DAVE CLARK FIVE-last night on PBS-good one
Posted: Wed Apr 09, 2014 3:30 pm
Anyone catch the DC 5 doc about the great band? Glad All Over...what a string of amazing hits. Dave Clark was one of the few managers/abnd leaders that was truly a fantastic ..business manager!
The part about not wanting to be a 24/7/365 on the road band was cool...they scheduled their tours so that they worked only five days a week and got 2 days off at whatever locale they were performing....to get some sun on the beach, go night clubbing, or just chill, whatever.
One of my all time favorites from the 60's...nice harp playing!
Catch Us If You Can
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zGvtBCgKeY
PBS 'Great Performances' features hits of '60s wonder band Dave Clark 5 in 'Glad All Over'
©The Daily News 2014...no infringment intended
BY DAVID HINCKLEY/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tuesday, April 8, 2014, 2:00 AM
Early rivals to the Beatles are recalled by performers including Gene Simmons and Paul McCartney
Fifty years ago, at the dawn of the British Invasion, the Beatles weren’t compared to the Rolling Stones. They were compared to the Dave Clark Five.
So Dave Clark himself clearly enjoys the fact that PBS’ “Great Performances” devotes two hours Tuesday night (8-10) to the DC5, in a special titled “Glad All Over.”
“Our band was different,” says Clark. “We were still playing rock ’n’ roll, but we had an entirely different sound: just one guitar, but an organ and a saxophone.”
The DC5 has sometimes gotten lost in history, perhaps because it broke up in 1967 and Clark held off for years on reissuing its catalogue. But “Glad All Over” treats the band as royalty.
“Whole magazines were published about the Beatles vs. the DC5,” recalls Bruce Springsteen.
In the end, the Beatles beat the DC5, which is no disgrace, because they beat everybody.
But the DC5 didn’t carve out a bad legacy. They appeared on the “Ed Sullivan” show 18 times, they’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in this special, a parade of rockers from Gene Simmons to Paul McCartney hail this bunch of blokes who saw Elvis and decided to form a band.
“We couldn’t get enough of American rock ’n’ roll,” says Clark, who is as quiet and soft-spoken in an interview room as the band was animated on stage. “We’d hear it when we played American air bases in the U.K. One of the reasons I wanted a sax in the band was that I loved Fats Domino’s ‘Blueberry Hill.’ ”
In the early days, says Clark, “We’d play 31/2 hours a night without repeating a song.”
To give the band a little break, drummer Clark developed the trick of playing repetitive riffs to a flashing light show.
A couple of those riffs, he says, turned into “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces,” two of the band’s biggest hits.
“Freddie Mercury said years later that he got the idea for ‘We Will Rock You’ from ‘Bits and Pieces,’ ” says Clark. “I never knew that.”
What Clark himself can tell you about “Bits and Pieces,” he adds with a wry smile, “is that there were supposed to be eight beats in the break. But I rushed it and there are only seven and a half.
“These days you’d just fix that. But it was a lot more complicated then. You had to take a piece of tape and physically splice it in. So we left it.”
The band did splice something in on another song: the harmonica interlude on “Over and Over.”
“Phil Spector asked me how we did that,” Clark says. “I didn’t tell him it was just a splice.”
After the DC5 broke up, Clark, who shrewdly owned the rights to all their music, held back on reissues until CDs came along and he felt the sound would be right.
He doesn’t think that dimmed the band’s star. It certainly didn’t prevent him from becoming a successful and wealthy producer across multiple platforms.
A one-time fringe actor, he produced movies and a musical, “Time,” that starred Cliff Richard and featured the last performance of Sir Laurence Olivier.
At the meeting where Olivier agreed to take the role, he finished up by telling Clark, “Now that we’re partners, call me Larry.”
There’s a sentence not everyone hears.
Not even the Beatles.
The part about not wanting to be a 24/7/365 on the road band was cool...they scheduled their tours so that they worked only five days a week and got 2 days off at whatever locale they were performing....to get some sun on the beach, go night clubbing, or just chill, whatever.
One of my all time favorites from the 60's...nice harp playing!
Catch Us If You Can
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zGvtBCgKeY
PBS 'Great Performances' features hits of '60s wonder band Dave Clark 5 in 'Glad All Over'
©The Daily News 2014...no infringment intended
BY DAVID HINCKLEY/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Tuesday, April 8, 2014, 2:00 AM
Early rivals to the Beatles are recalled by performers including Gene Simmons and Paul McCartney
Fifty years ago, at the dawn of the British Invasion, the Beatles weren’t compared to the Rolling Stones. They were compared to the Dave Clark Five.
So Dave Clark himself clearly enjoys the fact that PBS’ “Great Performances” devotes two hours Tuesday night (8-10) to the DC5, in a special titled “Glad All Over.”
“Our band was different,” says Clark. “We were still playing rock ’n’ roll, but we had an entirely different sound: just one guitar, but an organ and a saxophone.”
The DC5 has sometimes gotten lost in history, perhaps because it broke up in 1967 and Clark held off for years on reissuing its catalogue. But “Glad All Over” treats the band as royalty.
“Whole magazines were published about the Beatles vs. the DC5,” recalls Bruce Springsteen.
In the end, the Beatles beat the DC5, which is no disgrace, because they beat everybody.
But the DC5 didn’t carve out a bad legacy. They appeared on the “Ed Sullivan” show 18 times, they’re in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in this special, a parade of rockers from Gene Simmons to Paul McCartney hail this bunch of blokes who saw Elvis and decided to form a band.
“We couldn’t get enough of American rock ’n’ roll,” says Clark, who is as quiet and soft-spoken in an interview room as the band was animated on stage. “We’d hear it when we played American air bases in the U.K. One of the reasons I wanted a sax in the band was that I loved Fats Domino’s ‘Blueberry Hill.’ ”
In the early days, says Clark, “We’d play 31/2 hours a night without repeating a song.”
To give the band a little break, drummer Clark developed the trick of playing repetitive riffs to a flashing light show.
A couple of those riffs, he says, turned into “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces,” two of the band’s biggest hits.
“Freddie Mercury said years later that he got the idea for ‘We Will Rock You’ from ‘Bits and Pieces,’ ” says Clark. “I never knew that.”
What Clark himself can tell you about “Bits and Pieces,” he adds with a wry smile, “is that there were supposed to be eight beats in the break. But I rushed it and there are only seven and a half.
“These days you’d just fix that. But it was a lot more complicated then. You had to take a piece of tape and physically splice it in. So we left it.”
The band did splice something in on another song: the harmonica interlude on “Over and Over.”
“Phil Spector asked me how we did that,” Clark says. “I didn’t tell him it was just a splice.”
After the DC5 broke up, Clark, who shrewdly owned the rights to all their music, held back on reissues until CDs came along and he felt the sound would be right.
He doesn’t think that dimmed the band’s star. It certainly didn’t prevent him from becoming a successful and wealthy producer across multiple platforms.
A one-time fringe actor, he produced movies and a musical, “Time,” that starred Cliff Richard and featured the last performance of Sir Laurence Olivier.
At the meeting where Olivier agreed to take the role, he finished up by telling Clark, “Now that we’re partners, call me Larry.”
There’s a sentence not everyone hears.
Not even the Beatles.