Love, Gene Clark Issue Deluxe Versions of Rare Albums
High Moon Records has planned limited-edition reissues of hard-to-find albums from seminal psychedelic rockers Love and founding Byrds member Gene Clark. Love‘s Black Beauty, which the band recorded in 1973 but wasn’t available until High Moon put it out on vinyl in 2012, will be available on CD for the first time on November 11th. And Clark’s Two Sides to Every Story, which came out in 1977, will be available as an expanded CD release on November 18th. Both releases will contain bonus tracks.
Love recorded their Black Beauty album for the Buffalo Records label, but the company shuttered before releasing the record. High Moon gave the record its first issue, on vinyl, last year. The forthcoming CD edition, the first pressing of which will be limited to 5,000, comes in a hardbound, 64-page book, filled with previously unreleased photos and an essay by Ben Edmonds, and contains six bonus tracks, including a interview that writer Steven Rosen conducted with frontman Arthur Lee in 1974 for Rolling Stone and live recordings from the Glasgow date of the band’s 1974 tour of the U.K.
It also includes a song Lee wrote for the 1974 film Thomasine & Bushrod and a track that Lee recorded in 1996, “L.A. Blues” that was intended for a Tom T. Hall tribute record. Lee died in 2006 and the song was forgotten about until 2011, when the owner of the recording sent it to Lee’s widow.
High Moon also revealed that next year it intends to reissue Love’s 1974 album Reel to Real, which was made after Black Beauty, with 12 previously unreleased studio outtakes and alternate versions of songs, including four “never-before-documented” Lee compositions.
When Clark, who died in 1991 and who was recently the subject of the tribute comp No Other, put out Two Sides to Every Story in 1977, it was the country rocker’s first record in three years. The record featured performances by Emmylou Harris and, on guitar, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. It was out of print for years until High Moon put out a remastered version of the record in 2013. The expanded version of the album – which, like Black Beauty, will be put out in a limited-edition first pressing – comes in a 26-page hardbound book with previously unseen photos from the photo session for the album and liner notes by Gene Clark biographer John Einarson and an essay by Clark expert Tom Sandford.
The release includes a download card with access to bonus cuts, comprising more than 80 minutes of live performances, including four previously unreleased songs, as well as a never-before-released radio interview that B. Mitchel Reed conducted with Clark in 1974. The majority of the live tracks were recorded in Denver in October 1975, and four were captured in Dallas in May of that year. One bonus track, “I Saw a Dream Come True” – a Clark original that he never put to tape in a studio – was recorded in 1984.
The album coincides with what would have been Clark’s 70th birthday on November 16th. The singer-songwriter’s son, Kai, has put together a concert in celebration of his father’s career on that date at the Hotel Café in West Hollywood.