Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (49 page)

All the while, Sam was trying to get L.C. to move out to California permanently. But he had his girl, Barbara Clemons, back in Chicago, and he had his own career to think about, and, besides, to L.C. Los Angeles wasn’t nothing but a country town. Things were going good for him and his manager, Montague; his first record on the Chess subsidiary label Checker was still getting airplay, and his second was scheduled to come out before long. He had played the Royal Peacock in Atlanta in January, where he was billed with Clyde McPhatter, in a “Big Battle of the Singers,” as “L.C. Cook (Sam Cook’s brother).”

“Sam said, ‘Look, C., I want you to stay out here with me.’ I said, ‘Sam, you know I don’t like L.A.’” Not that he wasn’t grateful, but he had his own life to lead. So he drove back after a month or so, not long after it was announced in February that he had won a BMI songwriting award for Sam’s hit from the previous summer, “Win Your Love For Me.” He was glad he had been able to help Sam out in his long legal dispute with Specialty. But he had done no more for his brother, certainly, than his brother had always done for him.

“W
E’D BE SITTING AROUND TALKING,
” said Lou Rawls, “and maybe something would happen or somebody would say something, and that would trigger an idea. He always wrote with other people in mind. He would say, ‘[So-and-so] would sound good doing this.’”

“Sometimes,” said J.W., laughing, “we’d be sitting on the floor partying with a bunch of girls, creating while we were partying.”

The Kags catalogue was growing almost daily, even if for the time being its financial prospectus was not. J.W. really
believed
in their new venture, and his enthusiasm and energy were practically irresistible. He formalized the partnership early in the new year, and, with a canniness that did nothing to belie his smooth charm, he included Crain in the partnership papers, which listed 1845 South St. Andrew’s Place #2, Sam’s apartment, as the business address. The two of them, Sam and Alex, were writing like crazy, both separately and together, taking the sensible view that good songs were an investment that never diminished, particularly if you wrote the kind of standard that continued to be sung long after the original hit version was forgotten. For all practical purposes the Travelers no longer existed as a working group (Jesse Whitaker was already contemplating a revamped quartet that would be called the New Pilgrim Travelers and devoted exclusively to gospel), but J.W. recorded a couple of Sam’s new songs, “I’ll Always Be in Love With You” and “I Gopher You,” under the group’s name. He had Lou Rawls, whom he was undertaking to guide toward a solo career, singing lead, and while he would not have turned down a hit, the primary intent was more to create a glorified demo at Rex Productions expense, a record he could take around to other artists with the idea of their cutting the song and reaching a wider audience than the Travelers at this point were ever going to have.

He was, in fact, buttonholing every potential customer he could at any and every available opportunity. He approached Fats Domino, still at the height of his popular success, while he was getting his hair styled in the barbershop of the Hotel Watkins. But when he tried to tell Fats about publishing, “he looked at me like I had a tail, like, ‘Who is this stupid nigger?’ I felt embarrassed and cut down. But Sam had faith in me.” He went up to Jackie Wilson in the lobby of the same hotel. “I told him, ‘Man, I got a song for you [“I’ll Always Be in Love With You”].’ He said, ‘Sing it to me.’ So, fuck, I went on in the toilet and sung it to him. And he cut it! Then the Flamingos were in town, and I told one of them, I said, ‘Man, Sam wrote a song [“Nobody Loves Me Like You”], I think it would be perfect for you guys.’ So I sung it to them. [Some of the] musicians asked Sam, ‘What’s Alex doing? He’s got a hole-in-the-wall type of thing, you know.’ But I had confidence. I was operating out of my apartment, and it wasn’t even my apartment!”

Alex’s confidence seemed to be catching. Without any of the constant touring or major television exposure of the previous year, “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha” was proving to be Sam’s biggest hit since “You Send Me.” He had his last session for the Billie Holiday project on February 25, then returned to the studio five days later for an impromptu session designed primarily to lay down three more songs he had recently written. This time, there is no arranger, there is no orchestra, there is only Clif’s acoustic guitar, Adolphus Alsbrook on bass, a teenage drummer named Ronnie Selico, and a quartet that sounds suspiciously like the latest trio of Travelers (J.W., Lou, Oopie) for vocal support. The first number was a song Lou Adler and Herb Alpert had been working on that had caught Sam’s fancy. The thrust of it was that you didn’t need to possess any great degree of knowledge or education to know what your feelings were, and it circled around the idea that love—and love alone—could make the world a wonderful place.

