Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (33 page)

Bumps came out to the house for the first time probably the day after getting his Specialty release and, according to the memory of John Siamas’ son, John Jr., nearly twelve at the time and a passionate devotee of rock ’n’ roll, it was Bumps who was “the prize” for his father. “I remember my father telling me that Bumps had [produced] Little Richard—I mean, Sam Cooke was a nice aspect of it, but that wasn’t going to be the focus of the recording company. They were going to record jazz, they were going to record gospel, there was going to be a diversity, they were going to go into the music business.”

They agreed on terms similar to Bumps’ arrangement with Specialty but considerably more advantageous in a number of respects. Bumps would continue to get his $1,000 bonus for all singles that sold over one hundred thousand copies; his 1 percent producer’s royalty was a decrease by 1/4 of a percent, but it was on gross, not net, sales; best of all, from Bumps’ point of view, there were no restrictions on his management contract with Sam or any other artist. Whereas at Specialty he was limited to a 5 percent fee, which he split with Art, here he assigned himself 10 percent, with no split and no approval of his client list necessary from the label owner.

They made the deal pretty much on the spot, and Bumps went into the studio with the nucleus of the “You Send Me” rhythm section plus some additional musicians for instrumental sessions on June 26 and June 27. The session was billed to Rex Productions, the corporate name John Siamas had assigned to his new company with a bow to his friend and employee Rex Oberbeck. Not long afterward he came up with a name for the label, Keen, partially in deference to his principal advisor, partly because it was short, snappy, and conveyed an image in keeping with the tenor of the times. The corporation had four principal investors: Siamas, his brother Alex, and his uncles Andy and Paul Karras, who in sum put up $20,000. His lawyer, golfing partner, and best friend, John Gray, contributed legal expertise, just as Bob Keane would provide the musical direction and serve as a recording artist as well, in return for which he fully expected to earn his share in the company. Bumps, too, anticipated a substantial ownership share in exchange for the knowledge, contacts, and other valuable considerations that he brought to the table. This was going to work out great, Bumps told Sam. Siamas had unlimited funds, he was going to give them part of the publishing, Sam just had to sit back and wait because before they knew it, the money was going to be rolling in. They were sitting in the catbird’s seat.

W
HILE HE WAS WAITING
, Sam spent the summer on the sofa in the living room of Bumps’ apartment at 3949 1/2 South Normandie. He was living good, he told his brother L.C., Bumps always kept some money in his pocket, and he had the free use of Bumps’ brand-new gold-trimmed white Chrysler whenever he wanted to go anywhere. Bumps’ one-bedroom apartment would have been a little confining, of course, even if it hadn’t been stuffed with music charts and acetates and Bumps and Little Mama’s extensive collection of ceramic figures. But this was merely temporary. Bumps had a master plan and, he told Sam over and over again, Sam was going to be his number-one boy.

Early in the summer Sam met Sheridan “Rip” Spencer. Rip was still a high school student, finishing up that summer at Jordan High, where he had played football and was president of both the a cappella choir and his senior class. He and his cousin Brice Coefield had a group as well. They had come to Bumps’ attention the previous year as the Chevelles, and now as the Valiants (named for Prince Valiant, the Knight of the Round Table-type cartoon hero) were introduced by Bumps to John Siamas at his Windsor Hills home. Bumps told Rip it was a “rehearsal” for a session for Siamas’ new label.

“Sam was there,” said Rip, “and some of the guys in the band that was going to record with us. Bumps took us over there because he was proud of the artists he was turning on to Rex Productions and so John would spend his money to record [us]. John Siamas was a very nice gentleman and very interested in the music, [but] this was all brand-new to him. I remember he had this nice big den and his little boys [John Jr. and his young stepbrothers] were all excited that we were there. But he didn’t know nothing about the recording business, and Bumps had talked him into [it]. Bumps was a well-educated man. He was a helluva talker, and he knew the business and he knew how to make you do things.”

Rip never could remember if that was where he met Sam for the first time or if it was over at Bumps’ apartment, but he and Sam soon became the best of friends. “He would come by and pick me up at my house at Four-thirty East Eighty-fourth Place after school. I would get off the school bus and walk down there, and there he was, waiting for me in that white Chrysler. I would go in and change, and then we were off and running.”

