Review: The Searchers - Sounds Like Searchers (1965)

Tracks: 1) Everybody Come And Clap Your Hands; 2) If I Could Find Someone; 3) Magic Potion; 4) I Don’t Want To Go On Without You; 5) Bumble Bee; 6) Something You Got Baby; 7) Let The Good Times Roll; 8) A Tear Fell; 9) Till You Say You’ll Be Mine; 10) You Wanna Make Her Happy; 11) Everything You Do; 12) Goodnight Baby; 13*) This Feeling Inside; 14*) Goodbye My Love; 15*) Till I Met You; 16*) He’s Got No Love; 17*) So Far Away; 18*) When I Get Home.

REVIEW

Tony Jackson left the Searchers in July 1964 and was replaced by Frank Allen, a former member of Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers. Two consequences of this could have been predicted: (a) the Searchers would move to an even softer, folk-poppier sound, losing the faintest traces of «rough edges» they might ever have possessed; (b) Tony Jackson would try to start a solo career, fail at it, and disappear entirely from the musical world, to die sick, drunk, and forgotten at the age of 65 in 2003. In other words, his leaving the band helped nothing and nobody — but then again, had he stayed, it is equally doubtful that the Searchers would have survived the transition into a new musical era.

In discussing the band’s fourth album, and their first with Allen, it is always fair game to poke fun at the title — it is almost as if the group members themselves had second thoughts on whether they are still making quintessential Searchers-style music, or are headed somewhere completely different. One thing is for certain: after the generally high quality and subtle musical innovations of It’s The Searchers, this record is clearly a letdown. The biggest advantage of its predecessor was not even the participation of Tony Jackson and the inclusion of some genuine rock’n’roll numbers like ‘Hi-Heel Sneakers’; it was their «jangly» folk-pop formula, represented by such highlights as ‘Needles And Pins’ and ‘Sea Of Heartbreak’. Sounds Like Searchers finds no traces of it whatsoever, as if they’d forgotten their principal strength — and this at a time when folk-pop and folk-rock were so clearly on the move, with Dylan, the Byrds, and even the Beatles joining in the revolution.

Instead, most of Sounds Like Searchers falls into two categories — slow sentimental balladry and light, fluffy, amicably danceable pop. The very first song is telling already: a cover of Jeff Barry’s and Ellie Greenwich’s ‘Everybody Come Clap Your Hands’, a cuddly pop-R&B hybrid party anthem originally recorded by the little-known R&B outfit Moody and the Deltas a year earlier. The original version was heavily tilted toward establishing a rowdy party atmosphere (overdubbed party noises, exuberant harmonies, brass bursts, etc.); the Searchers push it more into the direction of melody, with sharper and cleaner guitar riffs and slightly more intricate vocal harmonies — but Frank Allen’s lead vocal comes straight out of a china shop, making me visualize a target audience of 6-year old kids around a Christmas tree. It’s all nice and cuddly, and the short, Shadows-inspired electric guitar solo is awesomely melodic, but I’d still take the original version by the Deltas over this milquetoast cover any day. Surely there might have been a better way to introduce Frank Allen to the LP-buying public, if he makes Tony Jackson sound like Eric Burdon in comparison.

Weird attempts to adapt the «playful R&B» formula to their own ends continue with the first single from the album, a cover of LaVern Baker’s ‘Bumble Bee’ from five years ago. It was one of her «joke songs», like ‘Tweedlee Dee’ and ‘Jim Dandy’, but a really fun one as well, and theoretically, there is no sin in a UK band covering a LaVern Baker joke song in March ’65, but why put it out as a single? Imagine the Beatles putting out ‘Dizzy Miss Lizzie’ as the first single off Help!, for instance... or, for that matter, having ‘You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)’ as the A-side and ‘Let It Be’ as the B-side. (Not that I’d object, of course, but only because the Beatles have the royal right to fuck with their fanbase; the Searchers never earned that right in the first place). What’s worse is that the Searchers almost put up a serious face when covering the song — LaVern does it in a goofy, vaudevillian way, with her backing band joining in on the fun (in the original, for instance, the guitar riff echoing the chorus of "a bumble bee, an evil bumble bee" is heavily distorted, as if imitating the actual hum of the blasted bumble bee in question; this tiny, but significant detail is totally lost in transition). The Searchers, once again, deliver a tight, well-polished, melodic version, with a cool tremolo guitar part replacing the original vibraphone — but the actual playfulness aspect is all but lost. Minor hint: if your band is not known for having any sense of humor, maybe don’t make a habit of covering humorous songs by other people?

