Raw footage of Ben E King interview

As mentioned in the previous post, Brent Wilson contacted Ben E King for the doo wop documentary Streetlight Harmonies but the singer died before an interview could be set up.

It's a great pity, in more than one sense. Wilson seems to have taken considerable pains to gain the trust of the artists who took part, and even though contributions were heavily edited in the final version the raw footage must have been quite extensive if the case of Vito Picone of the Elegants is anything to go by. According to a virtual Q&A Picone was "in the chair" for a straight six hours before someone realised it might be time to break for a meal.

 
We can only speculate about how much Mr Wilson might have been able to draw out of Ben E King but the good news is that there is at least one fairly substantial interview out there. In 1995 King was invited to talk about his early days for an episode of the documentary series Dancing in the Street aka Rock & Roll, coproduced by the BBC and WGBH, and the raw footage, a little over fifty minutes' worth, is now available on youtube.

The episode is called In the Groove (Be My Baby in the UK), and its focus is on "the years between Elvis and the Beatles, when the hit single became an intricately crafted work of art, and producers, songwriters and musicians created studio magic." I saw the original show but at this distance can only remember the moment he sings an acapella snatch of Stand By Me; I can't say how much of the interview was used.

But it's an undoubted pleasure to hear him in this unedited form: his charm and humility, attested to by so many, are evident throughout, and the unhurried pace allows him to flesh out his reminiscences with the kind of detail which the usual hurried promotional radio or TV appearance wouldn't permit.

For example, some readers may already know the story about none of his fellow Drifters backing him up in George Treadwell's office when he dared to ask for a pay rise - but here's what happened immediately afterwards:

I walked out the door. I stood on the side because it's a glass door there and I stood on the side so they wouldn't see a shadow of me or anything and nobody followed. I was out there for about fifteen or twenty minutes waiting. No one came out.

There is a happy ending, as we all know, but I didn't realise how much this was down to one person: Lover Patterson, the man who originally hired him for the Five Crowns, the group which became the Mark II Drifters. Patterson - "my first and last best friend in this whole wide world" - offered faithful support, even pawning his own clothes when Benny, faced with eviction, was on the verge of giving up the business and getting a "proper" job:

That was the first person that had convinced me that I was worth something and that's how I made up my mind I'd stay in it, for him more than for myself.

I assume that the person doing the interviewing is Elizabeth Deane, the series' producer in the US. Echoing his friend Charlie Thomas's remarks in Streetlight Harmonies, King essays a little gentlemanly flirtation when he talks about his main motivation for joining a streetcorner group but note Ms. Deane's firm hand  on the tiller (if she is indeed the one conducting the interview):

Ben E King:

See, the whole thing about doo wop wasn't just singing, it was to get girls. You see if you sound good, see, it's like - don't frown! - if you sound good, girls follow. Nothing to do with you personally. That's how it happened then. I was with a bunch of guys out of 118th Street and Eighth Avenue, so we would challenge guys all up and down that avenue. And girls found out that we were like good. And they would follow. And of course, whatever neighborhood we'd go to the girls in that neighborhood will become impressed because we're bringing girls with us. Girls are amazing, I think. [laughs]

Interviewer:

In some ways. Now can you tell us how you first came to be a Drifter?

I'm not going to provide a complete transcript of the interview here but will pick out a few more highlights to whet your appetite. Please note these have all been heavily trimmed as he often takes a practice run at a thought in a way which doesn't read so well on the page, so you will need to watch the video for the full effect.

The theme of the episode means that certain recordings are discussed at length. His recounting of the making of There Goes My Baby omits the famous detail of Jerry Wexler spitting out his tuna sandwich in disgust when he heard it - too indelicate? - but there's a lot to learn here even so. He is emphatic throughout about just how much he owes to the guidance of Leiber and Stoller: 

I wrote the song but their whole arrangement and concept has nothing to do with what I actually heard when I first wrote it. [The] only thing I owned about the song is the lyrics 'cause their arrangement was completely left field; it has nothing to do with gospel at all the way they arranged it. There was just so much going on [in the studio] but I just could not complain because it was going well and it sounded strange but it felt right.

There Goes My Baby was, he says, based on Dee Clark's Nobody But You, and he sings a few bars of both intros. This suggests that he may have had something more delicate and pop-oriented in mind for the song's arrangement, perhaps along the lines of his idol Sam Cooke's recordings for Keen.

In his book Chicago Soul Robert Pruter describes Nobody But You as "a stylistic breakthrough" for Clark, formerly of the Kool Gents, addding that:

An interesting coloration of a prominent flute and other approaches that gave the record a pop flavor set a pattern for later releases.

