Five & Dime
1973 studio album by David Ackles

Five & Dime is the fourth studio album by American singer-songwriter David Ackles. Released in October 1973 by Columbia Records, it was Ackles' final album.
Background
Following the release of American Gothic the previous year, Ackles felt immense pressure to follow up on its critical success. "I figured there was no way I could surpass what I had done in terms of the reviewers, because they had already committed themselves to it being better than peanut butter," Ackles said in a 1974 interview in Melody Maker. "I was literally stymied. Within the first few months after American Gothic came out I couldn't write a song."
Ackles switched to Columbia Records in part because the company agreed to let him record independent of label oversight. He drew upon a variety of sources for the new group of songs. "The songs are intended to be much more easy to get into, and I felt that it was time I lightened up a bit and made the album a little more accessible," he said.
"Surf's Down," a Beach Boys-esque parody, was informed by his own surfing hobby as a youth. "Postcards" was a response to his extensive stay in England while recording American Gothic.
“Five & Dime” enters the record as 1973 studio album by David Ackles. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Five, Dime and studio can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Five & Dime” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Five, Dime and studio provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q130748717. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Five & Dime” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.