Glad All Over

I can remember all sorts of specifics from my youth. I think as I get older my memory of things back in the mid-1960s actually improves (while my memory of this morning gets fuzzy). But, while I can remember watching band after band take the stage on The Ed Sullivan Show, I can’t remember what it was like to actually have a serious discussion over who was better – the Dave Clark Five or The Beatles, even if I do remember the question coming up.

There was a brief window in 1964, maybe even into early 1965 when The DC5 were riding high in the charts and showing up all over TV. Pretty soon however, you realized that Lennon & McCartney were actually growing as writers, turning out song after song and stretching the boundaries of what pop music could be, while Dave Clark & Company had pretty much done what they were going to do, never really producing a complete “album” as opposed to a steady flow of LPs with one hit single and tons of in-one-ear-and-gone-tomorrow filler.

But Dave Clark, the mastermind behind the band, understood the pop music business as well as any of the era’s impresarios and stretched the band’s talents to include eight top ten records and 15 albums in the United States between 1964 and 1967. In those three short years they made more appearances on the Ed Sullivan show than any other band, eighteen in all.

Dave Clark was born on December 15, 1939. With a reputation as a daredevil, he worked as a stuntman in over 40 films. When his soccer team needed money in 1960, he decided to form a band. He bought a set of drums and learned how to play them. The band started out life as a backing group for Stan Saxon, a North London singer. They signed a recording contract with Ember/Pye in 1962, and became more and more popular in England. Their first single in the UK was “Do You Love Me.”

Shortly after Liverpool gave the world Mersey Beat, the DC5 began to promote themselves as the vanguard of the “Tottenham Sound.” The band’s peak came early when in January 1964 they knocked the Beatles "I Want To Hold Your Hand" off the top of the UK Singles Chart (the position it had held for 6 weeks) with "Glad All Over." Toppling the Beatles brought some major press for the group and they took advantage of this with the release of their next single, "Bits and Pieces" which reached number 2 on the British Charts.

The Dave Clark Five took the U.S. by storm with 6 sold out tours and 15 Top 20 hits in three years. One of their tours included an amazing 12 sold out shows at Carnegie Hall in 3 days. Five more records from the group were released in 1964 that reached the top fifteen in the U.S., including the top ten songs, "Can't You See That She's Mine" (#4) and "Because" (#3). Their hot streak continued the following year with "I Like It Like That" (#7), "Catch Us If You Can" (#4) and their sole U.S. #1, "Over and Over", which had been released earlier by Bobby Day as the flip side of his hit, "Rockin' Robin".

All told, The Dave Clark Five placed 17 records in Billboard's Top 40 to go with 12 Top 40 United Kingdom hits between 1964 and 1967. Their song "Over And Over" went to number one in the U.S. on the Billboard Charts Hot 100 at the end of December 1965.

The band was also distinctive on three ways. In a design uncommon for a pop group of that (or any) era, the leader was the drummer. Dave Clark would play and sing with his drums positioned at the front of the stage, with the guitarists and keyboard to his rear and sides. The group was also unique in the British Invasion because it featured a saxophone, a sort of hold over from the early rock bands of the 1950s (and an element that would not resurface in a rock band for another decade when Clarence Clemmons took center stage with The E-Street Band).

The real genius of Dave Clark, and what set him apart from all of his contemporaries, was a business sense that was decades ahead of its time. Right from the beginning, he held ownership of all the DC5 masters and continued receiving royalties for years. Even more, he retained all the rights of the group’s numerous TV appearances, which is why you so rarely see them included in the growing stream of British Invasion TV specials. In the DVD series that’s been released collecting old Ed Sullivan highlights there are multiple disc releases of the British Invasion era that feature The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Animals, Herman’s Hermits, Freddy & The Dreamers and others, but there isn’t a single DC5 clip included.

Perhaps it was Clark’s background in cinema that was responsible for the band’s most individual accomplishment.

After the success of the Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night in 1964, the DC5 released their own film Catch Us If You Can (released in the United States as Having a Wild Weekend) in 1965. Directed by first time director John Boorman whose next film would be the film that gets my vote for Best US Crime Film Ever, Point Blank (1967), and Deliverance four years after that (and Boorman got closer than Kubrick to directing The Lord of the Rings in 1970, producing a screenplay that’s a very interesting single film adaptation), the film is immediately interesting for the way in which it deviates from the Richard Lester Hard Day’s Night pop-group-in-a-movie-formula. The Wikipedia entry has a nice summary:

“Far from being a conventional pop vehicle, this serious, thought-provoking film concerns itself with the frailty of personal relationships, the flimsiness of dreams, and the difficulty of maintaining spontaneity and integrity in a stage-managed ‘society of the spectacle.’ (That such a message is articulated through one of the very mass media that have created this society is just one of several ironies.) Boorman, an established documentary filmmaker and veteran of TV commercials, already displays great technical skill in this early film. This debut offering is particularly compelling (it drew favorable notices from Pauline Kael and Dilys Powell), not least because of the enormous cultural energy of the time (mid-1960s) in which the film was made.”

