The Dave Clark Five - Glad All Over 1964

The Dave Clark Five's first album might seem a bit on the meager side outside of the context of the first flush of the British Invasion. At the time, though, it was a pretty exuberant slab o' vinyl that rocked pretty hard for the most part, paced by the three Top 10 singles "Glad All Over," "Do You Love Me," and "Bits and Pieces." It was a huge seller as well, peaking at number three and remaining in the charts almost as long as the albums by their chief competitors of the era, the Beatles. And it does have a few decent, though not great, original songs that don't show up on greatest hits compilations: the solid pop/rocker "I Know You," the raucous "Twist and Shout" rip-off "No Time to Lose," and the surprisingly savage instrumental "Chaquita," an inversion of "Tequila" with its snaky, growling guitar riffs and dirty sax. There's also some pure filler, like the jazzy instrumental "Time" and the infantile "Doo Dah." It certainly ranks among their best non-greatest-hits albums, which isn't as high a recommendation as it sounds, since the group's LPs weren't that good overall. AMG.

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The Dave Clark Five - American Tour 1964

One of the Dave Clark Five's finest hours, American Tour (so named in commemoration of their first U.S. tour -- it's not a live album) is excellent from start to finish. The album encompasses slightly retrograde instrumental rock & roll, like the "Green Onions"-styled "Move On," in addition to the sophisticated pop/rock and driving garage rock of their vocal cuts. "Because" was one of the band's biggest American hits and, like everything on the album, was composed by its members. The mixture of jazzy chords, straight-ahead rock, and saxophone (which was pretty passé in 1964) is an interesting one, making the group less enigmatic than the Zombies and more obviously rooted in earlier rock traditions than the Beatles. Despite the adventurous construction of their vocal songs, they're willing to use standard chord progressions for their instrumentals. In that sense, the Dave Clark Five bridged the gap between the music ofBill Haley, the Bill Black Combo, and the Beatles in a way that few other British Invasion acts did. AMG.

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