Welcome to episode seventeen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Money Honey" by the Drifters. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.



Erratum

At one point in the podcast I say "Calhoun was the most important figure in the musical side of Atlantic Records". Obviously I meant "Stone was..." -- Charles Calhoun was only a pen name, and I refer to Jesse Stone as Jesse Stone everywhere else in the episode.

Resources

As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. In this case, two tracks are slightly different from the versions I used in the podcast -- I accidentally used copies of Clyde McPhatter's 1960s solo rerecordings of "Money Honey" and "Such a Night" in the Mixcloud. The versions I excerpt in the podcast are the originals.

Some of the material here comes from Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll by Nick Tosches. It's not a book that I like to recommend, as I've said before. Other material comes from  Honkers & Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm and Blues by Arnold Shaw, one of the most important books on early 50s rhythm and blues, and The Sound of the City by Charlie Gillett. But given the absence of any books on the Drifters or McPhatter, the resource I've leaned on most for this is Marv Goldberg's website.

There are many compilations of McPhatter and the Drifters. This one is a decent one.

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Transcript

There's a thought experiment, popular with the kind of people for whom philosophical thought experiments are popular, called the Ship of Theseus. It asks if you have a ship, and you replace every plank of wood in it as each plank rots away, so eventually you have a ship which doesn't share a single plank with the original -- is that still the same ship that you had at the start, or is it a totally new ship?

A little while ago, I saw a Tweet from a venue I follow on Twitter, advertising The Drifters, singing "all their great hits".

There's only one problem with this, which is that no-one currently in the Drifters has ever had a hit, and none of them have even ever been in a band with anyone who had a hit as a member of the Drifters. Indeed, I believe that none of them have even been in a band with someone who has been in a band with someone who was in a version of the Drifters that had a hit.

This kind of thing is actually quite common these days, as old band members die off -- I've seen a version of The Fourmost which had no members of the Fourmost, a version of the Searchers with none of the original members (though it did have the bass player who joined in 1964 -- and it would have had an original member had he not been sick that day), The New Amen Corner (with no members of the old Amen Corner), all on package tours with other, more "authentic", bands.

And of course we talked back in the episode on the Ink Spots about the way that some old bands lose control of their name and end up being replaced on stage by random people who have no connection with the original act. It's sad, but we expect that kind of thing with bands of a certain age. A band like the Drifters, who started nearly seventy years ago now, should be expected to have had some personnel changes.

But what's odd about the Drifters is that this kind of thing has been the case right from the beginning of their career. The Drifters formed in May 1953. By July 1955, the band that was touring as the Drifters had no original members left. And by June 1958, the band touring as the Drifters had no members of the July 1955 version. An old version of the band's website, before someone realised that it might be counterproductive to show how little connection there was between the people on stage and the people on their famous records, lists fifty-two different lineups between 1953 and 2004. In the future