They also felt uncomfortable with Page’s publicity stunts. His goal was to constantly have them in the papers. The Beatles were photographed with boxer Muhammad Ali at his training camp in 1964. Two years later so were the stripe-suited Troggs. One saga, which ran in three consecutive issues of New Musical Express in April 1967, had Chris leaving the band. He was quoted as saying that he was “sick of the long-haired, drug-taking image.” Almost like the feigned, heated exchange in a professional wrestling match, Larry countered with a threat of a lawsuit if Chris left. A substitute guitarist was photographed arriving to join the group as they were leaving for a tour. Of course, it was all a hoax. The Troggs fired Page as their manager in June 1967, although their product continued to be released on Larry’s Page One Records until October 1970. After firing him, they never recorded another hit.
Often referred to as “Britain’s only punk band,” at least as of the 1960s, The Troggs were also a prime influence of Britain’s first wave of heavy metal bands. Ozzy Osbourne, then with Black Sabbath, told me: “The very sexual and driving aspects of our music came from listening to records like The Troggs’ ‘Wild Thing’ and The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me.’ I’d never heard anything like those records before. They were very important.” (In 1972 The Troggs recorded a single with Sabbath’s original producer, Roger Bain, that was musically effective but a stiff commercially.) Jimi Hendrix provided another example when he made a heavy version of “Wild Thing” an integral part of his act. In the Monterey Pop film he closed his set with it as he set his guitar on fire.
In 1968 Tony Murray replaced Pete Staples on bass. Reg explained: “We were always classed as basic and simple, but this guy was one step simpler than we were—he was an idiot. When music started to progress and we wanted to progress, he couldn’t come with us. It reached its low ebb at a club date in Switzerland when he’d been making more mistakes. That night he played a tune different from ‘With a Girl Like You’ and didn’t know it until we’d told him afterward.”
Chris Britton added: “We played on this stage seven feet off the ground and he was so rigid that once he planted his feet he wouldn’t move. Some fan tugged his shoelace and he went over like a falling statue. It’s a shame because he’s a nice guy.” Although the lineup improved musically, The Troggs were victims of a lack of direction, and dropped off the charts. They even recorded bubblegum tunes in a misguided effort to get a hit.
During a recording session in 1970, studio engineer Clive Franks was so frustrated by The Troggs arguing with one another that he ran a backup tape as the band worked on a song called, of all things, “Tranquility.” The resulting twelve-minute tape, a real audio-verite of the recording process, was passed around England’s rock elite and became all the rage to quote from. Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, and the like made phrases like “duba-duba-duba-cha” and “put some fairy dust on it” part of their day-to-day chatter. (Jim Bickhart made me a cassette copy from one that he got from Dave Pegg of Fairport Convention.) Despite the wrath Reg heaped on Ronnie in the studio, their unbroken professional relationship remained intact. Although the group was embarrassed by the disclosure, through the years they acquired a new cachet and got more work. (They even played at Sting and Trudie Styler’s wedding reception in August 1992). “The Troggs Tapes” inspired a scene in This Is Spinal Tap. Director/writer Rob Reiner had gotten his copy from Mason “Classical Gas” Williams. I included an edited segment on The Rhino Brothers Present the World’s Worst Records, Volume Two in 1985.
In November 1971 Cream magazine editor Lester Bangs, portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous, ranted on The Troggs for twenty-four pages in the Who Put the Bomp fanzine. Sure, he went on tangents galore, but it was clear that he loved and understood The Troggs’ music. This was followed by Richard Meltzer’s one-page appreciation of their early records.
I was in London for three weeks in late summer 1973, but didn’t want to extend my trip an additional week to attend an October 19 taping of The Midnight Special TV show at the Marquee. Billed as The 1980 Floor Show, David Bowie starred and picked Marianne Faithful and The Troggs as his guest stars. Their appearance and Bowie’s endorsement did much to revive their career, resulting in better-paying gigs, if not a return to the charts. Although Bowie didn’t cover a Troggs’ song on his Pin Ups album, he did reveal that the band influenced his 1984 hit “Blue Jean.”
