...and their minor (but gorgeous) 1965 single "Goodbye My Love."
And from their transplendent 1979 comeback LP....
...please dig as stunning a power pop single as has ever been committed to magnetic tape, "It's Too Late."
BTW, the farewell album is still in print and available at a very reasonable price on Amazon. The Rockfield compilation (which is only one CD, but includes both of the band's Sire LPs and is on the Australian Raven label) is out of print, but Amazon has a couple of used copies for under twenty dollars.
A couple of addenda, if I may use that word.
To begin with -- and I can't prove this -- but I suspect that everybody more or less my age, for whom the British Invasion of 1964 was a seminal event, would consider The Searchers their second favorite band (after The Beatles, obviously). And don't give me any of that Rolling Stones crap -- The Searchers run of ridiculously great hits pre-dated the Stones initial creative flowering.
Secondly, when those Sire comeback albums came out, there was a concurrent very sad story involving -- you guessed it -- The Floor Models.
The short version: Sometime after the Sire albums were released, to a fair amount of media attention (approximately 1982), the Searchers deigned to perform in America for the first time since an oldies tour in the early 70s (when they had co-headlined Madison Square Garden at the same show Rick Nelson immortalized in "Garden Party.")
In any event, the Floor Models had been doing two songs from those Sire albums since day one, to the point that everybody we knew in Greenwich Village was convinced we had written them (in particular, the cover of The Records' "Heart in Her Eyes.")
Needless to say, we were totally excited by the chance to see our idols in the flesh, and all the more so given that they were going to be gigging at The Bitter End, the charmingly intimate club next door to The Other End, the sister room that was more or less the Flo Mos headquarters, where we had a residency for about two years.
So we showed up early -- to get seats in front of the stage -- and then finally there they were. The fucking Searchers. They plugged into their Marshall amplifiers, hit a gigantic 12-string D chord and...they weren't a rock band any more.
The shorter version: They were what the Brits call a cabaret act. There's no real American equivalent, but the deal is that in England, if you're a mid-level rock group and your hits have dried up, there's a whole support cicuit of small clubs (including some at summer beach resorts) where you can make a decent living playing short sets to an audience of moms, dads, and grandparents, where you do medleys of your hits (and those of other bands) and do a lot of waving to the audience and going "Hello, luv, how are you?"
I can't tell you how depressed we were, but that's what they were doing and bless their hearts.
Anyway, finally, I should mention that this single, which (a) got airplay in the states (I actually bought a copy at Sam Goody at the time, which was either 1966 or '67) is (b) fucking great and I am at a loss why it's not included on the farewell anthology.
The Searchers, ladies and germs. Let's really hear it for them.
7 comments:
The Searchers had a great sound but not much personality. The Sire albums were really good.
The Dave Clark Five were my second favorites in 1964.
Doctored Captain Al
One more thought:
For The Searchers to be clueless to the kind of audience they would be playing for in the States in 1983 is inexcusable. Didn't the band and their management have any idea of the kind of audience they'd have?
Doctored Captain Al
Summer of '76, Peter Frampton was riding high with Frampton Comes Alive, which crossed lines between soft teenybopper pop and endless guitar solo rock. Me and my college buddies got tickets for a double bill of J. Geils Band and Peter Frampton. What the hell, we figured, if nothing else we'd see J. Geils.
We debated about which Frampton we'd see -- guitar god or teenybopper idol?
J Geils was on first and they were good, of course. Then Frampton came on and we knew it in an instant -- draped in gold chains, with one of those gauzy white shirts open to the waste and his curls done up just so, there was no confusing which Frampton we were seeing.
So we hung around a while and got bored and left.
What the hell, we saw J. Geils.
(Just a year before, Frampton had played a modest room in the student union on the Buffalo campus. Now he was playing arenas. So yeah, who am I to say.)
The Searchers were ultimately great! And what band didn't cover them.
Did their membership change over the years, or stay the same?
Did they write their own material?
I was VERY into the British Invasion bands, but was largely unaware of them, except for Needles and Pins, which was transcendently great, and should have prompted me to seek out more of their stuff. Was much of their other stuff played on U.S. radio? If so, how did I miss it?
I saw the Searchers in December 81 and the band did acknowledge that they were playing to a young crowd in a South London club rather than a provincial scampi and chips joint. A set including all the hits & the best of the Sire records ended with a, by popular demand, repeat performance of "Needles and Pins". They seemed to enjoy playing to an appreciative, packed dancefloor.
I completely agree about It's Too Late -- and yet, somehow I never heard the Searchers' version until a few years ago. I knew it all these years from Marti Jones' version, which is pretty damn good itself.
To Jai Guru Dave's point, many of the Searchers' early hits were written by American songwriters, like Sonny Bono/Jack Nitzsche and Jackie DeShannon and Lieber & Stoller. The same is true of Herman's Hermits, early Manfred Mann, the Animals -- hell, even the Beatles covered a few Brill Building gems.
Marc
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