THE DAVE CLARK FIVE
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1962–1973 |
Classic pop-rock |
Because (1964) |
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Album
released: March 1964 |
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Tracks: 1) Glad
All Over; 2) All Of The Time; 3) Stay; 4) Chaquita;
5) Do You Love Me; 6) Bits And Pieces; 7) I Know You; 8) No Time To Lose; 9) Doo Dah; 10) Time; 11) She’s
All Mine. |
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It is extremely easy to laugh off
the so-called «Tottenham Sound» (which, to the best of my knowledge, was
never represented by anybody other than the Dave Clark Five) as a clumsily
marketed attempt to build up a commercial counter-proposition to the Mersey
Beat — in fact, this is precisely what all the hip-minded artists and their
fans had been doing for half a century. It is also not difficult to play the
Millennian Contrarian and start a public worship cult of the Dave Clark Five
as the ultimate proto-poptimist professionals, crafting a loud, dense,
immaculate pop sound that could actually make one feel more complete than the Fab Four. |
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What is far
more complicated is being able to embrace both sides — being able to respect
the Dave Clark Five for their truly one-of-a-kind sound, enjoy the craftiest
and catchiest of their hits and deeper cuts, and at the same time not shying
away from mocking the overtly commercial, derivative, and stagnant nature of
their music-making. Almost from the very start, the band clearly stood out
from the countless masses of second- and third-rate UK Beatle imitators — not
only for chronological reasons (their first single actually preceded ‘Love Me
Do’ by a good couple of months), but also because their emphasis on the drum
/ organ / sax combo, rather than electric guitars, as the music’s combustion
engine made their voice a strong and solitary one — at least until Manfred
Mann came along and kind of developed their own variation with a slightly
more sophisticated edge. The fact that they pretty much left it at that,
lending this interesting sound to fairly cheap and boring purposes, is
lamentable, but couldn’t we just live with that? I could probably live with
that. As with so many
other classic UK bands, the Dave Clark Five’s LP discography should be
studied from across the Atlantic: not only did their first American LP
actually come out earlier than their first UK LP, but they actually managed
to have seven LP releases during
their 1964–65 peak period in the US, as compared to a meager two in the UK. Of course, their
management pulled it off exactly the same way as in every other case: for
instance, about half of this debut LP is constructed from A- and B-sides
originally released in the UK from early 1963 to early 1964, and most of the
other tracks were recorded specially for the American market and never even
saw the light of day in England (at least, not early on). The cover carefully
notes that this is Glad All Over (Featuring "Bits And Pieces"),
because, of course, those two songs were their biggest hits at the time, both
at home and overseas — and how could a stereotypically rich American
teenager, as opposed to the stereotypically poor British one, miss a chance
to scoop up an LP with both of the
hit singles of Britain’s second-best band after the Beatles? Seriously,
though, ‘Glad All Over’ is quite a wonderful creation. Dave Clark may not
have been quite as unpredictable and ferocious as Keith Moon when it came to
drumming, but at least he was every bit as loud — no other drummer in the UK
at the time brutalized the poor bass drum with that much force (although
rumor has it that famous session drummer Bobby Graham actually played some of
his parts in the studio, including on this song). And when that wall-rattling
pounding is joined by Denis Payton’s «rhythm sax», running across the entire
song rather than simply soloing at the right moments, the effect is
undeniable — like a joyful band of young friendly hippos, rhinos, and
elephants stampeding into town to plunder the nearest candy shops. In other
words, take that Mersey beat, amplify the drum sound ten times, replace
rhythm guitar with sax, introduce a Motown / Isley Brothers influence with
the call-and-answer vocals, and take a production lesson from Phil Spector —
if that ain’t a recipe for idiosyncratic success, I don’t know what is. Then, however,
comes the problem: ‘Bits And Pieces’, the immediate follow-up and an even
more popular single in the US (but not in the UK), is a near-perfect
repetition of that same formula. The only difference is that the vocal melody
is notably more Brit-poppy this time, far more similar to some English
drinking song than to the Isley Brothers — but all the other construction
ingredients, from the insistent opening drum stomp to the pervasive sax and
rowdy lead vocals, are exactly the same: the band has found its formula and
it is sticking with it to the bitter end. "Other girls may try to take
me away / But you know, it’s by your side I will stay, I will stay" — truly,
more prophetic words have never been delivered by any artist on their first
hit record. This is not to
say that Glad All Over, the LP,
offers no variety whatsoever: when we are not talking about monster hit
A-sides, the band’s chief masterminds — Dave Clark himself and organist /
lead vocalist Mike Smith — allow themselves to stretch out and reach into
adjacent dimensions. Arguably the most creative efforts by the band are their
instrumentals. ‘Chaquita’, usually described as a variation on the Champs’
‘Tequila’, actually bears little resemblance to its famous prototype, being
based on a deeper, denser, «junglier» rhythmic groove and hooking the
listener with some killer call-and-response interplay between Payton’s
distorted lusty-elephant sax riffs and Lenny Davidson’s twangy lead guitar.
(For the record, the version on this LP is a re-recording: the original
version of ‘Chaquita’, slightly less dense and echoey, had actually been the
Dave Clark Five’s very first single, released on the small Ember label rather
than Columbia). And the Clark/Davidson-cowritten ‘Time’ is a clearly
Mancini-influenced lounge jazz composition with a suspenseful undercurrent
which... well, let’s just say the Beatles could never have come up with something like that, even if you are
totally free not to interpret this remark as a compliment in the DC5’s
direction. I am also quite
partial to the tasty surf-style slide guitar lick ringing off the chorus
harmonies in the otherwise fully formulaic ‘All Of The Time’; and to the way
the stinging, choppy verse vocals of ‘I Know You’ metamorphose into the
glorious gang chorus of "you don’t love me any mo-o-o-o-re". I am
much less partial to the idea of changing the lyrics to ‘Twist And Shout’,
renaming the song into ‘No Time To Lose’ and having the arrogance to credit
it to Clark and Smith; and I think that when it comes to British bands,
‘Stay’ and ‘Do You Love Me’ have both
been done much better by the Hollies on their debut record — simply because
the shrill and triumphant delivery of Allan Clarke is always preferable to
the strong, rowdy, and much less expressive style of Mike Smith. Finally, it is
totally Mersey Beat 1 : Tottenham facepalm when we discover that the band
has, for some mysterious extraterrestrial reason, appropriated the old
minstrel tune ‘Camptown Races’, renamed it ‘Doo Dah’ (what else?), gave it
new and even more stupid lyrics, and credited it to the bandleader. This is
simply one of those cretinous moments of the early Sixties when you can only
clench your head and scream WHY? To capture the 5-year old segment of the
market? This is the kind of artistic move that even the weakest of the
Merseybeat bands would hardly allow themselves. For sure, it was occasionally
tempting in those days to take your warmest toddler memories and see how they
fare against the rules of a modern production studio, but of all the things
to prevent contemporary rock and pop music from being treated seriously...
and before you interrupt me, no, ‘Yellow Submarine’ belongs to a different category of problems.
