A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 94: “Stand By Me”, by Ben E. King

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

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…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs by Andrew Hick. Episode 94. Stand by Me. By Benny King. 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 Tharp, that involves the drifters, Libre and Stoller, and Foller, and Foller. Phil Spector, and which marks the high point of the crossover from gospel to pop audiences that

have been started by Ray Charles. We're going to look at Stand By Me, by Benny King. When we left the drifters, they'd hit a legal problem. When the contract for the individual members had been sold to George Treadwell, the owner of the drifters, Drifters' name, Benny 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 sounder-like singer,

Johnny 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. Libre 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 Libre and Stoller increasingly relied on songs by other writers, and one team they particularly relied on was Pommas and Schumann. You'll remember we've talked about them in association with both the Drifters and Libre and Stoller previously, and that they'd been the ones who'd discovered the Benny King lineup of the drifters. Doc Pommas was one of the great R&B songwriters of the 50s, but by 1960 he and Mort Schumann, who was 13 years younger than him, had written a whole string of hits for white performers like Fabian, Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon and Bobby Darren. A typical example of the stuff they were writing was

two fools for Frankie Avalon. 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 33, and which had been the only drifter single on which Williams had taken a lead vocal, and now they wrote a song for King to sing, This Magic Moment. That made number 16 on the pop charts, but the next song they wrote for the group was a much bigger success,

and a far more personal song. Pommas 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, Pomas 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 Schumann then put to music with a vaguely Latin feel, like many of the drifter's recent hits. The result was a number one record, and one of the old-time classic songs of the rock and roll era. You the eye, let them hold you tight. You can smile, every smile for the man to held your hand beneath the palmer light.

But don't forget who's taking you home and in whose arms you're going to be. So, darling, save the last dance for me. That song has gone 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 Nilson and Bruce Willis, among many others. It would be the drifters only number one on the pop charts, and it was also Benny 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 Libre and Stoller, and which put out very different records from Atlantic. But either way, the result was that Benny 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 Laverne Baker. But the third was something else. At this point, as a favourite of their old friend Lester Sill, Lieber and Stoller were mentoring a kit that Sil thought had Fomis, named Phil Specter,

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 Lieber, 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. Lieber 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 Specter, No, I write with Mike Stoller, to which Spector would reply, well, he can write with us too. Lieber explained to him that that wasn't how things worked,

and that if there was any collaboration, it would be Libre and Stoller letting Spector write with them, not Spector graciously allowing Stoller to write with him and Lieber. Spector said that that was what he had meant, of course. Libre 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 Richie 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, Lieber, Stoller and Specter played the song to Jerry Wexler and Armate Ertigan as a trio, with Stoller on piano, Spector on guitar, and Lieber 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. 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, for which they had turned down. King had brought in the basic idea for the song, and Lieber had helped him finish off the lyric, while Stoller had helped with the music.

The resulting songwriting credit gave 50% of the royalties to King, and 25% each to Libra 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 Reverend Charles Albert Tindley, which had been recorded by various people, including Sister Rosetta Tharp. But the love of Jesus is in my soul. And the proximate influence for the song

was a song that Sam Cuck had written for his old group, The Soul Sturrers, the year before, which had in turn been inspired by Tendley's song. The lead vocal on the Soul Sturrers record was by Johnny Taylor, a friend of Cooks, who had replaced Cook in his first group, The Highway Cucs, and then replaced him in his second. one, because he sounded exactly like Cook. King idolized Cook, and was inspired by that record to come up with his own variant on the song. Working with Libre 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 code sequence they used was a simple adaptation of the standard doo-wop chord changes. On a normal do-wop song, the chords would go 1, minus 6th, 4th, 5th, with each chord taking up the same amount of time, like this. Stoller took those changes and made the 1 and minus 6th last two bars each. Then had the 4 and 5 chords both last a bar, and then go to 2 more bars of the one chord. That bar of four, bar of five, two bars of one thing, is almost what you get at the end of a 12 bar blues, except there you go, five, four, one, one, rather than four, five, one. So to compare, here's the end of a 12 bar blues. And here's what Stoller did again.

