"My Girl" - The Drifters (2006)

I watched The Drifters play a show in my high school gym.

Wait, that sounds too impressive. I watched a splinter of a splinter of The Drifters perform one-and-a-half songs in my high school gym and then all the students left to go eat lunch.

I went to a public school; this wasn't some special performance the PTA put a couple hundred thousand dollars together for. And I am 37-years-old; this was 2006, thirty years removed from the release of The Drifters' final studio album, which was itself 14 years removed from the last Drifters single Ben E. King sang on.

The Drifters were a bunch of guys. Many bands are a bunch of guys, but The Drifters were more guys than the bands you're thinking of. There was George Treadwell, a manager and singer who controlled the band and paid its members terribly, and then the famous people we think of as being in The Drifters– Clyde McPhatter, Ben E. King, Johnny Moore, etc.– and then there are the million people who shuffled through the group as Treadwell fired members or they left. Do you know who Gerhart Thrasher is, besides a man named like a Dolph Lundgren villain? No, me either. He sang with The Drifters from 1955 to 1958. Wikipedia lists about 30 singers who recorded with The Drifters in their '50s and '60s heyday, many for shorter terms than Thrasher's, though we have no way of knowing how many Drifters sang uncredited or for a few live performances. It's one of the best catalogs in pop music history and yet I would bet my (flooding-damaged) house you can't tell me the names of any of the people backing up Ben E. King on a song like "There Goes My Baby." You've heard that thing at least a dozen times a year since you were born and you probably know all the Beach Boys, but the information I'm talking about was purposely obscured by George Treadwell and/or it was never properly documented.

In the '60s, King was fired from or quit The Drifters, even though the band was called "Ben E. King and the Drifters." A man named Rudy Lewis took his place. A man named Rick Sheppard took Rudy Lewis' place. The Drifters' time as a creative endeavor was over by this point. Three different sources give me three different dates for Sheppard's employment in The Drifters and it's possible they're all wrong, but it seems he was, at longest, employed between 1966 and 1973. He did not sing on any of the hits.

In the ‘80s, Sheppard began touring as The Drifters Featuring Rick Sheppard while a zombie version of The Drifters continued under Treadwell's watch. The band's official bio says the Sheppard spin-off's "show is high energy and visually entertaining, mixing the classic Drifters repertoire that fans have come to know and love along with hits from the 1970s and 1980s done up in the unique Drifters style." In 1996, The Drifters Featuring Rick Sheppard released a Greatest Hits album, performing 10 songs Sheppard hadn't originally sung on.

At some point after that, The Drifters Featuring Rick Sheppard hired Kelvin Boyd, a singer whose name is a perfectly inverse level of cool from Gerhart Thrasher's. When Boyd left The Drifters Featuring Rick Sheppard, he founded Kelvin Boyd's Drifters. He wasn't even in the room for the unofficial side-band's 90s recordings, but somehow Boyd got away with calling his new group "Kelvin Boyd's Drifters."

I had a classmate who said his father was a Drifter. I didn't know how that would work, unless his dad was very old– everybody in the first few incarnations of The Drifters had been born in the 1920s and '30s and he and I shared a freshman science class during the 2003/2004 school year.

It was in this science class that Son Of Drifter, who was very religious, told me he didn't "hate" gay people, but wished they would all get on a boat and go somewhere he wouldn't have to look at or talk to them. I was less tolerant of him than he was of the LGBTQ+ community. I hated him because it seemed clear he was a fucking bigot.

His dad was Kelvin Boyd. That’s how my high school got the faint echo of The Drifters to play an assembly.

At an assembly before the 2006 Homecoming Dance, sitting in the Menlo-Atherton High School gym, I watched four men of wildly varying age come out and perform "Save The Last Dance For Me," as perfect a song as anybody's made. They were introduced as The Drifters because one of them had sung back-up for a guy who had acted as a substitute for the most famous member of The Drifters in a touring version of that band 30 years earlier.

I have a family friend who composed the score for a movie Jeff Bridges starred in, and I'm friends with Jeff Bridges in the same way Kelvin Boyd was a Drifter. I'm a flying reindeer in the same way Kelvin Boyd was a Drifter.

After we'd all cheered for The Drifters With Mile-Long Scare Quotes and they finished "Save The Last Dance For Me," the principal announced that we could all go to lunch if we wanted, but The Drifters would be sticking around to play a few more songs. They immediately launched into "My Girl," a Temptations single, and the line down from the bleachers and out the gym doors was so long that I heard them sing at least half of it.