Was "Yakety Yak" written before you guys went to New York or after.

No, it was written in New York.

It was written in my, I had a beautiful duplex apartment in the Village, right off of the park. And um, Mike came over to work with me there. And uh, we, we wrote it there. But I wanted to address myself to something else. I think I may have lost it.

Well, I'll tell them what he was going to address himself to, which was, um, the notion, as some people have wondered, whether there was a conscious transition from the kind of street language and street feel in the Coasters stuff that we did in LA, as opposed to the stuff we did, we started doing in New York, such as "Yakety Yak" and the answer simply is it's unconscious. I mean in the same way that we don't know where ideas flow from unless they're production numbers. Uh, it just comes out. And in this particular case it was very spontaneous. We were sitting in Jerry's apartment off of Washington Square. And I started playing this funny kind of beat and I stopped and he yelled out, take out the papers and the trash, and I yelled out, or you don't get no spending cash. And then we started writing the song and it, uh, it wrote itself pretty much within about 20 minutes.

You know, I'll tell you another clue, and you can say what it is, it seems to be getting in a more light cast to the material. The key, they key to understanding all the Coasters material, I think, and I haven't really thought, you know, I haven't thought too long on this, it just, it just hit me now after all these thousands of interviews about material --

And thousands of years.

And thousands of years. Uh, that, um, talking about whether it's rock 'n' roll or blues or R and B oriented, you know, and where did the, when did the transition come in or whatever. Uh, all of their material is somehow, no matter what it is, is somehow poking fun at an idea. In other words, "Yakety Yak" is poking fun at middle class American attitudes about raising children. Uh, right? Um, "Little Egypt" is poking fun at a guy going into a carnival, who goes in like every other rube and buys a seat to see some girl take her clothes off, right? And that, that's a parody of a kind of, you know, American culture.

"Along Came Jones" is a takeoff on television and --

And white American heroes.

And its constant, constant repetition of the same material.

Material, and, and all white American heroes. The original dummy, the dummy lyrics for "Along Came Jones" was and he was wearing a white hat, and he was riding a white horse. And another voice comes in and says, of course, of course, of course. So, you know, this, almost all these songs were about that. And you know, "Shopping For Clothes" is again, is like, is burlesque. You know, it's vaudeville. It's about, it's Charlie Chaplin black going into a department store and being told he doesn't have credit enough to buy anything, you know? That's the key to that. Now if some of them move one way, a little bit more to the left, or a little bit more to the right. Or some seem a little bit more white or a little bit more black, I think that's like unconscious. The main thing is that they're always about, they're always comedy, it's always vaudeville, and it's always some kind of social commentary.

Were you coming up in some of these cases with the idea of poking fun at this and that before you wrote the songs, or did this mostly emerge after you ______.

No, it happened simultaneously. It just, it grew that way, it came out that way.

It was simultaneously.

It was the attitude that we had.

What about the interaction with the Coasters in terms of when the material started getting into some of those like little racial attitudes, when it cut a little more close to the bone, was the group ever reluctant to --

We have songs in the trunk, we have songs, we wrote a song for them called "Colored Folks." [sings] Colored folks don't act like colored folks, colored folks don't talk like colored folks no more. Colored folks don't walk the way they did before. Billy Guy said, they're going to lynch us in Ricksburg. You know, they're gonna, man, and they looked at each other and Carl would look at him and then Dub would look up and they would look at me and they would look at me like, ha ha ha, these two white cats are crazy. We are not going to sing that song. We are not going to sing that song. You think it's funny? You think it's great? You want to be political? You want to make comments. You sing them. Yeah, of course they had attitudes. If they thought we were going to far, they would stop us.

They would let us know.

Yeah, but when we hit on something that was really in the ballpark, which was like theater, fun, universal, they were the best. And they were the easiest to work, some of our best days were in rehearsal.

Oh, it was the most fun of all. You know, they used to take a song after the, I mean we would be falling around on the floor laughing while we were rehearsing. And then when we finished the record they would go out on the road to different theaters and different clubs where they performed and when they came back in to learn new songs, they would perform for us, they would show us how they choreographed and performed these numbers, and it was a party, man, we always had a ball.

The difference, the major difference, and then it changes again, the change you brought in is like the second change or the third change. The first change is that it went from small cottage industry, which is like Aladdin, Modern, Specialty, you know, all the small labels.

Even Atlantic in New York. Which wasn't a family as such.

And King. The small that, that each, if you listen carefully, even though you have a roster of, you know, one label might have five, and another label might have 25 artists, they all had their own very discernible style. You know? The, King Records sounded like that because what's his name --

Henry Glover.

Henry Glover was the A and R man. And Specialty Records sounded like that.

And Bumps Blackwell.

