Gene Clark

I'll get back to Captain Penny, and really any and all TV programs made for kids from our region, in a day or two.  Too pass the time I wanted to put up a post about a favorite musician of mine.  I occasionally write articles for a music website from England,  This particular article showed up on Toppermost.co.uk on March 1st, 2014.  The premise of the site is the Top 10 songs by any artists. Hope you enjoy it and I promise an explanation of the Blog's Title in the next day or two.

Tried So Hard	Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers
Train Leaves Here This Morning	The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark
Outlaw Song	The American Dreamer OST
With Tomorrow	White Light
For A Spanish Guitar	White Light
In A Misty Morning	Roadmaster
Silver Raven	No Other
Home Run King	Two Sides To Every Story
Mary Sue	Under The Silvery Moon
Gypsy Rider	So Rebellious A Lover

The story of Gene Clark isn’t all that different from far too many other artists who never ‘made it’ because of their own personal demons. For a short moment, during The Byrds early years, he was the acknowledged star of a front line rock ‘n’ roll band. The Golden Boy, Prince Valiant with a soothing yet powerful voice and some serious songwriting chops. Already a veteran of The New Christy Minstrels when he helped form The Byrds, he seemingly had talent to burn. “A hero, our savior. Few in the audience could take their eyes off this presence. He was the songwriter. He had the gift,” is how fellow Byrd Chris Hillman described him. But a self destructive tendency sadly destroyed any chance Clark ever had for any sort of substantial solo career, even if he did try over and over again. His list of collaborators and band mates, and there were several bands the casual fan never heard of, reads as a who’s who of the Country Rock/Folk Rock movement. Yet even though he released one brilliant album after another he somehow managed to not chart once as a ‘solo’ act. And when he would occasionally have a peak, he’d find some way to wreck it. Drug addiction does that. I’ve decided to omit the first 2½ Byrds albums, and their mediocre reunion album from the early 70s, whose only high points were Gene. In that vein I also omitted the 2 (3 if you count 3 Byrds In London) McGuinn, Hillman and Clark albums. Just as an aside its a mistake to think of MCH as simply a mini-Byrds group. They made the very conscious decision to do a much slicker production and approach the song selection differently so as to distance themselves from The Byrds, probably to their detriment. Still, with all the missteps and excesses there were some truly amazing songs along the way for Clark, how could there not be with all his talent? I could easily do a top 30 songs of Gene Clark. Here are my favorite 10, at least for today.

After Gene left The Byrds for the first time he took 18 months off before releasing a solo album of sorts, an eternity for the 1960s. Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers featured Byrds Hillman and Michael Clarke, future Byrd Clarence White, Doug Dillard, Van Dyke Parks, Glen Campbell and Leon Russell. I imagine I hear hope in this album, a man who believes he is on the brink of some great things. Tried So Hard is a favorite of mine from the album, It’s a unique break up song for me as the singer thinks about how, “I’ve been thru similarities / It’s not the first break I’ve had / And I just can’t let it bring me down low.” There is some foreshadowing in the song as well with, “Still with all the things I can do or say / It won’t change the fate I know so well is mine”. Given his life over the next 25 years it’s hard not to read something into that line. Throw in some fantastic guitar playing by White and you have a great little song. But the album didn’t do well and Clark was back to The Byrds for a short stay. But as quick as he came back he was gone.

His next stop was in Dillard & Clark. An early country rock group led by Gene and Doug Dillard, it also featured Hillman, Clarke, Bernie Leadon and Sneaky Pete. Their first album, of two, has often been considered a landmark of the genre. But it was Gene, so the album didn’t sell. Train Leaves Here This Morning, co-written with Bernie Leadon and Doug Dillard, is a bit of a lament. Which was a strong suit for Gene, that voice had a touch of lament in it no matter what he sang. “Looked around then for a reason / when there wasn’t somethin’ more to blame it on”, strikes me as a problem many folks have. The singer in this song simply didn’t know what tomorrow might bring, and very casually didn’t really care. Not even The Eagles could ruin this song for me.

