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.
When I got involved with The Five Crowns who later became The Drifters, and we got this hit record, I still was looking at this as kind of a fun thing.
If the sky that we look upon should tumble and fall. Or the mountain should crumble to the sea. I won’t cry, no I won’t shed a tear, just as long as you stand by me.
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.
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.
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.
There was no, there was no in between. And when I got to New York all the other musics that’s in the world just came into my head whether it was the classics, jazz, I never knew what jazz was about all, had heard anything about jazz.
If there’s anything about the business that I love and that I’m extremely happy about, is that my career started at that time and that I met some of the greatest entertainers at that time and some are still here.
I think that the song, the song “Stand By Me” is one of those songs that… and someone asked me, what was you thinking about or what was you feeling about?
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.
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.
