Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (62 page)

Sam and Jess had their own differences to iron out. Jess had just issued a press release announcing the formation of Cooke-Rand Productions, whose avowed aim was to present “touring musicals and gospel shows.” Their first show, according to the press release, would be “a gospel caravan [with] a score by Cooke,” Jess as producer, and L.C. as musical director. But Sam knew it wasn’t going to happen. They were talking about two different things: what Jess wanted was to put gospel on the college circuit, while Sam’s only interest was to help more people of his own race appreciate the music. Sam wasn’t sure why he objected so vehemently to the idea, except that it seemed like Jess felt like he was doing gospel a favor. And the music didn’t need any favors from white people—and neither did Sam.

He was still pissed off at Jess over the whole BMI debacle. Now that it was over, and he was officially registered as a BMI writer, it seemed almost funny, but Jess’ condescending attitude toward his publishing company—and the growing rift between Jess and Alex—continued to rankle. The cause of the original problem was Sam’s own failure to sign up as a writer with BMI, one of the two major performing rights societies charged with collecting songwriter’s royalties (ASCAP was the other). The reason for the oversight was Sam’s inability to put his own name on any of his songs until the resolution of his legal difficulties with Art Rupe. As long as those difficulties were ongoing, L.C., and then Barbara, had been assigned songwriting credits, and while Kags was a BMI company, and both L.C. and Barbara had duly signed up as BMI writers, it was only after “Chain Gang” became a hit in the fall of 1960 that any real BMI money for Sam came due. That was when he and J.W. discovered, much to their consternation, that Sam was not an affiliated writer and, due to that lack of affiliation, had already lost almost $10,000 in performance royalties (money collected by BMI from radio, television, and any other public performance of his songs, which went into a common pool from which it could not be recovered if the songwriter was not already registered).

Sam and Jess Rand, ca. 1961.

Courtesy of Jess Rand

J.W.’s reaction was to simply go in and pick up the pieces. He had no interest in scapegoating or trying to assess blame. Jess, on the other hand, kept telling Sam, “We’ll go in there and sue. Can you imagine all the writers that haven’t gotten their money? We’ll start a [class-action] suit.” But J.W. had become friends with Dick Kirk, who ran BMI’s West Coast office, “and he said to me, ‘Look, Alexander, there’s more ways than one to skin a cat.’ He told me, ‘Bob Sour (who was president of BMI at the time) is coming out in a few weeks, and I’m going to have a few friends over to my house for drinks, and I’d like you to come.’ So I went, and I was telling Bob the story; I said, ‘I’m Sam Cooke’s partner, not his manager. It’s been his intention to join all along. All of his songs are in BMI.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you come to New York? I’d like to see him [join].’ So I drew money out of the company and bought myself a couple of suits and went to New York, and Bob Sour had George Marlo and Theodora Zavin [two veteran BMI executives] come into his office to meet me, and they worked out a fantastic deal.”

What they offered, in a three-year agreement dated November 21, 1960, and taking effect on January 1, 1961, was what was termed a three-for-one deal. BMI offered to guarantee as an advance against royalties for 1961 150 percent of what Sam
would
have earned in 1960 if he had been a BMI-affiliated writer, including in their calculation of the theoretical base all sums earned by Barbara and L.C. as well. The minimum guarantees for 1962 and 1963 would similarly be figured on 150 percent of Sam’s actual earnings in the preceding year.

J.W. brought the deal back to the Coast with understandable elation. “I was really thrilled, and I went over to Sam’s house and was telling him about it, and he called Jess and said, ‘Man, Alex has really got a good contract.’ And Jess’ answer was, ‘I don’t know, let me talk with Sam Reisman about it.’ That was his lawyer, you know. I said, ‘Sam, don’t you make no fool out of me.’ I said, ‘I went and got you a good deal. I’m not your manager, but I’m your partner.’ So he said, ‘Give me those fucking papers.’ Just like that. And he signed them. And that was the start of Jess Rand being out.”

