Liner Notes
The Senders are the great lost band of New York Punk. Begun in 1976, they were peers of all the early legends – Ramones, Blondie, Heartbreakers, etc. Their brand of dangerous sidewinder r&b, with a twist of rockabilly, shook the rafters at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, yet barely registered beyond the boroughs. This, despite the tacit endorsement of no less than Johnny Thunders in the pages of Zig Zag in 1978, informing Kris Needs they were “the best band in Noo Yawk” or words to that effect. He even inserted their absolute classic “The Living End” in certain of his live sets on occasion, and played a memorable series of gigs with them as a guest at a time when they were between guitar players, before the phenomenal Wild Bill Thompson set his stall permanently with The Senders.
What made them great? Well, they looked cool, for one thing, all greasy D.A.s, bespoke sharkskin suits and cockroach killer shoes. As singer Phil Marcade put it in his crucial memoir Punk Avenue: “Like sophisticated rockers with a few broken teeth,” or “elegant dandies in slightly wrinkled suits quickly starting to look like a gang of insane Teddy boys who slept in their clothes….” It was a look to match what poured out of the amps. These cats - Marcade at the vocal mic, when he wasn’t huffing at the harmonica; Thompson’s hotwired Gibson; Steve Shevlin’s throbbing bass lines; and a string of drummers, the longest-running being Marc Bourset – sounded as murderous as they looked. Be it the heartbreaking stroll of “The Living End,” the high voltage rockabilly of their rendition of Fats Domino’s “I’m Gonna Be A Wheel,” or the steaming straight-ahead punk of “You Really Piss Me Off,” The Senders rocked with accuracy, ferocity and a party-igniting spirit. They were the Dr. Feelgood of the Lower East Side, with perhaps a bit more warmth than their British cousins. These 31 tracks represent the heartbeat of late ‘70s Manhattan, especially in the seven cuts culled from one of those magical nights with Thunders plugged into the band’s Fender Twin Reverb, making explicit their debt to the New York Dolls and converting The Senders into a greasier Heartbreakers.
The Senders Are The Living Enders (You Know You’d Better Surrender)!
If you loved rock ’n’ roll in New York City between 1976 and 2001, you were almost certainly a Senders fan. For 25 years the Senders kept rock ’n’ roll alive in New York City, sometimes single-handedly.
From 1976 through the dawn of the 21st century the Senders played rock ‘n’ roll, ignoring all fads and trends. Lord knows how many musicians passed through the Senders, but I think of the classic line up as Wild Bill Thompson, who joined around ’78 on guitar; Steve Shevlin, a former boxer and later teacher to deaf kids, on bass; Marc “Moe” Bourset on drums; some nights, Danny Ray on tenor saxophone, and drummer turned singer Phil Marcade on vocals and harmonica. They were raw, greasy and fabulous.
By 1980 punk was pretty much over. Hardcore with it’s uniform and male aggro was on one side, hyphenated art world rejects on the other, and the rockers had mostly fled the city—the Heartbreakers to Europe, the Cramps to L.A., and too many to mention to an early grave. Clubs where you shared bar space with bikers and winos were out and “new wave” discos like Area were in. Velvet ropes, doormen, Eurotrash, disco and cocaine had moved downtown. Max’s, the Senders home base, had shuttered its doors in November ’81 and the band moved their residency to the Continental, where the Bowery starts at 8th Street. (Fittingly, the club in its previous incarnation, Jack The Ribber, had hosted Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ extended residency), although the Senders would play every club, bar, loft party and stage in the city at some point.
Being perpetually out of fashion and simultaneously ahead and behind their times, the Senders never landed a big record deal, they recorded for whoever would have them, Max’s own record label, the Midnight Records store label, some label in France, et al. But this means, like other bands of a similar mindset—the Blasters, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Dr. Feelgood, the Red Devils—the Senders were never neutered, processed, remolded, cleaned up or spit out by the record biz. No overproduced ‘80s sounding discs, no embarrassing videos, nothing they couldn’t be proud of. The 27 tunes here are a cross-sampling of what they did—The Senders Thing. Tunes by Don & Dewey, Bill Allen, Howlin’ Wolf and Otis Blackwell sit beside their originals—“Fat Face,” “Don’t Mind Me,” “My Baby Glows In The Dark;” raw, unvarnished, unproduced and great. If you were there, you remember, if you missed it, here’s your chance to do Do The Senders Thing.
James “The Hound” Marshall
NYC, February, 2022
But of course, Marcade had deep ties with the Dolls, going back to when he was a long-haired French teenager first dropping in on our shores. He, Thunders and Jerry Nolan became especially tight, and he ended up in NYC at roughly the point The Heartbreakers initially kicked up. According to Punk Avenue, the Ramones’ first gig was his welcome-to-NYC party. He ended up so well-connected amongst the LES’ early punk cognoscenti, he essentially wrote the French lyrics to Blondie’s European hit remake of Randy And The Rainbow’s “Denise,” transitioned to “Denis” for Debbie Harry’s purposes. Legs McNeil paid homage to Marcade’s endless, effortless cool in his forward to Phillippe’s book, indicating he’d write him into the background of every scene of a prospective Please Kill Me film script, laughing at the drama in the foreground with the most beautiful girl in the room wrapped around him.
Basically, Phil Marcade had to be in a band. And it had to be The Senders.
And yeah, their exclusion from anything beyond the history of late ‘70s NYC is absolutely criminal. Whether All Killer No Filler (1977-2001) will correct that remains to be seen. It’s just good to have these tracks in one place, living proof that The Senders were a great fucking band.
Tim Stegall
Austin, TX, May 26, 2022
