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5 episodes with five crowns
12 episodes with five crowns
2 episodes with five crowns
2 episodes with five crowns
2 episodes with five crowns
2 episodes with five crowns
2 episodes with five crowns
2 episodes with five crowns
2 episodes with five crowns
Le premier tome de la série The Five Crowns écrit par A.K Mulford, La Cour de la Haute Montagne, est ma toute première romantasy. On revient sur mes apriori mais aussi les vôtres concernant ce genre et pleins d'autres sujets qui tournent autours de ce livre : trope ennemies-to-lovers, esthétique du livre, aventure, smut...Instagram : @bande2livresTiktok : @bande2livresGoodreads : La Bande de LivresEpisode Un peu de nouveauté (HS) : Apple Podcast / Spotify / DeezerRetrouvez Lucie a.k.a Juciebg sur ses plateformes : Wattpad / Instagram / Tiktok Episode sur Un Automne pour te pardonner : Apple Podcast / Spotify / DeezerCrédit musique générique : Oleksii Holubiev from Pixabay Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
We're kicking off Season 9 of the TBRI® Podcast with a deep dive into the TBRI® Responsive Strategies. In this episode, Kari Dady walks us through the TBRI® IDEAL Response and Levels of Response as an approach to address behaviors. Links Referenced in this Episode: Kari's Bio Kari's TBRI in the Courts podcast Episode Kari's Meet the Trainer Episode Pinochle (card game) Five Crowns (card game) IDEAL Response Animate
Speaker: Matt ShivelyTitle: The Five CrownsDate: 2024-06-09, Sunday schoolFor more information about our church, visit www.stoningtonbaptist.org This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stoningtonbaptist.substack.com
This episode is all about card games! From the simple to the "brain-burning", we've got recommendations for all levels.
After discussing this week's book rec, The Five Crowns of Okrith series, we continue our House of Flame and Shadow Deep Dive with chapters 56-60.Hunt finds out he's a demonic test tube baby while he and Bryce are in Hel meeting with Aidas, Apollion and Thanatos, who share Helena's story — including why she chose Avallen as the Fae's stronghold — what happened to the final piece of Theia's power and what they know about the portal to nowhere aka "ultimate destruction." Elsewhere on the island, Ruhn and Lidia are days behind the plot and just now realizing Dec and Flynn are missing and Ithan and Hypaxia postpone their trip to Avallen when the Asteri fire brimstone missiles into Asphodel Meadows. Next week: chapters 61-65.Summon us @DTFaePodcast We like our coffee icy and our books spicy! Oh, and we're totally Down To Fae. A podcast for fantasy romance readers and fans of authors like Sarah J. Maas, Jennifer L. Armentrout, Rebecca Yarros and Carissa Broadbent. Follow along as your delulu hosts discuss your favorite romantasy books in a chapter-by-chapter read, re-read or refresher.
Scriptures: Revelation 2:8-11, 1 Corinthians 3:12-15, Romans 14:10, 1 Corinthians 4:5, Matthew 16:25, James 1:12, 1 Corinthians 9:24, 2 Timothy 4:8, 1 Peter 5:4, Isaiah 8:18, 1 Thessalonians 2:19. Be sure to check our Digital Bulletin often to keep updated on our announcements, events and more! https://koldodi.updates.church/?fbclid=IwAR2SzjT96MW2vACmNdw6V4uIcvNVMZ9rDfMV2CJUY2dxMYzDL9o-I9OK-bo
The Five Crowns of the Believer 3
The Five Crowns of the Believer 6
The Five Crowns of the Believer 5
The Five Crowns of the Believer 4
The Five Crowns of the Believer 7
The Five Crowns of the Believer 2
The Five Crowns of the Believer 1
This message highlights the history of the Babylonian system, and the mythologies that came out of it. You'll see that the world has never let go of this system. Today, Babylon is making its return. Spiritually, politically, economically, and in physical form. The prophecies in the Holy Bible are correct and fulfillment is always nearer than we think these days. Support this ministry through this link: https://linktr.ee/dontletthemburn
This is part 2 of my message highlighting the history of the Babylonian system, and the mythologies that came out of it. You'll see that the world has never let go of this system. Today, Babylon is making its return. Spiritually, politically, economically, and in physical form. The prophecies in the Holy Bible are correct and fulfillment is always nearer than we think these days. Support this ministry through this link: https://linktr.ee/dontletthemburn
Have you ever wondered about superheroes as modern-day myths? We're taking a deep dive into that intriguing subject today, alongside a look at the commercialization of art and entertainment. Christopher Gorham is joining us with some enlightening parenting advice that could change your perspective entirely! We're also chatting about the Malibu Barbie house that you can tour, and discussing generational complaints and how they differ among boomers, Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z– all with a glass of Pa Road Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc to keep the conversation going.Get ready for a literary feast as we flip through the pages of The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, a candidly critical and amusing guide. We also explore the process of assigning spirit animals and delve into the gripping thriller Dark Corners. Swifties, brace yourselves - we've got a lively discussion lined up around Taylor Swift's re-records. The fun doesn't end there, we also share our take on the card game Five Crowns and a Joker who strangely looks like our very own Andrew!Our conversation takes an exciting turn as we discuss Barbie collaborations and the Barbie house you can actually stay in, courtesy of Airbnb! We examine how art and emotion are intertwined and whether AI-generated art is devoid of this human touch. We also debate about the implications of an increasingly commercialized art scene. And if you're a fan of Secret Invasion or Claim to Fame, you're in for a treat as we talk about our recent watches. So get comfortable, plug in your headphones and enjoy this thought-provoking chat!
Become a Friend of the Show! – join our Patreon community Shuffle the cards and set up the board because we've got an episode packed with games. From the games we played growing up, to our favorite games to play with kids at different ages, and games we love to play with our spouses. Plus how to make games fun with kids when they're trying to be the worst and the games we refuse to play. Can we deal you in?Mentioned on the show:CandylandFive CrownsWise and OtherwiseLabyrinthZingo...for the full list of games we mention plus links to our Obsessions, check out our website show notes.Become a Friend of the Show! – join our Patreon communityConnect with us on Instagram: @higirlsnextdoorSee show notes on our website: girlnextdoorpodcast.comWe love to get your emails: higirlsnextdoor@gmail.comYour reviews on Apple Podcasts really help the show - thank you! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Welcome back to Word of Life Church Livestream. Thanks for joining us! For more information visit us at: Wolapopka.com WAYS YOU CAN GIVE : ■ Websitehttps://www.aplos.com/aws/give/Pastorlisamorgangmailcom/general ■ Cryptohttps://commerce.coinbase.com/checkout/3ed8f82e-d0c0-4849-8af7-818c2b553232 ■ Text to Givehttps://www.wordoflifeapopka.com/text-to-give FOLLOW US ON : ■ Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/wordoflifeapopka/?hl=en ■ Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/WordOfLifeChurchApopka ■ Youtubehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdyVmduSu1FKiQWs-FuEeJg LISTEN : ■ SoundCloudhttps://soundcloud.com/word-of-life-apopka ■ Apple Podcast https://gate.sc/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpodcasts.apple.com%2Fus%2Fpodcast%2Fword-of-life-apopka%2Fid1142290922&token=e7b154-1-1630603971972 WATCH : ■ Twitchhttps://www.twitch.tv/wolapopka/ ■ Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/WordOfLifeChurchApopka ■ Youtubehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdyVmduSu1FKiQWs-FuEeJg
20230319-Sun-PM- II Cor. 5:10 - Bible Baptist Church - www.bbc-kjv.com
20230319-Sun-PM- II Cor. 5:10 - Bible Baptist Church - www.www.bbcbyesville.com
In this episode of W.I.N. "What is Next?" Biblical Prophecy, Pastor Ken discusses the importance of studying biblical prophecy and how it can encourage, focus, and warn us. Specifically, we discuss the concept of the rapture and the Judgement Seat of Christ, where Jesus will judge every individual Christian based on their works. We also explore the possible rewards that a faithful Christian may receive, such as the imperishable crown, the crown of rejoicing, the crown of righteousness, the crown of glory, and the crown of life. Overall, this episode encourages listeners to live a purpose-driven life in preparation for what is to come.
With Pastor Stephen Chitty from Christian Life Church Sunday 3-5-23 https://my.bible.com/events/49040417
Carla and Melanie discuss their most played games of 2022.You can find Carla on Instagram: boardgamespecialist Facebook: Red Deer Board Game Fanatics You can find Melanie on Instagram: mels_boardgame_room Facebook: Mel's Board Game Room YouTube: Mel's Board Game Room Come say Hi on Discord https://discord.gg/vCgXa4xP[00:02:46] Rebuilding Seattle[00:05:45] Light in the Mist[00:06:25] Forge[00:12:16] Kingdom Builder[00:14:44] Framework[00:16:44] Pina Pirata[00:19:13] Ark Nova[00:22:50] Cash & Guns[00:26:18] Yinsh[00:28:53] Pizza Party[00:31:10] Istanbul Dice game[00:34:44] Impact[00:37:04] Ten[00:41:43] Vampire Queen[00:45:04] Color Addict[00:47:38] Klask[00:50:35] Five Crowns[00:55:18] Tempura[00:58:45] Bandida[01:01:49] Love Letter[01:05:25] Dice Miner[01:09:46] Skull
One night at The Apollo in 1958, George Treadwell fired the entire lineup of The Drifters. He then hired all of the members of The Five Crowns to become The Drifters. Charlie Thomas (along with Benjamin Earl Nelson - better known as Ben E. King) was a member of The Five Crowns, and while the original "classic" Drifters produced some hits, some of the biggest came from the era when Thomas was in the group. This was also the time when Lieber and Stoller were writing for the group. On January 31st, 2023, Charlie Thomas passed away at the age of 85. David Fleming interviewed Thomas in late 2015 when he was about to perform in the region, and has re-edited the conversation for this edition of KVC-Arts.
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Rhythm & Blues Foundation Inductee,Grammy® Award NomineeA Music Group BEFORE my Time that created Beautiful Music that is Classic & Treasured Today !! I LOVE MANY Genre's of Music, I Have a Special Place in my Heart for The Drifter's Music. This is my Tribute Show to a True Classy Gentleman, The last remaining Original Group Member who recorded the Music Hits, Charlie Thomas who just passed away this Week January 31st, 2023. This is Part 1 of my interview with him.Charlie actually Thanked Me for Interviewing HIM?!, the Honor was ALL Mine, What a Gentleman!Charles Thomas was an American singer best known for his work with The Drifters. Thomas was performing with The Five Crowns at the Apollo Theater in 1958 when George Treadwell fired his group, called The Drifters. Treadwell recruited the Five Crowns to become the new Drifters. Although the Five Crowns never made any impression on the national charts under their own name, they regularly charted locally in New York and were stars in Harlem.The new Drifters' first release was the 1959 hit "There Goes My Baby". This version of the group released the smash "There Goes My Baby," working for the first time with legendary songwriter/producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, and followed with a string of hits including the top 10 "Save The Last Dance For Me" and "This Magic Moment." Charlie was lead singer on two of the group's top 40 hits, "Sweets for My Sweet" and "When My Little Girl Is Smiling". Their late-'50s incarnation, featuring original members Doc Green, James Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, Ben E. King, and Charles Thomas, became the post-1958 Drifters, responsible for "There Goes My Baby" and the core of the group that later recorded "Up on the Roof," "Under the Boardwalk," and "On Broadway."Most of The Drifters biggest hits featured different lead singers:Ben E. King “There Goes My Baby” “Dance With Me” “This Magic Moment” “Save the Last Dance for Me” “I Count the Tears” Charlie Thomas “Sweets for My Sweet” “Room Full of Tears” “When My Little Girl is Smiling” Rudy Lewis “Some Kind of Wonderful” “Up On the Roof” “Please Stay” “On Broadway” Clyde McPhatter “Money Honey” “Honey Love” Bill Pinkney“White Christmas” (with Clyde McPhatter)Johnny Moore “Adorable” “Fools Fall In Love” “Ruby Baby” “Under the Boardwalk” “I've Got Sand in My Shoes” “Saturday Night at the Movies” Bobby Hendricks“Drip Drop”© 2023 Building Abundant Success!!2023 All Rights ReservedJoin Me on ~ iHeart Media @ https://tinyurl.com/iHeartBASSpot Me on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/yxuy23baAmazon ~ https://tinyurl.com/AmzBASAudacy: https://tinyurl.com/BASAud
Dennis begins a sermon series on the five fold giftings. In this first sermon Dennis teaches on the role of the Apostle. He explains what the office of the apostle is, their strengths, weakness, and who they are in the kingdom.
Deborah has a conversation with Mary about God's desire for this coming season, seeing with eternal eyes, and God's jealousy for his own people.
Dennis preaches on beginnings, what Tohu Wa-Bohu means, and who God is as the creator.
Deborah teaches on how creation declares the glory of God and how we can too.
Deborah interviews David about how Jesus pursued, delivered and annointed him during one of the darkest times of his life.
Dennis shares a testimony of what the Holy Spirit is doing, how to prepare for Jesus' return, and the importance of celebrating consistency.
Deborah interviews Karly about one of the darkest times in her life and how Jesus is continuing to restore, heal and use her story for a greater glory.
Dennis shares about radical obediance and fulfilling your purpose, destiny and calling in Jesus.
Deborah shares her spoken word about an encounter she had with God and the conservation that ensued. It parallels marriage with belief in Jesus and God's beautiful love story for His people.
Pastor Dan begins his series on the book of James and explains the difference between the Spirit of the word and the letter of the law.