After this group broke up, Clark recorded a couple songs for an odd little documentary called The American Dreamer about Dennis Hopper filming The Last Movie. Outlaw Song is a particularly powerful song as, unlike his usual work, it has a sense of pride in its bleakness. It’s a personal statement of sorts about living “inside the rational lines all men draw”. The American Dreamer is a little gem of a soundtrack album, all but forgotten.

Clark released arguably his first solo album with White Light which offered several great tunes. In many ways he brought his mood from American Dreamer to White Light, as its songs are whittled down to their most essential elements, really quite bare as songs go. The simple guitar piece that opens With Tomorrow (co-written with Jesse Ed Davis) is stark and somewhat haunting. “So with tomorrow I will borrow / another moment of joy and sorrow”. It’s a song I’ve never really completely gotten a hold of the meaning, but those lyrics still freeze me when I hear them.

Dylan supposedly has said For A Spanish Guitar was a song he, or anyone, would be proud to have written. For my money the best description of the musician’s task was in the lines, “For the right and the wrong and insane / for the answers they cannot explain / pulsate from my soul through my brain / in a Spanish guitar." It's simply a beautiful song.

Clark went into the studio to record his second A&M album, I’m sure hoping this would be the one for him. His band included White, Clarke, Spooner Oldham, Byron Berline and Sneaky Pete. Issues kept Clark from finishing, so A&M added two songs he recorded with the original Byrds for a planned reunion that didn’t happen for a few years, and one song he did with the Flying Burrito Brothers and released it only in Holland. And then they dumped Clark. Roadmaster didn’t see a release in the United States ‘til 1994. In a Misty Morning (as well as Full Circle and One In A Hundred) make it obvious though that Clark’s talent was as strong as ever. “Way down in my soul was the hope / that better days were always there to find.”

Clark joined the short-lived Byrds reunion, arguably producing some of the only listenable moments for the album. After a short stint in McGuinn’s band he joined Asylum Records and made a truly brilliant album, No Other. It’s an album that even though it barely broke 150 on the US charts is currently being covered note for note by an Indy Rock All-Star band on the “No Other Tour”. Produced by Thomas Jefferson Kaye, it was a bit of a train wreck considering the amount of time and money they spent in the studio but it’s brilliant and I didn’t have to cover the overruns. Asylum chief David Geffen was extremely angry with the sales, and more so with the fact Kaye and Clark had spent $100,000 and only recorded eight songs. It was deleted from Asylum’s catalog in under two years. Silver Raven from No Other could be one of the more heart breaking songs from the country-folk scene of the time. Clark did a bit of falsetto in the song, and it works. And there is that bassline, well – you’d have to have played the four string for years to really understand how amazing it is.

Three years later, Clark and Kaye were back with Clark’s final true solo album, Two Sides To Every Story. Home Run King is really a fun song, even though lyrically it’s quite depressing. Spruced up by some Emmylou Harris harmony vocals, I’ve never been able to keep from singing along to “You’re either just the newspaper boy or you’re Babe Ruth.”

A couple of years later, Clark rejoined Hillman and McGuinn of MCH, although his unreliable nature and probably his dissatisfaction with the slick sound of the group caused him to be moved to featured performer on the second album and gone by the third.

After that, Clark bounced around for a while forming a number of bands; Firebyrds, Flyte (with Hillman), sitting in with the Long Ryders and CRY. CRY was a band featuring Clark, Pat Robinson and former Byrd John York. The recordings, made in the mid-80s and not released for fifteen years, were also supported by Nicky Hopkins and the Band’s Rick Danko. Danko had performed with Clark in 1985 with his Byrds Tribute Show along with York, Richard Manuel, Blondie Chaplin, Rick Roberts and Michael Clarke, and was friends with Clark. In the 1980s the powerhouse radio station where I lived use to host something called the Coffee Break Concert, where essentially they would coerce whoever was in town that weekend to play a show at a downtown Cleveland club on Friday afternoon. Some twenty eight years ago, I saw Clark and Danko, as they couldn’t get everyone from the band on that stage, do a small intimate little acoustic show that is still one of my favorite concert-going experiences.