Anyway, I still cannot decide whether it is the blatant abduction of ‘Twist
And Shout’ or the corny carnival of ‘Doo Dah’ that constitute the album’s
biggest embarrassment, so let’s call it a friendly tie. That said,
given the almost total lack of artistic progress over the Dave Clark Five’s
peak years, Glad All Over emerges
as one of the band’s strongest afforts simply by way of being the first and
freshest. Cumulatively, they would have somewhat more consistent chunks of
vinyl in the near future, but the primal double punch of ‘Glad All Over’ and
‘Bits And Pieces’ was their crowning moment of influential glory — let us not
forget, after all, that they happened to be the second UK band after the
Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, and that they did not make it there just because of five more clean,
attractive, well-combed British faces, or just
because of Dave Clark’s extraordinary business and marketing skills. And as
late as early 1964, I suppose it would still take somebody like Leonard
Bernstein to see through the fundamental difference between the Beatles and
the Dave Clark Five — heck, just try to block any of your knowledge about
what happened later out of your mind, arm yoursef with pure emotion instead
of cold intellect, and for a brief moment you might feel like treating With The Beatles and Glad All Over as comparable and
compatible wave-of-joy generators. |
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Album
released: May 1964 |
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Tracks: 1) Can’t
You See That She’s Mine; 2) I Need You I Love You; 3) I Love You No
More; 4) Rumble; 5) Funny; 6) Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah; 7) Can I Trust You; 8)
Forever And A Day; 9) Theme Without A Name; 10) On Broadway. |
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I love ‘Can’t You See That She’s
Mine’ — I really do. It might just be my personal favorite tune in the entire
Dave Clark Five catalog. I love how it is so tight, intense, punctuated by
these sharply accentuated staccato guitar chords. How the rhythm section just
chugs along like it’s some very serious business, unnerving and metronomic
and without any signs of showing off. How Mike Smith contributes to the
sternness of the proceedings by allowing himself to forget that the English
language is in possession of long vowels — except for the third syllable of
each opening line ("can’t you se-e-e-e-e that she’s MINE?"),
imitating regular outbursts of irritation and frustration. How Denis Payton’s
saxophone break smoothly emerges from the general fray, marks the atmosphere
with several well-placed shrapnel rounds and then packs itself back into its
suitcase. |
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I mean, while
it is still a pop song, ‘Can’t You See That She’s Mine’ actually bothers
about adding a new dimension to the Dave Clark Five’s sound: where ‘Glad All
Over’ and ‘Bits And Pieces’ were both shiny-happy screamy anthems promoting
lovesick giddiness, this follow-up adds a snarky defensive bite to the loud
ecstatic bark. Perhaps they were explicitly thinking that their equivalent of
the Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’ needed to be followed by their equivalent of
a ‘She Loves You’ — or perhaps they weren’t thinking anything, and it just
came out that way. Whatever be, it is easily their punchiest number of all
time, and if only they’d bothered to follow it up with more compositions in a
similar vein, their artistic reputation, if not necessarily their commercial
impact, might have gotten a serious boost. The song was
actually taken as single from the band’s first UK LP, called A Session With The Dave Clark Five;
two months later, with two of the songs that had already been released on Glad All Over lopped off, the album
was issued as The Dave Clark Five
Return! for the American market. Once again, seven out of ten tracks were
bona fide originals, confirming the band’s desire to keep up with the
Liverpool competition at least on that front; however, with the world already
living in the age of A Hard Day’s
Night, the distance between the Fab Four and the Fop Five was growing
quite rapidly. Nevertheless, if you agree to slow down time and judge Return! by the standards of 1963
rather than 1964, it certainly holds up to the level of the previous album —
at the very least, it has fewer straightforward embarrassments such as ‘No
Time To Lose’ or ‘Doo Dah’. In fact, ‘Can’t
You See That She’s Mine’ gets extra support from at least two following
numbers. ‘I Need You, I Love You’ has one of the band’s catchiest vocal
melodies, a shiny, upbeat pop tune which gets its hooks into you not through
the tribal drum cannonade of a ‘Glad All Over’, but through a beautifully
constructed vocal sequence where the verse rises to high heavens on the wings
of group harmonies and then gets firmly, but gently conducted back to earth
by Mike Smith’s solo performance. In contrast to the joyful chivalry of this
tune, ‘I Love You No More’ is crunchier, dirtier, closer in spirit to the
Stones than the Beatles, and gives Smith a nice opportunity to play some mean
bluesy chords on the organ — the «nastiest» DC5 tune to that date, a
surprisingly rare occasion given their reputation for arch-cheerfulness. Side A closes
with a pretty impressive cover of Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’: the very decision to
cover one of rock music’s most important instrumentals is worthy of
admiration, but the band also does a good job injecting some of its spirit
into the melody — Payton’s sax, charged with an odd distortion effect that
gradually transforms its sound into that of a Jew’s harp (no, really!), is at
the forefront here, as important as the power chord guitar, and by the time
they really rev it up, the Dave Clark Five almost transform themselves into a
noisy predecessor of the early Who. Finally, Clark and Payton’s ‘Funny’ is
another harmless, danceable piece of pop fun, closest in atmosphere to the
early big hits but strangely deprived of their booming, wall-of-sound
production. The bad news is
that Side B hardly ever lives up to the potential of Side A. After an
honorably rocking start, here the band largely just mellows out and fizzles
away. First, the inclusion of ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’, the good-time anthem from
the controversial Song Of The South,
is, I believe, intended as a sequel nod to ‘Doo Dah’ — there is no way this
could be just a coincidence — although, admittedly, the sequel is more
interesting from a musical perspective, what with the group harmonizing not
against a steady beat, but against a slow, rhythmic, minimalistic-as-hell
sequence of power chords: not so much a «wall of sound» as a «rubble of
sound». Next, we have the fairly unmemorable, Searchers-style folk ballad
‘Can I Trust You’ which really does not work; the Mersey-style pop ballad
‘Forever And A Day’ which had already gone out of style; the slow-waltzing
orchestrated instrumental ‘Theme Without A Name’ whose guitar melody seems to
be copying the Shadows (come on, not in mid-’64!); and the oddest choice of
all — a faithful cover of the Drifters’ ‘On Broadway’. Mike Smith sings the
song reasonably well, but the band adds nothing to the original; honestly, I
think they must have included it in their repertoire specially for their
American visit or something. Still, the very
fact that Return! tries to build
its image without resorting to the anthemic, wall-rattling sounds of ‘Glad
All Over’ and ‘Bits And Pieces’ deserves a bit of respect; it is not a carbon
copy of the first album, it is not a collection of intentional filler, and it
tries out a few new ideas that sometimes work, sometimes do not, and
sometimes you can’t really tell because they are so small and barely
noticeable. It is not true that the Dave Clark Five bluntly refused to
