit Ridge off Mulholland Drive. A bold narcotic adventuress, Cass was even dabbling in heroin and pharmaceutical opiates – a major no-no in the LSD and marijuana community of that time. ‘[Smack] was always the bad drug,’ Crosby would write. ‘It got a little more open around the time that Cass and I were doing it, but it wasn’t something you told people.’
Crosby was the nexus of a nascent scene, the supercool spider at the centre of a web of new relationships. ‘He was the main cultural luminary to me,’ says Jackson Browne, then struggling on the hoot scene. ‘He had this legendary VW bus with a Porsche engine in it, and that summed him up – a hippie with power!’ For Bronx-born Ron Stone, owner of a hippie boutique on Santa Monica Boulevard that Crosby regularly frequented, the ex-Byrd was the scene. ‘The Byrds were the California band of the time,’ he says, ‘and there he was, the rebel within that group, tossed out on his ass. There was no question that it all spun around him and Cass.’
If Crosby used the Monterey Pop Festival to sabotage his position in the Byrds, he was nonetheless a key presence on that seminal weekend in June 1967. Bridging a sometimes insurmountable gulf between the Los Angeles faction behind the event and the Haight-Ashbury bands that dominated it, David hobnobbed with everyone from an edgy Paul Kantner to a diaphanous Brian Jones. Of all the LA stars he was the one who’d responded the quickest to what was happening in the Bay Area.
The brainchild of Lou Adler and John Phillips – whose Mamas and the Papas hits had made both men rich – Monterey Pop was effectively a rock ’n’ roll trade show masquerading as a love-in. Wresting control of the festival away from LA-based paper fortune heir Alan Pariser, Adler and Phillips transformed it into a seismic event starring as many of their superstar friends and contacts as they could cram into one long weekend. Also present at the event were the key rock executives of the day: Clive Davis of Columbia, Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic, Mo Ostin and Joe Smith of Warner/Reprise. Following Mo’s acquisition of Jimi Hendrix, Joe had signed the Grateful Dead, the quintessential Haight-Ashbury band. Clive Davis now picked up Big Brother and the Holding Company, featuring Janis Joplin.
Country Joe McDonald described Monterey as ‘a total ethical sellout of everything that we’d dreamed of’. Perhaps it was. But it was also the inevitable moment when the underground went mainstream. ‘The San Francisco groups had a very bad taste in their mouths about LA commercialism,’ Adler admitted decades later. ‘And it’s true that we were a business-minded industry. It wasn’t a hobby.’
From the perspective of Haight-Ashbury, LA was an apolitical anti-community, a sprawl of suburbs whose only focus was the lie of mass entertainment. The Haight bands would have agreed with embittered folkie Phil Ochs, who described his adopted Los Angeles as ‘Death City…the ultimate in the materialistic exaggeration of America’. Yet it was the very tension between LA and SF that made Monterey so fascinating. ‘