There is a fun song called Mary Sue from the CRY Sessions. It’s about a guy fondly remembering his girl from his youth, happily pondering whether “I wonder if your memory remembers me / Like I remember you”. Clark sounds happy, which isn’t a bad thing. And that line is a question I’m sure we’ve all asked ourselves.

CRY continued after Clark’s death with Carla Olson stepping into the C spot of the group. Olson was the lead singer of the Textones and had contributed some backup vocals to the original CRY sessions. In 1987, Clark and Olson released a duo album called So Rebellious A Lover which wound up being Clark’s best selling album, not including Byrds and MCH of course. And true to his career path, that meant he never recorded another album and died four years later. Mostly because of the huge royalty payday he received from Tom Petty’s 1989 cover of I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better which he poured into drug and alcohol abuse, even though in 1983 he had much of his stomach and intestines removed because of years of heavy drinking.

Still, in 1987, he had one more good album left to make, and he made it with Carla Olson. A couple of the songs on So Rebellious A Lover are up there with his best work. Gypsy Rider is a favorite of mine. Have you ever rode a motorcycle, I mean a serious bike? All those Born To Be Wild sort of songs never really captured the feeling of being out there on your bike to me. But “crank her over once again / put your face into the wind / find another road where you’ve never been / sing that 2-wheeled melody / the highway symphony” – that captures what it means to be out on your bike better than any other song Ive ever heard. Chris Hillman added a little mandolin to the song as there was almost always a former Byrd around to play with him.

It’s hard for me to reconcile so much great music, within so few albums released from 1966-1991, and the fact his solo career was an abysmal commercial failure. He should have been big, one of the biggest. Instead he was one of the legion of great musicians who wasted their talents in a self destructive spiral. Still, there are these ten songs and so many countless others.

Playhouse Square

  

 

You never forget what got you started. I was in Grad School working on a Masters in Library Science when I realized working in a public library was not going to be for me. Wasn't going to happen. Don't get me wrong, I've got a lot of great friends who are librarians and I spend a fair amount of time in Libraries myself, but it just wasn't for me. I had recently closed a couple of camera stores I owned  and was looking for a new career. I already had a Masters Degree in English (Literature, those compositions guys are weird-who gets a Masters in whether a comma or semi-colon should be used?) and figured working in a Library sounded like a cool idea. But I was wrong, that happens a lot with me.

Luckily I took an archiving class, and luckily the Cleveland Memory Project let me do my practicum with them. I'm a big believer in luck, it's done well by me over the years. A good thing considering the being wrong a lot thing..

So somehow I convinced the folks at Playhouse Square I was the guy they should trust to spend the next couple of months digging through the cabinets full of stuff they had collected over the years. By the time it was over I had found pictures of W.C. Fields in the 1920s when he was more juggler than comedian, a copy of George Burns and Gracie Allen's Wedding License, pictures of the artwork in the theaters from the weekend they opened, and just about a million cool photos and programs. There were photos of Euclid Avenue from the 1890s and menus from restaurants that served the theater district in the 1950s, and the program from opening night at the Hanna Theater. I was hooked.  Pictures like this one of the Allen Theater in 1928 are just fun to come across. This one was in a filing cabinet in the Playhouse Square offices and can be seen on the Playhouse Square Page at the Cleveland Memory Project hosted by Cleveland State.

A lot of folks in Cleveland don't really understand the jewel we have in Playhouse Square. Those beautiful old theaters that will be celebrating their 100^th birthdays in a couple of years are the 2cd largest performing arts center in the country. Denver also claims that honor, but frankly they have the play a little fast and loose with the numbers by including some theaters really outside their district.

