Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (69 page)

Beverly and Betty Prudhomme, with Art Lebow, Los Angeles County Fair, September 1957 (note Sam in booth).

Courtesy of Betty and Beverly Prudhomme

Johnnie got his vocal down on the Prudhommes’ song almost immediately. His voice broke in a couple of places, but that wasn’t really a problem—he got the phrasing and the feeling right, nearly identical, in fact, to Sam’s, down to the humming that Sam would so often interpolate into his vocals. The band, too, helped convey the world-weary sense of determination that Sam had written into the song (“Don’t, honey, don’t go away / Do you hear, do you hear / what I say?”), that peculiar combination of hope and despair that provided the underpinning for so many of his songs. Earl Palmer’s drumming was impeccable, the horns extended Johnnie’s clipped phrasing, and poor Clif just about wore his wrist out as they went through take after take (“You had that roll effect rather than chunka-chunka-chunka—it went on forever, and, man, I was damn near dead!”) but getting it right every time with his unfailing gift for metronomic precision. In the end, only the background singing left Sam less than completely satisfied—he had a precise idea of how he wanted it to sound, concluding each “ha cha ra” with a “huh!” so that it rolled off the singers’ tongues in a way that even Lou Rawls at first couldn’t quite grasp. Eventually they got it with Sam and Alex, too, pitching in, and the song came together without losing any of its freshness or originality. To Alex, who had gotten a little frustrated trying to clear the publishing on a composition he wasn’t sure was worth the effort, it was further proof of his partner’s vision. Johnnie felt for the first time like he really had a hit. And Lou Rawls, who just enjoyed being around Sam (“Sometimes he’d call and say, ‘Hey, Lou Lou, what you doing?’ and we’d ride around, maybe even go to the beach”), soaked up an atmosphere that he felt for every one of them represented a rare break from the day-to-day rounds. It wasn’t a matter of how much you got paid—though generally everyone did get paid. But there was a sense of progress, of pride, of limits being challenged and ambition being achieved, there was a positive energy that infused the situation in a way that transcended the mere circumstances of a session. “Everybody just wanted to be there to see what was happening.”

Only the Prudhomme sisters were upset. They felt as if a trick had been played on them. When Sam first let them hear a dub, they thought it was him, and when he told them it wasn’t, they felt hurt and even put up some halfhearted resistance to the record coming out. They couldn’t understand why he would record another singer who sounded just like him doing their song. But after he promised them that he would do the song himself someday, after Johnnie’s version had played itself out, they abandoned all opposition. With all of his bubbling enthusiasm, all of the manifest delight he so evidently took in every aspect of his life, how could anyone, they wondered, stay mad at him for long?

To Barbara it sometimes seemed that the whole world saw a different Sam than the one she knew. She could dress up to go out with him and still feel like his “sophisticated doll”—but it was an image, not a reality, and no one was more aware of the gulf between the two than her. She had never seen a man take more pride in his new home—he seemed so consumed with every detail of its furnishing, answering the questions of her two lady decorators as to his vision for each room with voluble pleasure. He got a grand piano for the music room, leather-bound volumes for the library, a new Jaguar XKE sports car, and he brought home paintings from his frequent forays to the Beverly Hills galleries. He hired a gardener, a pool attendant, and two maids for Barbara to supervise in one full-time position—at first she thought he was putting her in a position of genuine responsibility because she had finally earned his trust. But then she realized it was all strictly superficial; there was little room for her, or anyone else, in the picture.

He was a different person at home than he was out in the world, brooding, solitary, lounging around in the silk pajamas she bought him, smoking cigarettes and drinking his Scotch. He might be reading one of his books or listening to his music, something might capture his attention and he would pick up his guitar and start working out a song, but as far as he was concerned, she might as well not have been there. He could be stubborn over the smallest things. She begged him to put a fence around the pool, or at least to get a pool cover, but he adamantly refused, despite the advice of his friends, because, he said, with the pool in front, it would disfigure the appearance of the property. She didn’t think it was a question of money; Sam wasn’t like that. But one time early in the new year, she tried to get him to give her sister Beverly $300 for a down payment on a little Renault, and he blew up and started yelling at her and saying that he wasn’t going to take care of her whole damn family, and then he actually hit her and disappeared for days. The next time she heard from him, it was as if nothing had happened. He called and told her to cook him up a steak, and when he came home, there was nothing more said. It was like they were playacting, and the only way she could get through her role was to stay stoned.

