The Searchers#

The Searchers were an English Merseybeat group who emerged during the British Invasion of the 1960s along with the Beatles, the Hollies, the Fourmost, the Merseybeats, the Swinging Blue Jeans, and Gerry and the Pacemakers…

If John Ford is the greatest Western director, The Searchers is arguably his greatest film, at once a grand outdoor spectacle like such Ford classics as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950) and a film about one man's troubling moral codes, a big-screen adventure of the 1950s that anticipated the complex themes and characters that would dominate the 1970s. John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a former Confederate soldier who returns to his brother Aaron's frontier cabin three years after the end of the Civil War. Ethan still has his rebel uniform and weapons, a large stash of Yankee gold, and no explanations as to where he's been since Lee's surrender. A loner not comfortable in the bosom of his family, Ethan also harbors a bitter hatred of Indians (though he knows their lore and language well) and trusts no one but himself. Ethan and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), Aaron's adopted son, join a makeshift band of Texas Rangers fending off an assault by renegade Comanches.

There are worse things a once-great band can do than break up. They can NOT break up, and then try to regain lost fame by recreating their finest moments using all the benefits of modern pop technology – like this. By 1971, Merseybeat veterans the Searchers were reduced to just a couple of founding members and a spot recycling their old hits on the cabaret circui…

Perhaps the best studio album by a band that is really best represented by greatest-hit collections. This 1964 LP includes the classic hits "Needles and Pins" and "Don't Throw Your Love Away." It also features some of their best LP cuts, on which they applied their famed harmonies to American material that was both strong and obscure…

In a way, the Searchers are a footnote. Never entering the upper echelon of British Invasion beat groups, the band nevertheless had legs, outlasting all but the titans of the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Who. The Searchers always flew just below the radar, even if they had something of a renaissance at the tail end of the '70s with a new lineup headed by lead singer – and only constant – John McNally, with his lead guitarist companion Mike Pender directing the band through two superb power pop LPs and their jangle echoing in the stable of Shelter Records, heard strongly in the early records of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers. They are best known for their earliest hits – 1963's "Sweets for My Sweet," 1964's "Needles and Pins" – which may be because they were their biggest hits but it's also because the Searchers never abandoned their pure pop template throughout their entire career, something that becomes blindingly evident over the course of the four-disc box set Hearts in Their Eyes.

The Searchers' debut LP doesn't sound quite like any other album they ever issued. All of their Pye Records albums were rushed, but not like this – faced with an extraordinarily popular hit right out of the box in the guise of "Sweets for My Sweet" (which rose to Number One on the U.K. charts), the group cut 11 more finished tracks in one day, drawn from the best part of their stage act…

The Searchers were not only slipping in popularity by the time of this release, but were also slipping considerably behind the prevailing musical trends of the times. Maybe that's why they offered more original tunes (four) than usual…