Mostly they visited girls, “different women he had met during his religious tours. Sam was very much of a ladies’ man. When he came around, just more and more women came over. They would call their girlfriends, and, you know, we had a good time. Sam used to tell me all the time, ‘Rip I’m going to be a big star.’ It didn’t come across as bragging, just friendly conversation, but he used to tell me that all the time. He used to call me ‘Rip ’Em Up,’ and he’d say, ‘Watch and see, Rip ’Em up,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, Sam, I know, I know.’ ’Cause I knew Sam could sing good, but this is a heckuva business, and [I was thinking] maybe you’ll get through, and maybe you won’t.

“Sam had personality, talent, he stayed clean, dressed well, I guess he learned that through the religious circuit, those guys dressed real good. But Sam didn’t know anything about the music business or record labels at that time. None of us did. But we believed in Bumps, because the way that he talked, we believed that he knew. He was our leader. And I believe he convinced Sam to go with Keen Records because it was a new label, and John Siamas was a very rich man and Sam was going to get all the attention. Sam always wanted the attention, you know, because he always had it. I think that’s what sold Sam.”

When Sam asked him where he could get his hair processed, Rip took him to the Élite Coiffure Men’s Salon, just down the street from the Watkins Hotel, which manufactured its own brand of hair straightener, King Conk, and where you could see Nat “King” Cole and all the stars. Sam took Rip to a church in another part of town where they were having a gospel program, and he introduced Rip to the various groups—Rip couldn’t remember them all because he wasn’t into gospel at the time, but the one quartet that Sam really wanted him to get to know was the Pilgrim Travelers, led by an immaculately dressed, soft-spoken, gray-haired older gentleman with a smooth manner, and featuring a dapper, razor-thin young bass singer named Oopie and a new lead singer, a close friend of Sam’s just out of the army named Lou Rawls.

That was a rare foray into Sam’s old world, though. Mostly Sam wanted to meet Rip and his cousin Brice’s friends on the Los Angeles music scene: twenty-year-old Cornel Gunter, who in 1953 had joined a group called the Flairs at the invitation of his Jefferson High School classmate Richard Berry, whose current group, the Pharaohs, was enjoying a local hit with Berry’s Caribbean-flavored composition, “Louie Louie.” Gunter, who would go on to join the Coasters, had been one of the founding members of the Platters, too, and both Gunter and Berry had long-standing roots in the burgeoning L.A. r&b community.

Then there was Rip’s uncle Marvin Phillips, who with Jesse Belvin (as Jesse and Marvin) had had a number-two r&b hit on Specialty in 1953 with “Dream Girl” and then, as Marvin and Johnny (with various partners, including Jesse, serving as Johnny), had continued to have various hits and misses, including Phillips’ notorious signature tune, “Cherry Pie.” There were Obediah “Young” Jessie, another original Flair from Jefferson High and Jesse Belvin’s singing partner in the Cliques; Eugene Church; Gaynel Hodge, with his brother Alex an original member of both the Platters and the Turks; and countless others, all frequenting the clubs up and down Central Avenue, all haunting the publishing houses that lined a four- or five-block stretch of Selma Avenue in Hollywood (or hanging out at the Nickodell restaurant on Argyle, just around the corner), where the record company a&r men all came looking for songs.

At the center of it all was Jesse Belvin, a young, somewhat Hispanic-looking, extraordinarily talented twenty-four-year-old with a slick process who had cowritten both “Earth Angel,” the Penguins’ 1955 number-one r&b hit, and “Goodnight My Love,” recently adopted by Alan Freed as the sign-off song for his nationally syndicated show. Jesse had had a direct hand, as either writer, performer, or both, in virtually every major development on the L.A. r&b scene over the last five years. It was Jesse whom Bumps had first had in mind for the kind of balladeering stardom for which he was now grooming Sam, and Clif White had made his first Specialty appearance on guitar on one of Jesse’s early records. But Jesse Belvin, as René Hall pointed out, was not exactly a model of focus or responsibility. “Jesse would record for anybody. I don’t think he ever had a contract with any one company in those days.” Nor was he particular about his songwriting royalties. “Jesse could sit down and write songs on the spot, but he’d always turn around and sell ’em outright for $100 or so.” He didn’t even seem to care if his name went on the record, cutting demos to which strings and horns could be added and then “teach[ing] the lead to another singer,” so that singer could go out on the road and front the group. “That way he could sit there in the studio and crank out records. . . . That cat [just] loved to record.” “We worshipped Jesse,” said Gaynel Hodge. “He was like a big brother to all of us. We never questioned the things he did, even when it went against our own interests.” Sam for his part merely observed. He was in no position to do anything but watch and wait, and he eagerly soaked it all in.

