You’re writing it is how you feel. And when you’re finished you put your signature on it and you mail it off and that’s it. And that’s how “Stand By Me” was really.
I’m a songwriter. So I’m OK. But when I wrote “Stand By Me” as a song and to know that the song will probably be here for hundred and hundreds of years to come, it’s great, you know. And it was just simple lyrics.
The Phil Spector that I would meet has always been a nice, quiet, little guy who’s very serious about his work; obviously you can tell that because each and everything he’s ever done has always been charted.
One minute we can be in a small club, the next minute we can be in a coliseum, and the next minute we can be in a small auditorium. It varies, depending on the promoter, the budget, and the travelling distance.
Many times I’ve gone on tours with Paul Anka. He would have someone sitting behind him to keep people from even talking to him. You were almost in a little restricted area there.
In New York, I was excited about the music in New York because the only music that I was more or less involved with in the South was either country and western or hillbilly music as we used to call it when I was a kid and, ah, gospel.
Of course, the kids who had never heard of a person called Ben E. King were then aware of the name associated with the song. That gave a tremendous lift to me as an artist.
You take a chance to do something and you realize in your heart it’s either going to be the greatest thing that ever happened or the worst thing that ever happened. It won’t be an in between, I almost made a hit. It will be an instant flop or an instant success.
It’s something that, songwriters just write songs. It’s like an artist that paints. They paint what they feel. It’s not, it’s not about how many of these painting I’ll sell it’s just how they feel at the moment. And that’s how I wrote “Stand By Me”.
Those things don’t happen today. I feel sorry for the kids in the industry today. They have on sunglasses, eat caviar in jet planes, but they’ll never know the true feeling that we did.