progress; it is simply that theirs was a decidedly micro-progress, far more suitable to the conditions of 2020 than
1964. But hey, maybe all the more reason to give them a 2020 type of
aesthetic reassessment?.. |
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Album
released: August 1964 |
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Tracks: 1) Because;
2) Who Does He Think He Is; 3) Move On; 4) Whenever You’re Around; 5) I Want
You Still; 6) Long Ago; 7) Come On Over; 8) Blue Monday; 9) Sometimes; 10)
Any Time You Want Love; 11) I Cried Over You; 12) Ol’ Sol. |
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On second thought, maybe forget
what I said about ‘Can’t You See That She’s Mine’, because in reality my favorite Dave Clark Five song of all
time... and if not for the blasted copula, I wouldn’t even need to finish
that sentence. Actually, if we went on living in the pre-streaming and even
pre-CD era, it would have been simple as heck to define the one and only
desert island recording by the band: the UK single from May ’64 that had
‘Can’t You See’ as the A-side and ‘Because’ as the B-side. The saying goes that every
mediocre poet has at least one great poem in him, and mediocre British
Invasion bands are no exception — for the Clark / Smith writing team, their
indisputable gem was this little ballad, which does not attempt to stray away
from the formulaic conventions of early Sixties’ Brit-pop, but instead uses
them for a most soulful advantage. Taking a fairly simple quatrain, the band discovers
a brilliant way to harmonize it, essentially creating a mini-mood for each of
the first three lines before turning back full circle, going from statement
of fact ("it’s right that I should care about you...") to deep
tenderness ("...and try to make you happy when you’re blue...") to
heavenward prayer ("...it’s right, it’s right to feel the way I
do...") and back to even more definitive statement of simple fact
("...because, because I love you"). Even in the Beatles’ catalog,
such mood shifts within a single verse are hardly found around every corner. |
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As if that
wasn’t enough, Mike Smith finds the perfect instrumental companion for the
vocal harmonies — a sparse, but sharp organ riff which echoes the same moods,
particularly in the intro and in the laconic instrumental solo whose several bars
have you slowly ascending that stairway to heaven and then quickly whooshing
down the chute back to earth. Throw in a few contrastive, jack-knife-sharp
arpeggiated chords from Davidson’s guitar, and you are all set for an
unforgettable sonic experience, which says it all in two minutes and twenty
seconds. (And if you need a comparative angle to confirm just how superior it
is, my advice is to listen to the Supremes’ cover of the song on their
Liverpool tribute album — they understand what it is that makes the song
great, but are still unable to recreate it). As for the
album itself — the band’s third US LP from 1964 — there is just one problem
with it: next to the modest grandeur of ‘Because’, it sucks. Where the first
LP was centered around their early singles and the second was at least more
or less a «proper» LP, simultaneously released for the US and UK markets, American Tour is given away by its
name: a fairly quick cash-in to commemorate the band’s allegedly smashing
success in the States (to dissipate anybody’s doubts about that, the album
sleeve was peppered with photos intended to prove that the Dave Clark Five
were every bit the rival to the Beatles as the «Tottenham Press» would make
you believe on the other side of the Atlantic). In Canada, the record was
even released under the title of On
Stage With The Dave Clark Five, although the only «stage» in the entire
product is seen on the album cover (the DC5 never produced a proper live
album in their life). I am not sure
when and how all these recordings were made (session details are hard to come
by; I do not even know if any of these tracks were actually recorded in
America); one thing is interesting, though, and that is all the songs
counting as originals, credited to Clark and one of the other band members.
Maybe it was the influence of the concurrently released A Hard Day’s Night (the band, as usual, had to prove its equality
with the competition), or maybe it was decided that the last thing all those
hungry US fans of the British Invasion wanted were British Invasion covers of
Motown or US rock’n’roll artists; whatever the reason, American Tour is indeed the Dave Clark Five’s first album of
all-original songs (that is, if you exclude a couple of instrumentals like
‘Move On’ which fairly openly plagiarize the likes of ‘Green Onions’).
Whether that is really a good thing
is another, though fairly important, matter. As this set of
«original» pop-rockers quickly rolls by, I get the uneasy feeling that most
of them were probably written quickly and on special order to impress the
American market with as much «Beatle-style» product as possible. Song after
song after song, you get similar formula that seems more rigidly bent than
even before on emulating the loudness and exuberance of the Beatles, rather
than going in the opposite direction and trying to forge a distinct
«Tottenham» identity for themselves. This is particularly true of such tracks
as ‘I Want You Still’, ‘Come On Over’, and ‘I Cried Over You’, all of which
sooner or later succumb to vocal Beatlisms, while their pop hooks feel fairly
artificial and meaningless. It would probably take a small army of
musicologists, psychologists, and anthropologists to explain the quality
difference between ‘Glad All Over’ and ‘Come On Over’ — both of which are
loud, anthemic, catchy pop tunes, yet the former is unforgettable and the
latter just feels rotten. Maybe it is the incompleteness and clumsiness of
the main hook (that "come on over, any old time, now would be fine"
bit just feels stupid and left hanging in the air). Maybe it is the stiffness
of the harmonies, which just sound too monotonous and disciplined. Or maybe
it is just the contextual realisation that all these songs offer nothing new
— what sounded fresh and exciting less than a year ago (!) now sounds
predictable and repetitive, hunting for the exact same emotional impact and
atmosphere. Maybe this is
why ‘Because’ produces such a strong impact, since it is the band’s strongest
effort on the album to break the mould — and why, in general, their slower,
softer, and folksier compositions on American
Tour linger a little longer in the mind. On ‘Whenever You’re Around’ and
‘Sometimes’ they seem to want to be the Searchers rather than the Beatles,
and this mimicry comes off as a tad more convincing: ‘Sometimes’, in
particular, has a very touching resolution of the vocal melody, where the
spoken part subtly melts down into a melancholic hum — making good use of
those two murmury m’s in "soMetiMMMes" before seamlessly
transitioning into sonic wordlessness. It feels weird to declare a band as
extraverted and braggadocious as the DC5 to have mastered the art of musical
melancholy, but on this album at least, they sure are better at it than at
getting away with banging on all cylinders. And speaking of
banging, they do not quite forget about the needs of rhythm’n’blues-loving
crowds: ‘Move On’, ‘Blue Monday’, and ‘Ol’ Sol’ are all tracks intended to
keep all those fans of the Stones and the Yardbirds occupied while their
idols are off on their bathroom break. ‘Move On’, in particular, is nice to
play right next to the Stones’ ‘Stoned’, as both are very similar variations
on the ‘Green Onions’ theme — and while the DC5 predictably get a fuller,
more professional, more layered sound going on, emphasizing the sheer musical
potential of the groove, they have nothing on the Stones when it comes to
creating an atmosphere of suspense and danger. Jagger’s ominous and certainly
unsettling (for 1963–64) echoey murmurs of "stoned... out of my mind...