To Jess it wasn’t that simple. He was used to Sam’s secretive ways, and this was certainly not the first time Sam had gone behind his back. He had seen the way Sam had dealt with Art Rupe and outmaneuvered the Siamases, and he hadn’t really been surprised when Bill Cook turned up in the fall of 1960 with a management contract that he said rendered Jess’ invalid. Jess told him to take it up with Sam, and evidently he must have, because
Jet
magazine reported in its February 18, 1961, issue that the claim had been settled out of court for $1,500. But this whole publishing business, as Jess saw it, represented fundamental differences in philosophy and direction.

For Jess, who had started off in the business at fifteen out of a deep love for the popular songwriting tradition, ASCAP, which represented all the classic composers from Gershwin and Cole Porter to Harold Arlen and his first employer, Irving Berlin, was the one legitimate performing rights society. BMI, which had been in operation only since 1940 and had been founded as much as anything else to take up the spillover of “race” and “hillbilly” music, which ASCAP declined to license, was a kind of unregulated marketplace—and Sam’s choice of what Jess deemed BMI’s “fast money” over ASCAP’s “more astute” long-term approach was a direct slap in the face to Jess’ business judgment. There was a brief, bristling confrontation that appeared to be over almost as soon as it started, except that, knowing what he knew about Sam’s brooding nature and Alexander’s antagonism toward him, Jess was not altogether optimistic about the outcome. Still, there was nothing he could do about it, and if there was one thing he had learned from his long association with Sammy Davis Jr. and its bitter dénouement the previous summer, it was that “a contract with a client is only as good as your relationship with a client.” So he gritted his teeth and simply accepted the fact that there were certain areas of Sam’s life in which by definition—
Sam’s
definition—he did not belong.

Sam and Alex for their part saw Jess as increasingly out of touch and out of step, like someone who was all too proud of his mastery of the fine points of a subject whose fundamental premise he did not understand. But J.W. counseled patience. “Sam realized he was selling, he wasn’t buying,” J.W. said. They both recognized the duality with which they had long since learned to live. “Sam’s attitude,” said J.W., “was give them what they’re buying.” But always keep something for yourself.

SAR was for Sam and Alex. By April they had put out four new singles and conducted a pop session with Johnnie Taylor, who had grown tired of the ministerial life. They put out their first album, too,
Jesus Be a Fence Around Me
by the Soul Stirrers, with a beautiful four-color cover shot by celebrated jazz photographer William Claxton. Shortly after the LP came out, J.W. got a call from Leonard Chess, whose Checker label had an extensive gospel line. He told Alex SAR was going to ruin the market for everyone else if they insisted on giving gospel music that kind of high-class treatment. “He bawled me out! But I told him, ‘Look, Leonard, I was a gospel singer and Sam was a gospel singer, and everything we do is going to be treated with the same respect.’” It was an album of which they were both very proud. As J.W. quoted his partner in the album’s liner notes: “Although I wrote ‘Chain Gang’ (one of the country’s top hits), I thank GOD for the inspiration to write . . . ‘JESUS BE A FENCE AROUND ME.’” Or, as Sam put it in another context, assigning at least as much credit to purposeful intent, “I am aware that owning a record company is a losing deal much too often for comfort. But this company of mine is concentrating on recording Negro artists I feel have the ingredients to become as successful as I have. [And if I] lose a few dollars along the way, in the end it’ll be worth it to me. Morally, it’s a worthwhile project.”

“It was fun. It was family,” said Zelda Sands (née Samuels), SAR’s newest—and so far only—employee, who had come to work at $85 a week just after the start of the new year. She had arrived in Los Angeles not long before Christmas, looking for a music-industry job. A strikingly attractive, combative woman with the kind of figure that provoked both comments and stares (“I used to like to go over to her house and watch her tan,” reflected one musician wistfully), she was a veteran of the music business in New York, where she had first met Sam when he was playing the Copa and she was trying to pitch him a song. Ed Townsend steered her to SAR’s tiny office when she arrived on the West Coast, and she started making job calls from there, since the motel where she was staying didn’t have a phone. J.W. was in and out, but she only saw Sam once, when he came in off the road and, recognizing her, asked if she had gotten married yet. “I said no, and he said, ‘Good.’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t be married.’ ‘Ever?’ He said, ‘No, you’ve got too pretty a smile!’ I mean, he was always that way—with everybody.