In October 1973 The Troggs released their last great single, “Strange Movies.” I liked it so much that in 1978 I auditioned Martha Davis, then between lineups of the Motels, with the intention of recording it with her, but the project went no further.
I saw The Troggs on April 22, 1980, at the Whisky a Go-Go, where they amazed the audience with a steamy set that probably sounded as they had in 1966. Los Angeles record buffs and future Rhino staffers Gary Stewart and Danny Perloff called it “The best show I’ve ever seen.” I reintroduced myself to the group the day before when they played at the Rhino Records store. Ronnie Bond gave me his phone number and told me to give him a call when I was next in Britain. In 1984 I produced a Best of The Troggs for Rhino, which sold twenty-eight thousand copies.
Similar to The Kinks reuniting with Larry Page, The Troggs asked him back into their lives eight years after they had given him the axe. One of Larry’s ideas resulted in a March 1992 Rhino release. Members of R.E.M. were big Troggs’ fans and often included a Troggs’ song as part of their set. They performed “Love Is All Around” on MTV Unplugged and released a live recording of it as the B-side of a cassette single. Larry produced an album in Athens, Georgia, with Reg and Chris accompanied by R.E.M.’s Bill Berry, Mike Mills, Peter Buck, and regular sideman Peter Holsapple. R.E.M. was hot. The band’s current album, Out of Time, had sold over four million copies. Although R.E.M.’s vocalist Michael Stipe didn’t participate, we thought there would be a lot more loyal R.E.M. fans who had to have everything the band recorded, and were dissatisfied with only five thousand sales.
In 1994, Wet Wet Wet’s new recording of “Love Is All Around” was featured prominently in Four Weddings and a Funeral. On the strength of the hit movie, the record topped the British chart for fifteen weeks. By this time Reg was heavily into studying crop circles and the paranormal. He hosted The Reg Presley UFO Show on local cable TV. The British press reported that he looked forward to the financial windfall to enable him to hire helicopters to look at newly discovered crop circles, and to travel the world to investigate stories of UFOs and alien encounters. In 2004 he published his findings in Wild Things They Don’t Want Us to Know. In Rolling Stone magazine’s 2004 poll of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” The Troggs’ “Wild Thing” was ranked 257. Reg passed away in 2013; Ronnie in 1992.
The History of The
Dave Clark Five
The Dave Clark Five were among the better bands of the mid-sixties British Invasion. As with The Beatles, it took them a few years before they developed their sound and had success. They had no grand ambitions. The band formed for the temporary goal of making enough money to afford passage to Holland for Dave’s youth club soccer team. Members of the team played instruments, but there was no drummer, so Dave bought a drum set for ten pounds (twenty-eight dollars) from a Salvation Army outlet and learned the rudiments.
The band was good and gained a following, appearing often at the Tottenham Royal Mecca Ballroom. As exciting as the group was live, they weren’t convincing when they auditioned for record companies. There were few labels interested in signing the group, and those that did wanted to furnish the songs and define how they were to be recorded. Dave, though, believed in the band’s ability to make exciting records. He realized that he could control the repertoire if he paid for the sessions himself. He used the £300 ($840) he made for two days of stunt driving in a movie—crashing cars for a character played by singer Adam Faith—to pay for the recording. He then made a deal with EMI’s Columbia Records in the UK (and Epic in the US), and bluffed the label
into giving him a high royalty by asking for three times the going rate, thinking that would give him more room to negotiate when the company made a lower counter offer. Columbia didn’t have to risk the expense of recording, so, to his surprise, they agreed. He also asked for the masters to revert to him after ten years, and they agreed to this as well. Nobody thought that this music would have longevity.
Dave left school at fifteen. His family was poor. He wasn’t academically inclined. Somehow, though, he had a natural instinct for making good business decisions. He learned from his agent, Harold Davidson, and others. This led him to form a publishing company for the band’s compositions. Income from songs was usually split 50 percent for the writers, 50 percent for the publisher, which meant that Dave made money not only from the songs he helped to write, but also from the publishing. It’s one thing to take note of what songs dancers respond to, and another to eavesdrop on them between sets to pick up on phrases around which to build songs. Such eavesdropping resulted in the band’s first two big hits, “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces.”
