Saturday, March 1, 2008

Sad All Over

Mike Smith 1943-2008

He was two weeks away from seeing his Dave Clark Five inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. It's like Buck O'Neil all over again.

Fates and licensing (the greediness of a the drummer who named the band after himself) have conspired to keep the DC5 albums out of print, so they aren't as well known these days as they should be, but they had six top ten hits in the USA between 1964 and 1967, more than any British band besides the Beatles.

There isn't a whole lot of decent DC5 performance footage on youtube (just lots of pictures of records going around), but here's their first and most famous U.S. hit (the one that finally dethroned the Fab Four's number one stranglehold in early 1964) as covered by Ms. Suzi Quatro.



Dance in peace, Mike Smith.

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