Dennis teaches on the differance between baptism of water and baptism of the Holy Spirit. He also explains how water baptism is a symbol of our covenant with Jesus.
Dennis prophesies and demonstrates God's heart and power for this time and for the nations.
We are promised crowns (or gifts) when we get saved. Hopefully this podcast explains them well. Thanks for listening!!! Please LIKE, SHARE, FOLLOW and SUBSCRIBE!
We are promised crowns (or gifts) when we get saved. Hopefully this podcast explains them well. Thanks for listening!!! Please LIKE, SHARE, FOLLOW and SUBSCRIBE!
2022-08-03Brother Bruce Craig
| Foolish Heart (Vocal Sax Mix) | Johnny James aka Dr. J | 2022 | I Need A Love Like Yours | Deon Jackson | 2022 | That's How My World Began | The Compacts | 2022 | On Everything | LaToya London feat. Anthony Hamilton | 2022 | Pretending Dear | The Lovelles | 1969 | See You Smile | Myranda Dominiq | 2022 | Tell Me Your Name | Chaz | 1983 | Let Me Be The One (feat. Jimmy All Good) | Ralph James Soul | 2022 | Baby Baby Baby Love | The Volunteers | 196? | Let's Take A Chance | High Keys | 1966 | Remember | Rockwell Hallman | 2022 | Give You Love | Rockwell Hallman | 2022 | Ambience | Nia Sultana | 2021 | Leather Couch | Regal | 2021 | Woman To Woman (feat. Ashanti) | Keyshia Cole | 2012 | I Wish He Didn't Trust Me So Much | Bobby Womack | 1984 | Wanna Ride (feat. Wali Ali Jr) | Sha'leah Nikole | 2022 | You And Me | Penny & The Quarters | 2011 | Ask The Lonely | John Gary Williams | 1973 | I Apologize | Anita Baker | 1991 | If I Had To Live My Life Without You | Everette Harp | 1992 | Hush | Semaj Foreman | 2021 | I Don't See Me In Your Eyes Anymore | Ty Hunter | 1972 | I Am Controlled By Your Love | Helene Smith | 2022 | Suppress | Dylan Sinclair | 2022 | How Do You Say Goodbye | The Heartbreakers | 1968 | Before I Let You Go | Blackstreet | 1994 | Just A Part Of Life | The Five Crowns | 1971 | Here It Comes | The Persians | 1969 | Let's Try Again | Surface | 1986 | So Alone | Men At Large | 1992
Five Crowns of the Believer
Thirteen years fleeing witch hunters and the looming threat of death. Nineteen-year-old Remy knows she is possibly the last red witch alive, and she is determined to stay that way. The Northern Court King has slaughtered her home court and placed a bounty on red witch heads. When four fae warriors enter her tavern refuge, Remy tries to flee, but her magic isn't strong enough to stop a fae prince on a mission. The handsome Prince Hale of the Eastern Kingdom wants to stop a war with the Northern Court before his kingdom befalls the same fate as Remy's. He needs a red witch and Remy may be the only person alive who can help him. Can she really trust Prince Hale? Can her fallen court be resurrected from the evil clutches of the Northern Court King? For the chance to save herself, her people, and help defeat the Northern King, Remy must put her faith in Hale and his companions on a dangerous quest to find lost relics. The High Mountain Court is the first book in the thrilling fantasy saga, The Five Crowns of Okrith. Expect danger, intrigue, and thrilling passion as Remy journeys to save the kingdom she holds most dear.
This episode is also available as a blog post: https://jnmanokaran.wordpress.com/2022/02/13/five-crowns-14-february-2022/
For believers, there are rewards waiting in Heaven for the faithful. Discover more in this teaching my Mitch Ford on "The Five Crowns."
Debut author of the High Mountain Court (Book 1 of The Five Crowns of Okrith series)! Join us while we battle technology so we can talk about how humans are just another primate, world building, and why you should give your potential life partner a baby spider monkey to rehab. Always a fun time with my Co-Ali. Be sure you grab a copy of The High Mountain Court out now and Check out AK Mulford's podcast with K. Elle Morrison Indies Fully Booked. Find AK Mulford online using the links below! https://akmulford.com/ Amazon Author Page TikTok Facebook BookBub Goodreads --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rwtlo/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rwtlo/support
Learn about the Five Crowns awarded at The Judgement Seat of Christ.
This message was recorded LIVE Saturday May 15, 2021 [This podcast contains the sermon and altar call]
Brother Joe, with the guidance and direction of the Holy Spirit, preaching about the Five Crowns that Christians obtain and receive on Judgement Day.Scriptures used: 1Corinthians 9:24-27;Romans 8:12-18;Revelation 4:10-11.
Will, Henry and Allison (Mom) talk to Dad about the strangely great holiday season this year, playing games, UNO, Five Crowns, Machkoro, and other fun games, holiday food, garlic cheesy pull apart bread, tiramisu, our stay-at-home New Year's Eve, The Naked Gun, and our feelings about 2021. In the news, we talk about a signal that astronomers have identified as coming from Alpha Proxima that may be technological in origin, Jet Pack Man caught on video for the first time, aggressive squirrels in Queens, and the 2020 banished words list. The podcast talks about their favorite movies, TV, and music of 2020. Finally, for Treat Yourself, we tray a variety of mini Japanese cookies and crackers from Daiso.
A new MP3 sermon from Coragarry Free Presbyterian Church is now available on SermonAudio with the following details: Title: A Crown of Righteousness Subtitle: The Five Crowns of Heaven Speaker: Ray Carscadden Broadcaster: Coragarry Free Presbyterian Church Event: Sunday Service Date: 12/13/2020 Bible: 2 Timothy 4:8 Length: 38 min.
In our final study of this series, Peter appeals to his fellow elders as they shepherd the church based on the credentials he possessed. Listen in and learn what these were and how they apply to us today as followers of Christ.
Episode ninety-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Stand By Me" by Ben E. King, and at the later career of the Drifters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "If I Had a Hammer" by Trini López. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This 3-CD set has all Ben E. King's recordings, both solo and with the Drifters, the Crowns, and LaVern Baker, up to 1962. This episode follows on from episode seventy-five, on "There Goes My Baby". I'm not going to recommend a Drifters compilation, because I know of none that actually have only the original hit recordings without any remakes or remixes. The disclaimer in episode seventy-five also applies here -- I may have used an incorrect version of a song here, because of the sloppy way the Drifters' music is packaged. My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg's website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney's later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King. Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well. And Bill Millar's book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to look at a song that ties together several of the threads we've looked at in previous episodes. We're going to look at a song that had its roots in a gospel song that had been performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, that involves the Drifters, Leiber and Stoller, and Phil Spector, and which marks the highpoint of the crossover from gospel to pop audiences that had been started by Ray Charles. We're going to look at "Stand By Me", by Ben E King. [Excerpt: Ben E King, "Stand By Me"] When we left the Drifters, they'd hit a legal problem. When the contracts for the individual members had been sold to George Treadwell, the owner of the Drifters' name, Ben E King's contract had not been sold with the rest. This had meant that while King continued to sing lead on the records, including the first few big hits of this new lineup of Drifters, he wasn't allowed to tour with them, and so they'd had to bring in a soundalike singer, Johnnie Lee Williams, to sing his parts on stage. So there were now five Drifters in the studio, but only four of them in the touring group. That might seem like an unworkable arrangement for any length of time, and so it turned out, but at first this was very successful. Leiber and Stoller continued producing records for this new Drifters lineup, but didn't tend to write for them. They were increasingly tiring of writing to a teenage audience that didn't really share their tastes, and were starting to move into writing for adult stars like Peggy Lee. And so Leiber and Stoller increasingly relied on songs by other writers, and one team they particularly relied on was Pomus and Shuman. You'll remember we've talked about them in association with both the Drifters and Leiber and Stoller previously, and that they'd been the ones who'd discovered the Ben E. King lineup of the Drifters. Doc Pomus was one of the great R&B songwriters of the fifties, but by 1960 he and Mort Shuman, who was thirteen years younger than him, had written a whole string of hits for white performers like Fabian, Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon, and Bobby Darin. A typical example of the stuff they were writing was "Two Fools" for Frankie Avalon: [Excerpt: Frankie Avalon, "Two Fools"] They were one of the hottest teams in the Brill Building, but they still had a sensibility for the R&B music that the Drifters had their roots in, and so they were the perfect writers to provide crossover hits for the group, and that's what they did. They'd already written "If You Cry True Love, True Love" for the group, which had gone to number thirty-three and which had been the only Drifters single on which Williams had taken a lead vocal, and now they wrote a song for King to sing, "This Magic Moment": [Excerpt: Ben E. King and the Drifters, "This Magic Moment"] That made number sixteen on the pop charts. But the next song they wrote for the group was a much bigger success, and a far more personal song. Pomus was paraplegic after having had polio as a child, and either used crutches or a wheelchair to get around. His wife, though, was younger, and was an actor and dancer. On their wedding day, Pomus was unable to dance with her himself, and watched as she danced with a succession of other people. The feeling stayed with him, and a few years later, he turned those thoughts into a set of lyrics, which Shuman then put to music with a vaguely Latin feel, like many of the Drifters' recent hits. The result was a number one record, and one of the all-time classic songs of the rock and roll era: [Excerpt: Ben E. King and the Drifters, "Save the Last Dance For Me"] That song has gone on to be one of the most covered songs of all time, with recordings by Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Buck Owens, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Swinging Blue Jeans, Harry Nilsson, and Bruce Willis, among many others. It would be the Drifters' only number one on the pop charts, and it was also Ben E King's last single with the Drifters, after King's manager Lover Patterson came to an agreement with the Drifters' manager George Treadwell that would let King move smoothly into a solo career. There might have been more to it than that, as there seems to have been a lot of negotiation going on around the group's future at this time. There were reports, for example, that King Records were negotiating to buy the Drifters' contract from Atlantic, which would have been interesting -- it's hard to see the group continuing to have success at King, which didn't have Leiber and Stoller, and which put out very different records from Atlantic. But either way, the result was that Ben E. King started performing solo, and indeed by the time "Save the Last Dance" came out, he had already released a couple of solo records. The first of these was not a success, and nor was the second, a duet with LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: Ben E. King and LaVern Baker, "How Often"] But the third was something else. At this point, as a favour to their old friend Lester Sill, Leiber and Stoller were mentoring a kid that Sill thought had promise, named Phil Spector, who we've talked about before in the episode on The Gamblers, but who had now moved over to New York for a time. Spector was staying with Leiber, and would follow him around literally everywhere, claiming that he was so traumatised by his father's death that he couldn't be left alone at any time. Leiber found Spector annoying, but owed Sill a favour, and so kept working with him. And Spector kept pestering Leiber to collaborate with him on some songs. Leiber told Spector, "No, I write with Mike Stoller", to which Spector would reply, "Well, he can write with us too." Leiber explained to him that that wasn't how things worked, and that if there was any collaboration, it would be Leiber and Stoller letting Spector write with them, not Spector graciously allowing Stoller to write with him and Leiber. Spector said that that was what he had meant, of course. Leiber and Stoller reluctantly agreed that Spector could write with them, but then Stoller was unable to turn up to the writing session. Spector persuaded Leiber to go ahead and just write a song with him since Stoller wasn't around. He agreed, and they came up with a song called "Spanish Harlem", to which Stoller later added a prominent instrumental line, for which he didn't claim credit, because he thought that Spector would only whine, and he didn't need the hassle. Or at least, that's the story that normally gets told -- there are people who knew Ritchie Valens who say that the marimba riff on the record, which became the most defining feature of the song, was actually something that Valens had been regularly playing in the months before he died. According to them, Spector, who moved in the same circles as Valens, must have stolen the riff from him. I tend to believe Stoller's version of the story myself, but either way, Leiber, Stoller, and Spector played the song to Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun as a trio, with Stoller on piano, Spector on guitar, and Leiber singing. They agreed it should be on the B-side of the next single by King, though the song was popular enough that the record was soon flipped, and "Spanish Harlem" made the top ten: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, "Spanish Harlem"] But that wasn't even the most important record they made at that session, because after recording it, they decided to record a song that King had written for the Drifters, but which they had turned down. King had brought in the basic idea for the song, and Leiber had helped him finish off the lyric, while Stoller had helped with the music -- the resulting songwriting credit gave fifty percent of the royalties to King, and twenty-five percent each to Leiber and Stoller, as a result. King's song had a long prehistory before he wrote it, and like many early soul songs it had its basis in gospel music. The original source for the song is a spiritual from 1905 by Rev. Charles Albert Tindley, which had been recorded by various people, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, "Stand By Me"] But the proximate influence for the song was a song that Sam Cooke had written