yeah, here I go..." make far more sense than Mike Smith’s meaningless
"Move on..", and Keith Richards’ angry Chicago blues guitar licks
scratch and bite, while Payton’s harmonica soloing is utterly inoffensive. At
least the composition moves at a steady mid-tempo; ‘Blue Monday’ drags on
like a wounded turtle, with none of the players offering anything even
vaguely interesting. In the end, American Tour looks like the first
Dave Clark Five album which, while not overtly horrible on its own, clearly
showed that the band did not have a future — because only bands developing
and nurturing their own style had a future, and American Tour seems content to sacrifice those little sprouts
that the DC5 had developed with their first hits in favor of stylistic
emulation of whichever trends were rockin’ the boat in mid-’64. The band
itself was far from over, with more chart successes looming over the horizon,
but their chance to make a difference — if they ever had one — went kaputt.
Which, mind you, still has nothing
to do with ‘Because’ being a truly beautiful pop song which, in my opinion,
belongs in everybody’s collection / playlist. |
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Album
released: December 1964 |
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Tracks: 1) Any Way
You Want It; 2) Give Me Love; 3) I Can’t Stand It; 4) I’m Left Without
You; 5) Everybody Knows; 6) Crying Over You; 7) Say You Want Me; 8) When; 9)
Don’t You Know; 10) To Me; 11) It’s Not True. |
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By the end of 1964, it might
almost have looked as if the Dave Clark Five were renouncing their UK
citizenship for Uncle Sam. Their American
Tour now extended from Coast To
Coast, their Ed Sullivan appearances were more frequent than any other
British Invasion band’s, their singles appeared more often and at higher
positions in the American than the British charts, and their LP output
amounted to a record-breaking four
US albums in 1964 alone, as compared to a pitiful sole LP for the UK market.
Granted, there are only 11 songs on Coast
To Coast, clocking in at an embarrassing 21 minutes and 21 seconds as per
my playlist, but most of these songs were not even available in the UK other
than as expensive American imports — clearly, Dave Clark and his pals were
profiting from every minute of that short, but happy time window in which
they were allowed to ride the American Dream for all it was worth. |
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The record
continues the trend of its predecessor in that all of its tracks are original
compositions, traditionally co-credited to Clark and one of the other band
members; curiously, Mike Smith is seriously underrepresented this time,
lending his name to only one track, with Payton and Davidson more or less
evenly sharing the rest. However, the one and only song still cherished and
remembered from this LP is also the only song credited exclusively to Dave
Clark — though it has also been reported that it was actually written or at
least co-written by the band’s friend Ron Ryan (who has also claimed credit
for ‘Because’ and several other of the band’s best tunes). This is, of
course, ‘Any Way You Want It’, which, surprisingly, was not even a terribly
big hit for the band at the time (UK #25, US #14 — they did much better than
that many times), but has since then emerged as more or less the definitive DC5 tune, perhaps due
to some special effect it had on many future rock stars: as early as 1977, KISS
covered it for Alive II, and the
Ramones were such huge fans that they used it to finish off their very last
live show (as heard on their We’re
Outta Here! album). The song is
indeed a perfect embodiment of the band’s classic bombastic sound, which they
had begun to tone down a bit with their mid-’64 recordings — but here they
return to the full wall-of-sound sonic glory of ‘Glad All Over’, with a
focused, overpowering all-out instrumental attack on the senses, further
increased by using the Echoplex effect (which is why there is a certain
similarity between the song and, for instance, the wall-of-sound pop
production of Kimono My House by
Sparks). In terms of melody and structure, however, the song itself bears an
uncanny resemblance to the Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’ — its effect on the
listener is achieved through the exact same kind of build-up and release that
the Beatles used a year and a half earlier, except that the rising wave of
"come on, come on, come on, come on"’s has been replaced by a similar
wave of "it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright"’s,
and the place of the triumphant catchphrase resolution of "please please
me oh yeah, like I please you" is now occupied by "any way you want
it, that’s the way it will be". Meanwhile, the melody itself is
certainly cruder and less challenging than that of the Beatles song (no
harmonica phrasing, no classy chord changes like ‘Please Please Me’s little
ladder between verse and chorus, etc.), so the band has to overcompensate by sounding
louder than the Beatles — a skill
they’d already mastered much earlier — and you can kind of clearly see why
this strategy would have appealed to both KISS and the Ramones in the end. It’s still a
perfectly enjoyable song, relating to ‘Please Please Me’ in much the same way
that ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ relates to Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3, with
no need to underestimate the efficiency of the writers and performers; a
significant difference, however, is that Procol Harum were using classical
influences to vitalize and advance a completely new musical genre, while the
DC5 worked in the exact same pop-rock paradigm as the Beatles — and the fact
that, as late as the fall of 1964, they were still tweaking the same formula
that the Beatles had already taken to its limit in early 1963, is quite
telling: if the DC5 were not completely behind the times yet, it must have
already become clear to those following recent trends with open eyes and ears
that it would not take them long to disappear from the horizon. Particularly
since the rest of the album, while sounding consistent with the band’s usual
formula, is not too inspiring: ten generally very short songs (seven of them
not even exceeding the 2-minute mark!) written in exactly two styles — the
loud mid-tempo pop-rocker and the slow, sentimental pop ballad, with nothing