What's interesting about this is that Clark has a high tenor voice. It has been noted by others that King sings There Goes My Baby above his normal range, and the assumption is that he was forced into it. But if he had Dee Clark in mind as an inspiration for the song perhaps that explains why he immediately felt so comfortable singing it, despite being taken aback by the arrangement, as  he tells the interviewer:

When I got to Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller they went to the kettle drums, doom, doom, da dah da da dahhh, I said, "Oh my God, what do I do with this thing here?" But they said, "Okay, it's a four bar intro." And I didn't know nothing about counting bars and they showed me ... I have all these strings getting ready to do bits and pieces and the kettle drum's going. So I was a bit off but I knew once I started singing, it was their problem to fix [laughs], it wasn't mine.

Surely enough, I counted four bars and start singing - and it was like I imagine a mother feels when she's rocking her baby. Everything was so comfortable and easy and sweet. The song went straight down, no problems.

And they were brilliant, Jerry and Mike: as people, they were warm, they knew how to handle a singer, how to make you feel comfortable. And I knew something was happening with the music because of them. They were certain of what they wanted to do with this new sound that they were making. It just came out of the box and went straight up without anybody having to pump it or push it at all.

It's also worth mentioning that according to Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks King had been hired as second tenor/baritone in the Five Crowns, so while he may have been singing higher than normal on There Goes My Baby the stretch was not all that great.

Here he is on Save the Last Dance For Me, and the Latin rhythms Leiber and Stoller favoured:

He [Doc Pomus] gave me more than lyrics. He gave me a reason why the song was born. Because I knew this was actually from the experience that Doc himself had felt and this was very personal, I just closed my eyes in front of the microphone and I could see him watching his wife as she was dancing and I could sing the song because now the whole complete picture of the song and the reason it was written was all in my head.

I was comfortable with the Latin arrangements [because] I was raised 116th Street and 8th Avenue; only five blocks to the East was the East Side, which a lot of Hispanics were there. And that's where I used to go a lot to pick up things for my dad. So the music of that I was very familiar with. And I enjoyed the music rhythmically. So when Jerry and Mike was doing those arrangements I wasn't uncomfortable. 

My only problem was to make sure that I could sing that. It was a far cry from good gospel to singing, you know:

You can dance
Every dance with the guy
Who will give you the eye,
Let him hold you tight ...

That's a lot. In church you don't do all that movement with the mouth, you go from the heart and you slow yourself down and you get involved with people. But here my mouth became an instrument - "So darling save the last chance for me" - my mouth is completely going crazy here. Most black singers like to slow the words down: we're not interested in your ears, we just want to go directly to your heart.

Once Jerry and Mike got a hold of me they changed my whole attitude about the feeling of music and I can not only get into people's heads and hearts with the words, but I can also deliver it and make them feel what I'm saying, which I thought I'd never be able to do. It was because of them and their faith in me I was able to more or less do the both things: rhythmically and feeling.

Jerry Leiber and myself would sit down at the piano for hours and hours and hours and we would go through this song. I'm always trying to get him to slow things and he said, "It won't fit." We get into the studio, after fighting with him and losing, and he'll get the band together and have a run-through. And after I get there and I hear the run-through I have to say he's right.

So after about the third or fourth time of him and I fighting each other - not really loudly, just "What's your opinion?" kind of thing - I learned that in most cases he was right because he was using my voice as an instrument. It was up to me to find the feeling in what I was doing, and that's one of the things I've always credited him for: my learning how to approach different songs yet not losing the feeling of the song and putting my own feelings in it to deliver to the people. He taught me one great lesson: if you just concentrate on what you're doing and allow yourself to actually enjoy and let your feelings come out, whatever the tempos, whatever the rhythms, whatever the songs, nine out of ten times it'll work. And I've taken that lesson with me, oh, to thousands of studios.

Given the convoluted lyrics of Spanish Harlem he had a similar reaction:

I said, you gotta be joking. I would look at them like they was absolutely mad but, yet and still, once I would do it with the band, with the strings, it all made sense. And whatever I was feeling when I'd sing - "Nearer my God to Thee" - or anything else in church - I can actually find the same feeling when I'm doin' "There is a rose in Spanish Harlem."

And they taught me that it's not what you're singing, it's how you're feeling when you're singing it. And I don't care what studio I'm in, I don't care what producers is producing it and I don't care what song it is because they've taught me those things I feel so protected wherever I go as far as music.