for his old group, the Soul Stirrers, the year before, which had in turn been inspired by Tindley's song. The lead vocal on the Soul Stirrers' record was by Johnnie Taylor, a friend of Cooke's who had replaced Cooke in his first group, the Highway QCs, and then replaced him in his second one, because he sounded exactly like Cooke: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Stand By Me, Father"] King idolised Cooke, and was inspired by that record to come up with his own variant on the song. Working with Leiber and Stoller, he carefully crafted his secular adaptation of it, writing a lyric that worked equally well as a gospel song or as a song to a lover, other than the words "darling, darling" in the chorus. The chord sequence they used was a simple adaptation of the standard doo-wop chord changes. On a normal doo-wop song, the chords would go I, minor vi, IV, V, with each chord taking up the same amount of time, like this: [demonstrates on guitar] Stoller took those changes, and made the I and minor vi last two bars each, [demonstrates] then had the IV and V chords both last a bar, then go to two more bars of the I chord. [demonstrates] That bar of IV, bar of V, two bars of I thing is almost what you get at the end of a twelve-bar blues, except there you go V, IV, I, I, rather than IV, V, I, I. So to compare, here's the end of a twelve-bar blues: [demonstrates] And here's what Stoller did again: [demonstrates] So effectively Stoller has taken the two most hackneyed chord sequences in rock and roll music, and hybridised them to turn them into a single new sequence that's instantly recognisable: [demonstrates on guitar] In later years, Leiber always gave Stoller the credit for the song's success, saying that while the lyrics and melody were good, and King's performance exceptional, it was the bass line that Stoller came up with which made the song the success it was. I agree, to a large extent -- but that bassline is largely just following the root notes of the chord sequence that Stoller had written. But it's one of the most immediately recognisable pieces of music of the early sixties: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, "Stand By Me"] The record sounded remarkably original, for something that was made up almost entirely out of repurposed elements from other songs, and it shows more clearly than perhaps any other song that originality doesn't mean creating something entirely ab initio, but can mean taking a fresh look at things that are familiar, and putting just a slight twist on them. In particular, one thing that doesn't get noted enough is just how much of a departure the song was lyrically. People had been reworking gospel ideas into secular ones for years -- we've already looked at Ray Charles doing this, and at Sam Cooke, and there were many other examples, like Little Walter turning "This Train" into "My Babe". But in most cases those songs required wholesale lyrical reworking. "Stand By Me" is different, it brings the lyrical concerns and style of gospel firmly into the secular realm. "If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall, and the mountains should crumble to the sea" is an apocalyptic vision, not "Candy's sweet/And honey too/There's not another quite, quite as sweet as you", which were the lyrics Sam Cooke wrote when he turned a song about how God is wonderful into one about how his girl is loveable. This new type of more gospel-inflected lyric would become very common in the next few years, especially among Black performers. Another building block in the music that would become known as soul had been put in place. The record went to number four on the charts, and it looked like he was headed for a huge career. But the next few singles he released didn't do so well -- he recorded a version of the old standard "Amor" which made number nineteen, and then his next two records topped out at sixty-six and fifty-six. He did get back in the pop top twenty with a song co-written by his wife and Ahmet Ertegun, "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)", which reached number eleven and became an R&B standard: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)"] But as many people did at the time, he tried to move into the more lucrative world of adult supper-club singers, rather than singing R&B. While his version of "I Who Have Nothing" -- a French song that has since become a standard, and whose English lyrics were written for King by Leiber and Stoller -- managed to reach number twenty-nine, everything else did terribly. He sang "I Could Have Danced All Night" and "What Now My Love?" perfectly well, but that wasn't what the audience wanted from him. He made some great records in the later 60s, like "What Is Soul": [Excerpt: Ben E. King "What Is Soul?"] But even teaming up with Solomon Burke, Don Covay, Joe Tex, and Arthur Conley as The Soul Clan didn't help him kickstart his recording career: [Excerpt: The Soul Clan, "Soul Meeting"] He asked to be let go from his contract with Atlantic in 1969, and spent a few years in the early seventies recording for small labels. Meanwhile, the Drifters were continuing without King. After King left, Atlantic started releasing whatever material they had in their vaults, both songs with King's leads and older records from the earlier line-up of Drifters. But they were about to have even more personnel shifts. When they were on tour and got to Mobile, Alabama, Johnny Lee Williams said that he was just going to stay there and not continue on the tour -- he was sick of not getting to sing lead vocals, and he came from Mobile anyway. Williams went on to join a group called the Embraceables, who released this with him singing lead: [Excerpt: The Embraceables, "My Foolish Pride"] That was later rereleased as by The Implaceables, for reasons I've not been able to discover. The Drifters got in a replacement for Williams, James Poindexter, but he turned out to have stage fright, and the group spent several months as a trio, before being joined by new lead singer Rudy Lewis. And then Elsbeary Hobbs, the group's bass singer, was drafted, and the group got in a couple of different singers before settling on Tommy Evans, who had sung with the old versions of the Drifters in the fifties. The new lineup, Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, and Tommy Evans, would be one of the group's longest-lasting lineups, lasting more than a year, and would record hits like "Up On the Roof", by Goffin and King: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Up On the Roof"] But then Dock Green left the group. He and Tommy Evans joined another group -- even though Evans was also still in the Drifters. The Drapers, the group they joined, was managed by Lover Patterson, Ben E. King's manager, and had been given a name that sounded as much like "The Drifters" as possible. As well as Green and Evans, it also had Johnny Moore and Carnation Charlie Hughes, who had been in the same 1956 lineup of the Drifters that Tommy Evans had been in. That lineup of the Drapers released one single that didn't do particularly well: [Excerpt: The Drapers, "(I Know) Your Love Has Gone Away"] The new Drifters lineup, without Dock Green, recorded "On Broadway", a song that Leiber and Stoller had co-written with the Brill Building team of Mann and Weill. The guitar on the record was by Phil Spector -- he was by that point a successful producer, but Leiber and Stoller had bumped into him on the way to the session and invited him to sit in: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "On Broadway"] Tommy Evans then also left the Drifters, and was replaced by Johnny Terry, leaving a lineup of Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Gene Pearson, and Johnny Terry. But Rudy Lewis, the lead singer of the group since just after King had left, was thinking of going solo, and even released one solo single: [Excerpt: Rudy Lewis, "I've Loved You So Long"] That wasn't a success, but George Treadwell wanted some insurance in case Lewis left, so he got Johnny Moore -- who had been in the group in the fifties and had just left the Drapers -- to join, and for a few months Lewis and Moore traded off leads in the studio. One song that they recorded during 1963, but didn't release, was "Only in America", written for them by Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller had intended the song to be a sly satire, with Black people singing about the American dream, but Atlantic worried that in the racial climate of 1963, the satire would seem tasteless, so they took the Drifters' backing track and got Jay and the Americans, a white group, to record new vocals, turning it into a straightforward bit of boosterism: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Only in America"] Tragedy struck on the day the Drifters recorded what would be their last US top ten hit, the twenty-first of May 1964. Johnny Moore bumped into Sylvia Vanterpool, of Mickey and Sylvia, and she said "thank God it wasn't you". He didn't know what she was talking about, and she told him that Rudy Lewis had died suddenly earlier that day. The group went into the studio anyway, and recorded the songs that had been scheduled, including one called "I Don't Want To Go On Without You" which took on a new meaning in the circumstances. But the hit from the session was "Under the Boardwalk", with lead vocals from Moore: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Under the Boardwalk"] This version of the group -- Johnny Moore, Charlie Thomas, Gene Pearson, and Johnny Terry, would be the longest-lasting of all the versions of the group managed by George Treadwell, staying together a full two years. But after "Under the Boardwalk", which went to number four, they had no more top ten hits in the US. The best they could do was scrape the top twenty with "Saturday Night at the Movies": [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Saturday Night at the Movies"] There were several more lineup changes, but the big change came in 1967 when George Treadwell died. His wife, Faye, took over the management of the group, and shortly after that, Charlie Thomas -- the person who had been in the group for the longest continuous time, nine years at that point, decided to leave. There were a lot more squabbles and splinter groups, and by 1970 the Drifters' career on Atlantic was over. By this point, there were three different versions of The Drifters. There was a group called The Original Drifters, which had formed in 1958 after the first set of Drifters had been fired, and was originally made up entirely of members of the early-fifties lineups, but which was now a revolving-door group based around Bill Pinkney, the bass singer of the Clyde McPhatter lineup, and stayed that way until Pinkney's death in 2007. Then there was a version of the Drifters that consisted of Dock Green, Charlie Thomas, and Elsbeary Hobbs, the people who had been in Ben E. King's version of the group. Charlie Thomas won the right to use the name in the USA in 1972, and continues touring with his own group there to this day, though no more of that lineup of the Drifters are with him. And then there was a UK-based group, managed by Faye Treadwell, with Johnny Moore as lead singer. That group scored big UK hits when the group moved to the UK in 72, with re-releases of mid-sixties records that had been comparative flops at the time -- "Saturday Night at the Movies", "At the Club", and "Come On Over to My Place" all made the UK top ten in 1972, and Moore's Drifters would have nine more top ten hits with new material in the UK between 1973 and 76. And Ben E. King, meanwhile, had signed again to Atlantic, and had a one-off top ten hit with "Supernatural Thing" in 1975: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, "Supernatural Thing"] But other than that he'd continued to have far less chart success than his vocal talents deserved, and in the eighties he moved to the UK and joined the UK version of the Drifters, singing his old hits on the nostalgia circuit with them, and adding more authenticity to the Johnny Moore lineup of the group. He spent several years like that, until in 1986 his career had a sudden resurgence, when the film Stand By Me came out and his single was used as the theme. On the back of the film's success, the song reentered the top ten, twenty-five years after its initial success, and made number one in the UK. As a result, King became the first person to have hit the top ten in the US in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties -- a remarkable record for someone who had had relatively few hits. A greatest hits collection of King's records made the top twenty in the UK, as well, and King left the Drifters to once again become a solo artist. But this is where we say goodbye to King, and to the Drifters, and to Leiber and Stoller as songwriters. The UK version of the Drifters carried on with Johnny Moore as lead singer until he died in 1998, and up to that point it was reasonable to think of that group as a real version of the Drifters, because Moore had sung with the group on hits in the fifties and sixties, and in the UK in the seventies – roughly eighty percent of records released as by The Drifters had had Moore singing on them. But after Moore's death, it gets very confusing, with the Treadwell family apparently abandoning the trademark and moving back to the US, and then changing their mind, resulting in a series of lawsuits. The current UK version of the Drifters has nobody who was in the group before 2010, and is managed by George and Faye Treadwell's daughter. They still fill medium-sized theatres on large national tours, because their audiences don't seem to care, so long as they can hear people singing "Up On the Roof" and "On Broadway", "There Goes My Baby" and "Save the Last Dance For Me". In total thirty-four different people were members of the Drifters during their time with Atlantic Records. It's the only case I know where a group identity was genuinely bigger than the members, where whoever was involved, somehow they carried on making exceptional records. Leiber and Stoller, meanwhile, will turn up again, once more, next year, as record executives, collaborating with another figure we've seen several times before to run a record label. But this is the last record we'll look at with them as a songwriting team. We've been following their remarkable career since episode fifteen, and they would continue writing great songs for a huge variety of artists, but "Stand By Me" would be the last time they would come up with something that would change the music industry. It was the end of a truly remarkable run, and one which stands as one of the great achievements in twentieth century popular music. And Ben E. King, who was, other than Clyde McPhatter, the only member of the Drifters to ever break away and become a solo success, spent the last twenty-nine years of his life touring as a solo artist off the renewed success of his greatest contribution to music. He died in 2015, but as long as people listen to rock, pop, soul, or R&B, there'll be people listening to "Stand By Me".