between or beyond. In terms of melody, lyrics, and arrangements nothing here
seems to improve on the formula which had already been tested on the first
album and which, essentially, is based on the same songwriting, singing, and
arranging principles that were dominant on the Beatles’ first two records
(and were already being surpassed on Hard
Day’s Night). Each song has its own modest hook, but since the moods they
create are completely similar, trying to discern any individuality within
them is practically impossible. Tentatively, I
would say that they do a better job on the ballads, where you can at least
occasionally grapple on to some particularly juicy melodic phrase — for
instance, the soulful, Ray Charles-y piano introduction to ‘When’, further
darkened by the overhanging brooding bassline and the band’s slightly
funereal group harmonies; or the less interesting, but still
attention-grabbing dialog between piano and acoustic guitar at the start of
‘Crying Over You’, a song which a band like the Searchers might probably have
made more touching and subtle, but that’s OK. The pop-rockers, however, are
pretty much all interchangeable: as before, I like the overall sonic
onslaught, but at least if this were AC/DC, they’d have distinct guitar riffs
to separate one from the other — nothing of the sort exists for pairs like
‘Give Me Love’ and ‘Say You Want Me’, which sound about as different from
each other as their titles would suggest. It doesn’t
exactly sound like a band completely out of gas — more like a band completely
oblivious to the as-of-yet humble, but significant changes in the pop music
industry taking place around them, and as loyally and religiously devoted to
mining the still-current formula as an old school movie producer in the year
1930. That’s fine and dandy and enjoyable, but hardly deserving of such
astoundingly wild praise as found, for instance, in Bruce
Eder’s assessment of the album ("opens strong and gets better,
blooming into an amazingly diverse yet consistently powerful record") —
nostalgia for the classic sound of 1964 is one thing, of course, but
distorted retro-revisionism is something completely different. |
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Tracks: 1) Come Home; 2) We’ll Be Running;
3) Blue Suede Shoes; 4) Hurting Inside; 5) I’ll Never Know; 6) ’Til The Right
One Comes Along; 7) I’m Thinking; 8) Your Turn To Cry; 9) Little Bitty Pretty
One; 10) Remember, It’s Me; 11) Mighty Good Loving. |
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REVIEW The Dave Clark Five opened up 1965
on a much softer note than they closed up 1964: ‘Come Home’ is almost a
tear-jerker of a ballad, starting off slowly, with a little intriguing
interplay between Huxley’s bass and Clark’s quietly hissing cymbals, then
quickly growing in intensity to become the band’s finest exercise in the art
of pleading. (Some have noted the synchronicity between the song’s theme of
separation and the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that had just been passed a few
months back, but I don’t think we should really go that far). Amusingly, I think that the song’s biggest hook comes
not from the melody or the lead vocals, but from the convincingly desperate
"oh yeah!" backing vocal
in the chorus (Lenny Davidson?) which, for a couple of seconds, brings the
song close to «blue-eyed soul» territory. Other than that, it’s still a
little stiff, like most of the band’s hits, to stir up genuine emotion. A
decent enough counterpoint to ‘Any Way You Want It’, though. |
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For the
follow-up, however, they came up with a fairly strange choice: Chuck Berry’s
‘Reelin’ And Rockin’, the first and, I believe, also the last time when they
selected a classic rock’n’roll track as an A-side. It’s certainly not the
worst choice that they could have made: ‘Reelin’ And Rockin’ is lightweight,
playful fun without any rebellious, aggressive, or anthemic qualities to it,
and it fits the Dave Clark Five aesthetics to a tee. But unlike Chuck
himself, who would constantly breathe new life into the song by adding or
improvising new verses on stage and milking his «teasing clown» image for
what it was worth, the DC5 hardly come up with anything unpredictable — the
song sounds exactly how you’d expect it to sound with the big DC5 sound, extra
sax and keyboards and rowdy group harmonies and all, and once they get past
the first verse, you’ve pretty much heard it all. More importantly, this was
a bad sign to show to the audiences: everybody knew that the band’s strongest
selling point was its own songwriting, and if they had to fall back on old
Chuck Berry songs, right at the time when UK covers of US artists were
quickly going out of fashion, what was even the point of going on? Interestingly
enough, they decided not to include ‘Reelin’ And Rockin’ on the upcoming
album — probably because it failed to crack the US Top Twenty, for the first
time since the band became a regular on the Billboard charts. Rather
tellingly titled Weekend In London
(not sure if this means they were offering their US fans a weekend in London
or if it hints at the fact that by now, they were spending the other five
days of the week in Miami), the album does include a couple of totally
unnecessary covers: their take on ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, as could be expected,
never threatens the dominance of either Elvis or Carl Perkins, and their
cover of Bobby Day and Thurston Harris’ ‘Little Bitty Pretty One’, while
expectedly «thicker» and glammier than the Fifties’ original, does nothing to
properly one-up the original versions’ level of exuberance, although it at
least cannot be said that it does not sound different from the originals. But if you
purge the (already quite short, as usual) album from the covers, it can
easily be noticed that the band’s own songwriting — with Mike Smith now
returning to form as one of the primary composers — begins very heavily
leaning toward the softer, balladeering side. Of the loud-and-proud,
booming-and-bashing DC5 anthems à la ‘Glad All Over’ and ‘Any Way You
Want It’, there is only one: ‘We’ll Be Running’, with a nicely crafted hook
emphasizing the "running"
mood of the song (and by "running",
I’m pretty sure they mean "fucking",
but those resonant r’s and n’s just work a little better within
the context of the chorus than obstruents, which you just can’t draw out and
roll in your mouth at will. Oh, what do you mean by "it was 1965, for God’s sake?"
