A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 75: “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

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…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs By Andrew Huck. Episode 75 There Goes My Baby By the Drifters 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 Drifter's name, featuring re-recorded 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 Drifter's recordings that doesn't have one or two dodgy remakes on, replacing the originals. I've used multiple sources for the recordings I'm accepting here,

and in most cases I'm pretty sure that the tracks I'm accepting are the original versions. But particularly when it comes to songs that aren't familiar, I may have ended up using a re-recording rather than the original. Anyway, on with the story. 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 17 on Money Honey gives you all the details.

The Drifters had originally formed as the backing group for Clyde McFatter, who had been the lead singer of Billy Ward and the Dominoes in the early 50s, when that group had had their biggest success. The original line-up of the group had all been sacked before they even released a record, and then a couple of members of the line-up who recorded their first big hit became ill or died. But the group had released two massive hits, Money, Honey and Such a Night, both with MacFatter on lead vocals. But when she was a lot, I had to fall in love

But then MacFatter had been drafted And the group's manager, George Treadwell had got in a member of the original line-up, David Bourne, to replace McFatter. as Bourne could sound a little like Macfatter. When Macfatter was discharged from the army, he decided to sell the group named her Dredwell, and the drifters became employees of Dreadwell, to be hired and fired at his discretion.

This group went through several line-up changes, some of which we'll look at later in this episode, but they kept making records that sounded a bit like ones they'd been making with Clyde Macfatter, even after Bourne had left the group. But there was a big difference behind this. scenes. Those early records had been produced by Armet Ertagan 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

hit, like Shake, Rattle and Roll. But a little while after Bourne left the group, Ertigan and Wexler asked Jerry Lieber 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 10 on the R&B chart but did little or nothing in the pop market 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 57 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 100. Throughout 1957, the group had been gaining and losing members. Bill Pinckney, 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. But then Tommy Evans, Pinkney's replacement in the group, was fired, and Pinkney was brought back into the group. Hendrix 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 Justice.

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 Lieber 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.

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 Hendrix, Itchy-Twitchy Feeling, and the coasters sang the backup vocals for him, uncredited. That track went to number five on the R&B charts. By this time, the drifters were down to just three people, Gerhard Thrasher, Jimmy Mellner, 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 Dr. 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 Dr. 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 Pinckney decided he wanted to get the old group back together. He got a 1955 line-up of the drifters together. Pinkney, David Bourne, Gerhard Thresher and Andrew Thresher. 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 Pinckney 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. And with X-Driftor Johnny Moore singing lead as a solo artist, under the name Johnny Darrow. And with Bobby Hendrick's Ports about for Paws a dime I'm charged about for just any old town Damn

Dam And with Bobby Hendrick's singing lead As the Sprites 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 line-up of Doc Green, Yonkey Paul, and three brothers. Papa, Nikki, 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 Valley. Nonetheless, Patterson did manage to get them signed to a small record label, Rainbow Records, where they released You Are My Inspiration in 1952. The record label sent out a thousand copies of that single to one of their distributors.

Right at the point a trucker's strike was called, and ended up having to send another thousand out by plane. That kind of thing sums up the kind of look 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,

High 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. 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 in mind, 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 line-up changes. They now consisted of Yonkey Paul, Richard Lewis, Jesse Facing, Doc Green, and Bug Eye Bailey.

They put out one record on Riviera, you came to me. Yes, I was alone. The group broke up shortly after that, and Doc Green put together a totally new lineup of the Five Crowns. That group signed to one of George Goldner's labels, G, 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. Cup 2. They spent nearly two years without making a record, with constantly shifting line-ups as people kept

leaving and rejoining. And by the time they went into a studio again, they consisted of Charlie Thomas, Doc Green, Ellsbeary 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 line-up 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 Pommas before, back in November, but as a brief recap, Pommas 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 40s. 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 Youngblood, which Lieber 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 Schumann, who did understand rock and roll, and we heard one of the results of that last week, Teenager in Love by Dion and the Belmont, which would be the start of a string of hits for them. But in 1958, that had not yet been released. Pomas's 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 Hookman. Hookman 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 officers 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 and 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, 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, 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 realize that R&B records wasn't a real label, and Pommas 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 Schumann 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 Pommas, to play on it. At first that record was completely unsuccessful. But then, rather amazing. it started to climb the chart, 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.

Pommas 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 Dr 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, Doc Green, Ellsbury Hobbes, and Benjamin Nelson, who decided that he was going to take on a stage name and call himself Ben E. King. This new line-up 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 Screaming J. Hawkins.

Hawkins used to pop out of a coffin while performing, I put a spell on you. The group was 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 Benny 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 Libre 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 Bayon, a Brazilian musical style that is based on the same treseo rhythm that a lot of New Orleans R&B is based on. If you don't remember the triceo rhythm, we talked about it a lot in episodes on Fats Domino and others,

but it's that bomb bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, rhythm. We've always been calling it the triceo, but when people talk about the drifters' music, they always follow Stoller's lead and call it the bion 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 seem to have simultaneously, as we saw last week with Buddy Holly doing the same thing. It may indeed be that Libre and Stoller had heard it doesn't matter anymore 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 40 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 Vorn, 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 Cuck, but it came out sounding like no one but King himself.

Then, as a final touch, Libre and Stoller decided to use a kettle drum 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 kettle drum using the foot pedal, so he just kept playing the same note throughout the song, even as the chords changed. When Lieber 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 cut between two stations.

It's a goddamn awful mess. Armet Ertigan 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 Lieber 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. Benny 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 line-up change for the drifters, as they got in Johnny 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. 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 Pommas had written with Mort Tumman, about his own wedding reception. We'll hear more about that, and about Libre and Stoller's apprentice Phil Specter, when we return to the Drifters in a few weeks' time. A history of rock music in 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon Backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast.

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