Episode ninety-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King, and at the later career of the Drifters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “If I Had a Hammer” by Trini López. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This 3-CD set has all Ben E. King’s recordings, both solo and with the Drifters, the Crowns, and LaVern Baker, up to 1962. This episode follows on from episode seventy-five, on “There Goes My Baby”. I’m not going to recommend a Drifters compilation, because I know of none that actually have only the original hit recordings without any remakes or remixes. The disclaimer in episode seventy-five also applies here — I may have used an incorrect version of a song here, because of the sloppy way the Drifters’ music is packaged. My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg’s website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney’s later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King. Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. And Bill Millar’s book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we’re going to look at a song that ties together several of the threads we’ve looked at in previous episodes. We’re going to look at a song that had its roots in a gospel song that had been performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, that involves the Drifters, Leiber and Stoller, and Phil Spector, and which marks the highpoint of the crossover from gospel to pop audiences that had been started by Ray Charles. We’re going to look at “Stand By Me”, by Ben E King. [Excerpt: Ben E King, “Stand By Me”] When we left the Drifters, they’d hit a legal problem. When the contracts for the individual members had been sold to George Treadwell, the owner of the Drifters’ name, Ben E King’s contract had not been sold with the rest. This had meant that while King continued to sing lead on the records, including the first few big hits of this new lineup of Drifters, he wasn’t allowed to tour with them, and so they’d had to bring in a soundalike singer, Johnnie Lee Williams, to sing his parts on stage. So there were now five Drifters in the studio, but only four of them in the touring group. That might seem like an unworkable arrangement for any length of time, and so it turned out, but at first this was very successful. Leiber and Stoller continued producing records for this new Drifters lineup, but didn’t tend to write for them. They were increasingly tiring of writing to a teenage audience that didn’t really share their tastes, and were starting to move into writing for adult stars like Peggy Lee. And so Leiber and Stoller increasingly relied on songs by other writers, and one team they particularly relied on was Pomus and Shuman. You’ll remember we’ve talked about them in association with both the Drifters and Leiber and Stoller previously, and that they’d been the ones who’d discovered the Ben E. King lineup of the Drifters. Doc Pomus was one of the great R&B songwriters of the fifties, but by 1960 he and Mort Shuman, who was thirteen years younger than him, had written a whole string of hits for white performers like Fabian, Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon, and Bobby Darin. A typical example of the stuff they were writing was “Two Fools” for Frankie Avalon: [Excerpt: Frankie Avalon, “Two Fools”] They were one of the hottest teams in the Brill Building, but they still had a sensibility for the R&B music that the Drifters had their roots in, and so they were the perfect writers to provide crossover hits for the group, and that’s what they did. They’d already written “If You Cry True Love, True Love” for the group, which had gone to number thirty-three and which had been the only Drifters single on which Williams had taken a lead vocal, and now they wrote a song for King to sing, “This Magic Moment”: [Excerpt: Ben E. King and the Drifters, “This Magic Moment”] That made number sixteen on the pop charts. But the next song they wrote for the group was a much bigger success, and a far more personal song. Pomus was paraplegic after having had polio as a child, and either used crutches or a wheelchair to get around. His wife, though, was younger, and was an actor and dancer. On their wedding day, Pomus was unable to dance with her himself, and watched as she danced with a succession of other people. The feeling stayed with him, and a few years later, he turned those thoughts into a set of lyrics, which Shuman then put to music with a vaguely Latin feel, like many of the Drifters’ recent hits. The result was a number one record, and one of the all-time classic songs of the rock and roll era: [Excerpt: Ben E. King and the Drifters, “Save the Last Dance For Me”] That song has gone on to be one of the most covered songs of all time, with recordings by Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Buck Owens, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Swinging Blue Jeans, Harry Nilsson, and Bruce Willis, among many others. It would be the Drifters’ only number one on the pop charts, and it was also Ben E King’s last single with the Drifters, after King’s manager Lover Patterson came to an agreement with the Drifters’ manager George Treadwell that would let King move smoothly into a solo career. There might have been more to it than that, as there seems to have been a lot of negotiation going on around the group’s future at this time. There were reports, for example, that King Records were negotiating to buy the Drifters’ contract from Atlantic, which would have been interesting — it’s hard to see the group continuing to have success at King, which didn’t have Leiber and Stoller, and which put out very different records from Atlantic. But either way, the result was that Ben E. King started performing solo, and indeed by the time “Save the Last Dance” came out, he had already released a couple of solo records. The first of these was not a success, and nor was the second, a duet with LaVern Baker: [Excerpt: Ben E. King and LaVern Baker, “How Often”] But the third was something else. At this point, as a favour to their old friend Lester Sill, Leiber and Stoller were mentoring a kid that Sill thought had promise, named Phil Spector, who we’ve talked about before in the episode on The Gamblers, but who had now moved over to New York for a time. Spector was staying with Leiber, and would follow him around literally everywhere, claiming that he was so traumatised by his father’s death that he couldn’t be left alone at any time. Leiber found Spector annoying, but owed Sill a favour, and so kept working with him. And Spector kept pestering Leiber to collaborate with him on some songs. Leiber told Spector, “No, I write with Mike Stoller”, to which Spector would reply, “Well, he can write with us too.” Leiber explained to him that that wasn’t how things worked, and that if there was any collaboration, it would be Leiber and Stoller letting Spector write with them, not Spector graciously allowing Stoller to write with him and Leiber. Spector said that that was what he had meant, of course. Leiber and Stoller reluctantly agreed that Spector could write with them, but then Stoller was unable to turn up to the writing session. Spector persuaded Leiber to go ahead and just write a song with him since Stoller wasn’t around. He agreed, and they came up with a song called “Spanish Harlem”, to which Stoller later added a prominent instrumental line, for which he didn’t claim credit, because he thought that Spector would only whine, and he didn’t need the hassle. Or at least, that’s the story that normally gets told — there are people who knew Ritchie Valens who say that the marimba riff on the record, which became the most defining feature of the song, was actually something that Valens had been regularly playing in the months before he died. According to them, Spector, who moved in the same circles as Valens, must have stolen the riff from him. I tend to believe Stoller’s version of the story myself, but either way, Leiber, Stoller, and Spector played the song to Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun as a trio, with Stoller on piano, Spector on guitar, and Leiber singing. They agreed it should be on the B-side of the next single by King, though the song was popular enough that the record was soon flipped, and “Spanish Harlem” made the top ten: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, “Spanish Harlem”] But that wasn’t even the most important record they made at that session, because after recording it, they decided to record a song that King had written for the Drifters, but which they had turned down. King had brought in the basic idea for the song, and Leiber had helped him finish off the lyric, while Stoller had helped with the music — the resulting songwriting credit gave fifty percent of the royalties to King, and twenty-five percent each to Leiber and Stoller, as a result. King’s song had a long prehistory before he wrote it, and like many early soul songs it had its basis in gospel music. The original source for the song is a spiritual from 1905 by Rev. Charles Albert Tindley, which had been recorded by various people, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, “Stand By Me”] But the proximate influence for the song was a song that Sam Cooke had written for his old group, the Soul Stirrers, the year before, which had in turn been inspired by Tindley’s song. The lead vocal on the Soul Stirrers’ record was by Johnnie Taylor, a friend of Cooke’s who had replaced Cooke in his first group, the Highway QCs, and then replaced him in his second one, because he sounded exactly like Cooke: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, “Stand By Me, Father”] King idolised Cooke, and was inspired by that record to come up with his own variant on the song. Working with Leiber and Stoller, he carefully crafted his secular adaptation of it, writing a lyric that worked equally well as a gospel song or as a song to a lover, other than the words “darling, darling” in the chorus. The chord sequence they used was a simple adaptation of the standard doo-wop chord changes. On a normal doo-wop song, the chords would go I, minor vi, IV, V, with each chord taking up the same amount of time, like this: [demonstrates on guitar] Stoller took those changes, and made the I and minor vi last two bars each, [demonstrates] then had the IV and V chords both last a bar, then go to two more bars of the I chord. [demonstrates] That bar of IV, bar of V, two bars of I thing is almost what you get at the end of a twelve-bar blues, except there you go V, IV, I, I, rather than IV, V, I, I. So to compare, here’s the end of a twelve-bar blues: [demonstrates] And here’s what Stoller did again: [demonstrates] So effectively Stoller has taken the two most hackneyed chord sequences in rock and roll music, and hybridised them to turn them into a single new sequence that’s instantly recognisable: [demonstrates on guitar] In later years, Leiber always gave Stoller the credit for the song’s success, saying that while the lyrics and melody were good, and King’s performance exceptional, it was the bass line that Stoller came up with which made the song the success it was. I agree, to a large extent — but that bassline is largely just following the root notes of the chord sequence that Stoller had written. But it’s one of the most immediately recognisable pieces of music of the early sixties: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, “Stand By Me”] The record sounded remarkably original, for something that was made up almost entirely out of repurposed elements from other songs, and it shows more clearly than perhaps any other song that originality doesn’t mean creating something entirely ab initio, but can mean taking a fresh look at things that are familiar, and putting just a slight twist on them. In particular, one thing that doesn’t get noted enough is just how much of a departure the song was lyrically. People had been reworking gospel ideas into secular ones for years — we’ve already looked at Ray Charles doing this, and at Sam Cooke, and there were many other examples, like Little Walter turning “This Train” into “My Babe”. But in most cases those songs required wholesale lyrical reworking. “Stand By Me” is different, it brings the lyrical concerns and style of gospel firmly into the secular realm. “If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall, and the mountains should crumble to the sea” is an apocalyptic vision, not “Candy’s sweet/And honey too/There’s not another quite, quite as sweet as you”, which were the lyrics Sam Cooke wrote when he turned a song about how God is wonderful into one about how his girl is loveable. This new type of more gospel-inflected lyric would become very common in the next few years, especially among Black performers. Another building block in the music that would become known as soul had been put in place. The record went to number four on the charts, and it looked like he was headed for a huge career. But the next few singles he released didn’t do so well — he recorded a version of the old standard “Amor” which made number nineteen, and then his next two records topped out at sixty-six and fifty-six. He did get back in the pop top twenty with a song co-written by his wife and Ahmet Ertegun, “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)”, which reached number eleven and became an R&B standard: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)”] But as many people did at the time, he tried to move into the more lucrative world of adult supper-club singers, rather than singing R&B. While his version of “I Who Have Nothing” — a French song that has since become a standard, and whose English lyrics were written for King by Leiber and Stoller — managed to reach number twenty-nine, everything else did terribly. He sang “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “What Now My Love?” perfectly well, but that wasn’t what the audience wanted from him. He made some great records in the later 60s, like “What Is Soul”: [Excerpt: Ben E. King “What Is Soul?”] But even teaming up with Solomon Burke, Don Covay, Joe Tex, and Arthur Conley as The Soul Clan didn’t help him kickstart his recording career: [Excerpt: The Soul Clan, “Soul Meeting”] He asked to be let go from his contract with Atlantic in 1969, and spent a few years in the early seventies recording for small labels. Meanwhile, the Drifters were continuing without King. After King left, Atlantic started releasing whatever material they had in their vaults, both songs with King’s leads and older records from the earlier line-up of Drifters. But they were about to have even more personnel shifts. When they were on tour and got to Mobile, Alabama, Johnny Lee Williams said that he was just going to stay there and not continue on the tour — he was sick of not getting to sing lead vocals, and he came from Mobile anyway. Williams went on to join a group called the Embraceables, who released this with him singing lead: [Excerpt: The Embraceables, “My Foolish Pride”] That was later rereleased as by The Implaceables, for reasons I’ve not been able to discover. The Drifters got in a replacement for Williams, James Poindexter, but he turned out to have stage fright, and the group spent several months as a trio, before being joined by new lead singer Rudy Lewis. And then Elsbeary Hobbs, the group’s bass singer, was drafted, and the group got in a couple of different singers before settling on Tommy Evans, who had sung with the old versions of the Drifters in the fifties. The new lineup, Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, and Tommy Evans, would be one of the group’s longest-lasting lineups, lasting more than a year, and would record hits like “Up On the Roof”, by Goffin and King: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Up On the Roof”] But then Dock Green left the group. He and Tommy Evans joined another group — even though Evans was also still in the Drifters. The Drapers, the group they joined, was managed by Lover Patterson, Ben E. King’s manager, and had been given a name that sounded as much like “The Drifters” as possible. As well as Green and Evans, it also had Johnny Moore and Carnation Charlie Hughes, who had been in the same 1956 lineup of the Drifters that Tommy Evans had been in. That lineup of the Drapers released one single that didn’t do particularly well: [Excerpt: The Drapers, “(I Know) Your Love Has Gone Away”] The new Drifters lineup, without Dock Green, recorded “On Broadway”, a song that Leiber and Stoller had co-written with the Brill Building team of Mann and Weill. The guitar on the record was by Phil Spector — he was by that point a successful producer, but Leiber and Stoller had bumped into him on the way to the session and invited him to sit in: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “On Broadway”] Tommy Evans then also left the Drifters, and was replaced by Johnny Terry, leaving a lineup of Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Gene Pearson, and Johnny Terry. But Rudy Lewis, the lead singer of the group since just after King had left, was thinking of going solo, and even released one solo single: [Excerpt: Rudy Lewis, “I’ve Loved You So Long”] That wasn’t a success, but George Treadwell wanted some insurance in case Lewis left, so he got Johnny Moore — who had been in the group in the fifties and had just left the Drapers — to join, and for a few months Lewis and Moore traded off leads in the studio. One song that they recorded during 1963, but didn’t release, was “Only in America”, written for them by Leiber and Stoller. Leiber and Stoller had intended the song to be a sly satire, with Black people singing about the American dream, but Atlantic worried that in the racial climate of 1963, the satire would seem tasteless, so they took the Drifters’ backing track and got Jay and the Americans, a white group, to record new vocals, turning it into a straightforward bit of boosterism: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, “Only in America”] Tragedy struck on the day the Drifters recorded what would be their last US top ten hit, the twenty-first of May 1964. Johnny Moore bumped into Sylvia Vanterpool, of Mickey and Sylvia, and she said “thank God it wasn’t you”. He didn’t know what she was talking about, and she told him that Rudy Lewis had died suddenly earlier that day. The group went into the studio anyway, and recorded the songs that had been scheduled, including one called “I Don’t Want To Go On Without You” which took on a new meaning in the circumstances. But the hit from the session was “Under the Boardwalk”, with lead vocals from Moore: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Under the Boardwalk”] This version of the group — Johnny Moore, Charlie Thomas, Gene Pearson, and Johnny Terry, would be the longest-lasting of all the versions of the group managed by George Treadwell, staying together a full two years. But after “Under the Boardwalk”, which went to number four, they had no more top ten hits in the US. The best they could do was scrape the top twenty with “Saturday Night at the Movies”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Saturday Night at the Movies”] There were several more lineup changes, but the big change came in 1967 when George Treadwell died. His wife, Faye, took over the management of the group, and shortly after that, Charlie Thomas — the person who had been in the group for the longest continuous time, nine years at that point, decided to leave. There were a lot more squabbles and splinter groups, and by 1970 the Drifters’ career on Atlantic was over. By this point, there were three different versions of The Drifters. There was a group called The Original Drifters, which had formed in 1958 after the first set of Drifters had been fired, and was originally made up entirely of members of the early-fifties lineups, but which was now a revolving-door group based around Bill Pinkney, the bass singer of the Clyde McPhatter lineup, and stayed that way until Pinkney’s death in 2007. Then there was a version of the Drifters that consisted of Dock Green, Charlie Thomas, and Elsbeary Hobbs, the people who had been in Ben E. King’s version of the group. Charlie Thomas won the right to use the name in the USA in 1972, and continues touring with his own group there to this day, though no more of that lineup of the Drifters are with him. And then there was a UK-based group, managed by Faye Treadwell, with Johnny Moore as lead singer. That group scored big UK hits when the group moved to the UK in 72, with re-releases of mid-sixties records that had been comparative flops at the time — “Saturday Night at the Movies”, “At the Club”, and “Come On Over to My Place” all made the UK top ten in 1972, and Moore’s Drifters would have nine more top ten hits with new material in the UK between 1973 and 76. And Ben E. King, meanwhile, had signed again to Atlantic, and had a one-off top ten hit with “Supernatural Thing” in 1975: [Excerpt: Ben E. King, “Supernatural Thing”] But other than that he’d continued to have far less chart success than his vocal talents deserved, and in the eighties he moved to the UK and joined the UK version of the Drifters, singing his old hits on the nostalgia circuit with them, and adding more authenticity to the Johnny Moore lineup of the group. He spent several years like that, until in 1986 his career had a sudden resurgence, when the film Stand By Me came out and his single was used as the theme. On the back of the film’s success, the song reentered the top ten, twenty-five years after its initial success, and made number one in the UK. As a result, King became the first person to have hit the top ten in the US in the fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties — a remarkable record for someone who had had relatively few hits. A greatest hits collection of King’s records made the top twenty in the UK, as well, and King left the Drifters to once again become a solo artist. But this is where we say goodbye to King, and to the Drifters, and to Leiber and Stoller as songwriters. The UK version of the Drifters carried on with Johnny Moore as lead singer until he died in 1998, and up to that point it was reasonable to think of that group as a real version of the Drifters, because Moore had sung with the group on hits in the fifties and sixties, and in the UK in the seventies – roughly eighty percent of records released as by The Drifters had had Moore singing on them. But after Moore’s death, it gets very confusing, with the Treadwell family apparently abandoning the trademark and moving back to the US, and then changing their mind, resulting in a series of lawsuits. The current UK version of the Drifters has nobody who was in the group before 2010, and is managed by George and Faye Treadwell’s daughter. They still fill medium-sized theatres on large national tours, because their audiences don’t seem to care, so long as they can hear people singing “Up On the Roof” and “On Broadway”, “There Goes My Baby” and “Save the Last Dance For Me”. In total thirty-four different people were members of the Drifters during their time with Atlantic Records. It’s the only case I know where a group identity was genuinely bigger than the members, where whoever was involved, somehow they carried on making exceptional records. Leiber and Stoller, meanwhile, will turn up again, once more, next year, as record executives, collaborating with another figure we’ve seen several times before to run a record label. But this is the last record we’ll look at with them as a songwriting team. We’ve been following their remarkable career since episode fifteen, and they would continue writing great songs for a huge variety of artists, but “Stand By Me” would be the last time they would come up with something that would change the music industry. It was the end of a truly remarkable run, and one which stands as one of the great achievements in twentieth century popular music. And Ben E. King, who was, other than Clyde McPhatter, the only member of the Drifters to ever break away and become a solo success, spent the last twenty-nine years of his life touring as a solo artist off the renewed success of his greatest contribution to music. He died in 2015, but as long as people listen to rock, pop, soul, or R&B, there’ll be people listening to “Stand By Me”.
