The Searchers At The Bitter End New York 1983
THE BITTER END
I’m not sure if you have checked out the video on our Home Page which documents the story of our biggest U.S hit Love Potion Number Nine but it set me thinking. Or rather reminiscing.
There’s no need to tell you the story of the fluke success we had with that track. It’s all there in the video which is part of a series called Why This Song? The writers of that particular tune were the legendary duo of songsmiths Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller. Boy did they write some great songs, mostly for The Coasters and The Clovers not to mention the entire sound track of Jailhouse Rock for Elvis. Probably the finest movie score he ever enjoyed.
The other iconic composers at that time working along the corridor from them in the famous Brill Building on Broadway were Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Together they penned so many of the early Rock & Roll melodies. Poison Ivy (The Clovers), Teenager In Love, Save The Last Dance with Me (The Drifters), Can’t Get Used To Losing You (Andy Williams) and the list goes on and on. And of course they wrote Sweets For My Sweet which was a hit for a Liverpool band. Can’t quite remember which one.
In 1983, on November 19th to be exact, we performed at The Bitter End, on Bleeker Street in New York during our period with Sire Records. The records will show that it had at that time been temporarily renamed The Other End in an attempt to encourage a new image and a new clientele as the musical fashions changed. It was not a great idea and they soon reverted to the original name.
It was a magic night in our history with a capacity crowd and many more waiting around the block to gain entry. While hanging around waiting for our turn to get on stage, our support band The Smithereens were in full flight warming the crowd nicely. I wandered into the room and was soon beckoned over by a wheelchair bound member of the audience. He explained that he was in fact the one and only Doc Pomus and to say I was gobsmacked would be an understatement. To me he was an idol, as was his songwriting partner Mort Shuman, alas not in attendance that night. Mort had decamped from the U.S.A to London at first and then to Paris where he was treated as a demigod having composed the most amazing English lyrics to the music of Jacques Brel.
Fortunately despite being a little unnerved in the presence of my hero I was in command of my faculties enough to grab a quick picture. We didn’t call them selfies back then and one required a camera, this being decades ahead of mobile phones.
Amazingly that short American jaunt was to present us with yet another adoring and famous fan in the person of Joey Ramone. To be truthful I can’t quite remember if he turned up the same night as Doc Pomus or was it on the night of the Lone Star Cafe? Whatever, if it was the latter then it was only a matter of days apart.
It’s hard to imagine two groups whose sounds were so different having a connection but The Ramones were big fans of the British Invasion groups and had covered Needles & Pins on one of their albums. He was effusive in his praise of The Searchers and, although he was very much an oddball in many ways and almost spoke in a different tongue to us we thanked him for his kind words and enjoyed his company. And again I produced my little camera and snapped the bunch of us. The photo is of no great quality but at least we have the memory in those slightly fuzzy images.
This was the time when Mike Pender was still with us on vocals and Billy Adamson occupied the drum stool. The guy you can see with the blond hair and wispy moustache and beard is Ed Stasium who, along with Pat Moran, did such sterling work producing the second of our Sire albums. Ed by the way also produced the LP Road To Ruin for The Ramones on which you can find their cover of Needles & Pins. Further to that seven years on he produced The Smithereens. He obviously saw something in them that evening.
Well, getting back to the actual performance, we seemed to be playing extremely well on that occasion and we came off elated. And it appears that we impressed the media as well. We received the best review we have ever had in The Village Voice from one of the main music critics of the rock scene, Bruce Eder. If you came to the last Thank You tour you may have read his appreciation of the Bitter End show which I inserted into the brochure but assuming many of you either didn’t catch a show or did not purchase the programme I decided to reproduce it here. When someone hands out praise like that you really don’t want to forget it.
Just as an aside you might be interested in the story behind Save The Last Dance For Me. It’s very touching. Doc was a paraplegic due to polio as a boy and his wife loved to go out to enjoy the clubs, the music and the dancing. He was happy to allow her the freedom to have some fun but the proviso was that at the end of an evening she had to go home with him. What a story to put to song.
ONE OF THE GREAT SHOWS, EVER!
