Drift Away (1973)

Performer: Dobie Gray                                          Writers: Mentor Williams
Highest US Chart Position: #5                              Label: Decca Records
Musicians: Troy Seals, Reggie Young, David Briggs, Mike Leech and Kenny Malone

How this song failed to reach number one is absolutely mystifying to me. “Drift Away” by Dobie Gray has everything: a catchy hook in the chorus, an amazing vocal delivery, solid backing music, and wonderfully evocative lyrics. I don’t have any specific associations with the song, but every time I hear it I’m transported back to that magical summer of 1973 when pop music first began to become part of my consciousness. The song--as well as the performer--has quite an interesting background. It was written by producer Mentor Williams, who is the brother of the great songwriter Paul Williams, and first appeared on an album by John Henry Kurtz in 1972. That album also featured some heavyweights like Kenny Loggins, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, Doug Dillard, Jim Horn and Michael Omartian. The instrumentation has something of a country rock feel, not unlike a Neil Young tune when he was with CSN. But the album failed to chart, and Williams went back to the drawing board the following year with Dobie Gray as the singer. The arrangement is almost identical to what Williams did with Kurtz, but with new musicians like Reggie Young Jr. on guitar and Gray’s new vocals, it has a very different feel. This time the song was a top five smash and vindicated Williams’ belief in it. It was also the biggest hit of Gray’s career.

After some chording by Reggie Young on the guitar opening, he does a sort of sliding riff up the neck which is preceded by Mike Leech’s bass sliding into the downbeat, with Kenny Malone playing just the hi-hats and the bass drum. Gray’s vocals come in after the downbeat, and the short, eight-bar verse by the three musicians provides a soft cushion to sing over. When the chorus comes, it comes in strong, with Malone emphasizing the backbeat and Troy Seals coming in on guitar as well. If there’s any residual country-rock flavor left over from the original Kurtz version, it’s on the chorus with the twangy electric guitar. The same intro is played again by Young, but with the bass and drums underneath this time, and when the vocals come in for the next verse Malone plays a clock-like rhythm rather than the drums. A thick string section accompanies the chorus the second time through. A short bridge section has Malone improvising lightly on his cymbals while the strings and piano back up the vocals. This eases imperceptibly into the next verse, with Malone playing rim clicks on the snare along with the bass and strings. The next chorus is just the vocals and handclaps, with Young strumming lightly on the guitar and Leech coming in on bass toward the end. The out chorus has Gray improvising over the top with the piano and strings coming up in the mix as the tune fades out on a guitar solo.

The record was released in February of 1973, entering the charts at number eighty-five, and spent the entire spring on the charts, finally reaching it’s peak position of number five on May 12th, the same day Gray performed the song on American Bandstand. But Dobie Gray was not overnight success. By this time in his career he had already been performing and recording for over a decade. His first single was released in 1963, and two years later he reached the top twenty with the original vocal version of “The ‘In’ Crowd,” which Ramsey Lewis and his trio took to number five that same year in an instrumental version. After a stint acting, he began doing session work singing demos for Paul Williams and it was no doubt through that association that he me met Mentor. The album Drift Away was the first of several that Gray recorded at that time, though none of his other songs were as successful as the title track to his first album. The B-side of the single, “City Stars,” was co-written by Gray himself, along with Chuck Higgins Jr., but has little of the charm and excitement of the flip side. While I would categorize this music as soul, it’s not the seventies style of soul that was coming out of Philadelphia. Being recorded in Nashville, it is closer to the Muscle Shoals style of instrumentation that was used in the sixties. “Drift Away” is a terrific example of a song simply needing a second chance and having the right vocalist to connect with audiences.