This time around, we talk about which games, if asked by a stranger to play, we would always say yes to. These are games we can play with anybody and always enjoy. Listen to see which ones made our list and how much we overlapped (or didn't!)Spoilers below-----Jamie's list:10. Paladins of the West Kingdom https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266810/paladins-west-kingdom9. Miyabi https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/285533/miyabi8. Wingspan https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/266192/wingspan7. Second Chance https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/265683/second-chance6. Concordia https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/124361/concordia5. Castles of Burgundy https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/84876/castles-burgundy4. Roma https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/16496/roma3. Azul https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/230802/azul2. Race for the Galaxy https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28143/race-galaxy1. Roll Player https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169426/roll-playerJennifer's list:10. Roll for the Galaxy https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/132531/roll-galaxy 9. La Granja https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/146886/la-granja8. Rajas of the Ganges https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/220877/rajas-ganges7. Castles of Burgundy https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/84876/castles-burgundy6. Grand Austria Hotel https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/182874/grand-austria-hotel5. Miyabi https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/285533/miyabi4. Sagrada https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/199561/sagrada3. Five Crowns https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1472/five-crowns2. Encore! https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/206931/encore1. Second Chance https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/265683/second-chanceBlue Ska by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3453-blue-skaLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn’t play led to a genre-defining hit. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m not going to recommend a compilation this week, for reasons I mention in the episode itself. There are plenty available, none of them as good as they should be. The episode on the early career of the Drifters is episode seventeen. My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg’s website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney’s later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King. Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. And Bill Millar’s book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note about this one, before I start. As we’ll see in this episode, there have been many, many, lineups of the Drifters over the years, with many different people involved. One problem with that is that there have been lots of compilations put out under the Drifters name, featuring rerecorded versions of their hits, often involving nobody who was on the original record. Indeed, there have been so many of these compilations, and people putting together hits compilations, even for major labels, have been so sloppy, that I can’t find a single compilation of the Drifters’ recordings that doesn’t have one or two dodgy remakes on replacing the originals. I’ve used multiple sources for the recordings I’m excerpting here, and in most cases I’m pretty sure that the tracks I’m excerpting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren’t familiar, I may have ended up using a rerecording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story… [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] It’s been more than a year since we last properly checked in with the Drifters, one of the great R&B vocal groups of all time, so I’ll quickly bring you up to speed — if you want to hear the full story so far, episode seventeen, on “Money Honey”, gives you all the details. The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McPhatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early fifties, when that group had had their biggest success. The original lineup of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the lineup who recorded their first big hits became ill or died, but the group had released two massive hits — “Money Honey” and “Such a Night”, both with McPhatter on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Such a Night”] But then McPhatter had been drafted, and the group’s manager, George Treadwell, had got in a member of the original lineup, David Baughan, to replace McPhatter, as Baughan could sound a little like McPhatter. When McPhatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group name to Treadwell, and the Drifters became employees of Treadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion. This group went through several lineup changes, some of which we’ll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like the ones they’d been making with Clyde McPhatter, even after Baughan also left the group. But there was a big difference behind the scenes. Those early records had been produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and had usually been arranged by Jesse Stone, the man who’d written “Money Honey” and many other early rock and roll hits, like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”. But a little while after Baughan left the group, Ertegun and Wexler asked Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to start working with them. Leiber and Stoller, you might remember, were working with a *lot* of people at the time. They’d come over to Atlantic Records with a non-exclusive contract to write and produce for the label, and while their main project at Atlantic was with the Coasters, they were also producing records for people like Ruth Brown, as well as also working on records for Elvis and others at RCA. But they took on the Drifters as well, and started producing a string of minor hits for them, including “Ruby Baby” and “Fools Fall In Love”. Those hits went top ten on the R&B chart, but did little or nothing in the pop market. [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] That song, which had Johnny Moore on lead vocals, was the last big hit for what we can think of as the “original” Drifters in some form. It came out in March 1957, and for the rest of the year they kept releasing singles, but nothing made the R&B charts at all, though a few did make the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinkney, who had been chosen by the other group members to be essentially their shop steward, had gone to Treadwell and asked for a raise in late 1956, and been promptly fired. He’d formed a group called the Flyers, with a new singer called Bobby Hendricks on lead. The Flyers recorded one single, “My Only Desire”: [Excerpt: the Flyers, “My Only Desire”] But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney’s replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendricks thought that was the end of his career, but then a few days later Pinkney phoned him up — Johnny Moore was getting drafted, and Hendricks was brought into the group to take Moore’s place. But almost immediately after Hendricks joined the group, Pinkney once again asked for a raise, and was kicked out and Evans brought back in. Pinkney went off and made a record for Sam Phillips, with backing music overdubbed by Bill Justis: [Excerpt: Bill Pinkney, “After the Hop”] The group kept changing lineups, and there was only one session in 1958, which led to a horrible version of “Moonlight Bay”. Apparently, the session was run by Leiber and Stoller as an experiment (they would occasionally record old standards with the Coasters, so presumably they were seeing if the same thing would work with the Drifters), and several of the group’s members were drunk when they recorded it. They decided at the session that it was not going to be released, but then the next thing the group knew, it was out as their next single, with overdubs by a white vocal group, making it sound nothing like the Drifters at all: [Excerpt: The Drifters “Moonlight Bay”] Bobby Hendricks hated that recording session so much that he quit the group and went solo, going over to Sue Records, where he joined up with another former Drifter, Jimmy Oliver. Oliver wrote a song for Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”, and the Coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Bobby Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”] By this time, the Drifters were down to just three people — Gerhart Thrasher, Jimmy Milner, and Tommy Evans. They no longer had a lead singer, but they had a week’s worth of shows they were contracted to do, at the Harlem Apollo, on a show hosted by the DJ Doctor Jive. That show was headlined by Ray Charles, and also featured the Cookies, Solomon Burke, and a minor group called the Crowns, among several other acts. Treadwell was desperate, so he called Hendricks and Oliver and got them to return to the group just for one week, so they would have a lead vocalist. They both did return, though just as a favour. Then, at the end of the week’s residency, one of the group members got drunk and started shouting abuse at Doctor Jive, and at the owner of the Apollo. George Treadwell had had enough. He fired the entire group. Tommy Evans went on to join Charlie Fuqua’s version of the Ink Spots, and Bill Pinkney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 lineup of the Drifters together — Pinkney, David Baughan, Gerhart Thrasher, and Andrew Thrasher. That group toured as The Original Drifters, and the group under that name would consist almost entirely of ex-members of the Drifters, with some coming or going, until 1968, when most of the group retired, while Pinkney carried on leading a group under that name until his death in 2007. But they couldn’t use that name on records. Instead they made records as the Harmony Grits: [Excerpt: The Harmony Grits, “I Could Have Told You”] and with ex-Drifter Johnny Moore singing lead, as a solo artist under the name Johnny Darrow: [Excerpt: Johnny Darrow, “Chew Tobacco Rag”] And with Bobby Hendricks singing lead, as the Sprites: [Excerpt: The Sprites, “My Picture”] But the reason they couldn’t call themselves the Drifters on their records is that George Treadwell owned the name, and he had hired a totally different group to tour and record under that name. The Crowns had their basis in a group called the Harmonaires, a street-corner group in New York. They had various members at first, but by the time they changed their name to the Five Crowns, they had stabilised on a lineup of Dock Green, Yonkie Paul, and three brothers — Papa, Nicky, and Sonny Boy Clark. The group were managed by Lover Patterson, who they believed was the manager of the Orioles, but was actually the Orioles’ valet. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released “You’re My Inspiration” in 1952: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You’re My Inspiration”] The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors, right at the point a truckers’ strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of luck the Five Crowns would have for the next few years. Nothing they put out on Rainbow Records was any kind of a success, and in 1953 the group became the first act on a new label, Old Town Records — they actually met the owner of the label, Hy Weiss, in a waiting room, while they were waiting to audition for a different label. On Old Town they put out a couple of singles, starting with “You Could Be My Love”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Could Be My Love”] But none of these singles were hits either, and the group were doing so badly that when Nicky Clark left the group, they couldn’t get another singer in to replace him at first — Lover Patterson stood on stage and mimed while the four remaining members sang, so there would still be five people in the Five Crowns. By 1955, the group had re-signed to Rainbow Records, now on their Riviera subsidiary, and they had gone through several further lineup changes. They now consisted of Yonkie Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Dock Green, and Bugeye Bailey. They put out one record on Riviera, “You Came To Me”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Came to Me”] The group broke up shortly after that, and Dock Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner’s labels, Gee, and released another single, and then they broke up. Green got together *another* lineup of the Five Crowns, made another record on another label, and then that group broke up too. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting lineups as people kept leaving and rejoining, and by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Papa Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, and a new tenor singer called Benjamin Earl Nelson, who hadn’t sung professionally before joining the group — he’d been working in a restaurant owned by his father, and Lover Patterson had heard him singing to himself while he was working and asked him to join the group. This lineup of the group, who were now calling themselves the Crowns rather than the Five Crowns, finally got a contract with a record label… or at least, it was sort of a record label. We’ve talked about Doc Pomus before, back in November, but as a brief recap — Pomus was a blues singer and songwriter, a white Jewish paraplegic whose birth name was Jerome Felder, who had become a blues shouter in the late forties: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send for the Doctor”] He had been working as a professional songwriter for a decade or so, and had written songs for people like Ray Charles, but the music he loved was hard bluesy R&B, and he didn’t understand the new rock and roll music at all. Other than writing “Young Blood”, which Leiber and Stoller had rewritten and made into a hit for the Coasters, he hadn’t written anything successful in quite some time. He’d recently started writing with a much younger man, Mort Shuman, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week — “Teenager in Love” by Dion and the Belmonts, which would be the start of a string of hits for them: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, “Teenager in Love”] But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomus’ wife had a baby on the way, and he was desperate for money. He was so desperate, he got involved in a scam. An old girlfriend introduced him to an acquaintance, a dance instructor named Fred Huckman. Huckman had recently married a rich old widow, and he wanted to get away from her during the day to sleep with other people. So Huckman decided he was going to become the owner of a record label, using his wife’s money to fund an office. The label was named R&B Records at Doc’s suggestion, and Doc was going to be the company’s president, while Mort was going to be the company’s shipping clerk. The company would have offices in 1650 Broadway, one of the buildings that these days gets lumped in when people talk about “the Brill Building”, though the actual Brill Building itself was a little way down the street at 1619. 