It was a wholesale introduction to a world which, as Rip recognized right away, Sam knew very little about. But it was an education which he picked up very quickly, and a world which he found to have more layers than he could ever have imagined. Rip, and Bumps and J.W., too, introduced him not just to singers like Jesse Belvin who were his own age or younger but to black entrepreneurs of an earlier generation as well. Bumps took him around to meet John Dolphin, a big, burly, cigar-chomping larger-than-life former car salesman, whose record store was one of the principal hangouts for the young singers and songwriters and a key source of education in the record business in one way or another for them all. Dolphin, who had opened his first shop in 1948, when “race records” were still being sold almost exclusively out of barber shops and shoe-shine stands, had named it for what he considered its two star entities, “Dolphin’s” for obvious reasons and “of Hollywood” because, for one thing, he considered Central and Vernon, where the store was located, to be as glamorous as any white-folks’ neighborhood, but also because, as he boasted, if black folks couldn’t go to Hollywood, “then I’ll bring Hollywood to the blacks.” He started his own record labels, too, Recorded in Hollywood first, then Lucky, Money, and Cash, and his own song publishing operation, which, in keeping with the philosophy of his two most recent label names, was notorious for benefiting its owner far more than the young songwriters he was constantly discovering and signing up.

He could discourse for hours on the business, and for a discriminating listener like Bumps or J.W. Alexander he was an invaluable source of information and advice. What he and his shop were best known for, though, was the all-night radio show that broadcast from the record-store window over KGFJ, L.A.’s most popular black station. It had started with a two-hour purchase of time in 1950 and had now grown to the point where not only was it a highly effective means of advertising the store, it had proved the perfect vehicle for “market research.” Distributors were not about to miss the point, said Huggy Boy, the white jock who had the show for a couple of years before going out on his own. “I could break a record—a good record—if I played it enough, and distributors learned that if John Dolphin would get a [free] box of a certain record, he’d want to play that record on the show until the box was sold out. . . . After two o’clock in the morning when the bars let out, Dolphin’s was jam-packed, especially on weekends. We’d invite everybody down to the party—I’d say, ‘Turn the car around, don’t forget we’re on the corner of Central and Vernon, Vernon and Central, ten magic paces from the corner of Central and Vernon, meet Lovin’ John Dolphin, the man with the big cigar.’ Dolphin loved it. He’d tell me, ‘Lawdy be, Dolphin’s of Hollywood is the greatest record store in the whole United States of America. Now Huggy, baby, all I want you to do, you tell those people, those little white kids, to turn their cars around, get their butts over here, and buy Lovin’ John Dolphin’s records, and I’ll make it right with you.’”

There was Ted Brinson, the bass player on the “Summertime” session, who had arrived in L.A. with the Andy Kirk band in 1939 and, a dozen years later, purchased some recording equipment and built his own home garage studio at 9514 South Central, where “Dootsie” Williams, another longtime fixture on the scene, recorded “Earth Angel” for his DooTone label, by now almost equally well known for Redd Foxx’s under-the-counter “blue” comedy routines. Then, too, there was Rafael “Googie” René, a versatile young piano player with a flair for record producing, who oversaw (and was supported as an artist by) his dad Leon’s Class Records. Leon René and his brother Otis, Creole songwriters from New Orleans originally, who went back in the business to the 1920s, had been operating their own labels since 1942, and between them had written such pop standards as “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” and “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman.”

It was a whole world of music, a homegrown recording scene of such diversity and sophistication that it made Chicago look like a sleepy country town. “The Vernon Avenue-Central Avenue area,” local historian Michael Betz remarked in terms that could equally well have applied to Bronzeville when Sam was growing up, “was a self-sufficient community with two black-owned newspapers, banks, insurance companies, churches and civil rights organizations.” But nowhere was this sense of self-sufficiency more exemplified than in its music community, nowhere was there a sense of greater excitement and possibilities than in this independent black enclave of musicians and entrepreneurs that Sam was now determined to make his home.