The Searchers/The Other End/Nov 19th 1983
Bruce Eder
NEW YORK N.Y
The hottest ticket to be had in New York Last Saturday Wasn’t for Yentl or anything happening on Broadway or at The Met. It was for The Other End where there was a line stretching down the street and around the corner (remember we’re talking about one of your smaller more intimate clubs here) for The Searchers.
Yeah, that’s right, that quartet from Liverpool who probably defined that city’s rock and roll better than any other band including The Beatles. You got it – the bunch with hits like Needles & Pins, Sugar & Spice, Love Potion Number 9 and Farmer John.
Before you start wondering if this is another old 1964 review you’re reading (it isn’t) or if the show was part of some rock and roll revival (it wasn’t) let me get it out of the way. The Searchers were fucking incredible.
I came out of the early show at The Other End that night – which almost ran into the late show – which must have run almost till dawn – like Bowman at the end of 2001 after he’s been through the space warp, my eyes wide and unblinking, my ears sucking up the silence of the street after what I’d just heard and my head somewhere else.
No, I didn’t see God but I heard him doing his best Liverpool accent.
What do you say about a band that still gives letter perfect performances of its songs to you that can jam so effectively. Name me any other band including the Beatles who can jam on stage on some of those earliest songs.
The sound is so clean and polished yet put out with so much power, so economically that the entire experience seems to violate at least one law of physics; and who sing as well if not if not better than they did when they hit internationally. That they’re the greatest surviving band of their generation? That’s wholly inadequate – I mean who else is left, The Shadows?
That they’re the greatest band as a band of their generation, surviving or not? (That doesn’t mean much to today’s generation – you have to know how stiff the competition was between The Beatles, Gerry & The Pacemakers, The Hollies, Rory Storm & The Hurricanes, The Big Three and The Dakotas. Besides, what about all the other bands they’re better than?
That either Michael Pender or John McNally could give Roger McGuinn a few lessons on the 12 string guitar? True enough – they led McGuinn through the basics way back when anyway, and they’ve gotten better. But they were put here to do a lot more than that.
When The Searchers started out they had one of the most polished sounds heard in rock and roll up until that time and they’ve had 21 years to work on it. This has been time well spent. to judge by the evidence of Saturday’s show, which featured playing as crisp as anything reading this has ever heard in concert.
Beginning with Sweets For My Sweet the quartet, Frank Allen (bass, lead vocals), Michael Pender (12 string guitar vocals), John McNally (lead guitar, vocals), Billy Adamson, (drums) offered performances of two decades of their music from Sick And Tired, one originally from their 1962 Hamburg Live album up through a 10 minute electric version of Switchboard Susan from their 1979 Sire entitled Searchers which brought the house down.
The band, for whom this was the last night of a very successful four week tour of The United States (their first in 10 years) expressed their pleasure and amazement at the popularity of their later material.
Songs such as Love’s Melody, Hearts In Her eyes and It’s Too Late drew the kind of applause that crowds normally reserve for established hits.
The group went out of its way to do every song requested as best they could, though there were dozens of these, from vintage hits to LP tracks off their first album back in ’63. Among the highlights were Sugar And Spice, Love Potion Number Nine (Allen, “Our biggest in The Sates completely by accident”), Take Me For What I’m Worth, What Have They Done To The Rain, Farmer John, Bumble Bee (“One that no one in England ever asks for but people here always want to hear), and When You Walk In The Room.
They were also funny throughout the night beginning when Allen introduced founding member Michael Pender, “The Boy George of Liverpool but not quite so butch though,” and described the riotous nature of this tour, OD’ing on 7 Up and stepping on the cracks in pavements.
Founder member John McNally, in addition to some phenomenal guitar work (particularly in the long jam at the end) kept surprising the rest of the band by starting up songs that they evidently didn’t know they could still do – they did them, but beautifully to their own surprise.
The audience. jammed in right to the rafters and the limits of both standing room and the law (at least one man had come in from Australia for this show) ate up all of it without exception, a fact even more amazing when you consider the fact that at least a small crowd was there only for the opening act, The Smithereens.