1650 was still a prime music business location though, and the company’s office would let both Doc and Mort go and try to sell their songs to publishing companies and record labels. And they’d need to do this because R&B Records wasn’t going to put out any records at all. Doc and Mort’s actual job was that one of them had to be in the office at all times, so when Huckman’s wife phoned up, they could tell her that he’d just popped out, or was in a meeting, or something so she didn’t find out about his affairs. They lived off the scam for a little while, while writing songs, but eventually they started to get bored of doing nothing all day. And then Lucky Patterson brought the Crowns in. They didn’t realise that R&B Records wasn’t a real record label, and Pomus decided to audition them. When he did, he was amazed at how good they sounded. He decided that R&B Records was *going* to be a real record label, no matter what Huckman thought. He and Shuman wrote them a single in the style of the Coasters, and they got in the best session musicians in New York — people like King Curtis and Mickey Baker, who were old friends of Pomus — to play on it: [Excerpt: The Crowns, “Kiss and Make Up”] At first that record was completely unsuccessful, but then, rather amazingly, it started to climb in the charts, at least in Pittsburgh, where it became a local number one. It started to do better elsewhere as well, and it looked like the Crowns could have a promising career. And then one day Mrs. Huckman showed up at the office. Pomus tried to tell her that her husband had gone out and would be back later, but she insisted on waiting in the office, silently, all day. R&B Records closed the next day. But “Kiss and Make Up” had been a big enough success that the Crowns had ended up on that Doctor Jive show with the Drifters. And then when George Treadwell fired the Drifters, he immediately hired the Crowns — or at least, he hired four of them. Papa Clark had a drinking problem, and Treadwell was fed up of dealing with drunk singers. So from this point on the Drifters were Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Elsbeary Hobbs, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new lineup of the group went out on tour for almost a year before going into the studio, and they were abysmal failures. Everywhere they went, promoters advertised their shows with photos of the old group, and then this new group of people came on stage looking and sounding nothing like the original Drifters. They were booed everywhere they went. They even caused problems for the other acts — at one show they nearly killed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing “I Put A Spell on You”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell on You”] The group were sometimes asked to carry the coffin onto the stage with Hawkins inside it, and one night Charlie Thomas accidentally nudged something and heard a click. What he didn’t realise was that Hawkins put matchbooks in the gap in the coffin lid, to stop it closing all the way — Thomas had knocked the coffin properly shut. The music started, and Hawkins tried to open the coffin, and couldn’t. He kept pushing, and the coffin wouldn’t open. Eventually, he rocked the coffin so hard that it fell off its stand and popped open, but if it hadn’t opened there was a very real danger that Hawkins could have asphyxiated. But something else happened on that tour — Ben E. King wrote a song called “There Goes My Baby”, which the group started to perform live. As they originally did it, it was quite a fast song, but when they finally got off the tour and went into the studio, Leiber and Stoller, who were going to be the producers for this new group just like they had been for the old group, decided to slow it down. They also decided that this was going to be a chance for them to experiment with some totally new production ideas. Stoller had become infatuated with a style called baion, a Brazillian musical style that is based on the same tresillo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don’t remember the tresillo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others, but it’s that “bom [pause] bom-bom [pause] bom [pause] bom-bom” rhythm. We’ve always been calling it the tresillo, but when people talk about the Drifters’ music they always follow Stoller’s lead and call it the baion rhythm, so that’s what we’ll do in future. They decided to use that rhythm, and also to use strings, which very few people had used on a rock and roll record before — this is an idea that several people seemed to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may, indeed, be that Leiber and Stoller had heard “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” and taken inspiration from it — Holly had died just over a month before the recording session for “There Goes My Baby”, and his single hit the top forty the same week that “There Goes My Baby” was recorded. Stoller sketched out some string lines, which were turned into full arrangements by an old classmate of his, Stan Applebaum, who had previously arranged for Lucky Millinder, and who had written a hit for Sarah Vaughan, who was married to Treadwell. Charlie Thomas was meant to sing lead on the track, but he just couldn’t get it right, and eventually it was decided to have King sing it instead, as he’d written the song. King tried to imitate the sound of Sam Cooke, but it came out sounding like no-one but King himself. Then, as a final touch, Leiber and Stoller decided to use a kettledrum on the track, rather than a normal drum kit. There was only one problem — the drummer they booked didn’t know how to change the pitch on the kettledrum using the foot pedal. So he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] When Leiber and Stoller took that to their bosses at Atlantic Records, they were horrified. Jerry Wexler said “It’s dog meat. You’ve wasted our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations. It’s a goddamn awful mess!” Ahmet Ertegun was a little more diplomatic, but still said that the record was unreleasable. But eventually he let them have a go at remixing it, and then the label stuck the record out, assuming it would do nothing. Instead, it went to number two on the charts, and became one of the biggest hits of 1959. Not only that, but it instantly opened up the possibilities for new ways of producing records. The new Drifters were a smash hit, and Leiber and Stoller were now as respected as producers as they already had been as songwriters. They got themselves a new office in the Brill Building, and they were on top of the world. But already there was a problem for the new Drifters, and that problem was named Lover Patterson. Rather than sign the Crowns to a management deal as a group, Patterson had signed them all as individuals, with separate contracts. And when he’d allowed George Treadwell to take over their management, he’d only sold the contracts for three of the four members. Ben E. King was still signed to Lover Patterson, rather than to George Treadwell. And Patterson decided that he was going to let King sing on the records, but he wasn’t going to let him tour with the group. So there was yet another lineup change for the Drifters, as they got in Johnnie Lee Williams to sing King’s parts on stage. Williams would sing one lead with the group in the studio, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”] But for the most part, King was the lead singer in the studio, and so there were five Drifters on the records, but only four on the road. But they were still having hits, and everybody seemed happy. And soon, they would all have the biggest hit of their careers, with a song that Doc Pomus had written with Mort Shuman, about his own wedding reception. We’ll hear more about that, and about Leiber and Stoller’s apprentice Phil Spector, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks time.
Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "There Goes My Baby" by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn't play led to a genre-defining hit. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rebel Rouser" by Duane Eddy Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I'm not going to recommend a compilation this week, for reasons I mention in the episode itself. There are plenty available, none of them as good as they should be. The episode on the early career of the Drifters is episode seventeen. My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg's website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney's later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King. Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller's side of the story well. And Bill Millar's book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note about this one, before I start. As we'll see in this episode, there have been many, many, lineups of the Drifters over the years, with many different people involved. One problem with that is that there have been lots of compilations put out under the Drifters name, featuring rerecorded versions of their hits, often involving nobody who was on the original record. Indeed, there have been so many of these compilations, and people putting together hits compilations, even for major labels, have been so sloppy, that I can't find a single compilation of the Drifters' recordings that doesn't have one or two dodgy remakes on replacing the originals. I've used multiple sources for the recordings I'm excerpting here, and in most cases I'm pretty sure that the tracks I'm excerpting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren't familiar, I may have ended up using a rerecording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story... [Excerpt: The Drifters, "There Goes My Baby"] It's been more than a year since we last properly checked in with the Drifters, one of the great R&B vocal groups of all time, so I'll quickly bring you up to speed -- if you want to hear the full story so far, episode seventeen, on "Money Honey", gives you all the details. The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McPhatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early fifties, when that group had had their biggest success. The original lineup of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the lineup who recorded their first big hits became ill or died, but the group had released two massive hits -- "Money Honey" and "Such a Night", both with McPhatter on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, "Such a Night"] But then McPhatter had been drafted, and the group's manager, George Treadwell, had got in a member of the original lineup, David Baughan, to replace McPhatter, as Baughan could sound a little like McPhatter. When McPhatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group name to Treadwell, and the Drifters became employees of Treadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion. This group went through several lineup changes, some of which we'll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like the ones they'd been making with Clyde McPhatter, even after Baughan also left the group. But there was a big difference behind the scenes. Those early records had been produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and had usually been arranged by Jesse Stone, the man who'd written "Money Honey" and many other early rock and roll hits, like "Shake, Rattle, and Roll". But a little while after Baughan left the group, Ertegun and Wexler asked Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to start working with them. Leiber and Stoller, you might remember, were working with a *lot* of people at the time. They'd come over to Atlantic Records with a non-exclusive contract to write and produce for the label, and while their main project at Atlantic was with the Coasters, they were also producing records for people like Ruth Brown, as well as also working on records for Elvis and others at RCA. But they took on the Drifters as well, and started producing a string of minor hits for them, including "Ruby Baby" and "Fools Fall In Love". Those hits went top ten on the R&B chart, but did little or nothing in the pop market. [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Fools Fall In Love"] That song, which had Johnny Moore on lead vocals, was the last big hit for what we can think of as the "original" Drifters in some form. It came out in March 1957, and for the rest of the year they kept releasing singles, but nothing made the R&B charts at all, though a few did make the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinkney, who had been chosen by the other group members to be essentially their shop steward, had gone to Treadwell and asked for a raise in late 1956, and been promptly fired. He'd formed a group called the Flyers, with a new singer called Bobby Hendricks on lead. The Flyers recorded one single, "My Only Desire": [Excerpt: the Flyers, "My Only Desire"] But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney's replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendricks thought that was the end of his career, but then a few days later Pinkney phoned him up -- Johnny Moore was getting drafted, and Hendricks was brought into the group to take Moore's place. But almost immediately after Hendricks joined the group, Pinkney once again asked for a raise, and was kicked out and Evans brought back in. Pinkney went off and made a record for Sam Phillips, with backing music overdubbed by Bill Justis: [Excerpt: Bill Pinkney, "After the Hop"] The group kept changing lineups, and there was only one session in 1958, which led to a horrible version of "Moonlight Bay". Apparently, the session was run by Leiber and Stoller as an experiment (they would occasionally record old standards with the Coasters, so presumably they were seeing if the same thing would work with the Drifters), and several of the group's members were drunk when they recorded it. They decided at the session that it was not going to be released, but then the next thing the group knew, it was out as their next single, with overdubs by a white vocal group, making it sound nothing like the Drifters at all: [Excerpt: The Drifters "Moonlight Bay"] Bobby Hendricks hated that recording session so much that he quit the group and went solo, going over to Sue Records, where he joined up with another former Drifter, Jimmy Oliver. Oliver wrote a song for Hendricks, "Itchy Twitchy Feeling", and the Coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Bobby Hendricks, "Itchy Twitchy Feeling"] By this time, the Drifters were down to just three people -- Gerhart Thrasher, Jimmy Milner, and Tommy Evans. They no longer had a lead singer, but they had a week's worth of shows they were contracted to do, at the Harlem Apollo, on a show hosted by the DJ Doctor Jive. That show was headlined by Ray Charles, and also featured the Cookies, Solomon Burke, and a minor group called the Crowns, among several other acts. Treadwell was desperate, so he called Hendricks and Oliver and got them to return to the group just for one week, so they would have a lead vocalist. They both did return, though just as a favour. Then, at the end of the week's residency, one of the group members got drunk and started shouting abuse at Doctor Jive, and at the owner of the Apollo. George Treadwell had had enough. He fired the entire group. Tommy Evans went on to join Charlie Fuqua's version of the Ink Spots, and Bill Pinkney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 lineup of the Drifters together -- Pinkney, David Baughan, Gerhart Thrasher, and Andrew Thrasher. That group toured as The Original Drifters, and the group under that name would consist almost entirely of ex-members of the Drifters, with some coming or going, until 1968, when most of the group retired, while Pinkney carried on leading a group under that name until his death in 2007. But they couldn't use that name on records. Instead they made records as the Harmony Grits: [Excerpt: The Harmony Grits, "I Could Have Told You"] and with ex-Drifter Johnny Moore singing lead, as a solo artist under the name Johnny Darrow: [Excerpt: Johnny Darrow, "Chew Tobacco Rag"] And with Bobby Hendricks singing lead, as the Sprites: [Excerpt: The Sprites, "My Picture"] But the reason they couldn't call themselves the Drifters on their records is that George Treadwell owned the name, and he had hired a totally different group to tour and record under that name. The Crowns had their basis in a group called the Harmonaires, a street-corner group in New York. They had various members at first, but by the time they changed their name to the Five Crowns, they had stabilised on a lineup of Dock Green, Yonkie Paul, and three brothers -- Papa, Nicky, and Sonny Boy Clark. The group were managed by Lover Patterson, who they believed was the manager of the Orioles, but was actually the Orioles' valet. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released "You're My Inspiration" in 1952: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, "You're My Inspiration"] The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors, right at the point a truckers' strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of luck the Five Crowns would have for the next few years. Nothing they put out on Rainbow Records was any kind of a success, and in 1953 the group became the first act on a new label, Old Town Records -- they actually met the owner of the label, Hy Weiss, in a waiting room, while they were waiting to audition for a different label. On Old Town they put out a couple of singles, starting with "You Could Be My Love": [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, "You Could Be My Love"] But none of these singles were hits either, and the group were doing so badly that when Nicky Clark left the group, they couldn't get another singer in to replace him at first -- Lover Patterson stood on stage and mimed while the four remaining members sang, so there would still be five people in the Five Crowns. By 1955, the group had re-signed to Rainbow Records, now on their Riviera subsidiary, and they had gone through several further lineup changes. They now consisted of Yonkie Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Dock Green, and Bugeye Bailey. They put out one record on Riviera, "You Came To Me": [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, "You Came to Me"] The group broke up shortly after that, and Dock Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner's labels, Gee, and released another single, and then they broke up. Green got together *another* lineup of the Five Crowns, made another record on another label, and then that group broke up too. