McGuinn, Clark & Hillman

McGuinn, Clark & Hillman (later McGuinn-Hillman) came about in 1977, when three former members of the original Byrds -- Roger McGuinn, Gene Clark, and Chris Hillman -- decided to try and update their sound in a new context. The impetus for the reunion took shape in stages over the course of that year. McGuinn and Hillman had played together longer than any of the other original members, with six albums (and innumerable concerts) across four years during the 1960s, and as late as 1967 they'd tried without success to reintegrate Gene Clark -- the best songwriter among them and a superb singer, but also the first to leave -- back into the band. Then, in early 1977, with each fronting his own band, they planned a joint tour of Europe promoting their own respective new releases. The Byrds were still idolized across Europe, even more so than in the United States, and ticket sales were brisk and press coverage enthusiastic. The actual tour didn't go off exactly as planned, owing to Clark's ever-present personal (and psychological) demons on one end and Hillman's business disputes with the promoter on the other. But the experience of singing together on-stage for the first time in more than ten years, as they did at two successive shows at London's Hammersmith Odeon, was so satisfying to all three that McGuinn and Clark ended up touring the United States together as a duo; they were joined at some performances by Hillman (and even fellow original Byrd David Crosby occasionally showed up at their performances, most notably at the Boarding House in San Francisco, the latter becoming an unofficial Byrds reunion, captured in a radio broadcast and later released as the bootleg Doin' All Right for Old People). Those mostly West Coast "reunion" shows happened to be witnessed by...