Creativity Quote by Ben E. King

A band name shouldn’t sound like a payroll category, but here it does. Ben E. King’s memory of becoming “the new Drifters” and getting “a hundred dollars a week” lands with the blunt clarity of a pay stub, and that’s the point: the romance of early R&B is inseparable from the machinery that packaged it. The phrasing is tellingly passive - “we took on the name,” “signed a contract,” “to be put on salary” - as if identity itself was an assignment handed down by someone with a ledger.

The Drifters were famously more brand than fixed lineup, a rotating cast controlled by management, and King is quietly narrating what it felt like to step into a successful act that wasn’t exactly yours. “We became the new Drifters” is both promotion and erasure: instant prestige, instant replaceability. The salary detail sounds modest now, but in context it signals a trade-off that defined the era’s Black pop economy: steady money in exchange for autonomy, publishing leverage, and often the right to one’s own name.

There’s also a subtle pride in the arithmetic - five men, five shares, $500 total - a quick snapshot of a working group making it professional. Yet the clinical specificity (“which I think was like…”) hints at how little control artists had over the terms that shaped their lives. King isn’t mythmaking; he’s demythologizing. The glamour gets reduced to a weekly rate, and the legend of “The Drifters” becomes what it often was: a job title you wore until someone decided you didn’t.