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting lineups as people kept leaving and rejoining, and by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Papa Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, and a new tenor singer called Benjamin Earl Nelson, who hadn't sung professionally before joining the group -- he'd been working in a restaurant owned by his father, and Lover Patterson had heard him singing to himself while he was working and asked him to join the group. This lineup of the group, who were now calling themselves the Crowns rather than the Five Crowns, finally got a contract with a record label... or at least, it was sort of a record label. We've talked about Doc Pomus before, back in November, but as a brief recap -- Pomus was a blues singer and songwriter, a white Jewish paraplegic whose birth name was Jerome Felder, who had become a blues shouter in the late forties: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, "Send for the Doctor"] He had been working as a professional songwriter for a decade or so, and had written songs for people like Ray Charles, but the music he loved was hard bluesy R&B, and he didn't understand the new rock and roll music at all. Other than writing "Young Blood", which Leiber and Stoller had rewritten and made into a hit for the Coasters, he hadn't written anything successful in quite some time. He'd recently started writing with a much younger man, Mort Shuman, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week -- "Teenager in Love" by Dion and the Belmonts, which would be the start of a string of hits for them: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, "Teenager in Love"] But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomus' wife had a baby on the way, and he was desperate for money. He was so desperate, he got involved in a scam. An old girlfriend introduced him to an acquaintance, a dance instructor named Fred Huckman. Huckman had recently married a rich old widow, and he wanted to get away from her during the day to sleep with other people. So Huckman decided he was going to become the owner of a record label, using his wife's money to fund an office. The label was named R&B Records at Doc's suggestion, and Doc was going to be the company's president, while Mort was going to be the company's shipping clerk. The company would have offices in 1650 Broadway, one of the buildings that these days gets lumped in when people talk about "the Brill Building", though the actual Brill Building itself was a little way down the street at 1619. 1650 was still a prime music business location though, and the company's office would let both Doc and Mort go and try to sell their songs to publishing companies and record labels. And they'd need to do this because R&B Records wasn't going to put out any records at all. Doc and Mort's actual job was that one of them had to be in the office at all times, so when Huckman's wife phoned up, they could tell her that he'd just popped out, or was in a meeting, or something so she didn't find out about his affairs. They lived off the scam for a little while, while writing songs, but eventually they started to get bored of doing nothing all day. And then Lucky Patterson brought the Crowns in. They didn't realise that R&B Records wasn't a real record label, and Pomus decided to audition them. When he did, he was amazed at how good they sounded. He decided that R&B Records was *going* to be a real record label, no matter what Huckman thought. He and Shuman wrote them a single in the style of the Coasters, and they got in the best session musicians in New York -- people like King Curtis and Mickey Baker, who were old friends of Pomus -- to play on it: [Excerpt: The Crowns, "Kiss and Make Up"] At first that record was completely unsuccessful, but then, rather amazingly, it started to climb in the charts, at least in Pittsburgh, where it became a local number one. It started to do better elsewhere as well, and it looked like the Crowns could have a promising career. And then one day Mrs. Huckman showed up at the office. Pomus tried to tell her that her husband had gone out and would be back later, but she insisted on waiting in the office, silently, all day. R&B Records closed the next day. But "Kiss and Make Up" had been a big enough success that the Crowns had ended up on that Doctor Jive show with the Drifters. And then when George Treadwell fired the Drifters, he immediately hired the Crowns -- or at least, he hired four of them. Papa Clark had a drinking problem, and Treadwell was fed up of dealing with drunk singers. So from this point on the Drifters were Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Elsbeary Hobbs, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new lineup of the group went out on tour for almost a year before going into the studio, and they were abysmal failures. Everywhere they went, promoters advertised their shows with photos of the old group, and then this new group of people came on stage looking and sounding nothing like the original Drifters. They were booed everywhere they went. They even caused problems for the other acts -- at one show they nearly killed Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing "I Put A Spell on You": [Excerpt: Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put a Spell on You"] The group were sometimes asked to carry the coffin onto the stage with Hawkins inside it, and one night Charlie Thomas accidentally nudged something and heard a click. What he didn't realise was that Hawkins put matchbooks in the gap in the coffin lid, to stop it closing all the way -- Thomas had knocked the coffin properly shut. The music started, and Hawkins tried to open the coffin, and couldn't. He kept pushing, and the coffin wouldn't open. Eventually, he rocked the coffin so hard that it fell off its stand and popped open, but if it hadn't opened there was a very real danger that Hawkins could have asphyxiated. But something else happened on that tour -- Ben E. King wrote a song called "There Goes My Baby", which the group started to perform live. As they originally did it, it was quite a fast song, but when they finally got off the tour and went into the studio, Leiber and Stoller, who were going to be the producers for this new group just like they had been for the old group, decided to slow it down. They also decided that this was going to be a chance for them to experiment with some totally new production ideas. Stoller had become infatuated with a style called baion, a Brazillian musical style that is based on the same tresillo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don't remember the tresillo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others, but it's that "bom [pause] bom-bom [pause] bom [pause] bom-bom" rhythm. We've always been calling it the tresillo, but when people talk about the Drifters' music they always follow Stoller's lead and call it the baion rhythm, so that's what we'll do in future. They decided to use that rhythm, and also to use strings, which very few people had used on a rock and roll record before -- this is an idea that several people seemed to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may, indeed, be that Leiber and Stoller had heard "It Doesn't Matter Any More" and taken inspiration from it -- Holly had died just over a month before the recording session for "There Goes My Baby", and his single hit the top forty the same week that "There Goes My Baby" was recorded. Stoller sketched out some string lines, which were turned into full arrangements by an old classmate of his, Stan Applebaum, who had previously arranged for Lucky Millinder, and who had written a hit for Sarah Vaughan, who was married to Treadwell. Charlie Thomas was meant to sing lead on the track, but he just couldn't get it right, and eventually it was decided to have King sing it instead, as he'd written the song. King tried to imitate the sound of Sam Cooke, but it came out sounding like no-one but King himself. Then, as a final touch, Leiber and Stoller decided to use a kettledrum on the track, rather than a normal drum kit. There was only one problem -- the drummer they booked didn't know how to change the pitch on the kettledrum using the foot pedal. So he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "There Goes My Baby"] When Leiber and Stoller took that to their bosses at Atlantic Records, they were horrified. Jerry Wexler said “It’s dog meat. You've wasted our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations. It’s a goddamn awful mess!” Ahmet Ertegun was a little more diplomatic, but still said that the record was unreleasable. But eventually he let them have a go at remixing it, and then the label stuck the record out, assuming it would do nothing. Instead, it went to number two on the charts, and became one of the biggest hits of 1959. Not only that, but it instantly opened up the possibilities for new ways of producing records. The new Drifters were a smash hit, and Leiber and Stoller were now as respected as producers as they already had been as songwriters. They got themselves a new office in the Brill Building, and they were on top of the world. But already there was a problem for the new Drifters, and that problem was named Lover Patterson. Rather than sign the Crowns to a management deal as a group, Patterson had signed them all as individuals, with separate contracts. And when he'd allowed George Treadwell to take over their management, he'd only sold the contracts for three of the four members. Ben E. King was still signed to Lover Patterson, rather than to George Treadwell. And Patterson decided that he was going to let King sing on the records, but he wasn't going to let him tour with the group. So there was yet another lineup change for the Drifters, as they got in Johnnie Lee Williams to sing King's parts on stage. Williams would sing one lead with the group in the studio, "If You Cry True Love, True Love": [Excerpt: The Drifters, "If You Cry True Love, True Love"] But for the most part, King was the lead singer in the studio, and so there were five Drifters on the records, but only four on the road. But they were still having hits, and everybody seemed happy. And soon, they would all have the biggest hit of their careers, with a song that Doc Pomus had written with Mort Shuman, about his own wedding reception. We'll hear more about that, and about Leiber and Stoller's apprentice Phil Spector, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks time.
Episode seventy-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters, and how a fake record label, a band sacked for drunkenness, and a kettledrum player who couldn’t play led to a genre-defining hit. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rebel Rouser” by Duane Eddy Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’m not going to recommend a compilation this week, for reasons I mention in the episode itself. There are plenty available, none of them as good as they should be. The episode on the early career of the Drifters is episode seventeen. My main resource in putting this episode together was Marv Goldberg’s website, and his excellent articles on both the early- and late-period Drifters, Bill Pinkney’s later Original Drifters, the Five Crowns, and Ben E. King. Lonely Avenue, a biography of Doc Pomus by Alex Halberstadt, helped me with the information on Pomus. Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz tells Leiber and Stoller’s side of the story well. And Bill Millar’s book on the Drifters, while it is more a history of 50s vocal group music generally using them as a focus than a biography of the group, contains some interesting material. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note about this one, before I start. As we’ll see in this episode, there have been many, many, lineups of the Drifters over the years, with many different people involved. One problem with that is that there have been lots of compilations put out under the Drifters name, featuring rerecorded versions of their hits, often involving nobody who was on the original record. Indeed, there have been so many of these compilations, and people putting together hits compilations, even for major labels, have been so sloppy, that I can’t find a single compilation of the Drifters’ recordings that doesn’t have one or two dodgy remakes on replacing the originals. I’ve used multiple sources for the recordings I’m excerpting here, and in most cases I’m pretty sure that the tracks I’m excerpting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren’t familiar, I may have ended up using a rerecording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story… [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] It’s been more than a year since we last properly checked in with the Drifters, one of the great R&B vocal groups of all time, so I’ll quickly bring you up to speed — if you want to hear the full story so far, episode seventeen, on “Money Honey”, gives you all the details. The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McPhatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early fifties, when that group had had their biggest success. The original lineup of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the lineup who recorded their first big hits became ill or died, but the group had released two massive hits — “Money Honey” and “Such a Night”, both with McPhatter on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters, “Such a Night”] But then McPhatter had been drafted, and the group’s manager, George Treadwell, had got in a member of the original lineup, David Baughan, to replace McPhatter, as Baughan could sound a little like McPhatter. When McPhatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group name to Treadwell, and the Drifters became employees of Treadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion. This group went through several lineup changes, some of which we’ll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like the ones they’d been making with Clyde McPhatter, even after Baughan also left the group. But there was a big difference behind the scenes. Those early records had been produced by Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, and had usually been arranged by Jesse Stone, the man who’d written “Money Honey” and many other early rock and roll hits, like “Shake, Rattle, and Roll”. But a little while after Baughan left the group, Ertegun and Wexler asked Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller to start working with them. Leiber and Stoller, you might remember, were working with a *lot* of people at the time. They’d come over to Atlantic Records with a non-exclusive contract to write and produce for the label, and while their main project at Atlantic was with the Coasters, they were also producing records for people like Ruth Brown, as well as also working on records for Elvis and others at RCA. But they took on the Drifters as well, and started producing a string of minor hits for them, including “Ruby Baby” and “Fools Fall In Love”. Those hits went top ten on the R&B chart, but did little or nothing in the pop market. [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Fools Fall In Love”] That song, which had Johnny Moore on lead vocals, was the last big hit for what we can think of as the “original” Drifters in some form. It came out in March 1957, and for the rest of the year they kept releasing singles, but nothing made the R&B charts at all, though a few did make the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinkney, who had been chosen by the other group members to be essentially their shop steward, had gone to Treadwell and asked for a raise in late 1956, and been promptly fired. He’d formed a group called the Flyers, with a new singer called Bobby Hendricks on lead. The Flyers recorded one single, “My Only Desire”: [Excerpt: the Flyers, “My Only Desire”] But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney’s replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendricks thought that was the end of his career, but then a few days later Pinkney phoned him up — Johnny Moore was getting drafted, and Hendricks was brought into the group to take Moore’s place. But almost immediately after Hendricks joined the group, Pinkney once again asked for a raise, and was kicked out and Evans brought back in. Pinkney went off and made a record for Sam Phillips, with backing music overdubbed by Bill Justis: [Excerpt: Bill Pinkney, “After the Hop”] The group kept changing lineups, and there was only one session in 1958, which led to a horrible version of “Moonlight Bay”. Apparently, the session was run by Leiber and Stoller as an experiment (they would occasionally record old standards with the Coasters, so presumably they were seeing if the same thing would work with the Drifters), and several of the group’s members were drunk when they recorded it. They decided at the session that it was not going to be released, but then the next thing the group knew, it was out as their next single, with overdubs by a white vocal group, making it sound nothing like the Drifters at all: [Excerpt: The Drifters “Moonlight Bay”] Bobby Hendricks hated that recording session so much that he quit the group and went solo, going over to Sue Records, where he joined up with another former Drifter, Jimmy Oliver. Oliver wrote a song for Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”, and the Coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Bobby Hendricks, “Itchy Twitchy Feeling”] By this time, the Drifters were down to just three people — Gerhart Thrasher, Jimmy Milner, and Tommy Evans. They no longer had a lead singer, but they had a week’s worth of shows they were contracted to do, at the Harlem Apollo, on a show hosted by the DJ Doctor Jive. That show was headlined by Ray Charles, and also featured the Cookies, Solomon Burke, and a minor group called the Crowns, among several other acts. Treadwell was desperate, so he called Hendricks and Oliver and got them to return to the group just for one week, so they would have a lead vocalist. They both did return, though just as a favour. Then, at the end of the week’s residency, one of the group members got drunk and started shouting abuse at Doctor Jive, and at the owner of the Apollo. George Treadwell had had enough. He fired the entire group. Tommy Evans went on to join Charlie Fuqua’s version of the Ink Spots, and Bill Pinkney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 lineup of the Drifters together — Pinkney, David Baughan, Gerhart Thrasher, and Andrew Thrasher. That group toured as The Original Drifters, and the group under that name would consist almost entirely of ex-members of the Drifters, with some coming or going, until 1968, when most of the group retired, while Pinkney carried on leading a group under that name until his death in 2007. But they couldn’t use that name on records. Instead they made records as the Harmony Grits: [Excerpt: The Harmony Grits, “I Could Have Told You”] and with ex-Drifter Johnny Moore singing lead, as a solo artist under the name Johnny Darrow: [Excerpt: Johnny Darrow, “Chew Tobacco Rag”] And with Bobby Hendricks singing lead, as the Sprites: [Excerpt: The Sprites, “My Picture”] But the reason they couldn’t call themselves the Drifters on their records is that George Treadwell owned the name, and he had hired a totally different group to tour and record under that name. The Crowns had their basis in a group called the Harmonaires, a street-corner group in New York. They had various members at first, but by the time they changed their name to the Five Crowns, they had stabilised on a lineup of Dock Green, Yonkie Paul, and three brothers — Papa, Nicky, and Sonny Boy Clark. The group were managed by Lover Patterson, who they believed was the manager of the Orioles, but was actually the Orioles’ valet. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released “You’re My Inspiration” in 1952: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You’re My Inspiration”] The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors, right at the point a truckers’ strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of luck the Five Crowns would have for the next few years. Nothing they put out on Rainbow Records was any kind of a success, and in 1953 the group became the first act on a new label, Old Town Records — they actually met the owner of the label, Hy Weiss, in a waiting room, while they were waiting to audition for a different label. On Old Town they put out a couple of singles, starting with “You Could Be My Love”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Could Be My Love”] But none of these singles were hits either, and the group were doing so badly that when Nicky Clark left the group, they couldn’t get another singer in to replace him at first — Lover Patterson stood on stage and mimed while the four remaining members sang, so there would still be five people in the Five Crowns. By 1955, the group had re-signed to Rainbow Records, now on their Riviera subsidiary, and they had gone through several further lineup changes. They now consisted of Yonkie Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Dock Green, and Bugeye Bailey. They put out one record on Riviera, “You Came To Me”: [Excerpt: The Five Crowns, “You Came to Me”] The group broke up shortly after that, and Dock Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner’s labels, Gee, and released another single, and then they broke up. Green got together *another* lineup of the Five Crowns, made another record on another label, and then that group broke up too. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting lineups as people kept leaving and rejoining, and by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Papa Clark, Elsbeary Hobbs, and a new tenor singer called Benjamin Earl Nelson, who hadn’t sung professionally before joining the group — he’d been working in a restaurant owned by his father, and Lover Patterson had heard him singing to himself while he was working and asked him to join the group. This lineup of the group, who were now calling themselves the Crowns rather than the Five Crowns, finally got a contract with a record label… or at least, it was sort of a record label. We’ve talked about Doc Pomus before, back in November, but as a brief recap — Pomus was a blues singer and songwriter, a white Jewish paraplegic whose birth name was Jerome Felder, who had become a blues shouter in the late forties: [Excerpt: Doc Pomus, “Send for the Doctor”] He had been working as a professional songwriter for a decade or so, and had written songs for people like Ray Charles, but the music he loved was hard bluesy R&B, and he didn’t understand the new rock and roll music at all. Other than writing “Young Blood”, which Leiber and Stoller had rewritten and made into a hit for the Coasters, he hadn’t written anything successful in quite some time. He’d recently started writing with a much younger man, Mort Shuman, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week — “Teenager in Love” by Dion and the Belmonts, which would be the start of a string of hits for them: [Excerpt: Dion and the Belmonts, “Teenager in Love”] But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomus’ wife had a baby on the way, and he was desperate for money. He was so desperate, he got involved in a scam. An old girlfriend introduced him to an acquaintance, a dance instructor named Fred Huckman. Huckman had recently married a rich old widow, and he wanted to get away from her during the day to sleep with other people. So Huckman decided he was going to become the owner of a record label, using his wife’s money to fund an office. The label was named R&B Records at Doc’s suggestion, and Doc was going to be the company’s president, while Mort was going to be the company’s shipping clerk. The company would have offices in 1650 Broadway, one of the buildings that these days gets lumped in when people talk about “the Brill Building”, though the actual Brill Building itself was a little way down the street at 1619. 1650 was still a prime music business location though, and the company’s office would let both Doc and Mort go and try to sell their songs to publishing companies and record labels. And they’d need to do this because R&B Records wasn’t going to put out any records at all. Doc and Mort’s actual job was that one of them had to be in the office at all times, so when Huckman’s wife phoned up, they could tell her that he’d just popped out, or was in a meeting, or something so she didn’t find out about his affairs. They lived off the scam for a little while, while writing songs, but eventually they started to get bored of doing nothing all day. And then Lucky Patterson brought the Crowns in. They didn’t realise that R&B Records wasn’t a real record label, and Pomus decided to audition them. When he did, he was amazed at how good they sounded. He decided that R&B Records was *going* to be a real record label, no matter what Huckman thought. He and Shuman wrote them a single in the style of the Coasters, and they got in the best session musicians in New York — people like King Curtis and Mickey Baker, who were old friends of Pomus — to play on it: [Excerpt: The Crowns, “Kiss and Make Up”] At first that record was completely unsuccessful, but then, rather amazingly, it started to climb in the charts, at least in Pittsburgh, where it became a local number one. It started to do better elsewhere as well, and it looked like the Crowns could have a promising career. And then one day Mrs. Huckman showed up at the office. Pomus tried to tell her that her husband had gone out and would be back later, but she insisted on waiting in the office, silently, all day. R&B Records closed the next day. But “Kiss and Make Up” had been a big enough success that the Crowns had ended up on that Doctor Jive show with the Drifters. And then when George Treadwell fired the Drifters, he immediately hired the Crowns — or at least, he hired four of them. Papa Clark had a drinking problem, and Treadwell was fed up of dealing with drunk singers. So from this point on the Drifters were Charlie Thomas, Dock Green, Elsbeary Hobbs, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new lineup of the group went out on tour for almost a year before going into the studio, and they were abysmal failures. Everywhere they went, promoters advertised their shows with photos of the old group, and then this new group of people came on stage looking and sounding nothing like the original Drifters. They were booed everywhere they went. They even caused problems for the other acts — at one show they nearly killed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing “I Put A Spell on You”: [Excerpt: Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, “I Put a Spell on You”] The group were sometimes asked to carry the coffin onto the stage with Hawkins inside it, and one night Charlie Thomas accidentally nudged something and heard a click. What he didn’t realise was that Hawkins put matchbooks in the gap in the coffin lid, to stop it closing all the way — Thomas had knocked the coffin properly shut. The music started, and Hawkins tried to open the coffin, and couldn’t. He kept pushing, and the coffin wouldn’t open. Eventually, he rocked the coffin so hard that it fell off its stand and popped open, but if it hadn’t opened there was a very real danger that Hawkins could have asphyxiated. But something else happened on that tour — Ben E. King wrote a song called “There Goes My Baby”, which the group started to perform live. As they originally did it, it was quite a fast song, but when they finally got off the tour and went into the studio, Leiber and Stoller, who were going to be the producers for this new group just like they had been for the old group, decided to slow it down. They also decided that this was going to be a chance for them to experiment with some totally new production ideas. Stoller had become infatuated with a style called baion, a Brazillian musical style that is based on the same tresillo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don’t remember the tresillo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others, but it’s that “bom [pause] bom-bom [pause] bom [pause] bom-bom” rhythm. We’ve always been calling it the tresillo, but when people talk about the Drifters’ music they always follow Stoller’s lead and call it the baion rhythm, so that’s what we’ll do in future. They decided to use that rhythm, and also to use strings, which very few people had used on a rock and roll record before — this is an idea that several people seemed to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may, indeed, be that Leiber and Stoller had heard “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” and taken inspiration from it — Holly had died just over a month before the recording session for “There Goes My Baby”, and his single hit the top forty the same week that “There Goes My Baby” was recorded. Stoller sketched out some string lines, which were turned into full arrangements by an old classmate of his, Stan Applebaum, who had previously arranged for Lucky Millinder, and who had written a hit for Sarah Vaughan, who was married to Treadwell. Charlie Thomas was meant to sing lead on the track, but he just couldn’t get it right, and eventually it was decided to have King sing it instead, as he’d written the song. King tried to imitate the sound of Sam Cooke, but it came out sounding like no-one but King himself. Then, as a final touch, Leiber and Stoller decided to use a kettledrum on the track, rather than a normal drum kit. There was only one problem — the drummer they booked didn’t know how to change the pitch on the kettledrum using the foot pedal. So he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “There Goes My Baby”] When Leiber and Stoller took that to their bosses at Atlantic Records, they were horrified. Jerry Wexler said “It’s dog meat. You’ve wasted our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations. It’s a goddamn awful mess!” Ahmet Ertegun was a little more diplomatic, but still said that the record was unreleasable. But eventually he let them have a go at remixing it, and then the label stuck the record out, assuming it would do nothing. Instead, it went to number two on the charts, and became one of the biggest hits of 1959. Not only that, but it instantly opened up the possibilities for new ways of producing records. The new Drifters were a smash hit, and Leiber and Stoller were now as respected as producers as they already had been as songwriters. They got themselves a new office in the Brill Building, and they were on top of the world. But already there was a problem for the new Drifters, and that problem was named Lover Patterson. Rather than sign the Crowns to a management deal as a group, Patterson had signed them all as individuals, with separate contracts. And when he’d allowed George Treadwell to take over their management, he’d only sold the contracts for three of the four members. Ben E. King was still signed to Lover Patterson, rather than to George Treadwell. And Patterson decided that he was going to let King sing on the records, but he wasn’t going to let him tour with the group. So there was yet another lineup change for the Drifters, as they got in Johnnie Lee Williams to sing King’s parts on stage. Williams would sing one lead with the group in the studio, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “If You Cry True Love, True Love”] But for the most part, King was the lead singer in the studio, and so there were five Drifters on the records, but only four on the road. But they were still having hits, and everybody seemed happy. And soon, they would all have the biggest hit of their careers, with a song that Doc Pomus had written with Mort Shuman, about his own wedding reception. We’ll hear more about that, and about Leiber and Stoller’s apprentice Phil Spector, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks time.
This sermon is a description of -five crowns- the Bible says a believer can earn by faithfully serving Christ
In this episode, we discuss Star Wars: Outer Rim and some fun card games to play with your family and friends this Christmas. We also talk about whether we are gamers or collectors...or both.Finally, we give you the details on how to WIN A BOARD GAME! That's right, it's a giveaway!Thanks for listening! Please subscribe and share with your family and friends.Website: https://boardtogethergames.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/board2getherFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/board2gether/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BoardTogetherGamesTheme music created using BandLab.com
Today, Josh and Jared unpack the final two heavenly crowns and how to receive earn them.
Today Josh and Jared discuss three of the five heavenly crowns and how to win them using Scripture.
With Pastor Stephen Chitty from Christian Life Church
Our hosts run down their busy, busy week, before looking at some recently played games. Adrian gets frustrated at unlock, Zach frustrates other players in Five Crowns, and Jeff gets frustrated at Mid level Gorm in Kingdom Death Monster. In News, Ninja Division gets more bad news and Funko joins the gaming scene. In Kickstarters Coloma, Winterborne, and Terrain Crate 2 get announced as well as the new Tiny Epic Game. Some emails and listener feedback close out the show. 00:00:29 - Intro Banter! Featuring: The Oscars, A new phone, a bad drive, another job, Amateur wrestling 00:30:40 - What have we been playing?: Tokyo Highway, Between Two Castles, Wordsy, Unlock The Island of Doctor Goorse, Counterfeiters, Five Crowns, Kingdom Death Monster 00:59:45 - The Bloody Minute 01:00:42 - News: IDW drops Ninja Division 01:02:58 - News: Funko goes gaming 01:06:20 - News: Relic rerelease 01:08:31 - News: Jaws the Board Game 01:10:38 - News: Irish Gauge 01:14:08 - KS: Terrain Crate 2 01:17:11 - KS: Winterborne 01:20:27 - KS: Coloma 01:24:23 - KS: Tiny Epic Tactics 01:30:28 - Emails! 01:39:25 - Paulo's Youtube corner 01:43:10 - Get ready for Tsukiyumi from Grey Fox Games Slack Channel Patreon Guild
Thursday Evening Bible Study
Thursday Evening Bible Study
The panel unearths three more games in this week’s episode... First up we book and run til the kings go wild in the card game Five Crowns Next we live beyond our means to make a splash in High Society And Finally, through back-biting bureaucracy we bust big business in Anti-Monopoly
Ellen Bell discusses some of Orange County's most historic restaurants including Five Crowns in Newport Beach, Ramos House Cafe and El Adobe in San Juan Capistrano, the Harborside in the Balboa Pavillion, Mrs Knott's Chicken Dinner Restaurant in Buena Park, The Cellar in Fullerton and Watson's Soda Fountain in Orange.
Ryan and Matt "Guy Fi-hairy" Amberg abbreviate things while Ryan is in Idaho and/or Yellowstone and talk about Team Fortress 2's Gun Mettle update, Fallout New Vegas mods, Fallout Shelter, Corn on the 4th of July, Mexican Horseshoes or "Cornhole" (true), Spoons, King of Tokyo, and Five Crowns.
The Bible clearly teaches that after the rapture of the believer, he will be brought before the Lord Jesus, sitting upon His Judgment Seat, known as the “Bema” (Greek). This is a judgment of his works, not his sins. His sins have been atoned for and will be “remembered no more forever” (Heb. 10:17). Here […]
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