Not even Lou Adler thought it was much of a song, “but Sam kept coming back to it. He’d say, ‘What about that song, you know?’ And then he’d start on it again. His idea—since it was all about reading and books and what you didn’t have to do in order to [find love]—was to take it more towards school, and that’s how it evolved. And then when he pretty much finished what he wanted from the song, we were over at the Keen studio one day, and Sam said, ‘Let’s try “Wonderful World.”’ I don’t know what it would have been if he didn’t get involved, but what it became was because of him.”

What it became was a perfect pop confection in which, as Sam might have defined it, the simplest elements were allowed to coalesce in such a way as to form a whole much greater (and more memorable) than the sum of its somewhat flimsy parts. “Don’t know much about history,” Sam declared over a light Latin beat while completing the educational transformation of the song. “Don’t know much biology / Don’t know much about a science book / Don’t know much about the French I took:

But I do know that I love you

And I know that if you love me, too

What a wonderful world this would be.

It had become, as Lou said, a kind of conversation with the listener, “it was light, it wasn’t, ‘Listen to this song.’ Sam always told me, ‘You got to be talking to somebody.’ Even if the lyric was heavy, his approach to it wasn’t that intense.” The third song he did that day, “No One Can Take Your Place,” once again with Clif’s jangly acoustic lead, bore out this dictum even more strongly, as Sam translated an unadulterated gospel feel into a swinging celebration of life, love, and freedom, propelled by interjections and hand claps from the gospel chorus.

Ironically, the formal gospel session that he had the next day achieved little of that feeling. Bumps had long contended that gospel possessed the greatest unrealized sales potential of any music in the world; in fact, ever since first hearing Sam at the Shrine, he had come to believe in the visceral power of the music and its inherent appeal to a mass audience, to
any
audience, if that audience could only be exposed to it. His intention, from the time that he and Sam had come over from Specialty together, was to cut Sam singing gospel, only classier, with strings and a big chorus, hell, they might even use the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. His recordings with the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and the Gospel Harmonettes for Keen’s Andex subsidiary the previous year were only a barebones rehearsal for that session. But Keen’s gospel series, as true as it was to the classic quartet sound, had failed to sell, the Blind Boys and the Harmonettes were on the verge of leaving the label, and Bumps himself was to all intents and purposes out of the picture. Nonetheless, Sam’s eight-hour session, arranged by René with strings, harp, kettledrum, and a near-operatic “jubilee” chorus, could not have better captured the spirit of Bumps and Sam’s plans.

Perhaps the very length of the session, coupled with the fact that they were able to complete only five titles in all that time, is an indication of the vexed nature of the enterprise. On the other hand, the tempo not only on such old-time standards as “Steal Away” but on Sam’s own “That’s Heaven to Me” was
very
slow, and Sam’s singing, however beautiful, was very stately and very somber. So perhaps they were just taking their time. It was in any case a project dear to Sam’s heart, something that unquestionably comes through in the sincerity of his singing. And it was, as it turned out, the last time Sam would set foot in the Keen studio for a formal session.

He and Alex continued to set up demo sessions for their songs anywhere and everywhere they could. Sam was writing now at almost fever pitch and would continue all through that spring. “Only Sixteen,” which was inspired by Lou Rawls’ stepsister Eunice’s sixteenth birthday, was intended for a teenage actor and singer named Steve Rowland, a friend of Ricky Nelson’s, who hung around the studio sometimes and whose father was a B-movie director. “We just liked him,” J.W. said, “and he asked Sam to write this song. Sam used the bridge from ‘Little Things You Do,’ and we cut a tape and gave it to Steve, but his producer didn’t like the song, and it broke Steve’s heart. So Sam recorded it himself.”

