TEMPORAL LOBE: (AUDITORY RECEPTION/ASSOCIATION)

That seminal style was exemplified by such classics as "Honey Love," "Such a Night," and "Money Honey," recorded between 1953 and 1955. But by 1956 McPhatter had left The Drifters to pursue a solo career on Atlantic and Mercury, and the group began to founder.

In 1958, The Drifters hit their absolute nadir with "Moonlight Bay," a sing-along style recording of which Mitch Miller would be proud. (Some believe the record was a mismarked issue of a Ray Ellis Singers or Ray Conniff Singers session.) It seemed that, with this horrid recording, The Drifters were washed up, beached on their moonlight bay, with no place in the rock 'n' soul revolution thier earlier incarnations had helped create.

Hardly.

Founder McPhatter and his replacement, Johnny Moore, had come and gone, and The Drifters' tenor lead position was fluid. Current lead Bobby Hendricks sang respectably on "Drip Drop" (later a Dion hit), recorded during the all-wet "Moonlight Bay" session, but there was obviously a need for a leader.

Enter The Five Crowns, a group whose career can be traced back to 1952 and a song called "You could Be My Love," a prototype for the megahit "Sh-Boom" released on Cat, a division of Atlantic. The Crowns had released 10 or so songs, coming up with everything but hits, and it was mildly amazing that they persisted as a group for six years.

By 1958, The Crowns were Charles Thomas, tenor; Doc Green, baritone; Elsbeary Hobbs, bass and lead tenor; and Benjamin Nelson, much better known as Ben E. KIng. Their turning point came at New York's Apollo Theater, where any rhythm & blues act of consequence appeared. On the same bill, The Crowns appeared with the headlining Drifters.

"The New Jersey Ben E. King group The Five Crowns were on a show with us at the Apollo Theater, and we were The Drifters, and the were The Crowns," Bobby Hendricks recalls. "This was the last appearance of the origional Drifters per se at the Apollo theater. The Crowns were taken downtown and given the name The Drifters."

This radical realignment was made by George Treadwell, who owned the Drifters name and could hire and fire band members at will. He needed young blood and label support. "I don't think that they were interested," says Hendricks of Atlantic's attitude. "Material was hard to come by. The Drifters were all in disarray with personnel and management. There was a lull in activity. They had other things they were pushing, Ray Charles and LaVern Baker. They were just waiting for The Drifters to get their act together."

The debut session of the Drifters in March 1959 included four songs, only one of which was a hit-- the Leiber & Stoller production of " There Goes My Baby."

In 1959, everything changed, remebers Mike Stoller. "They said, 'you can't hit a home run every time at bat, don't worry about it.' But we felt there was something in that record, even though they felt it was like listening to two radio stations at the same time.

"It wasn't a great mix that they heard," Stoller adds. "Tommy Dowd, who was their engineer before he bacame a producer, [and] we remixed it. I think it was probably done on three tracks. But we did what we could."

The new Drifters existed under the unusual conditions. According to Hendricks, "None of them were under contract. That's why I call them a supermarket group. Look at Ben E. King--I was told he received $500 from the ' There Goes My Baby' recording. The big guys got the money, so Ben e. King quit. All the songs released afterward [with his vocals] were already on the shelf. He recorded a bunch, then he split."

"The Drifters were actually a hired group, owned by the managers," Stoller says. "They hired the singers and paid them a salary. The singers got no royalties--it was a strange situation. The lead singer at the time was Ben E. King. It was the first time we had worked with him. While we were rehearsing ' There Goes My Baby,' the changes led me into a melody that sounded like some orchestral pieces. We decided to use actual strings on it. This was the first rock 'n' roll production to include strings, something that would quickly be widely imitated.

"It was four fiddles and a cello," Stoller continues. "It didn't become a monstrous production. In the studio there was a timpani, but the drummer was a drummer, not a percussionist, and had never played a timpani before. Theoretically, the timpani should have been tuned and adjusted for each change, but since nobody knew how to do that, we just let it go all the way through, which makes for a rather interesting sound."

The next session, " (If You Cry) True Love, True Love" (featuring the only known recording of replacement tenor Johnny Lee Williams on lead vocal) and the more conventional " Dance With Me," sung by Ben e. King, set free a swirling sound that was realized with higher production values in later releases.