He didn’t like her to invite her friends over, and when he had
his
friends over, it was as if he were ashamed of her, staying with them in the bar or the music room, limiting any contact they might have had with her. He was indulgent with Tracey, who at sixteen months showed no signs of speaking, but Linda was the only one who could really get his attention. He could sit and talk with her by the hour, read to her and make up songs in a way that both warmed and broke Barbara’s heart. He had relented a little with Vincent, especially after his mother had pronounced that the little boy looked just like Sammy as a baby, but there remained that obstinate withholding of himself, he never accepted or gave his heart to the chubby little boy. She didn’t have anyone to talk to except her sister, and she didn’t know who to trust. The presence of any other woman in the room put her on immediate alert, it was like a switch got turned on in Sam and she could watch him go to work, practically making an assignation right then and there under her very nose. He was out every night with his friends, he and Alex were always talking “business”—they kept plotting how they were going to break this or that SAR artist, and they were just as involved with Lou Rawls’ career as they were with their own. It seemed sometimes like there was no division between work and play, and she didn’t fit into either.

H
E HAD BEEN HOME
for the better part of three months when he flew to Chicago at the end of February for a series of SAR sessions. Alex stayed in Los Angeles to promote the new Johnnie Morisette release (they had decided to hold back Johnnie Taylor’s single until the beginning of May to give “Meet Me at the Twistin’ Place” some breathing space), so Sam was on his own, focusing his attention on the first day on R.H. Harris, his one-time mentor, now forty-five years old but still in possession of one of the most thrilling voices in gospel. The former Soul Stirrers lead had formed his new group, the Gospel Paraders, a couple of years earlier, with the explicit idea of developing the most advanced contemporary harmonies in gospel or any other kind of music, but Sam and Crain appear to be in the thick of the background singing on this session, and Sam worked Harris with no evident trace of self-consciousness for up to thirty or forty takes of each song. The result was a masterpiece of “gospel blues” expression, and though neither Sam nor Alex had signed Harris with any expectation of commercial success (it was as much as anything, J.W. said, a matter of keeping faith), they believed in Harris, they believed in the music, and they were determined to use their label, at least in part, as a vehicle for expressing that belief. It was the session on the day after Harris’, though, that was the real reason for the trip.

Sam had finally persuaded the Womack Brothers to switch over to pop. He and Alex had put out a second gospel single on the group at the start of the year. It was probably the best song from their June session, “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” with the seventeen-year-old middle brother Bobby’s rasping, buzz-saw lead, but neither Sam nor Alex had any hopes for the record’s prospects. Mostly they wanted to prove to the Womacks that there was no commercial future for them in gospel music.

The Womack Brothers had certainly enjoyed their brief moment in the gospel spotlight. Their first release had put them out on tour with the Staple Singers and the Dixie Hummingbirds, but, as Sam kept telling them, it wasn’t going to do a thing for their pocketbooks or prestige. Even the girls in their high school, Bobby said, still liked “the basketball players, the football players, the baseball players, they said, ‘That’s the Womack Brothers, but they be singing something about “Thank you, Jesus,”’ It was embarrassing!” And once they saw Sam perform at a rock ’n’ roll show at the Pla-Mor Ballroom in Cleveland in August, the first rock ’n’ roll show they had ever attended, it was all over. “My father told me, ‘You might as well kill me if you go to that show,’” Bobby said, “but, you know, I
had
to go, and it was all different. The people screamed, the women were going crazy—we didn’t get a chance to talk to him, they just ushered him out, but I was saying, ‘Shit, man, you know, we want to do that.’ You know,
this
is what I wanted to do.”