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. In later years, Lieber 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 baseline is largely just following the root notes of the chord sequence that Stoller had written, but it's one of the most immediately recognizable pieces of music of the early 60s. 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 have been reworking gospel ideas into secular ones for years. We've already looked at Ray Charles doing this. and at Sam Cuck, 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 candies, sweet and honey too, does not not another quite quite as sweet as you, which were the lyrics Sam Cook wrote when he turned a song about how God is wonderful into one about how his girl is lovable. This new type of more gospel-inflicted 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 Amour, which made number 19, and then his next two records topped out at 66 and 56. He did get back in the pop top 20, with a song co-written by his wife and Armet Ertigan, don't play that song, You Lied, which reached number 11 and became an R&B standard.

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 Libra and Stoller,

managed to reach number 29. 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? but even teaming up with Solomon Burke, Don Covey, Joe Tex and Arthur Conley as the Soul clan didn't help him kickstart his recording career.

He asked to be let go from his contract with Atlantic in 1969 and spent a few years in the early 70s 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, 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. That was later re-released as by The Implacables, 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 Ellsbury 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 50s.

The new lineup, Rudy Lewis, Charlie Thomas, Doc 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. But then Doc 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, Benny 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 Draper's released one single that didn't do particularly well. The new drifters' line-up without Doc Green recorded on Broadway, a song that Libra and Stoller had co-written with the Brill Building team of Man and Wyle. The guitar on the record was by Phil Specter. He was by that point a successful producer,

but Libra and Stoller had bumped into him on the way to the session and invited him to sit in. 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.

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 50s and had just left the Draper's, 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 Lieber and Stoller. Libra 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 drifter's backing track and got Jay and the Americans, a white group, to record new vocals, turning. it into a straightforward bit of boosterism.

Tragedy struck on the day the drifters recorded what would be their last US top ten hit, the 21st 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 have been scheduled, including one called, I Don't Want to Go On Without You, which took on a new meaning of the circumstances.

But the hit from the session was Under the Boardwalk, with lead vocals from Moore. This version of the group, Johnny Moore, Charlie Thomas, Jean Pearson, and Johnny Ten, 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 20 with Saturday Night at the movies. There were several more line-up 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 drifter's 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 50s lineups, but which was now a revolving door group based around Bill Pinckney, the bass singer of the Clyde McVatter lineup, and stayed that way until Pinckney's death in 2007. Then there was a version of the drifters that consisted of Doc Green, Charlie Thomas and Ellsbeary Hobbs, the people who had been in Benny 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 line-up of the drifters are with him. And then there was a UK-based group, managed by Fay Treadwell, with Johnny Moore as lead singer. That group scored big UK hits when they moved to the UK in 1972, with re-releases of mid-60s 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 top 10 in 1972, and Moore's drifters would have nine more top 10 hits with new material in the UK between 1973 and 76. And Benny King, meanwhile, had signed again to Atlantic, and had a one-off

top 10 hit with Supernatural Thing in 1975. But other than that, he continued to have far less chart success than his vocal tarns deserved, and in the 80s 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 Morrill line-up 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 re-entered the top 10, 25 years after its initial success, and made number 1 in the UK. As a result, King became the first person to have hit the top 10 in the US in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. A remarkable record for someone who had had relatively few hits.

A greatest hits collection of King's records made the top 20 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 Libre 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 50s and 60s and in the UK in the 70s. roughly 80% of records released as by The Drifters had had more 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 Fay 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, 34 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. Lieber 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 15, 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 20th century popular music. And Benny King, who was, other than Clyde MacFatter,

the only member of the drifters to ever break away and become a solo success, spent the last 29 years of his life touring as a solo artist after 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.

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