It’s all just a matter of phonetics!). The nasty problem is that they use the
same vocal tricks as before — the drawn-out "you’ll be wasting tiii-iiii-iiii-iiime" sounds just like
"so glad you’re
miiii-iii-iii-iiine", and this, too, reinforces the impression that
the band is starting to go around in circles. In the
serenading department, we can just as well detect attempts at self-repetition
in ‘Your Turn To Cry’, whose use of organ and group harmonies bears a strong
resemblance to ‘Because’ — meanwhile, the slightly jazzy guitar sound of that
song is re-enhanced for ‘Hurting Inside’, almost as if the collective
goodness of the band’s finest musical moment was split in two and used up to
make two inferior recreations. I really like ‘Hurting Inside’ (even if it has
the audacity to steal a musical hook from the Beatles’ ‘I’m Happy Just To
Dance With You’), but it feels like a conscious attempt to repeat the accidental
magic of ‘Because’, and these things never truly work the way you want them
to. Meanwhile, ‘Remember It’s Me’ is an even more blatant attempt to
slavishly rewrite ‘Come Home’, merely replacing the song’s minimalistic bass
intro with keyboards — what, they couldn’t at least have waited to include it
on their next album, so it wouldn’t
share the same LP space with its naturally superior role model? Perhaps the
oddest inclusion is ‘Til The Right One Comes Along’, which is, in itself,
just another typically DC5 pop ballad, but recorded here without the typical
DC5 pop sound — just Lenny Davidson on acoustic guitar and group harmonies
accompanying Smith’s lead vocal. There is nothing too special about the
chords or the mood, but the approach is curious: not even the Beatles, by
that time, had dared to record anything so
minimalistic, sending Ringo out on a smoke break. Maybe they were trying to
score with the folkies (a little too late for that, though); in any case,
they should have probably tried out a different band member for the lead
vocal as well (something like Phil Collins on ‘More Fool Me’, remember that
one?), because Mike Smith’s timbre is just... I don’t know, a bit too flat,
maybe, for such a stripped-down, «intimate» affair. He’s definitely not John
Lennon, who had a good flair for both loud and quiet; Smith is emotionally
uninteresting in «quiet» mode, though I admit that these are all rampantly
subjective judgements. Anyway, the
good news is that Weekend In London
is, in its worst moments (‘Blue Suede Shoes’, etc.), merely expendable rather
than cringey, and in its best moments, perfectly listenable as yet another
product of the DC5’s hit-making pop machine. The bad news is that the pop
machine has all but ceased churning out new ideas, and is now more about
recombining the best bits of old ideas in new variations — some of which work
better than others — which is, of course, particularly disappointing for the
spring and summer of 1965, when the age of brilliant idea-making in pop music
was just beginning to cross over the threshold. The band may have been "running, running, running", but
mostly on the spot: Weekend In London
pretty much sounds like a 1964 album, totally unaware of the waters around
them having grown — so we’ll just have to accept it that soon they’ll be
drenched to the bone. Which they will. |
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Tracks: 1) Having A Wild Weekend; 2) New
Kind Of Love; 3) Dum-Dee-Dee-Dum; 4) I Said I Was Sorry; 5) No Stopping; 6)
Don’t Be Taken In; 7) Catch Us If You Can; 8) When I’m Alone; 9) If You Come
Back; 10) Sweet Memories; 11) Don’t You Realize; 12) On The Move. |
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Technical details first: Having A Wild Weekend was a US-only
album, presented as the formal soundtrack to the band’s first and last moving
picture, which came out in the UK as Catch
Us If You Can and in the US as Having
A Wild Weekend, hence the LP title. However, only four of the songs (two
of them instrumentals) were actually used in the movie; the other eight had
no connection to it whatsoever — a tradition that the Dave Clark 5 obviously
inherited from the Beatles. I have never seen the movie, although it might be
interesting as the directorial debut of John Boorman (Excalibur, Hope And Glory etc.), and since even Pauline Kael is
reported to have given it a thumbs up, it is well possible that it did have
some artistic merit — however, it is highly unlikely that any such merit
would have much to do with the complex and intriguing personalities of Dave
Clark, Mike Smith, Denis Payton, Lenny Davidson, and Rick Huxley. The band
did not even play themselves in the movie (rather, they were portrayed as a
team of freelance stuntmen), so it probably relates to the music in much the
same way as Help! the movie relates
to Help! the LP — that is,
tangentially at best. The only serious sign that you might be dealing with a
soundtrack here is a notable (but not dramatic) increase in
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Of the two
vocal numbers written specially for the movie, ‘Catch Us If You Can’ is the
clear winner. It’s one of those ‘Hey Hey We’re The Monkees’-style anthemic
songs — announcing the arrival of the band in playfully suspenseful,
harmlessly vivacious ways. No genuine aggression or defiance, but just a nice
statement of teenage self-assertion — «we’re
here alright and what are you gonna do about that, huh?» The pompous
bombast of the chorus’ group harmonies riding up on the twin rocket of sax
and organ would be nothing new to fans of ‘Glad All Over’ or ‘Any Way You
Want It’, of course, but this was the first time when the bombast would serve
as the base for an «anthem of youth» rather than a love song; I wouldn’t go
far enough to call ‘Catch Us If You Can’ a social statement, but it’s as
close as the band made it up to that point. A weird detail is that the
harmonica solo in the instrumental break is reminiscent of Lennon’s playing
on ‘I’m A Loser’ — probably just an amusing coincidence, but be my guest if
you’d like to interpret it as a veiled hint at a bit of self-deflation in
contrast to the self-aggrandizing "we
will yell with all of our might" lyric. On the other
side, the title track is a relative letdown. ‘Having A Wild Weekend’ tries a
bit too hard to paint the band as
maniacal rockers who would be truly
capable of making their weekends as «wild» as possible. From the opening
hoarse one-two-three-four!
countdown that feels like a parody on ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and up to
the crazy-mad-delirious instrumental break with Mike Smith whooping and
wooing over Payton’s ecstatic sax, this is one of those classic «guys who
don’t know how to rock pass themselves for natural-born rockers» moments that
triggers gags, cringes, and facepalms. It’s hard to explain why — on the
surface, they are doing precisely the kind of stuff that the Beatles do when
covering ‘Long Tall Sally’, but with the Beatles it works and with the DC5 it
blows. Perhaps it’s just Mike Smith’s vocals, which are much better suited
for a «pop» or «soul» style than «rock». More likely,
though, it is the fact that ‘Having A Wild Weekend’ itself is based on a
thoroughly pop melodic structure —
in fact, that entire «on Saturday
night, everybody having fun / you don’t know it but I’m having me some»
melody is no rock’n’roll at all, but rather a Jack-and-Jill-went-up-the-hill type of singalong, and when you
give it a ‘Long Tall Sally’ kind of arrangement, the resulting clash is
embarrassing. My own gut reaction is telling here — these old guts want to go wild along with Ruth
Brown’s ‘Wild Wild Young Men’, or Steppenwolf’s ‘Born To Be Wild’, or the
Stones’ ‘I Go Wild’, but when it comes to this song, all they send me is a
strong signal that the Dave Clark Five are faking it and that they really
spend their actual weekends at
their parents’ houses, playing cribbage and helping wash the dishes. Fortunately for
us, ‘Having A Wild Weekend’ is just about the only such blatant display of
«musical inadequacy» on the entire record. The only other declarative
«rocker» here is ‘No Stopping’, which is (a) an instrumental, so the problems
with Mike Smith’s voice are automatically nullified and (b) blatantly steals
the dangerous riff from Vince Taylor’s ‘Brand New Cadillac’, further
enhancing it with a distorted Payton sax lead line to kick-ass effect. They
still end up sounding playful rather than outright aggressive, but with a bit
of genuine snap — here’s a track that maybe even The Who might have dug
(after all, they did cover the musically similar ‘Batman Theme’ a year later,
being no strangers to combining a little playful humor with kick-ass
rock’n’roll aggression). The rest of the
compositions — all of them credited to band members, though some are more
openly derivative than others — predictably veer between unimaginative, but
catchy pop-rock and sentimental, but equally catchy ballads. The instrumental
numbers, other than ‘No Stopping’, are okay; ‘When I’m Alone’ and ‘Sweet
Memories’ are generic 1964-style movie serenades à la ‘Ringo’s Theme’
from Hard Day’s Night, with moody