“Then Christmas came, and I saw Sam again at the California Club. He asked how things were going, and I said I still hadn’t found anything, and I was all alone ’cause I didn’t know anyone in town, and I started to cry—I didn’t expect to, but I did. And he said, ‘Let me ask you something. How much would it take for you to pay your bills?’ He said, ‘Figure it out to the dollar.’ And I did. I told him it would be $85 a week. And he said, ‘Okay, you’ve got a job.’”

She went to work the following Monday, but the building superintendent had to let her in, because Sam and J.W. were both on the road. She quickly picked up the business, wrote label copy, did the paperwork for copyrights and clearances, dealt with pressing plants and distributors, and started writing songs with J.W. It wasn’t about work as much as it was about being part of a team, working for two guys she loved and admired. “I had to teach them how to be bosses. I watched over them. I protected them.” As far as she was concerned, Jess Rand wasn’t even in the picture. “Other than Lou [Adler] and Herbie [Alpert] at social events, I was the only white person in their lives. I’d always yell at Alex, I’d try to teach him. Not about the business. He made sure he was knowledgeable in that. What he wasn’t good at was people. He was nice to everybody, he believed everybody, I never heard him talk against anybody, and he [got] such a kick out of himself when he had all the right answers, he would just get tickled. But he didn’t really want to make waves in a white man’s world.” She conceived of herself, she said, almost as a watchdog over their interests, and Alex for his part got a kick out of
that.
“She would call up the distributors when I was out of town,” he chuckled, “and yell at them. ‘You take advantage of Alexander,’ she’d say. ‘He’s such a
good
person!’”

Sam she found a thornier problem, as much for personal as professional reasons—but her feelings about him were no less admiring. “He was very pretty to look at, he was charming, he was warm, he was handsome. He had a very good heart, always had his hand in his pocket to give people a few bucks if they were in need. He took you at face value—as long as you didn’t hurt him. I know he would discuss everything with Alex. [But] there was a part of Sam—he could hold the final cards and not tell anybody anything. And if he caught you at something he didn’t like, that he felt was dishonest, instead of talking it out [with you], he walked away from you forever.”

To Sam and Alex both, SAR Records was clearly something more than just another business venture. As J.W. said, “We wanted to give young black artists the benefit of as good a production as they could get with a major company. We used the top studios. We didn’t short-cut. We never thought of it as a training ground. We thought of it as an opportunity to contribute something back to the community.”

L
UIGI WAS FINALLY PERSUADED
to come out to the Coast and record Sam, with René Hall writing the arrangements, in April. They had had another New York session when Sam was in town for the BMI awards, and the resulting single, like “Sad Mood” before it, sold no more than 150,000 copies, or one-quarter the sales of “Chain Gang.” So, despite the fact that Hugo wouldn’t be accompanying him (he didn’t fly), Luigi cheerfully embraced the new arrangement, arriving several days early for what he considered to be the most important part of any session, the preproduction planning.

They met at René’s office, just around the corner from SAR, Sam, J.W., Luigi, and René. Luigi had never met René before, but he immediately felt comfortable with him, and he felt comfortable with the arranging ideas René sketched out for the two songs on which they were all agreed—which didn’t seem substantially different from the arrangements that Sammy Lowe might have come up with if they had conducted the session in New York. What made them different was the input Sam had already provided prior to Luigi’s arrival. It was the same input he had had on every session he had ever done with René—he would come in with a rough voice-and-guitar demo that he and Clif had put together, then dictate his arranging instructions as René played the song back on one tape recorder while recording both it and Sam’s instructions on another. It always astonished René how “with no formal musical training whatsoever, Sam could hear the entire orchestra, the string lines, the bass lines, the horn lines and hum [the parts] in perfect harmony.” Then René would bring the instructional tape to the studio—mainly so Sam couldn’t give him a hard time about his blueprint not being followed.