The Heart of Rock and Soul by Dave Marsh

30 THERE GOES MY BABY, The Drifters Produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller; written by Benjamin Nelson, Lover Patterson, and George Treadwell Atlantic 2025 1959 Billboard: #2

In the best scene of American Not Wax, Floyd Mutrux's 1978 film biography of Alan Freed, Tim McIntire's Freed, sitting in the studio doing his show, gets a disturbing phone call from his father back in . When it's over Freed hangs his head in his hands. The engineer reminds him from the other room that it's time for another record. Freed says nothing, just reaches over and cues one up. As it begins playing, he speaks over its intro. "This is Alan Freed and I love you," he says in a voice husky and mysterious. "You know what -- it's raining in Akron, Ohio .., but it's a beautiful night in . These are the Drifters, and 'There Goes My Baby. ' " He reaches over and turns the record up as loud as it'll go. Suddenly, swirling strings deliver Ben E. King's nasal voice crying, "There goes my baby, movin' on down the line." It's a moment meant to convince you that Freed loves the music not because it's made him rich and famous but because it satisfies something within him. And it succeeds. Not only Freed but "There Goes My Baby" deserves to be enshrined, for the moment when those strings entered, took an irrevocable step toward soul music. This next step in the evolution of record-making made it even more decisively a producer's music, concocted in the studio without much reference to what happened on stage or in doo-wop hallways with perfect echoes. "We trying to create some kind of collage," Jerry Leiber once said. "We were experimenting because the things that were planned for the date were falling apart . . . Stanley [Applebaum, the arranger] wrote something that sounded like some Caucasian take-off and we had this Latin beat going on this out-of-tune tympani and the Drifters were singing something in another key but the total effect-there was something magnificent about it." After it became a hit, he said, "I'd be listening to the radio sometimes and hear it and I was convinced it sounded like two stations playing one thing." Leiber is too modest. For what the arrangement really brought forward, by forcing King (in his debut as the Drifters' lead voice) to sing in a key well above his natural range and underpinning the result with SO much pseudo-Tchaikovsky, was an air of abject hopelessness - the same kind of frustrated defeat that Alan Freed might have felt after.talking to his father. The magnificence, I suppose, comes because we've now had thirty years to understand that the song sounds the same on either end of the wire.

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