Bumps Blackwell was in there. And Maxwell Davis was with Modern and Aladdin and their records sounded like that. And all these styles by the way we were expert at copying.

But when we did and ultimately started Spark Records, they all sounded, they had their own sound too.

Yeah, yeah. It was very interesting, you know, it's almost like, it was almost like regional, we all, we all agreed, even though we loved this record on Atlantic and we loved that record on Aladdin that the most exciting, the most exciting record label was Chess. We loved Chess because Chess for us was authentic, it was pipeline authentic, and they still held on. The other labels were like, became urbanized and slick and professional and good. But not the same.

Did you have a sense of yourselves as being sort of younger hipsters sort of coming along in a generation and supplanting some of the squares or was that always a very hip business even in the sort of songwriting aspect.

Absolutely. The old guys, the old guys are still smarter than anybody else and funnier. You know, and they're in their 80s, most of them.

Irving Caesar is in his 90s.

Forget it, forget it. There aren't any 40 or 50 year old songwriters walking in that -- forget it, forget it. There aren't any 40 or 50 year old songwriters walking in that --

That are sharper.

-- that could stand in the same room with these guys.

Gerald Marx, who wrote, uh, "All of Me." Just incredible.

Yeah. No, that's not the thing. Uh, you know what it was? The great ones from, the great ones from Tin Pan Alley, like the people that Mike's mentioned, are the great ones, they really are there. If you're talking about the kind of middling Tin Pan Alley kind of, you know, really commercial, you know, hook writers, yeah, but --

That's a different story.

That's a different story.

The Drifters obviously posed a completely different kind of challenge because here you are, first of all you're producing a group that you were not writing for.

In a sense, yes, the Drifters were essentially a company doing, doing business as the Drifters. Now, you can explain that.

Well, the Drifters started with Clyde McPhatter who had come out of the group the Dominoes on King Records, and uh, Atlantic got a hold of, uh, Clyde McPhatter who was an incredible singer and formed a group around him called the Drifters. Um, but the name the Drifters somehow came to be owned by a manager and an accountant and some other guys.

And a lawyer.

Well, he was one of the other guys I guess. At any rate, after Clyde left the group and then moved to England, they replaced him with other singers, I think Johnny Moore was one of them. And they went on to have additional successes. Uh, as a matter of fact, we had one song done by them, or two actually, one that Nesui Ertegun produced, "Oh Ruby Baby", and then "Fools Fall in Love."

Which was subsequently done and made big hits, one by Presley, and one by, uh, uh, Dion --

Dion DeMucci. Right. But now the Drifters, who were a valuable name, ceased to exist after a while, and the guys at Atlantic, Ahmet and Jerry Wexler, um, thought that they had a valuable property in the name. So they contacted the owners of the name, who were not performers or singers. And um, requested that they bring in a group. So they hired a group that I believe was called the Crowns, uh, and turned them into the Drifters. And the lead singer was Ben E. King.

And so this existing group called the Crowns, with lead singer Ben E. King, became the Drifters. And Atlantic had this new group, new group of Drifters I should say. And they, uh, asked Jerry and me to produce them. And the first session was the one with "There Goes My Baby," which, um, hah, which we brought into Atlantic and played for them, and they did not want to release that record at all. In fact, um, Jerry Wexler was livid when he heard it. He said, this sounds insane. Uh, I don't know where the heck the music is coming from, and what are those violins doing in there? And Ahmet said, Ahmet was trying to be very nice to us. And he said, listen, guys, you know, you can't hit a home run every time you come to bat and we love your work, but I really, this is a bit too much.

Where did the string thing come from?

Well, it evolved during rehearsals. I came up with this line, which, um, sounds like Boradim or Rimsky-Korsakov because it just, it felt good. And Jerry says, that sounds like violins. And I said, well, why not? So we got five fiddles and a cello and uh, that became the first record that we know of that uh, was ostensibly an R and B record with strings on it. We also added our favorite, uh, Brazilian rhythm, the bayon, the boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom. And it we put it on that record, but it was played by a timpani, which never changed its pitch which also created a kind of weird, muddy sound and overtones. And uh, I guess that's what Jerry Wexler and Ahmet were responding to when they first heard it. But we felt there was something in there. And uh, we worked on it with Tommy Dowd, uh, who was Atlantic's engineer. And uh, when it came out, you know, it became number one pretty soon.

With the Coasters it seems like there was very much, not only the vocal group, but also the instrumental groups like the small hand-picked group of guys, and it was, it was very intensively rehearsed and slotted in and it, it almost is like the approach of serialist composers in a way. I know you studied that stuff, but they'll take every aspect of the music and sort of quantify every aspect, every aspect sort of like, whereas this is much more of a 19th century classical, almost if you want. Does that make any sense to you at all? Do you see a connection?