The importance of band-composed songs was brought home in October 1963 with their first charting record. The group loved American rock ’n’ roll, and recorded a cover of The Contours’ 1962 hit “Do You Love Me,” which skirted the Top 30 in the UK. Dave had seen the Motown vocal group perform it live on tour in Britain. But it was bested by a contemporary, beat group (i.e. like The Beatles) arrangement by Brian Poole and the Tremeloes, which made it to number one. In contrast, The Dave Clark Five’s version was slower, more rhythm and blues in feel, and superior. If the band relied mostly on their own songs, they wouldn’t risk being beaten out again. (Seven months later, “Do You Love Me” became the group’s third hit in America, rising to eleven. Brian Poole’s version failed to chart.)
Dave was a controlling person. He was disciplined in the martial arts (including karate), and as a stunt man he was used to being precise. It was unheard of for a member of a rock band to also be the producer of their records, which Dave was. On the first few releases, unsure of how his attribution would be perceived, he credited the producer as Adrian Clark, utilizing his engineer Adrian Kerridge’s first name and his own surname. Kerridge was on staff at Lansdowne, London’s first independent recording studio. He worked with Dave to create a sound that was unique to The Dave Clark Five (aka DC5), utilizing four-track recording machines. Reverb featured prominently on their records. Rather than relying on an in-place echo chamber, Kerridge placed a microphone in the stairwell of a concrete bunker at the back of the studio. Reverb provided a novel hook to the group’s next single, “Glad All Over,” which topped the charts in England.
Dave was also the band’s manager. It was a function he’d provided from the beginning, and he didn’t feel a need to change when the group became popular, to give control to somebody else, even if he were more experienced. Having aspired to be a professional soccer player, he was, as a member of the band, more like the captain of a team that worked well together. He made good choices in solidifying the band’s lineup. Mike Smith was the musical genius of the group. In addition to having a superb voice, he was classically trained on the piano, and cowrote many of the songs with Dave. Lenny Davidson played guitar, Rick Huxley bass, and Denis Payton sax.
The longhair era of rock signaled attitudes that were antiestablishment and free-wheeling, and skirted the rules. In contrast, in February 1964 Dave had his group members sign conventional, five-year employment contracts, almost as if they were in a 1940s dance band. Each member received a weekly salary of fifty pounds, four weeks of paid vacation a year, but no artist royalties on the records. They were on call twenty-four hours a day, were responsible for maintaining their own instruments, and had to follow Dave’s guidelines on hair and dress. His lineup stayed intact for the nine years of the band’s duration.
Ed Sullivan had a highly watched variety show in the States. His ratings soared when The Beatles were guests, and he thought The Dave Clark Five would be a good follow-up. American teens, especially girls, loved these British newcomers. They looked different with their long hair, their English accents were novel, and they seemed polished and charming compared to local grown talent. Handsome Dave was the epitome of charm, whether he was addressing girls with “luv,” or complaining that he couldn’t get a good cup of tea in America.
When Ed’s people contacted Dave’s agent, he turned them down. Dave had no interest in going to America. From performing at US air bases in Britain, where off-duty soldiers had a good time getting drunk and behaving badly, he thought America “would be the pits.” He was persuaded when the show offered a fee of $10,000 and a luxurious, all-expenses paid trip. It was an enormous amount of money compared to the fifteen pounds a day Dave had made as an extra in films and TV. It proved to be a turning point.
Ed loved the band. It wasn’t so much that he related to their music, it was more how clean cut they all were. Displaying black and white matching stage clothes, neat haircuts, dazzling smiles, and matinee-idol chins, The Dave Clark Five were the best looking and most stylish of all the bands of the British Invasion. Their debut on his show on March 8, 1964, incited the same mania the teenage members of his studio audience showed for The Beatles the previous month, so Sullivan booked them for a return appearance. It was only then, in the face of the reception they received in America, that the band quit their day jobs and made the commitment to turn professional. The DC5 eventually racked up twelve appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, more than any other rock band.
