Coast to Coast

Any album that opens with "Anyway You Want It" already has a leg up over most of the competition around it. Arguably the jewel of the Dave Clark Five's singles output, it's a song that has aged every bit as gracefully as, say, "I Saw Her Standing There" or "A Hard Day's Night."So Coast To Coast opens strong and it gets better, blooming into an amazingly diverse yet consistently powerful record made up entirely of group originals. These mostly take us into the DC5's own, uniquely energetic renditions of Merseybeat-style harmonies, on "To Me" (a song that might be as fine as anything that Lennon and McCartney wrote on the Beatles' first three albums, with its exquisitely lyrical saxophone break by Dennis Payton), "I'm Left With You" (which calls to mind "This Boy" in the most favorable way), the soaring "Everybody Knows (I Still Love You)" (which offers some of Lenny Davidson's most flamboyant rhythm guitar work), and the haunting "When," with its larger-than-life piano and rhythm section. Surrounding all of this surprisingly elegant songwriting, singing, and playing is some first-rate rock 'n' roll in the form of "Say You Want Me" (a close cousin of "Anyway You Want It" in sound and timbre), "Don't You Know," and "It's Not True." Had there been an actual rock press in 1964, or if the Dave Clark Five been taken more seriously sooner, Coast To Coast would probably be regarded today as something close to an essential British Invasion record, if, perhaps, not as seminal as, say, the Beatles For Sale LP, but definitely more solid and important than all but one other album: (It's The Searchers) by the Searchers.