Meanwhile, the battle for originality seems to be hopelessly lost — by early 1965, when «write your own or die» seems to have been established as an unwritten law for UK bands, we find the Searchers still doing mostly covers, with only three original compositions, all credited to Curtis, found on the LP. They are surprisingly decent: ‘If I Could Find Someone’, in particular, is a touching ballad with some surprising vocal moves (like the emergence of the lonesome, plaintive "...and I love to hear somebody say..." bridge out of the harmony mesh of the "...if I could find someone" chorus — there are distinct echoes of the Beatles’ ‘If I Fell’ here, but mood-wise rather than melody-wise), and ‘You Wanna Make Her Happy’ is a catchy pop serenade with lots of quirky chord changes and a cool little Chet Atkins-influenced country-pop riff used as delimiter in between verses. (The third Curtis original, ‘Everything You Do’, is just a brief rockabilly-style throwaway, but not particularly irritating, either). However, it does feel as if — in accordance with Frank Allen’s complaints in the liner notes — all these songs simply were not given enough gestation time; the arrangements are minimal, the lyrics are fluffy, and the overall feel is that, emotion-wise, all of this stuff is still hopelessly stuck somewhere in 1963.

I don’t even feel like discussing the rest of the covers on the album, because they all suffer from exactly the same problem: most of the songs are good, but it never feels as if there is a real sense of purpose to the Searchers covering them. The best outcome is that they might help one unearth some forgotten goodies — I’d never even heard of Moody and the Deltas, for instance, before listening to this album, or of Lou Johnson, the soul singer who first recorded Bacharach and David’s ‘Magic Potion’ in a solidly soulful version which makes the Searchers’ one completely expendable. (I have a suspicion they only recorded the song because they’d already done ‘Love Potion No. 9’, so, as well-established experts in love potions, they simply couldn’t pass up on this one). And what did they think to achieve by covering the orchestrated waltz of the Drifters’ ‘I Don’t Want To Go On Without You’? Without a Steve Marriott or a Rod Stewart-type singer in the band, competing with the power of the Atlantic R&B sound on a vocal level is a battle that’s lost before it is even started.

In short, while time has helped me to somewhat mellow out — there are really no bad songs on the album, and all the covers are at least formally competent and listenable — Sounds Like Searchers still represents the start of a clear (and fairly quick) downward slide for a band that took quite a bit of time to find their special strength, then embarrasingly failed to capitalize on it.

Interestingly enough, the small run of singles that they would release throughout 1965 — available on the remastered CD edition of the album as bonus tracks — does show that the race was not yet completely run. Most of these songs are originals, and a few show some promising developments, most notably ‘He’s Got No Love’, co-credited to Curtis and Pender — the song is notable for containing much the same little pop riff that Pete Townshend would later use (nick?) for his own ‘A Legal Matter’, though one could argue that it is, in turn, itself derivative of the Stones’ riff for ‘The Last Time’. Anyway, that riff is encrusted inside an echoey, reverberating arrangement, with gorgeous harmonies that are but one step away from the baroque-pop explosion of next year. The B-side of the single, ‘So Far Away’, was recorded in much the same style, but is just a tad weaker because the overall melody is extremely derivative of Buddy Holly (the opening is pretty much pilfered directly from ‘Listen To Me’). But then they had to go and spoil it by choosing a Bobby Darin track for their next single — ‘When I Get Home’ (not the Beatles song), which may actually sound a little crisper than the Darin original (at least it’s not a Drifters song), yet still completely ditches that proto-psychedelic jangly reverberation of the previous single. In other words, one step forward, one step back, same old muddle again.