Review: The Drifters - Rockin' & Driftin' (1958)

Tracks: 1) Moonlight Bay; 2) Ruby Baby; 3) Drip Drop; 4) I Gotta Get Myself A Woman; 5) Fools Fall In Love; 6) Hypnotized; 7) Yodee Yakee; 8) I Know; 9) Soldier Of Fortune; 10) Drifting Away From You; 11) Your Promise To Be Mine; 12) It Was A Tear; 13) Adorable; 14) Steamboat.

REVIEW

By late 1958, when Atlantic finally deemed it suitable to scrape together another chunk of the Drifters’ singles output and put it on another LP, the band had gone through an entire series of lineup changes, fully justifying their ill-given name as well as making this LP, with its chronologically shuffled sequencing, a confusing mess. Clyde McPhatter, officially drafted into the Army in early 1954, completely parted ways with them by the end of that year, ‘What’cha Gonna Do’ being his last recording with the band; his first replacement in the lead vocal position was former supporting tenor David Baughan, but he proved to be hard to work with, and did not get the chance to record anything during his brief tenure.

Enter Johnny Moore, a completely new recruit taken over from the Hornets, a minor vocal band from Cleveland of more or less no importance. This is where things once again started cooking: to reinforce the Drifters as a leading force in vocal-heavy pop, Atlantic selected ‘Adorable’, a minor hit for the L.A. doo-wop group The Colts, and (probably) gave Johnny Moore instructions to blow that thing sky-high. Which he did: comparison with the original shows that the song works much better in tenor than in baritone form, and, most importantly, Moore showed that he could carry the classic Drifters’ soulful-romantic spirit with just as much confidence as McPhatter. Perhaps the ritualistic doo-wop chanting of "adorable-dorable-dorable-dorable baby" has not truly survived its epoch, but Moore’s beautiful upscale flourish of "and soon — you’ll be mine — alone — you adorable ONE!.." is so perfectly executed that it can probably survive a nuclear winter, if need be. The B-side to the single, Buddy Lucas’ ‘Steamboat’, is less interesting: a bluesy R&B tune that sounds like a cross between ‘Money Honey’ and a generic Jimmy Reed blues, probably included to show that the new band could handle «grittier» material just as well as it could continue the sentimental tradition. It certainly could, but it’s just one of those been-there, done-that moments which does not have the humor, catchiness, or originality of ‘Money Honey’.

For their next move, Atlantic turned to the genius of Leiber and Stoller, who gave the band ‘Ruby Baby’, a fairly straight and simple number devoid of their usual humor (this, after all, was not the Coasters), but still injected with their usual bouncy energy and catchiness. Although Moore also does a great job here (note especially the exuberant whoa-oh-oh’s, whose function is to reroute the hero from passive to active mode in the blink of an eye), the main focus is on group harmonies — the smooth integration between Moore’s lead, tenor support, and baritone corner-turns. With the song’s sprightly tempo, it is not the easiest job in the world to keep this complex system of vocal cogs in ideal motion, but this is what the Drifters did better than almost anybody at the time. Again, the B-side is a little inferior — the slow torch ballad ‘Your Promise To Be Mine’, with an impeccable Moore vocal but no particularly distinctive features otherwise.

Things went on rollin’ steady in early ’57, when Leiber and Stoller upped their antes and came out with ‘Fools Fall In Love’, an even more sentimental tune than ‘Ruby Baby’ but also an even faster one, and also featuring cleaner and sharper production — where the Drifters sounded somewhat muffled earlier, as if some invisible pillow separated them from us listeners, ‘Fools Fall In Love’ finally boasts ideal clarity of sound, giving Johnny’s "...shake the hand of a brand new fool!" refrain all the ironic jubilance it deserves. (My favorite part of the song, though, is the sax flourish bringing it to its abrupt end — such a tasty, kick-ass finale, and you won’t find it on the Elvis cover, for that matter).

All of these singles sold well (‘Adorable’ even went to #1 on the R&B charts), but fortunes turned sour sometime in mid-’57. ‘Hypnotized’ was actually a cool pop song (written by Norman Petty, Buddy Holly’s resident songwriter, so you can bet your life it would at least be bouncy and catchy), but it did not make great use of the band’s vocal powers, and maybe even sounded a bit too comical and vaudevillian for the fans. Worse, the follow-up was ‘Yodee Yakee’, an even faster and an even more comical tune — ironically, it came out several months before the Coasters’ ‘Yakety Yak’, yet while the latter became a national smash, the former went completely unnoticed. Apparently, nobody wanted to see the Drifters as a comedy outfit, which is perfectly understandable, given their previous reputation, and perfectly baffling from the point of view of whatever the hell those strange people at Atlantic were thinking. (And I like ‘Yodee Yakee’, but I sure as hell wouldn’t guess to ever associate it with the Drifters).

The situation worsened even further when Johnny Moore had to follow in McPhatter’s steps — Uncle Sam needed more fresh meat for active duty — and was replaced by Bobby Hendricks, who, ironically, just a year before was the lead singer in the Flyers, a band co-founded by him with ex-Drifter Bill Pinkney, who had quit the band due to the low salary issue. The label turned to Leiber and Stoller again in search of salvation, who gave them ‘Drip Drop’ — honestly, not one of their high­lights, merely a piece of standard 12-bar blues given a bit of extra bounce and crowned with a questionable hook whose main point is to find as many closed syllables with the coda of -ip to rhyme with each other ("tip, tip, tip... hip, hip, hip... lip, lip, lip... slip, slip, slip..." etc.). In addition, the B-side to that single was ‘Moonlight Bay’. You know you’re in serious trouble when you have nothing better than ‘Moonlight Bay’ to give to your best vocal group for a B-side.

And this is precisely where we close the page on this era of the Drifters, with the simply, but aptly titled Rockin’ & Driftin’ putting together all that stuff, padding the record out with a couple extra outtakes, and giving it out to the public in order to remind us all that anybody can have their good days and their bad days. I am a little stumped about why the opening track should have been ‘Moonlight Bay’ (couldn’t they have left it for last, like a ‘Her Majesty’-type joke or something?), but other than that, well, it’s just a fairly loyal compilation of the band’s 1955–1958 material. (You might note, by the way, just how little stuff those Atlantic bands were recording — much to Ertegun’s honor, he was not in favor of having his artists re-record precisely the same formula every 30 days or so, preferring to give them more time to come up with fresh solutions, though, as you can see here, it did not always work so well, either).

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