By 1967 pop music was awash in the bright colors and paisley of psychedelia which proved a difficult fit for the band. One of the strangest moments in pop music came with their last single, a cover of Neil Young's "Southern Man." The best description was a comment made by my friend, Indianapolis musician John Sheets after I played the single for him. There was a long pause, and John looked at me and said in the most serious tone I've ever heard him use, "Everything about that was wrong."
Below, however, is the "psychedelic" DC5 covering The Youngbloods in the early 1970s and doing a rather nice job of it.



When the group split, Clark attended drama school. Mike Smith continued in the music business, writing commercial jingles and producing other artists. Lenny Davidson became a guitar teacher in Hertfordshire and ran a business that services church organs. Rick Huxley went to work for the Vox musical instrument company before opening Musical Equipment Ltd in Camberwell, and then turned to electrical wholesaling. Dennis Payton went in to the real estate business and continued to play music part time until his death in December 2006.

In March of 2008 The Dave Clark Five will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

History and Mythology and Methamphetamine

Back in the 70s I had a friend who was heavy into speed. He had a tiny little house on a back alley and there were many nights when I’d be bored or coming down from some drugs of my own and I’d drop in. He worked at a little desk with a little lamp and stacks of books and he was always writing in this perfect handwriting smaller than anyone’s I’d ever seen. He was working on some grand theory of everything, tying together ancient civilizations and contemporary cultural theory in way I don’t think anyone but he understood.

What he was doing then, long before personal computers and the internet, is what I think we would all do today if we had a high-speed internet connection, a blog, and some crystal meth. I can remember how those little lines of fine white powder just burnt like hell, very different from the coke we’d sometime share that would numb the back of your throat and make everything glow a wee little bit as it made everything slightly more interesting.

For a lot of people I think drugs are all about the pleasure. But for some, for the curious, it’s all about how they make the world more… interesting.

Anyway… I don’t do those things anymore, my body can’t survive the strains it could shake off thirty years ago. But I was playing on line a while ago and had a kind of metaphorical flashback to 4 or 5 in the morning, in that little house on the alley as I started to write something about the ancient Greeks and the British invasion.

So, you need to understand that Euhemerus was a Greek mythographer (4th Century BC) at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedonia. He is chiefly known for a rationalizing method of interpretation, known as Euhemerism, that treats mythological accounts as a reflection of actual historical events shaped by retelling and traditional mores.

The writer Robert Graves said of Greek myth: "True myth may be defined as the reduction to narrative shorthand of ritual mime performed on public festivals, and in many cases recorded pictorially." (The Greek Myths, Introduction). Graves was deeply influenced by Sir James George Frazer's mythography The Golden Bough, and he would have agreed that myths are generated by many cultural needs.

Myths authorize the cultural institutions of a tribe, a city, or a nation by connecting them with universal truths. Myths justify the current occupation of a territory by a people, for instance. All cultures have developed over time their own myths, consisting of narratives of their history, their religions, and their heroes. The great power of the symbolic meaning of these stories for the culture is a major reason why they survive as long as they do.

Myths that are based on a historical events over time become imbued with symbolic meaning, transformed, shifted in time or place, or even reversed. One way of conceptualizing this process is to view 'myths' as lying at the far end of a continuum ranging from a 'dispassionate account' to 'legendary occurrence' to 'mythical status'. As an event progresses towards the mythical end of this continuum, what people think, feel and say about the event takes on progressively greater historical significance while the facts become less important. By the time one reaches the mythical end of the spectrum the story has taken on a life of its own and the facts of the original event have become almost irrelevant.

This method or technique of interpreting myths as accounts of actual events, euhemerist exegesis, dates from antiquity and can be traced back (from Spencer) to Evhémère's Histoire sacrée (300 BCE) which describes the inhabitants of the island of Panchaia in the Indian Ocean as normal people deified by popular naivety.

As Roland Barthes affirms, "Myth is a word chosen by history. It could not come from the nature of things.”

Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician. Barthes's work extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiology, existentialism, Marxism and post-structuralism.

Barthes' 1957 book Mythologies was a collection of interrogations of pieces of cultural materia conducted to expose how bourgeois society used them to assert its values upon others. For instance, portrayal of wine in French society as a robust and healthy habit would be a bourgeois ideal perception contradicted by certain realities (i.e. that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiology, the study of signs, useful in these interrogations. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were second-order signs, or significations. A picture of a full, dark bottle is a signifier relating to a signified: a fermented, alcoholic beverage - wine. However, the bourgeois take this signified and apply their own emphasis to it, making ‘wine’ a new signifier, this time relating to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing wine. Motivations for such manipulations vary from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights brought Barthes very much in line with similar Marxist theory.

Now, the thing that I want to take from all of this is this notion of “mythology” not as some imaginary realm of dragons and elves, but as the end of a process that involves the removal of actual events from their concrete historical moorings.