In talking about Stand By Me, as in many other interviews, he repeats the assertion that recording it was an afterthought during some leftover time in a session, and that it was therefore a head arrangement. If you have read an earlier post about the song (link below) you will know that that has been vigorously dismissed by Leiber and Stoller as "The figment of someone's imagination", though it's certainly a romantic idea. They told me directly, during a 2001 Q&A in London, that everything had been written out beforehand for every instrument.

The song was originally offered to the Drifters, despite what had passed between them:

We had kind of gotten our friendship back in gear. And I told them about this song that I wrote. And I took it down to Charlie Thomas's place and rehearsed it with the guys. They loved the song. And they said, "Look, we have to take it down to George [Treadwell] and we have to do it for him."

So they took the song,  along with myself, we all went down to George's office and here I am, standing in there again that I thought I'd never do, and the guys were singing the song. And after it was over he lifted up his head and he looked at me he said: "Benny, it's not a bad song but we don't need it." So I took the song, I tucked it under my arm and left the office for the last time. 

If you have already seen Streetlight Harmonies you will be aware of the significance of that mention of Charlie Thomas: he sings Stand By Me at the end of the documentary. Sad to think that the film might have offered a chance to see two members of the Five Crowns singing together almost sixty years on.

As others do in Streetlight Harmonies - and as Bobby Jay does in the earlier doo wop documentary Life Could Be a Dream - King acknowledges the destructive force of the Beatles' arrival in America as far as his kind of music was concerned:

There was a bit of jealousy because we were cut off at a time, we was just getting ready to become stronger than strong ourselves. All the signs were there that the music that was being created right here at home was going to be tremendously big. And then all of a sudden these kids came along and stopped all that. And it was a strong pill to swallow. 

But of course Ben E King endured and did whatever gigs he had to do. By the early eighties, as described in Gerri Hirshey's Nowhere to Run, he was still "making a nice living", but finding audiences in hotel ballrooms and dinner theatres "very, very hard to reach". Eventually, however, he came back to prominence when the film Stand By Me, which used his original recording of the song, helped make it a hit again twenty five years on.

Here, then, is that full interview for Rock & Roll/Dancing in the Street, conducted in 1995, ten years into his renaissance:





And to conclude, here is the version of Stand By Me from Streetlight Harmonies, as sung by Charlie Thomas, LaLa Brooks of the Crystals and  Vito Picone with support from Straight No Chaser. I have to say I'm not sure how much I actually like this, but its symbolic power is undoubtedly important.






Postscript:


Despite the date attributed to the youtube clip below, this is the interview material as edited for Rock & Roll, the American version of the series, featuring a few interjections from Leiber and Stoller and Atlantic engineer Tom Dowd along the way. (It's actually two Kingcentric segments of the programme joined together, as discussion of the Beatles comes later.)





It's very well assembled - but it's not quite the same as the edit of the equivalent episode in the British version, Dancing in the Street.

You may have noticed that in the above clip Ben E King's reference to using doo wop as a means of getting girls did not make the cut. But it's present in the UK version. It can't have been edited out for time reasons because the sequence is not shorter - you get exactly the same amount of time hearing the group sing, just with less of Ben E King's voiceover. You can compare the UK version here.

I contacted Hugh Thomson, the BBC producer, who explained that the BBC produced half the programmes and WGBH the other half (including the episode with Ben E King) "then we each versioned the other's programmes for our own territories so in effect ended up with two rather different series."

In an acceptance speech by Elizabeth Deane and Hugh Thomson - the series won a Peabody award - the former mentions several people involved in the two clips the audience has just seen, so it may be that one of those acknowledged was the interviewer. You can see it here.

Incidentally, the 2001 Leiber and Stoller Q&A I mentioned took place at the NFT in London after the screening of another documentary, this one centred on them, in a series called The Songwriters, about various Brill Building. I don't know whether the raw footage for that has been made available anywhere, but King also features and is similarly charming, talking about their songs as being like different suits to don, each one pleasing in its own way.




Related posts and links:

For those wanting to hear King and Thomas together, this post features a clip of them performing Stand By Me with other ex-Drifters in 2007.

Most of what I have written about Ben E King can be found in a single post, here. It includes a detailed account of the origins of Stand By Me.

My review of Streetlight Harmonies is here.

The publisher's page about Robert Pruter's Chicago Soul is here. 

Mr Pruter also wrote Doo Wop: The Chicago Scene, which was indispensable for my series about the Flamingos' early recordings; find a guide to these posts here.

Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks page on Ben E King is here. 

This post was updated on 28/5/20 to include the new information in the postscript.