He wrote “I Want You to Know” and tailored it specially for Milton Grayson, a silky baritone and former Domino who had joined Keen as a solo artist the previous summer. Sam and J.W. wrote “Try a Little Love” as their own “sideways” interpretation of “Try a Little Tenderness,” the heartfelt ballad that had been recorded by both Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra in its original crooner’s version but then, in 1952, had been reinterpreted by Little Miss Cornshucks in a homegrown Dinah Washington- influenced variation. He wrote the bright and bouncy “Just For You” in addition to “When a Boy Falls in Love,” a romantic takeoff on an idea he had picked up from gospel singer Clinton Levert, and “Cupid,” which took a corny Hallmark card kind of image and forever italicized it by the manner in which he drew out the signature line. Each of the songs was simple, direct, conversational, and Sam and J.W. demoed them all, just singing into a tape recorder with strummed guitar accompaniment if no studio time was available. They were determined to get their product out any way they could. They had a business to run.

J
ESS RAND DIDN’T KNOW
anything about their business, and he didn’t care. He did know that Sam was worried about this chick he had brought out from Chicago. As Jess understood it, he was afraid she might sue him, or take the songs he had put in her name—but Jess didn’t concern himself with the particulars. At this point he hadn’t even met the girl or her daughter. What Jess did concern himself with was Sam’s career, and he was confounded by how best to advance it with a client who didn’t want any advice. One time Sam actually asked how he had liked the show, and Jess said he thought it was a little wooden, Sam could use some more movement onstage. “Sam just looked at me and walked away.” He told Sam that Sammy Davis Jr. had suggested he might take either tap or drumming lessons to loosen up his act, and this time Sam wouldn’t even look at him—but the next thing Jess knew, he was taking tap from Eddie Foy and putting together an act with Lou Spencer, who worked out of Eddie’s studio. To J.W. it was all a lot of bullshit, fomented as much by William Morris as by Jess. “They told him he needed an act. They built it up so all of his failures [stemmed from] the Copa. When he wanted them to book him into some of the other clubs, they’d say, ‘Well, Sam, you know you have to get an act.’ I went out to Eddie Foy’s studio [because] he wanted me to see what he was doing, and he was tapping with the top hat and cane. Sam wasn’t any kind of a dancer, and it was clumsy, very clumsy. I mean, I came up tapping, and this wasn’t for him. But Lou Spencer says to me, ‘He looks like a little doll, doesn’t he?’ And I [thought to myself], ‘Yeah, that’s just what he looks like. He don’t look like Sam Cooke. He looks like a fucking doll.’” But J.W. knew that Sam was going to have to figure that out for himself.

Sam was out again right after the March 3 session. He played Honolulu, then appeared on Dick Clark’s ABC-network
Beech-Nut Show
in New York the following Saturday night, singing “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha” and, of course, “You Send Me.” He was booked into the Palms of Hallandale, a converted drive-in just north of Miami with a 106-foot bar and an outdoor barbecue, the week of the twenty-third, with a booking at the Palms’ sister club in Jacksonville the following week. Charles was accompanying him on the road now, serving as full-time driver, valet, and muscle, if muscle was needed. Like Crain, like Clif and Alex, he was someone with whom Sam could always be himself, someone on whom he could absolutely rely. “Sam did things exactly the way he wanted to,” observed L.C., too independent to ever formally go to work for his brother but an equally loyal member of the team. “He would tell you exactly what he wanted you to do and what he didn’t want you to do. Like he told my brother Charles, ‘Charles, you are going to have an expense account. I know you are going to spend money, because if I had someone else’s money, I would spend it. But there’s only one thing: don’t kill me while you’re spending. Bring me a receipt for everything you spend, but just don’t kill me.’ Charles said, ‘I will never kill you, bro. I am sure going to spend your money, but I am not going to kill you.’ And Charles lived up to that.”

Sam had just arrived in Hallandale when he got the news that Dolores had died in an automobile accident in Fresno, California, where she was living with her son. She had moved back six or seven months earlier, after the divorce. Sam always stayed in touch with her and was glad when she got herself a job as a cocktail waitress, but she had been depressed and drinking heavily, and the people she was with on Saturday night tried to persuade her to let one of them drive her home from the bar where she had been drinking. She was at the wheel of the 1958 Oldsmobile convertible Sam had given her when she ran off the road at a high rate of speed at 12:40
A.M.
on Sunday morning.