And so we fast forward to early 1964 and the beginning of what we all now call the “British invasion.”

I started thinking about the British invasion as an example of cultural mythology when I read the article “Before the Beatles: International Influences on American Popular Recordings, 1940-63” by William L. Schurk, B. Lee Cooper and Julie A. Cooper in the May 2007 issue of the journal Popular Music and Society. It is an academic journal and, as such, most often stuffed full of the self-evident nit-picked into absurdity. I published a couple times in the journal, presented papers at their conferences over the years and, because of my odd mix of academic and music business credentials, I am a member of their advisory board (which is to say, I don't pay for the journal).

But I digress….

In their introduction the authors write that, “This discographic compilation is designed to debunk the myth of 1964 as the foreign influence watershed year in American recorded music. . . . The misconception being examined is that, until the arrival of The Beatles, Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, Hollies, Kinks, Zombies, and others in 1964, American recording charts were largely devoid of foreign-born performers.”

In 40 pages chock full of charts and tables these scholars present a very well-reasoned argument that there was a significant non-US presence in the pop charts well before the supposed invasion, and that US-artists fared far better during the invasion than is generally believed. But I would extend this conclusion a bit farther.

The mythology of the British invasion is tied to a much larger mythology of America in the 1960s, and an even larger mythology of the 1960s itself. The exit of Eisenhower, the arrival of JFK, Kennedy’s subsequent assassination, the baby boom, Vietnam, rise of drug use, etc., all neatly places the 1950s in a conservative pin-striped box and the 1970s into a polyester disco shirt box, the 80s into a Reagan-Gordon Gekko-shaped box and so on.

If there is anything the culture needs to get over more than the myth of the 1960s I don’t know what that might be.

The essence of that myth is that we had our chance, the planets were aligned, we could have had a utopia, but we blew it. Now the planets won’t align for another 9,000 years so, really, what’s the point? This is a horrible, self-centered, banal, and destructive mythology, more destructive than any Reagan-based mythos the Republicans can muster.

I still like paisley, I long for the return of ruffled cuffs and collarless jackets, and I kind of miss the beads. But perhaps it’s time to see the 1960s as the superficial paper-thin bourgeois “revolution” that it was (and take another look at the 1950s while we’re at it) and try walking forward one more time before the light fades entirely.

Back To Mono...

Woo hoo!

After a dozen tries I just managed to win an auction for an original UK 1st pressing of The Rolling Stones Let It Bleed on Decca, in mono.

This is the last of the major Stones albums to be done in stereo and mono editions. Beggars Banquet, the year earlier, like Let It Bleed, was only issued in the UK in mono, there is no US mono pressing.

This brings me ever closer to finishing a complete set of UK and US Rolling Stones LPs in mono. There are three things that potentially attract me to the mono versions of 60s records.

First, as in the case of The Beatles, the final mixing sessions where the album was mixed to mono was done separately from the stereo mixes and often there are significant differences between the two. The Beatles, John, Paul & George anyway, would always closely oversee the mono mixes of their albums, but leave the stereo mixes to the engineers. George Harrison, Geoff Emerick (their recording engineer) and others have long said that you've never heard the Sgt. Pepper LP unless you've heard the mono version. In the era of CD remastered editions, there are precious few examples of labels returning to the original mono versions.

Second, as in the case of the early Stones LPs, Donovan's Sunshine Superman, Procol Harum's first album and many others, there simply are no true stereo pressings, only mono. All the stereo pressings of these records are actually "electronically reprocessed stereo" a crude scam in which some echo and panning is added to the mono version. And vastly inferior.

Third, on a good turntable with good outboard equipment, early mono pressings of rock & roll records just sound better. They're punchier, louder, more energetic and "in your face" than the stereo pressings. If you ever have the chance, compare the first two Jimi Hendrix Experience LPs in mono and stereo; you'll be amazed.

For reasons I'll never understand I got into this Stones listening jag sometime before Christmas and didn't lift my head up out of it for well over a month. I came out of it a much bigger fan of the early records. In the past my early Stones collection was the greatest hits collection, High Tide and Green Grass, the best of five early Greatest Hits records I spent a lot of time with between 1965 and 1966. The other four great ones from this eara were The Best of The Animals on MGM, The Kinks Greatest Hits on Reprise, The Beach Boys Greatest Hits on Capitol, and The Best of The Lovin Spoonful on Kama Sutra. Three great British Invasion bands and two great American bands all similar in that their early LPs were comprised on one or two hit singles surrounded by filler. These LPs were concentrated bursts of what made each of these bands so great.

Imagine a set list of "Satisfaction" "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" "You Really Got Me" "Surfer Girl" and "Do You Believe In Magic?"

Sublime.

The great tribute to The Beatles is that there was never any effort to assemble a "Greatest Hits" album for them as it would have to have been a box set housing all their existing LPs and singles in a neat new cover.