twangy guitars and nostalgic harp solos taking up the most prominent spots —
while the fast-paced ‘Dum-Dee-Dee-Dum’ is a 100% spot-on (and 100% pointless)
imitation of Duane Eddy’s twangy-cowboyish ‘Detour’ style (even Payton’s
trademark saxophone here ends up sounding like all those Steve Douglas parts
on Duane Eddy albums). Of the vocal
numbers, ‘Don’t You Realize’ is perhaps a bit of a standout: the deep,
cavernous echo, the variations in tempo, the emphasis on minimalistic bass
and organ in the verse gives the song an aura of «deep soul», something that
not a lot of British bands were going for in mid-’65 — maybe The Moody Blues
and occasionally The Animals, but for the Dave Clark Five this type of sound
was a first and Smith’s voice is a much better instrument for it than for the
«all-out rock’n’roll» of the title track. However, the song does not really
go far enough with this vibe, and none of the other tracks try to milk it
either — ballads such as ‘I Said I Was Sorry’ rather hearken back to the
Beatles circa 1963. Catchy country-pop like ‘If You Come Back’ sounds more
«modern» for 1965 in that respect, but not particularly interesting to write
about in detail. On the whole, Having A Wild Weekend does a good job
of keeping the band «on the level» and is a fairly symmetric companion to Weekend In London, though the
abundance of instrumentals would arguably take it down a peg or two. And for
all the busy nature of 1965, the chronological distance from May to July
wasn’t that big, so it would be
impossible to accuse the band of lagging even further behind the time than
they did last time around. Though, admittedly, copycatting Duane Eddy was a
bit of a weird move. |
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Tracks: 1) I Like It Like That; 2) Pumping;
3) I Need Love; 4) Maybe It’s You; 5) That’s
How Long Our Love Will Last; 6) A Little Bit Of Love; 7) I’ll Be Yours My
Love; 8) Please Love Me; 9) Goodbye My Friends; 10) I Am On My Own; 11) She’s
A Loving Girl; 12) You Know You’re Lying; 13*) Over And Over. |
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REVIEW All right, first and foremost let
us talk briefly about The Song That Killed The Dave Clark Five. By the end of
1965, it was becoming clear that pop music had evolved into a steam train,
accelerating like crazy toward the great unknown. ‘Like A Rolling Stone’,
‘Satisfaction’, ‘My Generation’, ‘Yesterday’ (no Rubber Soul yet, but getting there), the emergence of folk-rock,
the heaviness of the Yardbirds, the first blimps of psychedelia and art-rock
on the horizon. «Progress or perish» was the clear signal for each and every
band or artist that sprung up in the first wave of the British Invasion. And
taken purely theoretically, The Dave Clark Five did have what it might take
to progress — a certain level of instrumental skill, a certain amount of
musical diversity in their repertoire, and, above all, a whole lot of band
members engaged in derivative, but nevertheless at least formally original
songwriting. I mean, it’s not like they necessarily had to pick up a sitar or
learn to produce crunchy, distorted riffs to move their art forward. The
times were open for just about anything. If The Beach Boys could progress
from naïve surf anthems to visionary teen pop symphonies, why not the
DC5? |
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Yet it did not
happen, and this is the reason (or, at least, a conveniently symbolic
approximation of the reason). Instead of joining the trend and trying to
produce something mind-blowing, for its last original single of 1965 The Dave
Clark Five chose ‘Over And Over’ — a DC5-stylized cover of a minor 1958 hit for the
doo-wop / pop artist Bobby Day (a.k.a. Robert James Byrd). The original was a
fast-paced, catchy, and, of course, very lightweight pop tune set to the same
boogie-meets-ska-like danceable rhythm as used by LaVern Baker on ‘Jim
Dandy’; the DC5 expectedly adapted it to their «Tottenham sound», slowing the
song down and musically turning it into a dialog between Payton’s wave-like
saxophone rhythm and Clark’s perky, cocky, snare-heavy drumming. Both
versions are fun, with the difference being that Bobby Day’s original is
probably better suited for a prom dance, while the cover feels more
appropriate for a lively wedding ceremony. (And seven years in between feels
like a conservatively respectable interval for the prospective couple, no?). Needless to
say, it was hardly a crime to release a song that belonged in 1958 (or, if
you take into consideration the band’s arrangement, in 1963) at the end of
1965 — retro-fashion always has a niche carved out for itself even in the
most futuristic circumstances. What was
unfortunate, though, is that the song caught on so well across the Atlantic
that it became the band’s one and only #1 hit in the States; a smashing hit
that must have convinced Dave Clark that this
kind of music was precisely what their audiences wanted to hear, and never
mind all those «progressive experiments» going on with their chief
competitors. Of course, one should not forget that the biggest song of 1965
in the States (18 weeks on the charts!) was ‘Wooly Bully’ by Sam the Sham and
the Pharaohs (though, amusingly, it actually failed to reach #1 on any of
those weeks), so clearly the demand for simplistic, infantile entertainment
was not going anywhere, and ‘Over And Over’, by and large, falls into the
same category (though it is nowhere near as humorous or self-mocking as
‘Wooly Bully’). In other words, one should never over-estimate the
sophistication levels of record-buying crowds, not even at the very zenith of
pop music development. But it is very
likely that this kind of success messed up the band members’ heads; and it is
definitely not a coincidence that I
Like It Like That — their third (!) American LP of 1965, released
concurrently with the single (but not including it) — turned out to be the
band’s last consistently good offering for the LP market as such. The title track
for the LP was the only cover on it, which the band had already released for
the American market as early as June ’65 (it only went up to #7, though). The
original was a delectable piece of barroom R&B, sung by Chris Kenner and
co-written by the illustrious Allen Toussaint, who also played piano on it,
opening the tune with the trademark ‘Rockin’ Pneumonia’ piano flourish that
screams NEW ORLEANS! louder than a
Mardi Gras cheer. This was killed off on the DC5 version, as Mike Smith
converts the barrelhouse piano to bluesy organ and also develops an unusually
deep, growling singing voice that is almost a complete anti-thesis to the
chirpy, sprightly vocal harmonies of the days of yore — not to brag, but on
this song he actually sounds like he could kick Chris Kenner’s wrinkly ass
right into the gutter. Lack of artistic progress, you say? The way he bellows
out those "You take Sally, and
I’ll take Sue / And we’re gonna rock away all of our blues" lines
clearly implies that the inexperienced school kids have grown into a bunch of
burly, jacked-up sailors. At least on record, that is. With that kind of vocal
tone, ‘I Like It Like That’ is not
the kind of record that an excited British or American middle-class kid could
safely bring into the living room of his clean, conservative parents. Not that there
is anything particularly threatening about the song, or anything
uncomfortably mysterious — and, come to think of it, the DC5 could sound
suitably burly and rowdy as early as ‘Chaquita’ on their debut album. But
they did spend most of their career in the throes of formulaic
sentimentalism, and the sound of ‘I Like It Like That’ was quite atypical for
a single release — suddenly, that vocal take out of nowhere makes you think
of The Kingsmen rather than Herman’s Hermits. Perhaps this was the band’s subconscious response to the «1965 Challenge»:
they decided that it was time to let in a bit of braggardly roughness, in the
manner of a proper garage / rhythm’n’blues band. Of course, the true challenge was not about
«roughness» for its own sake — rather about making the listener aware that
you are an active part of those times that were a-changin’ — but we should
probably not make such heavy demands on the collective musical instincts of
the band. As for the
actual LP, well, it sounds promising and
frustrating at the same time. On one hand, something was definitely stirring
under the surface, because the first three tracks kick serious coordinated
ass. The title track is immediately followed by ‘Pumping’, one of the band’s
heaviest instrumentals for which they borrow the well-used rhythm of Marvin
Gaye’s ‘Can I Get A Witness’ and then cross it with the textural grittiness
of a Booker T. & The MG’s — a combination that actually works, even if
there’s a little too much of everything going on at the same time («pumping»
bass, thick organ, blaring harmonica); my own preference lies with something
like the Stones’ ‘Now I’ve Got A Witness’ reworking, where harp and guitar
take consecutive solo turns rather than work together to thicken the groove.