It led to a family crisis. J.W. worked on his fellow Mason, Friendly Sr., while Sam continued to stand as the primary role model for the boys. In the end, despite the continued vehemence of his opposition, Mr. Womack relented enough to let their mother drive them to the session but told them in a family meeting that if they went, they were on their own, they were not going to pursue a rock ’n’ roll career while living in his house. “We all cried,” said the oldest, Friendly Jr., who had his own misgivings on the subject, “[but] we said, ‘We’re gonna do it anyway.’”

Zelda and J.W. had prepared a song for them based on their second single, Bobby’s showpiece “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray.” The new number was called “Lookin’ For a Love,” and Sam was sold on it from the first, he loved the
energy
of the song—“but we felt strange,” said Bobby, “almost like we were making a mockery of God. Sam was saying, ‘Man, [now] just don’t be tense. I know you feel tense.’ He was laughing. He said, ‘Ain’t no [Holy Ghost] coming in here after you,’ ’cause he had been through all that and he knew we were tripping hard, ’cause this was God’s song.”

Sam told Bobby, “You gotta stop chewing your words if you want to reach over. If they don’t understand what you’re saying, they can’t relate.” But, he said, on the other hand, he didn’t want Bobby sounding
too
proper. “’Cause then you’ll start to sound like me!” He spent a good deal of time positioning them so their hand claps would sound just right. “He’d run from the board back out to where we were,” said Bobby, “he was on me about my phrasing and getting the message across, but he’d be like, ‘Damn, I wish I could be in this, too!’”

The only other song they attempted that day was “Somewhere There’s a Girl,” the lyric that Sam had improvised over “Somewhere There’s a God” at their first session. They didn’t quite achieve the ethereal quality that Sam had imparted to the song, but with Curtis singing lead they came close. “Wail it for me, huh, Curt?” Sam implored good-naturedly, and when, after seven takes, he felt that they were nearly there, he declared, “This is for the Womacks,” as if to make the distinction that now they were singing the song for themselves.

Everyone was happy at the conclusion of the evening. Sam pronounced that they had cut themselves a hit, and he told them that he and Alex had come up with a new name for the group, too. It was a name they had first hit upon when things started to go bad at Keen and J.W. thought he and Sam might record as a duo for another label. They had never actually used it, but now they had the perfect recipients for the title: five young boys with a different sound who, as J.W. said, were all “slim, long-haired, all but Friendly played left-handed, we were going to take them to Sy Devore and dress them up like lovers.” And that was how they signed their new contract—as the Valentinos.

Sam was home for another month after returning from Chicago. J.W. concluded the deal with RCA for the Keen masters, thus paving the way for a Sam Cooke Greatest Hits LP. Liberty brought out the single that Sam had produced with Herb Alpert and Lou Adler on their mutual friend, George McCurn, the former Pilgrim Travelers bass singer better known as Oopie Doopie Doo (“Baby, put your hand on top of my head,” Oopie told Herb as an explanation for some of his lapses from orthodox phrasing. “You feel all that motion there?”). The song they had recorded was an update of “The Time Has Come,” one of Sam’s earliest compositions, given an eccentric romantic twist by the resonant agility of Oopie’s voice. Sam swam in the pool almost every day, and J.W. had just about persuaded him to take up the game of tennis. Every night, Johnnie Morisette or Johnny “Guitar” Watson or Johnnie Taylor was playing somewhere around town. There was no question that Sam had enjoyed this unaccustomed interlude, but with the Henry Wynn tour scheduled to start on April 6, he was ready to go back on the road.

H
E HAD BEEN OUT
for just under a week when the idea for a radical reworking of Charles Brown’s song first came to him. He was in the limo on his way to Atlanta, the car’s headlights sweeping the highway as he sat in the backseat with the little pinprick of light from his reading lamp illuminating the lyrics he was writing down. The song would retain its gospel flavor and the call-and-response format that made it in essence a vocal duet, and some of the words would even continue to suggest its spiritual origins—but its refrain (“Bring it to me, bring your sweet lovin’, bring it on home to me”) would leave little doubt as to its secular intent.