Today marks the sixth anniversary of the induction of the Dave Clark Five into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. To commemorate the occasion, I am posting an e-mail I wrote to my three kids and Momma Cuandito on March 8, 2008.
THE OLD BOY RAISES ONE IN HONOR OF MIKE SMITH
Hello Boys & Girls,
Imagine you are 16 years old, a high school junior. You grew up in the Chicago area. When you were a 13 year old
eighth grader you had the rug pulled out from under you when your
family moved from Chicago to Iowa four months before you were to have
graduated from the school you had attended since the first day of first
grade. Now, as a sixteen year old you are asked
to move to North Dakota, a place your family used to ridicule when you
lived in Chicago. You do not want to relocate again. You hated moving
the first time. You are being asked to start all over again. You still
miss Chicago. In North Dakota you will be even farther away. You
think to yourself "Why not just shoot me now?"
When you get to North Dakota it is the third week of January, 1964.
The temperature is fifteen below. Your new school has only four sports
for boys, none of which is baseball or tennis, the only two sports you
were pretty good at. You are not a recluse but you are shy. Your dream
is Notre Dame, but you are only a junior. Can that dream sustain you
for a year and a half? It seems like an eternity. You need something
in your life besides studying.
Fast forward two weeks. There is a band from England that everyone
is talking about. They call themselves the Beetles, or as you find out
later, the Beatles. No one in North Dakota had
ever heard of them before you arrived there. Now their music is all
over the rock stations of Minot, Regina and Winnipeg. This is the one
thing that you can experience with your new classmates on at least an
even keel. They know nothing more about the Beatles than you do. In
fact, as an avid listener to Chicago Top 40 radio since you were in
fifth grade, you probably know a little more about music than most of
them do. This is cool. Maybe living on the tundra won't be so bad
after all.
You wonder what the Beatles look like every time you hear I Want
To Hold Your Hand on the A.M. radio. It is on the air all the time!
There is definitely a mysteriousness about them. You listen to their
music, but there are no published pictures of them, at least not in the
Minot Daily News. The fact that these guys are from England adds to
the intrigue. On February 9, 1964, the Beatles appear on the Ed
Sullivan Show, a Sunday night variety show. They open the show by
singing All My Loving, Till There Was You and She Loves You. The
girls in the audience are screaming and crying throughout. There are
subtitles identifying each of the Beatles to the television audience
because, in a way, they all resemble each other; it's hard to tell them
apart. When John Lennon is identified the screen reads underneath his
name, "Sorry girls, he's married." Ed Sullivan advises the audience
that if they behave themselves, he will bring the Beatles back on later
in the show. No one in the audience or in
television land really cares about the other guests on Ed's show. They
just want more Beatles. Finally at the end of the show, Ed keeps his
promise (as if he were ever not going to bring the boys back on), and
they close the show with I Saw Her Standing There and the number 1
song in the country, I Want To Hold Your Hand.
During the next week, there is absolutely no one
in school or on the radio who isn't talking about the Sullivan show and
the Beatles. Now more Beatles songs are being played, as people learn
that the Beatles have been releasing records in the UK for the last two
years. Until now, those songs never made it to the US airwaves.
Industrious radio music programmers discover that, although the Beatles
sound nothing like the Four Seasons or the Beach Boys, the two
most popular American groups on the pop charts at that time, there were
other British bands whose sound was akin to that of the Beatles. The
American teens crave the British sound, and the programmers are only too
happy to oblige.
The UK band which most people associate with the Beatles as being
the leaders of the British Invasion is the Rolling Stones. That
perception is certainly justifiable, as the Stones have stood the test
of time and have been labeled by some as the "World's Greatest Rock And
Roll Band." However, in February and March, 1964, at the dawning of the
British Invasion, when American teens craved as much Brit music as
possible, there were actually two other bands who were the Beatles' main
competition in the US more so than the Stones. (The Rolling Stones did
not have a Top 40 hit on the Billboard charts until July 1964, with Tell Me.) One of those two other bands was
the Searchers, like the Beatles another Liverpool band, who allegedly
(according to some DJs) claimed that they were the equal of, if not
better than, the Fab Four. The Searchers' debut on the Billboard charts
was in March 1964 with Needles And Pins. History has proven that any
claim by the Searchers of equality with the Beatles was only in their
dreams. For one thing, unlike the Beatles, the
Searchers did not write their own material. (Interestingly, the late
great Sonny Bono co-wrote Needles And Pins.) Also, the Searchers had
only one top ten hit during their eight year existence, Love Potion Number Nine, which peaked at number 3 in early 1965.