Still, it’s a serious enough rhythm’n’bluesy claim, even if it is about one year
too late on the scene. The real key
track, however, is ‘I Need Love’, which is about as massively caveman-ish as
the band ever got. I think that the melodic inspiration for the song might
have come from the Yardbirds’ ‘For Your Love’ (my ear suggests multiple
melodic intersections), but the band places more emphasis on groove and power
than melody — there is even a trance-like groove coda to the song that lasts
around a whole minute, which is a personal record for the DC5 — and while
nowhere near a bright visionary like Keith Relf, Mike Smith is certainly ten
times the expressive belter as he howls and rages about needing love with all
the hormonal drive of a bona fide wild garage rocker. Yes, it’s more Tom
Jones than the actual Yardbirds, but it’s better than Tom Jones: ‘I Need
Love’ is the work of a proper band
firing on all cylinders, with the vocals, saxes, guitars, organs, and drums
serving a collective function. Throw in some rather lewdly clad go-go dancers
in the accompanying (unfortunately, shortened) video, and what you
get is the absolute apex of The Dave Clark Five as a «hungry beast», almost
as if taking a quick peek into proto-Stooges territory (though, of course,
still too heavily disciplined for that). But after that
promising three-song punch, I Like It
Like That dips back into the tried and true. If the fact that about half of those songs feature the word love in their title does not ring a
bell on its own, one quick listen will show that the rest of the album does
indeed largely constitute of sentimental pop ballads — none of which are
particularly awful, but most of which just fall back on already exhausted
formulas. Some of it once again sounds like early Beatles, some more like okayish
imitiations of Bacharach & David, and a couple do try to tap into the
more modern folk-pop style — like the melancholically waltzy ‘I’m On My Own’,
whose acoustic rhythm contrasts nicely with the colorfully distorted electric
lead... except that the lead is kind of pinched from the Beatles’ ‘Baby’s In
Black’, which is not a crime but rather an indication of the paucity of
songwriting ideas. The Dave Clark Five had always been «songwriting leeches»,
churning out tweaked variations on other people’s originality, but this is
sometimes more and sometimes less sharply noticeable, and they do a worse job
of covering their tracks on I Like It
Like That than they did before. No wonder — if you are pressed for a rate
of three new LPs per year, you are probably bound to yield to creative
exhaustion. Not that the
quality of the songs has dipped that seriously: the band still takes the idea
of a sticky hook very seriously,
and it almost amazes me how I can hum the melody of almost every single tune
on here just by looking at the title. And when The Dave Clark Five steal,
they certainly do not act like clumsy street muggers, but rather like nimble,
professional cat burglars: little pieces here and there, stolen melodies
disassembled into tiny pieces which are then reshuffled and re-scattered all
over the place — for instance, in ‘Goodbye My Friends’ they have a melismatic
bit at the end of the line "appreciation
of me has gone down..." which follows the exact same contour as the
vocal melody in the Beatles’ ‘What You’re Doing’, but it takes an effort to
catch it because the rest of the song is completely different. (Almost the
same vocal trick later appears in ‘You Know You’re Lying’, a song that also echoes the Yardbirds’ ‘Heart Full
Of Soul’). I like the
results on the whole — I just don’t feel like discussing the individual songs
because, well, let’s just say they do not bring a whole lot of fresh
spiritual content to the table, and there are no accidental gems like ‘Because’
in the bunch. The closest to a truly grand ol’ tune would probably be ‘I’ll Be
Yours My Love’, the only song on here whose biggest vocal hook is not the title: rather it is the three
or four different ways in which Mike Smith belts out the word "forever"
(I do move with the proposition to rename the song to ‘Forever’ to weed out
non-conformist exceptions to the rule). It’s a pretty damn good blue-eyed
soul number, almost making me wish for a Mike Smith solo album to be hailed
as a legitimate precursor for the Rod Stewart / Joe Cocker era — but then
again, it’s just this one little bit. (It is
pretty odd, though, that with his fairly impressive playing, singing, and
songwriting talents Mike never got anywhere after the band’s demise: I could
easily see a guy like that thriving on the 1970s pop market). The bottomline
is that the entire album relates to ‘Over And Over’ much the same way as an
early Manfred Mann LP relates to ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’: the hit single is a
puerile catchy jingle for the kids, while the album shows far more breadth
and depth than the single could ever suggest. While this does not imply that I Like It Like That stands up to the
standards of late 1965, it still shows that the band was not «finished» as
such, and that it could, in fact, evolve into something both mature and tasteful if they’d only known to
better exploit Mike Smith’s talents. Yet somehow the accursed success of ‘Over
And Over’ put an end to all that — I suppose that in the States at least,
from then on, The Dave Clark Five were placed square into the category of Herman’s
Hermits, and that pretty much did it. Because, you know, once a Herman’s Hermit,
always a Herman’s Hermit. No parole, no escape. |
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