Review: The Dave Clark Five - American Tour (1964)
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.
REVIEW
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.
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.
Only Solitaire: The Dave Clark Five reviews