Customer Reviews

Fantastic Expedition & Through the Morning

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Dillard and Clark is one of the most unique musical groups I have ever heard. Gene Clark, former member of the Byrds and probably their best songwriter provides the songs and lead vocals. Doug Dillard, banjo player, and member of the bluegrass group The Dillards (the Darlings on the Andy Griffith Show) provides backup. Other members of Dillard and Clark were Byron Berline (fiddle player who backed the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers), Michael Clarke (ex-Byrd and a Flying Burrito Brother), Bernie Leadon (future Eagle), Jon Corneal (former member of Gram Parsons' International Submarine Band), and female backing vocalist Donna Washburn. Ex-Byrd Chris Hillman and Flying Burrito Brother Sneaky Pete Kleinow also played on a few of their songs. This CD contains everything Dillard and Clark released, including their 2 albums, as well as singles they released between albums. What really makes this music so unique is the banjo playing. For instance, on "Why Not Your Baby," the best track on the album, the banjo comes in adding an eerie sound to the poignant song. Then the strings come in, creating a sound that is rarely, if ever heard. Also, on "Radio Song," banjo and harpsichord are played side-by-side creating yet another sound that stands out. Every song is good, but the standouts are, "Out on the Side," "Something's Wrong" and "Through the Morning, Through the Night." Also, the Eagles later used D&C's, "Train Leaves Here This Mornin" on their first album. The material from their first album, "Fantastic Expedition" is the strongest, and most creative. The other material is not as notable and often borders on straight bluegrass (such as "Rocky Top"). Clark also wrote fewer songs on their second album, making it more uneven. The cover songs are still good, such as "So Sad" written by the Don and Phil Everly, and "No Longer a Sweetheart of Mine." In general, this is one of my favorite CDs, showcasing an early incarnation of country-folk-rock/pop, or whatever you wish to call it. The material is memorable, heartfelt, and shows the talent of the critically acclaimed members. The sound quality is good, but not excellent, and is probably a result of the original masters. You can't beat this deal, with over 70 minutes of some of the best music ever made combined with decent, although humorous at times, liner notes (the British writer describes the Andy Griffith Show as a "comedy soap opera"). This is definitely the only Dillard and Clark CD to buy because it contains it all.

I remember looking at the old vinyl album versions of these, when they were only a few years old, and putting them back in the rack. I never bought 'em until I got this CD a few weeks ago. My god, what I'd missed. Life would have been very different had I known these songs earlier. This is the best CD I've ever bought on a whim.

The best thing about it is the songwriting. These are simple, accessible songs that will stick in your head and make you happy and eager to listen again. By the time I'd listened once, I found myself racing home to hear "Train Leaves Here This Mornin'", "In the Plan", and especially "With Care From Someone" again.

Besides the songwriting, there's also great vocal harmonies all over the place, not as just ornamentation, but integral to many of the songs, like "Why Not Your Baby", "Out On the Side" and again, "With Care From Someone".

There are toe-tappers ("Rocky Top", "No Longer a Sweetheart of Mine"), gospel hoe-downs ("Git It On, Brother", "I Bowed My Head and Cried Holy"), and well crafted I/IV/V blues tunes ("Kansas City Southern"), and sad, swaying steel guitar country tunes ("Through the Morning, Through the Night"). There's plenty of hot banjo picking and fiddle, but this CD is all about great songs. Buy it.

I always appreciate it when record companies properly exploit the CD format and combine 2 full LPs onto one release and--better yet--include some contemporaneous rarities.

This set pulls together both of the Dillard & Clark Expedition albums along with a small handful of extra tracks from that same time. The first album "Fantastic Expedition" includes a number of Gene Clark's career bests such as "Out on the Side," "She Darked the Sun," "This Train Leaves Here this Mornin'," "With Care from Someone" and the jaw-dropping "Something's Wrong." What an amazing string of great songs! How the British commentary on the packaging can call this album a "minor classic" escapes me; it's a major classic.

The second album "Through the Morning, Through the Night" has the wonderful title track, another great Clark original in "Kansas City Southern" and some really nice covers. It is a much more country oriented album. It is not at all on the level of "Fantastic Expedition," but it's still worth having.

Two of the extra tracks "Why Not Your Baby" and "Lyin' Down the Middle" are quite strong.

The four star rating reflects the five star value of "Fantastic Expedition" and the three star rating of "Through the Morning, Through the Night."