Playing guitar on this session was Billy Davis, also known as Tyran Carlo when working and cowriting with the Detroit-based Berry Gordy Jr. since The Drifters were extremely popular in Detroit, it's not surprising that their tunes influenced The Supremes and The Temptations. The Supremes, when they were known as the Primettes, sped up " There Goes My Baby" to create "Tears of Sorrow." The Tempts, then known as the Distants, borrowed freely from " Dance With Me" to invent "Answer Me."

"This Magic Moment," The Drifters' first attempt with a Latin-based sound, extended their hit string, and Davis' guitar played a very dominant part in the recording. The next session produced The Drifters' first #1, the absolutely gorgeous " Save The Last Dance For Me," which John Lennon said ws the basis for the Beatles' 1968 "Hey Jude." Save The Last Dance For Me" was the first Pomus-Shuman composition to be recorded by the group. (" I Count The Tears," recorded in the same session, was the second.) Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman had their first taste as a songwriting team with "A Teenager In Love" by Dion & The Belmonts and "Hushabye" by The Mystics, both in 1959.

Immediately after this, his fourth session as Drifters lead, King was pulled from the group; he recorded a duet with LaVern Baker as his first follow-up. Doc Pomus stayed with King to cocompose (with none other than an apprentice of Leiber & Stoller named Phil Spector) King's first big try at fame, "First Taste Of Love," a sort of inside-out "Save The Last Dance For Me". It was the flipside, a Leiber and Spector song called "Spanish Harlem," that charted for the young soloist, followed immediately by his gigantic "Stand By Me." King was replaced by Rudy Lewis, whose first session produced some classics, including the glossy " Some Kind Of Wonderful,: written by Jerry Goffin and Carole King, as well as the moody ballad " Please Stay," and the cha-cha rocker " Sweets For My Sweet." To enhance Lewis' lead, a session girl group was brought in that included Dee Dee and Dionne Warwick, Doris Troy, and Cissy Houston, later lead of The Sweet Inspirations and mother of Whitney. Shortly thereafter, Lewis sang on " When My Little Girl Is Smiling" in February 1962.

the next big hit for The Drifters was " Up On The Roof," which peaked at #5 and was their best showing since "Last Dance" in 1960. This Goffin-King song featured ex-Ravens bass Tommy Evans and Doc Green's baritone replacement, Eugene Pearson, previously the lead singer of The Embers and The Rivileers, who'd had a major local hit with "A Thousand Stars" in 1955.

"On Broadway" charted next for The Drifters, hitting #9. The song, by Leiber & Stoller with Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann, was supposedly first written for (and actually recorded by) the girl group The cookies, who had hits like "Chains" in 1962 and who backed up Little Eva on "The Loco-Motion."

Legend has it that the guitar backing for " On Broadway" was supplied by Phil Spector, and according to Mike Stoller, the legend is correct. "He was quite a good guitar player," Stoller recalls. "Later on, after he'd gone on his own with his own label [Philles], we bumped into him on the street and asked him to come by and sit in on something we were doing with The Drifters. He played this guitar solo for ' On Broadway.'"

"I'll Take You Home," a sort of answer to " Save the Last Dance For Me," was Rudy Lewis' last Drifters session, but on this song the lead tenor was Johnny Moore, the same singer who had replaced Clyde McPhatter as lead in 1956. The song charted at #25, a surprisingly good showing.

For "Under the Boardwalk," Lewis was scheduled to take lead duties. He died suddenly, supposedly on the very morning of the session, and was replaced by Johnny Moore. The song was also the first Bert Berns production with the group. Berns had an impressive track record with Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters, The Isley Brothers, The Jarmels, and, later, various acts for the Bang label including the #1 "Hang On Sloopy" by the McCoys in 1965. In " Under The Boardwalk," the lyric "We'll be making some love" met with some resistance and was replaced by the more innocuous "We'll be having some fun."

A consistent lineup appeared on the group's final two hits, both in 1964: "Saturday Night At The Movies," (#18) and "I've Got Sand In My Shoes," a #33 answer to Under The Boardwalk"

The Drifters were clearly two distinct vocal groupls, the one that endured between 1953 and 1958, and the one that lasted from 1959 through the end of the 1960s. This latter group, with several of their best leads and a varied mix of instumentation and production approaches, created a fascinating library of sound, and, more important, hits. More than 30 of their recordings hit the Top 100, and 11 reached the Top 20--these songs truly rank among the very best of The Drifters.