Well, the Coasters was a small group, I mean in terms of the background. The arrangements uh were always geared to like one saxophone, and of course, the prime one was King Curtis, although we did start out here on the West Coast, with Gil Burnall. Um, who was a wonderful --

Excuse me.

He blew a great saxophone.

Yes he did. I did that in honor of him.

Uh, and that, hah, we went to New York and we heard King Curtis at the end of some session playing this kind of chicken scratch stuff and we said that's the sound we want. And um, the little licks that were played on the record between phrases those were all written out. But the solos were concepts originally of Jerry's to sing phrases into King's ear while he was playing. And eventually it just developed into a fantastic style. And King was a master musician. Now, with the Drifters that was a whole different bag and it started of course with this kind of notion of using the strings on "There Goes My Baby." And from there on, uh, it seems that we had the most fun trying to, expanding the orchestral sounds behind a rhythm and blues group.

You know, the big difference, if you could explain it this way between the Coasters and the Drifters, the Coasters was our own personal statement. The Drifters was a singing group that we were, we were producing. And we didn't even, I mean, we found, we liked them, they were okay, you know, they didn't kill me. I loved Ben E. King's sound, the sound of his voice, but the Drifters was a job. And the job was to get hits, to write, to produce hits. And they had a big, masculine kind of, you know, velvety sound. And we liked it enough, you know. And what we essentially did was, uh, I mean I, Mike and I decided and I think maybe me more so, because Mike and I decided, and maybe me more so because Mike was able certainly to write those songs. I couldn't particularly myself write those kinds of romantic songs. I didn't like them. But there were lots of young teams around that could. And I would, I would contract these kids, I'd give them assignments, like Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Goffin and King and --

Well, Pomus and Schuman, of course.

Pomus and Schuman and I'd say, hey, the Drifters are coming to town, you know, and uh, we need some hits songs. And Mike and I would try to write one, and sometimes we would, you know, like "There Goes My Baby" or we rewrote it, or we'd write something, or we wrote "Stand By Me" with Ben E.

But that was for Ben E. as a solo artist of course.

Yeah, right, but by and large we didn't write that kind of material.

Did the increasing complexity of the music on these dates have anything at all to do with changes in the recording studio technology?

Well, you know, uh, when we did, uh, things like, um, I'm trying to think of the, um, save the last dance for me, for example. I think that was done on four tracks, maybe only three. And we had all these different things going on at the same time. It was very different than today's recording techniques where you have 24 tracks. We had to balance, we had to leave a track for the lead singer. We had the Drifters themselves. We had a female group, either Dionne, Didi and Cissy --

Houston.

Warwick and Houston respectively. Or we had a white studio girls group. Um, we had strings, we had endless number of percussion instruments, we had brass, we had woodwinds.

We were very, very experienced in mixing from the early days of mono. So three tracks was like a luxury. And we knew how to get a record made on the fly. I mean we, we worked very hard at, at a very, at very, um, precise minutia in terms of relationships between brass and rhythm and strings and brass and rhythm and strings, and brass and voice. We had these, these things were set. We weren't recording wild and thinking, we'll do it all later. We were doing it while we were doing it.

And we had the advantage in a way, we had an engineer that we worked with that most of these things were done at Bell Sound. But we had four additional hands once the tune was laid down, and we knew for example at this point, the trumpet is coming in, and then you've got to duck it because it's going to be too loud for the mix. And Jerry and I would also work on the fly the parts to pre-mix. Because there was no post-mix.

So the availability of that, good. "Save The Last Dance For Me" -- what was the genesis. That's a real special song. And there was something there, I'm trying to remember where we saw this, and couldn't or I couldn't, about Doc writing it, watching his wife dance and of course being from a wheelchair.

Well, I don't know if he was watching. I mean he was married to this beautiful blonde.

Could you say Pomus was married?

Doc Pomus was married to this beautiful blond lady, she was gorgeous. And you know, Doc was, was a bit was, uh, in a wheelchair.

Could you start that again, because somebody was talking over you.

Uh, Doc Pomus was married to this very beautiful woman, and he, uh, and he loved her very much. And you know, Doc Pomus was crippled. He was, uh, he lived in a wheelchair. And uh, I think that this song came out of just, uh, the whole fantasy of, uh, someone either stealing his wife, or dancing with his wife, some kind of, you know, reassuring statement about she, she'd come back, whatever was going on. After the party, she'd come back to him. Uh, I don't know if it was literal. I don't know if it was the fact that he was actually watching her. That to me is a little bit literal for a songwriter.

No, but I, I think you're right. I think it's definitely his, a very personal statement on his part about save the last dance for me. You can dance with anybody else, but you're going to come home with me.