Following on from the previous post about Ben E King touring the UK with Johnny Moore in the eighties, here is a more recent example of Drifters Reunited - come to think of it, there are so many ex-members it's surprising there isn't a dedicated website of that name.
This is a clip from a 2007 PBS special in which Ben E King once again gets to sing Stand By Me with a version of the Drifters, this time with each singer grabbing a piece of the action. King sings first, then Charlie Thomas, with whom he goes way back: Thomas was a fellow member of the Five Crowns, the group hired en masse in 1958 to replace the existing Drifters (Clyde McPhatter had left some years earlier).
The unfortunate Thomas got the studio equivalent of stage fright when the new Drifters went in to record and couldn't sing King's composition There Goes My Baby, thus handing his bandmate a golden opportunity when Leiber and Stoller told Benny to sing lead instead. I have read, incidentally, that King intended to go on tour with Charlie Thomas's Drifters in recent years but I don't know if that ever happened.
Next up is Bobby Hendricks, who I think was a member of the group given their marching orders - he sang lead on Drip Drop in 1958, just before the changeover - followed by Bill Pinkney, making his last ever television appearance, not long before his death. Pinkney was in the very first group with Clyde McPhatter, so quite a range is covered in those four men.
I don't propose to go into the long and tangled history of the various groups calling themselves the Drifters at one time or another; the reader is guided towards Bill Millar's book The Drifters, though it is long out of date as far as more recent personnel goes. What interests me most about this clip is the thought that King must have been delighted not only to be reunited with so many singers from the group from whom he got and to whom he gave so much but also to be singing the song originally intended for the Drifters with so many past members.
More than two decades on, it's a kind of bookend to the 1985 show with Johnny Moore's "Yeah!" of encouragement as King launches into Stand By Me. By 2007 it's understandable that not everyone may be at full vocal strength but their appearance together melts the heart nevertheless: testament to the enduring power of a song which Ben E King was obliged to sing on his own almost half a century earlier.
Related Posts:
Previous post about Ben E King on British TV with Johnny Moore here.
Post about Stand By Me here.
No comments:
Post a Comment