There Goes My Baby

This is the hit from the summer of 1959 which put the Drifters back on the charts after a long career slump, but it was with an entirely new set of musicians. In 1958 the group's manager George Treadwell, who owned the name, fired the group and replaced them with members of a group called The Crowns and added Ben E. King as lead singer. Their first session was produced by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who were known as a songwriting team but were also well known producers. The took a very unorthodox approach to the record, which worked and gave the new Drifters their first hit. Stoller explained, "We slapped on soaring strings, and exotic baion beat, kettledrums, timpani and every other god-damn sound we could think of."

This was a very chaotic recording, with the tympani out of tune and Ben E. King's vocals coming in too soon at the beginning. With all the instrumentation going on, Leiber said that the first time he heard it on the radio, he thought he was picking up two stations. This production anarchy didn't sit well with Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, which was The Drifters' label, and the song marked the first dark cloud on the horizon between Leiber and Stoller and the label. As given in Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography, Wexler hated the song as soon as he heard it, saying, "I'd never release s--t like this. It's dog meat! You're wasting our money on an overpriced production that sounds like a radio caught between two stations." Protip: Jerry Wexler was later caught in an audit showing that he owed Leiber and Stoller $18,000. He welshed.

The writing credits on this song are split five ways between Leiber and Stoller, Ben E. King (listed under his real name Benjamin Nelson, Drifters manager George Treadwell, and Lover Patterson, who helped give King his start in the business and wrote some songs with the singer. Exactly who came up with what contributions to the song remains unclear.