Realizing the expanse of the US market, Dave focused his energies on the States, organizing a tour that commenced May 25 at the Mosque Theater in Newark, New Jersey. The group commanded $10,000 per show. For touring the US, a Martin 404 propeller plane was leased from the Rockefellers. “DC5” was painted on the exterior, which would have been more appropriate if it had been a McDonnell Douglas aircraft, the DC initials for Douglas Commercial.
The band toured the States six times—to The Beatles’ three. This resulted in the DC5 having more hits in America than in Britain. During 1964 they had seven Top 20 hits in America, all but one band-composed, and were second only to The Beatles in popularity. Because The Beatles style was described as Merseybeat (owing to Liverpool’s River Mersey), the media described the music of The Dave Clark Five as the Tottenham Sound. Although there were a large number of bands from Liverpool, many of which also became successful, like Gerry & The Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas, there was no comparable scene in the north London suburb of Tottenham, and hence no other proponents of the sound.
On tour The Dave Clark Five mirrored the experiences of The Beatles: motorcades from the airport, sneaking into hotels through kitchens, fans chasing them and hiding in their hotel rooms. Among the hundreds of dolls and other gifts they received was a sheep. Dave didn’t know what to do with it, so he left it in their hotel suite. Upon returning from the show, he discovered that the sheep had chewed every credit card and every piece of furniture. As he said, “We didn’t trash hotel suites, but the sheep did.”
Their live show was a different matter. It was the best production by a rock band for its day. It commenced with a dramatic, pounding cover of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn Theme.” On “Five By Five,” another instrumental—the band had primarily played instrumentals in its pre-hit years—Dave got up from his drum kit to stand at an array of large floor tom drums, to pound away as purple and red lights flashed from inside the drums. During such moments, black light made the band members seem to glow in the dark in their white shirts.
By 1965, the DC5’s popularity was exceeded by Herman’s Hermits and The Rolling Stones. The band still produced good records, but they were no longer perceived as hip. Their lineup included a saxophone, an instrument more identified with the pre-Beatles era. Coming a year after the release of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, and only a week after their Help!, the group’s feature film, Having a Wild Weeke
nd (Catch Us If You Can in Britain), was pessimistic in tone, overly ambitious in its satire of consumerism and, ultimately, boring. It suffered from a lack of memorable songs comparable to those of The Beatles’ Lennon and McCartney. The DC5’s status fell further when they failed to progress as The Beatles had, whether embracing more ambitious concepts or psychedelic drugs.
The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and other groups success with self-composed songs resulted in the confidence to depart from the rock ’n’ roll covers that were part of their repertoires in their early years. After a very successful first year of Dave Clark and Mike Smith compositions, the DC5 fell back on covers of American rock ’n’ roll hits “Over and Over” (Bobby Day), “I Like It Like That” (Chris Kenner), and “You Got What It Takes” (Marv Johnson), songs Americans at the air bases had turned them onto. Or maybe the change in repertoire owed to the group not having composed as many hits as they claimed? In a 2009 interview, Ron Ryan, once a friend of Dave’s, claimed that he—not Dave—wrote “Bits and Pieces,” “Because,” and “Anyway You Want It.” Because he was also a friend of the other band members, he agreed to a paltry settlement because he didn’t want bad publicity to adversely affect the momentum of the band.
As fans became savvy, they realized how little value for money they were getting when they bought DC5 albums. The group’s first two American albums averaged twenty-three minutes of music; their first Greatest Hits totaled twenty-three minutes, and More Greatest Hits, twenty-two minutes. The Beatles’ and Herman’s Hermits’ first two American albums averaged twenty-seven minutes. (American albums had fewer tracks than the English ones owing to a different way of allocating publishing fees.) The Dave Clark Five had good album tracks, but not enough to make good value the seven albums they released in their first two years, making the listening experience less satisfying than albums by The Beatles, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, and Herman’s Hermits. All of these factors contributed to the group being dismissed as lightweight. Their popularity slid further, and after the summer of 1966, they had only one more Top 30 hit in America. When they tried to be progressive, with such singles as “Live in the Sky” and “Inside Out,” they missed the mark. Dave gave up touring in 1967, and the band’s activity slowed. He produced two records that made the Top 10 in England in 1970, before the band announced its dissolution in August of that year.
My British Invasion Page 17