Review: The Dave Clark Five - Coast To Coast (1964)
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.
REVIEW
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.
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.
Only Solitaire: The Dave Clark Five reviews