Finally we get to the purpose of my little tribute... The other UK
band which, for that crazy time of the initial stages of the British
Invasion, gave the Beatles some competition, was the Dave Clark Five.
The DC 5 was a five-man band from Tottenham, a London Suburb. Their
sound was distinct from the Beatles for a couple of reasons. First,
they featured an organ and a sax, neither of which was in the Beatles'
format. Instead of guitar solos for the song breaks, the DC 5
songs' breaks would often have an organ or sax solo. Secondly, all four
of the Beatles sang, but with respect to the DC 5 their lead vocals
were handled almost exclusively by Mike Smith, the organist. There was no mistaking Smith's
voice, whether on a rocker or a ballad; gruff, soulful and
sincere. The DC 5 actually hit the Billboard charts with Glad All
Over exactly one week after the famous Ed
Sullivan Show in February 1964. Although the DC 5 did cover some other
artists' songs (as did the Beatles), most of their songs were written by
members of the group, particularly drummer/founder Dave Clark and Mike Smith,
thus putting them a cut above the Searchers. Besides Glad All Over,
other big hits for the band included Bits And Pieces, Can't You See
That She's Mine, Because and Over And Over. The number one
thing which made these songs hits was not the members' musicianship.
(They were not in the Beatles' league either as songwriters or as
musicians.) It was Mike Smith's
singing ability. Only a very small handful of singers at the time were
better, in my view. Ed Sullivan thought enough of the DC 5 to invite
them to be on his variety show approximately twenty-seven times, more
than any other music act in the history of that show.
***
I found out on March 6 that Mike Smith
died on February 28, 2008. He had been paralyzed as a result of a fall
from a security fence on his property in southern Spain in September
2003, and except for a very few days, had lived his life in a hospital
since his accident. Throughout his four and a half year ordeal, he
remained upbeat beyond imagination. He had many friends throughout the
world both in and out of the music business, including Peter Noone (the
"Herman" of the sixties Brit band Herman's Hermits) and Bruce
Springsteen. Mike Smith also kept a web page which you can find by Googling his name. One of the saddest things about Mike's
pasing is that the DC 5 is scheduled to be inducted into the Rock And
Roll Hall Of Fame on March 10, and he had hoped to make the trip to NYC
for the induction. It's hard to believe that someone who had such
horrible luck in the last years of his life could not have at least
survived another ten or eleven days.
When you get to be an old codger like me
you take notice when some things that may have formed you in your youth
all of a sudden disappear. Some examples. I still remember exactly
where I was on December 8, 1980 when I found out that John Lennon had
been killed. Last year when I was in Libertyville I took a walk down my
old street, Cook Avenue, only to discover that
the house in which I grew up was bulldozed so the new property owner
could build a McMansion on the lot. My high school class, the Class of
1965, did not receive a yearbook, and according to sources I trust, we
are the only class in the history of the school to have that ignominious
distinction. The room I lived in junior year in Dillon Hall is no
longer sleeping quarters, but instead is now part of a very large study lounge. MHT, where I taught for eleven years, is closing its doors at the
end of the current school year. Now Mike Smith, a guy whose music I loved, is in that big concert hall in the sky.
If you read all of this you are a real trooper. Maybe some of this
explains why I am a pack rat. In any event, I plan to hoist one in honor of Mike Smith the next time I quaff a cold one,
and if some of what I wrote here made sense to you, I hope you'll do
the same. Thank God for your good health, and while you're busy
planning for the future, appreciate the present. Some day the present
will become the past, and it 's not always easy to hold onto those
memories you want to keep.
I love you all. The Old Boy
