Review: The Dave Clark Five - I Like It Like That (1965)

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.

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?

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.

• Only Solitaire reviews: The Dave Clark Five