LATEST ADDITIONS

MF: Why are there so many guest drummers on your records?

LP: Because I'm a guitar player. I think what happened in the ’70s with all the disco kind of stuff — all the drummers became, like, machines? So that kind of drumming became a prerequisite....

MF: And how did you feel about that? Was that pushed on the band?

Unidentified voice: The White man again! [Laughter]

MF: That was pushed on the band....

Unidentified voice: The evil White Demon! [More laughter]

Gene Clark went from superstar status to cult favorite faster than probably any artist in rock’s history. Departing from The Byrds at the very height of their powers (immediately after “Eight Miles High”, which he was the major architect of), he bounced from label to label, cutting some of the greatest albums of the late-60’s and early 70’s in the process. He progressed, flowered and remained, in a quiet way, one of the finest singer-songwriters of the period, and in hindsight, chronicled the stylistic shifts in music and social mores as well as anyone, including larger lights such as Neil Young. Some of his finest work was for A&M Records, either in tandem with Doug Dillard (The Fantastic Expedition Of Dillard & Clark, which mid-wife’d the ‘country rock’ genre) and 1971’s Gene Clark - also known as White Light to many fans; as good as any ‘singer-songwriter’ record from the early 70’s. On this album, none other than Bob Dylan commented that one song, the epic “Spanish Guitar”, was one that he wished he’d written.

The opening track to Starsailor’s sophomore long-player, Silence Is Easy claims “Music Was Saved”. I won’t go so far as to take that totally to heart, but at times, and in some ways, the album makes me feel that way. There is a special sense of camaraderie, and yes, salvation throughout the proceedings, that leaves one feeling buoyant, liberated and cleansed—and it has less to do with musicianship or sonic appeal, and more to do with the songs themselves.

Producer Rick Rubin born in Long Beach, Long Island, New York in 1963, graduated high school in 1981. Johnny Cash, born in Kingsland, Arkansas in 1932, graduated high school in 1950. Yet these two, separated in time by more than thirty years, and by an even wider socio-cultural gap, will forever be linked by the music they created together during Cash’s last decade of life. Rubin’s resurrection of Cash’s career with the release of American Music in 1994 is but one fascinating facet of this enigmatic figure’s twenty year career in music.

In 1984, while a film and video student at N.Y.U., Rubin met Russell Simmons at Danceteria—a New York club where downtown hardcore rockers and uptown rappers mixed comfortably—and the two immediately hit it off, sharing a common musical vision of hard beats and hard rhymes, with Simmons drawing from R&B roots and Rubin from hard rock. Rubin had a vision of melding the two seemingly disparate musical forms and though he’d never produced a record, he sought out the duo of T. La Rock and Jazzy Jay, and out of that came a 12” vinyl single, “It’s Yours,” which was released on Partytime/Streetwise records. It featured rhyming raps set to a loud, hardcore beat with metal overtones. Though the track went on to sell around 100,000 copies—an impressive number for the newly emerging musical genre—Rubin was never paid for his work.