The title of this review comes from a line said by The Dude, played by Jeff Bridges in "The Big Lebowski." It refers to 60's folk/country rockers who resented the slick Eagles becoming so popular when groups like Dillard and Clark were far more soulful and accomplished.
A "super-group," made from former and original singer of the Byrds, Gene Clark and banjo man Dillard, these songs, esp. the first ones from their first album, are all carefully-crafted songs, with great harmonies and instrumentals. The final dozen or so, from the second album, suffer only in comparison with the first. The writing isn't as inspired and there are more covers.
But for anyone who followed the Byrds through their Gram Parsons phase and into the Burrito Brothers, this is just the best.

It is a great deal to get these two albums on one disc. Gene Clark's vocals are wonderful and Douglas Dillard's excellent banjo playing helps the songs immeasurably. My favorite songs on the album are certainly "Why Not Your Baby" and "Lyin' Down the Middle" because I think they are the most perfectly arranged songs and they feature beautiful and unique banjo and vocal interaction. Another classic song is "Train Leaves Here This Morning" which was famously covered by the Eagles on their first album. Unlike the Eagles, Dillard and Clark's music is raw and emotional, it is truly some of the greatest music ever recorded. The song "She Darked the Sun" approaches the same territory the Byrds (minus Gene Clark) were exploring with their great album "Sweethearts of the Rodeo". If you enjoy Douglas Dillard's banjo picking, then I would recommend listening to The Dillards. There is an excellent collection of Dillards songs called "There Is a Time" with 29 songs, 15 of which feature Douglas Dillard on banjo. There are 5 instrumentals on that album and a lot of original songs. The Dillards were a major influence on the music of The Byrds.

Both of these albums, sadly under-appreciated when they first appeared, stand up extremely well some 30+ years later. Unlike the previous reviewers, I've always judged the second album the stronger of the two--perhaps because it is the more "Dillards-like." (I remember how despondent we bluegrass fans were when brothers Doug and Rodney Dillard went their separate ways.) Leaving aside the mediocre covers of standards "Rocky Top" and "Rollin' In My Sweet Baby's Arms," as well as the over-the-top "Corner Street Bar," the material is uniformly solid. The four ballads--the Everlys' "So Sad," the Beatles' "Don't Let Me Down," and the achingly beautiful Gene Clark compositions "Through the Morning, Through the Night" and "Polly"--are probably the stand-out cuts, with polished arrangements and sublime three-part singing by Clark, Dillard, and Donna Washburn. In any event, this reissue--a masterpiece of the country-rock genre--is surely on my "desert island" list of essential recordings.

Doug Dillard (ex-Dillards) and Gene Clark (ex-Byrds) teamed up to together and recorded two albums in the late sixties. Those albums are included here together with other tracks not released on either album, so this set contains everything that Dillard and Clark recorded together for A+M. Although their style is generally described as country rock, their music contains plenty of bluegrass, too - if you don't like the sound of the banjo, you may not appreciate this album.

The first album, Fantastic expedition of Dillard and Clark, contains many original songs, often written or co-written by Gene Clark. One such song, Train leaves here this morning, was written by Gene with Bernie Leadon who later helped form the Eagles - a cover of the song appeared on the first Eagles album. Git it on brother is a cover of an obscure Lester Flatt song.

Next come the three bonus tracks, which include a distinctive cover of Elvis Presley's Don't be cruel.

The second album, Through the morning through the night, contains fewer originals and more covers, including Rocky top (a country hit for Lynn Anderson and a smaller country hit for the Osborne brothers), So sad (Everly brothers), Four walls (Jim Reeves), Don't let me down (Beatles), No longer a sweetheart of mine (Reno and Smiley) and Rollin my sweet baby's arms (Bill Monroe). This album also features a female singer, Donna Washburn, who sings lead on Rocky top as well as backup on other tracks.

The country and bluegrass aspects of their music are a little more obvious in the second album than the first. Which album you prefer may depend on your own musical taste, but both are excellent in their different ways.

This is an intriguing collection, containing elements of music to be found elsewhere but still sounding different to anything else I've heard. Like so much country rock music of the time, it was not commercially successful at the time because the public was not ready for such a mix.

