Doug Dillard and Gene Clark
The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark
(Edsel, 1968)

Doug Dillard and Gene Clark formed a deep musical bond when they played together in the Byrds and later created the first classic country-rock album to come out of the LA cosmic cowboy scene with The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark.

Dillard grew up playing bluegrass in Salem, MO, alongside his brother Rodney. He was a first-rate guitar picker by his teens and picked up banjo at 15. By the time he was 21, his lightening fast banjo runs—think Earl Scruggs on speed—had made him a local legend. The brothers recorded with a number of local bands before starting their own group, the Dillards, and moving to LA to make it. They rightly thought a bluegrass band would stand out more in Hollywood than Nashville. The night they landed in LA, they played an after-hours set at the Ash Grove, and Elektra A&R man Jim Dickson gave them his card. The next day, he signed them. Their debut, Back Porch Bluegrass, amazed people with its musicality and the unbelievable speed of Dillard’s banjo and Dean Webb’s mandolin. (Many critics assumed Elektra had sped up the tapes to produce the album’s blazing tempos.) The Dillards soon got national exposure playing the Darling Brothers Band on The Andy Griffith Show, but they were too adventurous to keep playing traditional bluegrass. They slowly brought electric instruments and folk-rock attitude into their act. Sometime in 1967, Dillard left the band to play with the Byrds on a European tour. He met Clark, who had recently rejoined the band, and when the Byrds fired Clark again, he teamed up with Dillard and cut The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark.

Clark was an original Byrd and wrote many of the band’s best-known tunes, including “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better”, “Here Without You”, “She Don’t Care About Time”, and “Eight Miles High.” He was a great vocalist, but Columbia decided McGuinn and Crosby should be the lead singers, which made Clark bristle and led to his on-again, off-again career with the band. In 1968, with Dillard as a collaborator, he signed with A&M and they started work on The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark. The album featured current Byrd and soon to be Flying Burrito Brother Chris Hillman on mandolin, songwriter and future Burrito/Eagle Bernie Leadon on banjo, bass, and guitar, future Burrito Sneaky Pete Kleinow on pedal steel, and a handful of LA session players. The album came out in the last half of ’68, just after the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo and right before the Flying Burritos’ Gilded Palace of Sin.

Dillard and Clark envisioned the album as “progressive bluegrass” and recorded without a drummer. Still, the album sounded more country than bluegrass, and more rock than folk, with subtle hints of psychedelia. With 20/20 hindsight, it can be seen as the game changing outing it was. The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark was not a commercial hit, but it was played constantly on the new freeform FM stations that were popping up in the late ’60s, especially the “drug reference” song “Train Leaves Here This Mornin’”, which made it onto the first Eagles album a few years later.

Listening to The Fantastic Expedition today, it’s easy to hear it as a template for the whole LA country-rock movement. Clark’s soulful, country vocals influenced a generation of West Coast singers, and Dillard’s playing embraces bluegrass, rock, country, and folk with an effortless grace. The eight originals written or co-written by Clark rank with his best work; if they’d been recorded by the Byrds or the Eagles, they might have secured his reputation as a great songwriter.

The album cover didn’t hint at what was contained within, with its photo of Clark handing Dillard a joint while both sit on large motorcycles, Dillard flashing a stoned, open-mouthed smile. Anyone expecting a joy ride was sorely disappointed; like many country and bluegrass albums The Fantastic Expedition was a trip into the most wounded regions of the human heart. The record opens with “Out on the Side”, lament-flavored by a mournful gospel organ and an emotionally depleted vocal from Clark. The mood continues with “She Darked the Sun”, a bluegrass weeper with a pop arrangement and some of Clark’s most oddly poetic lyrics, including the hook, “With the length of her mind, she darked the sun.”

“Train Leaves Here This Mornin’”, the album’s ‘hit,’ is a gentle folk-rock tune with vocal harmonies from Clark, Leadon, and bass player David Jackson that prefigure everything the Eagles ever recorded. Hillman’s mandolin, the acoustic interplay between Dillard and Leadon on guitar, and another hopeless vocal from Clark make the tune a real tearjerker. The pot references in the song made it a stoner favorite: “And I watched as the smoker passed it on,” and “There’s a train leaves here this morning, and I don’t know what I might be on.”

“With Care from Someone” blends banjo, harmonica, and guitar for a folk-pop confection, with harmonies that may have inspired Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Dillard’s picking adds a touch of bluegrass to the arrangement. “The Radio Song” should have been a big hit with hints of Beatles, Eagles, Everlys, and countless country crooners who agonized about lost love. Andy Belling’s harpsichord adds a vaguely psychedelic accent. Lester Flatt’s “Git It On Brother” gives Dillard a chance to show off his fancy pickin’ on a Southern gospel tune marked by the sparkling harmonies of Clark, Leadon, and Jackson. Where Andy Belling’s harpsichord solo came from is anybody’s guess.

They wrap up the album with the bluegrassy “In the Plan”, a secular gospel tune written by Clark, Dillard, and Leadon that’s full of cosmic longing and existential angst, and the dark pop of “Something’s Wrong”, a shriek of pain sung to one of Clark’s most beautiful melodies. His anguished vocal and Dillard’s weeping violin grab hold of your heart and give it a painful squeeze.

In the ’60s, certain iconic records could be found in every hippie home and crash pad, including The Fugs, The Velvet Underground and Nico, and The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark. These albums still sound iconic because they mixed timeless music and keen observations about the darker side of the human condition. Psychedelia may fade, but the blues will never die, and The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard and Clark is just about as blue as you can get.

Listen: “Train Leaves Here this Morning” [at youtube.com]

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