Catch the Dave Clark Five if you can on PBS

Just two weeks after the Beatles’ landmark appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in February 1964, the British group the Dave Clark Five — the Beatles’ biggest rivals in the U.S. — had its own remarkable debut on the hugely popular Sunday night CBS show. It was the start of something big.

The DC5 performed “Glad All Over,” which had knocked the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” off the top of the U.K. charts earlier in the year. The members of the group from Tottenham in North London were handsome and well dressed, and their music was a pulsating mix of percussion, vocals, sax and sex appeal.

Dave Clark was a demon on the drums, vocalist and keyboardist Mike Smith had a voice between a growl and a purr, Lenny Davidson was the lead guitarist, Rick Huxley played bass guitar, and Denis Payton supplied the tenor and baritone saxophones, harmonica and guitar.

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The DC5 would appear on “Ed Sullivan” 18 times — more than any other British group. Over an eight-year period, the band sold more than 100 million records and had 15 consecutive top 20 U.S. singles before disbanding in 1970. Its fun and carefree songs included “Over and Over,” “You Got What It Takes,” “Catch Us If You Can,” “Do You Love Me,” “Because” and “I Like It Like That.”

Max Weinberg, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’s drummer extraordinaire, was 12 when he saw the DC5 on the Sullivan show. It remains a vivid memory.

The DC5, Weinberg noted, were “these really good-looking guys with an incredibly powerful sound and with Dave Clark leading the band with his name on the bass drum. I had been playing the drums for a couple of years. When I saw that he was the leader, I said, ‘That’s a job I would like.’”

The band members starred in their own 1965 feature, “Catch Us If You Can,” which was known as “Having a Wild Weekend” in the U.S., directed by famed filmmaker John Boorman. Even Clark’s boxer, Spike, had his own fan club.

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Clark was also business savvy. He was not only the leader of the group but he was also its manager. And unlike the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Clark owned the rights to the band’s music. In 2008, the DC5 was inducted into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame just days after Smith died. Clark and Davidson are the only two members alive.

PBS’ “Great Performances” is celebrating the influential group in the new special “The Dave Clark Five and Beyond — Glad All Over,” which airs Tuesday and Friday.

The special features footage from the group’s Sullivan appearances, which have not been seen in decades, as well as newsreel and other performance footage, clips of Tom Hanks’ impassioned speech at the DC5’s Rock Hall of Fame induction and interviews with Weinberg, Springsteen and their E Street Band mate Steve Van Zandt, plus Stevie Wonder, Sharon and Ozzy Osborne, Whoopi Goldberg, Twiggy, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Gene Simmons.

The special, said Stephen Segaller, vice president of programmer for WNET, which produces “Great Performances,” is a perfect fit for PBS.

“The early rock ‘n’ roll and the British invasion is so much of the soundtrack of the baby boomer generation,” said Segaller, who was a fan of the DC5 growing up in England. “I remember every week turning into the live pop music shows on British television.”

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Clark, who wrote, directed and produced the special, said, “I was never going to make a documentary.” But he said that friends like Hanks, Springsteen and Van Zandt had urged him to commemorate the legacy of the DC5.

The band began on a lark as a way to make the money for his youth soccer team to travel to the Netherlands to play a match.

“We were all mates from school,” Clark said over the phone from London. “When we came back from winning the match, I thought that was going to be it.”

But it wasn’t. The group got a gig playing the staff ball at Buckingham Palace — a friend of Clark’s mother worked as a maid there.

“We went up on the subway and had just enough money to get us a cab to get us through the palace gates,” recalled Clark.

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The group began to play clubs and American military bases. “They gave us hamburgers, which we never had,” he said. “During the break, they would put these American records on the jukebox and said, ‘Can you play them?’ We didn’t know them, but I said, ‘Give us a copy of the recording and we’ll learn them.’”

By 1963, the group was a mainstay at the Tottenham Royal, had released a few singles and had made the first of some 30 appearances on the classic British TV musical series “Ready Steady Go!” About a decade later, Clark bought the rights to the show.

But the group wasn’t prepared for the impact of the Sullivan show. “Three or four weeks later, we toured America to sold-out big arenas,” said Clark. “At first, we traveled by regular airplane, and it was absolutely chaotic. I said, ‘Guys, we are going to get our own plane.’”

Weinberg saw the DC5 live during that first tour. He bought a ticket to see the group when it came to Newark, N.J., in May 1964.

Weinberg said he had never heard a “sound like that in my life. Mike Smith was one of the great vocalists in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. They sounded exactly like the records. They were great showmen. My whole drum style grew largely out of Dave Clark. The way he played, it was so forward. I can testify the drums were just pushing that rhythm.”

susan.king@latimes.com

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‘Great Performances: The Dave Clark Five and Beyond — Glad All Over’

When: 8 p.m. Tuesday; 10 p.m. Friday

Where: KOCE