The latter needed work. They were entirely too raw, and if their bass was turned up too high that was a saving grace – he is the best musician among them and the most animated musically.
The best part of that set was a version of Brian Wilsons Girl Dont Tell Me which explored sides of the song The Beach Boys never touched on back in ’65. It also showed more melodic invention than any of their own material.
The Searchers erased any impression they’d made after two bars, something they probably would have done to The Stones just as easily. By the time they got around to doing Needles And Pins (“That special song you find once”) the effect was positively orgasmic. I found out later that people outside and across the street had heard the song and its reaction. This was one of the most ecstatic exiting crowds I`ve ever seen at any show. And the fever on the late show line for the few remaining tickets were running high.
And me? Well, by the time my head had cooled down after about four hours (just about the time the second show was probably ending) I could think about a few things. Ancillary matters like if there was a way to arrange knighthoods for the people who had brought them to The States and the people at The Other End for booking them and important stuff like The Searchers, They’re a fucking unbelievable band.
They’re recording a new album now and they promised the next visit would be next year, not in another ten like it took them to get back this time.
I’d arrange my reservations for those shows early – real early – once the word of mouth on this show starts to spread.
While checking out the piece about The Bitter End I dredged through my box of memories and came across a few more snaps from that early 80s period when we were in the Big Apple promoting the Sire recordings – certainly the finest we made outside of the glorious hit years of 1963-66.
I mentioned that I’m not sure which shows fitted into the same tour but they were all taken on closely to each other. The photo of me playing my blue Aria fretless bass was during the Bitter End show. I know it was called The Other End at that time but in essence it was still the legendary Bitter End to everyone. I loved playing the fretless bass and always regretted swapping it later on for another bass that I didn’t much like at all.
Another Greenwich Village rock venue was Heartbreaks. During the daytime it was a fully functioning business premises, something to do with the meat industry I recall but I may have misremembered. Anyway, when night time arrived it was transformed into an atmospheric beat club so popular with New Yorkers and of course all those who travelled distances to see their favourites up close. The night we performed there we attracted a couple of celebrity guests.
In the photo you can see (left to right) star guitarist of Motorbiking fame, Chris Spedding, John Turner (our sound man at the time), Tony Costellano (our tour manager for that short trip) and David Essex.
Another venue further down on Long Island was My Father’s Place. It did not belong to my dad in case you are confused. That was the name of the club. Our celebrity fan that night was guitar hero Ritchie Blackmore (in the green blouson) who came along with a couple of chums. I think their complement added up to perhaps a tenth of the total audience. Someone lost money that night. But hey, that’s how it goes sometimes. Swings and roundabouts.
For the black and white photo we travel quickly through the years and the night Marky Ramone sat in on drums for Needles & Pins. I think the year was 2008. The venue was The Cutting Room down on 24th Street. What a night that was and Marky was so good. The clip is still on Youtube if you want to check it out.
Also in the picture are Willie Nile, a New York based rock artiste and big pal of Bruce Springsteen, and May Pang. May Pang, in case you don’t know, was Yoko Ono’s assistant who she deputised to go with John Lennon on what has been called his “lost weekend”. We got chatting after the show and I repeated the story of my first encounter with John at the Star Club in Hamburg, January 1st 1963 and was fascinated at hearing her reaction. The tale has been told soooooo many times in interviews and in my two books (Travelling Man and The Searcher & Me) that I won’t bother going through it all again. But it was an interesting experience to say the least.
While I don’t have a great deal to do since our retirement I intend to keep looking through my stuff and compiling articles that I hope will keep you interested and keep us in mind. I suppose I need to know that this is something you want so do give your feedback to Gary who will pass your comments on to me.
And that’s about it from me for now. I’ll try to dredge up more stuff as and when and I hope it pleases you. And by the way, John McNally says “Hi”. We were in touch the other day just mulling over things. Don’t get excited. He’s not that keen on getting back on the road even if something big were to be offered. And who can blame him. It’s time to stop and smell the roses, as they say. In fact he is currently planning to offload some of his guitar collection. I dearly hope he will save at least one twelve string, one six string and maybe a nice acoustic – just in case! You never know.
Stay well.
Frank Allen.