You will notice there are no Beatles songs on my 1972 mixtape. That's because a long time before I assembled it, a friend gave me a copy of his own All-Beatles mixtape so I didn't need the Fab Four on the one I put together. There are also no Rolling Stones numbers on mine because it was only much later that I developed an appreciation of the Stones.
There was one song on mine from The Dave Clark Five, a band that briefly (very briefly) was hailed by some — and by "some," I mean "a few" — as the smarter alternative to The Beatles. Back around the time most kids in my age bracket were hailing John, Paul, George and Ringo as the most fabulously awesome band ever, some friends took the snob approach, which involves belittling what everyone else likes and insisting you've found something better.
I didn't think The Dave Clark Five were better or even equal, though I liked one song they recorded…"Catch Us If You Can." I heard it often on KHJ radio, though this was well before I began taping that channel and building my mixtape of songs they played. At the time, I considered buying the 45 RPM record of The Dave Clark Five performing "Catch Us If You Can" but before I did, I came across a cheaper alternative.
In a Von's Market one day, I spotted a rack of 45 RPM records for sale. It said "Hit Records" on the rack and indeed, they were. They were records produced by the Hit Records Company, a firm which took whatever song was big on the Top 40, had some unknown band imitate it and then put out a record at a much cheaper price. The Dave Clark version was 89 cents at my local record shop. But I could buy a version by The Jalopy Five right there at the Von's for 39 cents.
I decided to save myself a trip to the record shop and fifty cents by buying The Jalopy Five's version of it. In 1965, fifty cents could buy you four new 12-cent comic books (with two cents left for miniature Hershey bars) or that year's Superman and Batman annuals.
And there was a bonus. The flip side of the record was "Just a Little Bit Better" performed not by Herman's Hermits like the version on the charts. The Hit Records version was performed by that famous group, Hank's Hounds. It would not have surprised me if it had turned out that The Jalopy Five and Hank's Hounds were the same guys. For all I know, everyone on the Hit Records label — groups like The Roamers and The Beagles — were some of or all the same guys or same gals.
Here is "Catch Us If You Can" as performed by The Jalopy Five…
And here's the original version — the one I had on my mixtape — performed (and badly lip-synced on some TV show) by The Dave Clark Five…
At some point in the late seventies or early eighties, I noticed somehow that there was no "The Best of The Dave Clark Five" record album out. Every other one of those groups had all their biggest hits on one or two albums but there was no such thing for the DC5, as someone must have called them. I mentioned this one day to a guy I knew who was working for Rhino Records…just the kind of record company that would have put out such a thing.
I asked, "Is it just that they're so totally forgotten that there's no market for it? If there's a market for the best of Freddie and the Dreamers, I can't see why there wouldn't be one for the Dave Clark Five." He chuckled and then said approximately…
"There'd be a huge market for it and I think we went after the rights. The trouble is that Dave Clark made, like, a zillion dollars when they were hot and he's set some astronomical price for anyone who wants to put out the kind of record you describe. We could sell a lot of that record but we couldn't make any money on it."
I didn't know then if that was true but I just looked at Wikipedia and it says, "Between 1978 and 1993, none of their music was available to be purchased in any commercial format due to rights-holder Clark declining to license the band's recordings." So I guess it was true. The item also tells of a few releases that eventually did happen and it says that everything they did is available on Spotify. That's great but I'd really rather hear "The Best of The Jalopy Five."