Review: The Dave Clark Five - Glad All Over (1964)
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.
REVIEW
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.
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.
Only Solitaire: The Dave Clark Five review page