As a huge fan of White Light, I decided to check out Gene Clark's earlier and later releases. This Dillard and Clark compilation is great: it contains pretty much all of their material (2 albums plus four bonus tracks). The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark is a great album--it rivals Gene's other masterpieces and marks a unique moment in the evolution of folk and country rock. Through the Morning, Through the Night is OK--some extra group members are added, diluting (in my opinion) the great sound that Dillard and Clark had worked up for themselves on the first album, and playing mostly covers. There's only one problem with this product, and that's the way in which it's packaged--the album art is bland, the liner notes (as other reviews have rightly pointed out) are stinky, and for some bizarre reason, the bonus tracks are inserted at odd places in the middle of the compilation--"Why Not Your Baby" is a great song and an excellent bonus track, but it's plopped smack in the middle of Fantastic Expedition. Not only does this spoil the vibe of the album as a discrete unit, the song is in mono and really interrupts the listening experience. These are pretty minor complaints (I listen to the album after it's been imported into iTunes, so I've correctly resequenced the tracks and given the albums their rightful artwork). Despite these gripes, it's totally worth it, since both albums are packed into one CD--an excellent deal.

The first album is far and away the best. Somehow Gene Clark's songwriting became razor sharp in just a short period of time--he was prolific, to be sure, but the songs of heartbreak on Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers don't hold a candle to the great imagery and mysterious musings of the songwriter who croons on this album and would go on to create White Light and No Other. Gene's great lyrics and achingly emotive vocal delivery are complimented so well by Dillard's banjo/guitar virtuosity and tasteful background vocals. It's the best of both worlds--the acoustic textures of country/bluegrass without sounding too hillbilly, combined with the experimentation of folk rock without the pretense. There are lots of highlights on this album, especially the opener, "Train Leaves Here This Morning," "With Care for Someone," and the ramped-up "Git it on, Brother."

Through the Morning, Through the Night is definitely a pleasant listen--it's got more of a defined country feel, with a lot of pedal steel and up-down bass. There are certainly some highlights, too, such as "No Longer a Sweetheart of Mine" and the duet "Rocky Top." Thing is, Gene Clark is a terrific songwriter, and it's an album of mostly covers. I think he sounds the best when he's wringing the emotion out of his own songs, and though these are well-chosen songs, they don't have the magic of Clark originals. Additionally, other vocalists take the lead on much of the album, which I find kind of disorienting and disappointing--if it's a Gene Clark album, I'd probably prefer to hear him sing lead most of the time.

As it stands, Dillard and Clark's first album is totally essential listening for any fan of the Byrds, Gene Clark, or folk- or country-rock and bluegrass. The fact that it's combined on one disc with the lesser gem Through the Morning... is an added bonus--I don't know if that album is really worth buying on its own, but it makes an excellent supplement for the Expedition, which is indeed Fantastic!

I won't add to the other comments about how good the music is. It is; at least the first album and much of the second. Great stuff.

However, if you're interested in this album for any reason other than the music, forget it. The liner notes are awful. Was there an editor during this process? I mean, the inclusion of paragraphs are pretty standard these days, aren't they? Run-on sentences aren't necessary either and generally tend to detract from the writing. They don't even do us the favor of letting us know which tracks appeared on "Fantastic Expedition" and which on "Through the Night." And there is little historical information other than loads of name-checking.

Reading the liner notes in one sitting--which was pretty easy as they're only about three pages--left me dizzy and annoyed. If I had to do it all over again I would probably buy the two albums apart from each other. Really.

I'd heard bits of both the Dillard and Clark ablums on the wonderful Gene Clark retrospective "Flying High," but it's even better hearing both in their entirety. "Fantastic Expedition" wins hands down as the better of the two; Clark contributes a number of great songs to the album and the mood is a true mix of rock, folk, country, and bluegrass, not the Poco type of country-rock.

Highlights on the first album include "Train Leaves Here This Morning," "Out on the Side," "She Darked the Sun," "The Radio Song," and "Why Not Your Baby." The first album grants five stars on its own.

"Through the Morning, Through the Night" is simply not up to the standard of the first, although it contains it some great songs. The title track, "Kansas City Southern," and "Polly," which are all Gene Clark originals not coincidentally, are the highlights. Overburdened by covers and more of a bluegrass tone, the second album is good, but not great.

The cover of "Four Walls" on the second album was particularly disappointing to me because I'm a fan of the Jim Reeves version. Jimmy Dale Gilmore does a great version on his album "Come on Back," too. Fans of traditional bluegrass will be happy with the material on the second album; the cover of "Rocky Top" which is sung Donna Washburn is a complete waste, though.

Overall, the disc combines a great album with a good one and since these songs are hardly if ever played on the radio, it's a lot of great music a person can discover for the first time.