It's one of the great stories of Cleveland. The five theaters opened between February of 1921 and November of 1922 and were one of the prides of Cleveland for decades. By July of 1969 four of them were closed and it seemed the golden age of theater in Cleveland was over. But then in the 1970s some civic leaders stopped the destruction of the Ohio and State and started the revitalization of the area.

It took quite a while but in October of 1998 all four marquees on Euclid Avenue burnt at night again for the first time in 30 years. These days Playhouse square welcomes over one million visitors a year.

And while “these days” is quite a triumph it's the history of those couple blocks that interested me a few years ago, and still does now. Oddly enough my sometimes writing partner Thomas Kubat was working on a project for the Cleveland Playhouse at the same time. Guess it was fate we'd team up to write a book on Burton, Ohio and another on Cleveland Area Disasters 1900-1950. Thomas did include a pretty large section about a couple of plays the folks of Burton had put on in the 1950s and 1960s. So it wasn't completely unrelated.

The offices of Pursue Posterity where Thomas and I ply our trade is in the ideastream building in the Playhouse Square District. So I get to hang out in the area whenever I want.

But like I said, it was my first project and when I saw my name on the website, this website http://www.clevelandmemory.org/playhousesquare/ I was knew what I was going to be doing for quite a few years. Take a look at the online collection I put together, It's pretty interesting I think. More importantly get down to Playhouse Square if you get the chance. The Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, The Broadway Series or Cinema on the Square. Fantastic events in amazing settings.

How Television Attempted to Entertain Cleveland Kids in the 1940s and 1950s

 

    Originally this was published as blog entry at Pursueposterity.com, which as everyone knows is the premiere archiving firm in Northeast Ohio.  And as one of the three guys who actually have a title at the office I should know.

 The author, Calvin Rydbom, is an archivist and VP of Marketing with Pursue Posterity.


I can't imagine how much fun every day would be if I got to do something new and different. If it works, I might do it again tomorrow and if it doesn't, just try something else. Even if it worked, I still might try something else. Orson Welles described coming to Hollywood and being let loose to make a movie much like being a kid in a candy store. I'm guessing, maybe even hoping, that being told you get to create whatever television program you want and then broadcast it over the airwaves to anyone who had a television was a pretty similar sensation. It must have been a hoot to be a player in television’s infancy.

A lot of those television pioneers had movies, stage, or even variety shows to use as a jumping off point. This wasn't all that true for the performers whose job it was to entertain children in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Arguably, it was the folks who created programs aimed at children who had the largest throw it against the wall and see what sticks way of doing things. Programs designed for children in Cleveland were not all that unique when compared to the rest of the country. But they were our shows, Cleveland shows. And they were shows hosted and often created by performers who are still considered iconic in our region's history.

That first group of performers aren't quite what you'd call iconic, in fact they are largely what you'd call forgotten. I'd like to talk a little about them though, and a little about how they paved the way for those who came after them.

I doubt very few of its participants, if any, thought of television as an art form worth preserving in the late 1940s. Very little effort was made to save those early television programs, and children's programming was no exception. Knowing who they were, where they came from, or how they came up with what they did wasn't information worth saving in their minds, I suppose. Very little footage or records exist unfortunately. Most of the shows from that era exist only in the memories of those who were there.

Cleveland television officially began in October of 1947 when WEWS became our region's first broadcast station. Not long after WEWS' debut, Uncle Ed's Magic Farm, sponsored by Weather Bird Shoes, started a two year run from 1948 to 1950. The main occupant of the magic farm was named Skeeter Scarecrow, and he is certainly one of those performers lost in the past, at least for the time being. Who knows what is out there still waiting to be found in someone's attic.

