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’,
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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
«incidental-music» type instrumentals. |
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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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