Waterfall

Dillard & Clark Out on the Side
The Left Banke Foggy Waterfall

I like the Band, I like the Byrds, I like Blue Rodeo, and if I'm hungover, I even like the Eagles, but really, there's not much of the nudie-suit cactus rock genre I can take. You take a step in one direction, it's Gram Parsons (okay); you take another step, and all of the sudden you're listening to Country Joe & The Fish play jug-band music. No thanks. Between the world of Hollywood and the music of the 1960's, I've had about as much of the desert as I can take.

So colour me surprised when I came across this song by Dillard & Clark (Gene Clark & Doug Dillard, respectively), the first cut from their 1968 debut album. Like all sepia-toned country music, the voices sound a little too yokel-y and flat, but the pacing and guitar-work at the end makes up for it. And in a similar vein, on a different coast, a year later, the Left Banke recorded Foggy Waterfall, which never made it to the light of day until a Rhino compilation many decades later. Both of these songs end better than they begin.