The first big television star among Cleveland's children was Jim Breslin, who spent years as a director at WEWS. He was better known those days as Texas Jim. Much like other shows of the era, little or no footage remains of the Texas Jim television show. The only footage I've been able to locate thus far is from a 1956 WEWS promo, and it's wonderfully entertaining. You can certainly see why Texas Jim was a favorite of area tykes. Later on, Breslin appeared as Professor Yule Flunk alongside Captain Penny, who was one of the more iconic hosts that followed on the heels of the original bunch..

Another program to make its debut in 1948 on WEWS was Uncle Jake's House. Gene Carroll, who had significant success earlier as a radio & stage comic and radio disc jockey, appeared as Uncle Jake. The pairing of Carroll and WEWS was a good match as he hosted a program on the station up until his death in 1972.  Most Clevelanders old enough to remember Carroll probably remember him more for his Sunday morning talent show which was more or less America's Got Talent for Cleveland, although the talent level might not have on the level of the shows that dominate network prime-time today.

You know the old gag where you walk behind a couch, crouching down more and more so it looks like you are walking down stairs? Carroll did a variation of that on his show when he had the kids crouch down so it seemed they were going downstairs on Uncle Jake's elevator. Early technology at its finest.

After a three years stint at a Toledo station, Mary Ellen Colchagoff hosted Fun Farm on WEWS. And Linn Sheldon, who later found fame as Barnaby, had a practice run of sorts as Uncle Leslie.

Although very little exists of these early WEWS shows they certainly paved the way for Captain Penny and Barbara Plummer, the host of Romper Room, to become stars in the late 1950s, and stay local celebrities into the early 1970s. I was never much of a Romper Room fan as Miss Barbara never viewed Calvin in her magic mirror when she seemingly saw so many other kids. But I can still remember Captain Penny telling my five year old self at the end of every show “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool Mom. She's pretty nice and she's pretty smart. If you do what Mom says you won't go far wrong." Strong words and sage advice for a five year old to contemplate. Plus he introduced me to The Three Stooges, something any boy would thankful for. It wasn't til years later I wondered why a train engineer was called Captain.

The second television station in the Cleveland market debuted in October of 1948. Originally called WNBK, it went through a couple call letter changes before settling on the WKYC we're now familiar with. As opposed to its competition WNBK  waited a few years before entering the competition for younger viewers.

The first show for children on WNBK, or at least the first that had any sort of lasting impact, was Captain Glenn's Boarding House. Starting in the summer of 1953 the program starred Glenn Rowell, who had been Gene Carroll’s partner in radio and stage for many years, and a puppeteer named Cy Kelly. The show itself was really just a copy of previous show called Captain Glenn's Bandwagon , which Rowell had been hosting in Cincinnati before deciding to try his luck in Cleveland.

Right around that same time someone at WNBK decided that perhaps they could keep kids entertained by showing silent films with a narrator and some music. And so Noontime Comics with Joe Bova appeared on Cleveland airwaves. Bova also wound up hosting Tip Top Clubhouse, which had a just out of his teens sidekick named Dom Deluise.  Years before he became a star handling the comedy relief in the 1970s Burt Reynolds films, Deluise started his career with Bova in Cleveland before following him to New York in the mid 1950s. They tried to make a go of Tip Top Clubhouse in New York but had little to no success. Bova did stay a fixture on New York television for years though using essentially the same format while giving the show numerous names.

In 1956, the station, by then called KYW, got pretty creative with Morning Surprise hosted by Tom Haley and his robot sidekick Mr. Rivitz. What made the show different was it not only aimed itself at preschool age children but at their mothers as well, as it mixed interviews that might interest adults in with the cartoons and comedy interplay between Haley and Mr. Rivitz.

Around the same time KYW secured the rights to Popeye cartoons with the idea they could be a show in their own right. Luckily for Cleveland children during the next few decades they decided to find themselves a host instead of just showing the cartoons. Lin Sheldon showed up for his audition in a variation of the costume he had worn while playing a Leprechaun in Finian's Rainbow. A friend at the station had tipped him off that all the hopefuls the previous day had shown up in sailor outfits. Sheldon decided if he could stick out and be unique his chances of landing the job might be better. And so we have Barnaby, who taught us "If anybody calls, tell them Barnaby said hello. And tell them that I think you are the nicest person in the whole world... Just you."

Cleveland's third television station got started a little later than the other two, debuting in December of 1949 as WXEL before eventually becoming today's WJW.  King Jack's Toybox got things rolling there,  with Bogo Heath, Wally Sanford and Pat Ryan as King Jack and his loyal subjects, which of course included court jesters to handle the laughs Pat Ryan also co-hosted The Play Lady along with a Frog Puppet. By far the longest running show to debut on WXEL was Dave Herbert's Mister Banjo. Unfortunately for WXEL, Herbert's almost two decade run as an iconic children's television host happened after he left Cleveland for Miami, Florida on Banjo Billy's Fun Boat. Red Goose Merry-Go Round with Walk Kay, as Kousin Kay, stuck around for a while but WXWL/WJW was never able to create a popular host as its two competitors had for several years.

In the early 1960s they even attempted a Bozo the Clown program, but it really didn't click with Cleveland the way the character did in Chicago, where to call Bozo beloved would be a bit of an understatement. It wasn’t until 1964 when they brought in Ray Stawiarski and his Franz The Toymaker character from Columbus that they found a character whose popularity could hold it's own against Captain Penny and Miss Barbara of  Romper Room over on WEWS and Barnaby on WKYC.

I would imagine that having so many programs being offered on the Cleveland stations, Akron’s WAKR never felt the need to develop its own children’s programming.  Program listing from the 1950s do list a childrens program called Hinky Dinks, which is just as lost to the past program as any of its Cleveland Counterparts.

Sadly, almost all programs broadcast before the early 1960s were lost to us. If anyone out there has some fond memories of these programs I'd love to hear from them.

Why Blog?

 

     Why Blog? It's certainly not because I think people should know, or much less care really, about what I'm doing on a daily basis.  Nor do a have some silly notion that what I have to say is important, it isn't really. Not in the least if I'm being truthful.  In all honesty the idea of doing a daily diary blog scares the hell out of me, I'm still not even all that comfortable with the idea of Facebook.

No, I've been informed by the publisher of my first two books and another publisher who may be publishing my 3rd that I need some sort of social media presence.   Seems that's important these days.

     So the Books.  This is one http://www.arcadiapublishing.com/9780738594125/Burton, and this is the other http://www.arcadiapublishing.com/9781467110259/Cleveland-Area-Disasters. You can buy them at Barnes & Noble and a lot of smaller private book stores around town.  Although when I saw that the Wine Store in Little Italy and the gift shop at the Cleveland Museum of Art carried one of my books, well that excited me more than any bookstore. Sometime when I just feel like being stupid I wander into a book store, autograph one of my books and put it back on the shelf.  I'd like to think some store has sent the book back as defaced not realizing it's an actual autographed copy.  That has to add a couple pennies to it's value.

     At the moment I'm working on the history of Children's TV Programming in Cleveland. Which is why Captain Penny is in the title of this blog.  During the next few weeks I'll be posting some chapter's in progress, some excerpts of some interesting interviews.  I think you'd enjoy hearing about the 30 minutes I spent talking with Barnaby's daughter as she was such a nice lady and I learned so much about Barnaby's career.  Hopefully those posts will lead to other people wanted to talk to me about the subject.

    I'll also be prattling on about the previous books, and some projects on other facets of Northeast Ohio History.  And just because I'll probably be linking to a series of articles I've written for a music site over in the United Kingdom.  Some of them aren't bad and I kind of want more people to read the,.

     Hello, and Goodbye for now.

Calvin Rydbom