Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (73 page)

Arden’s fears about Little Richard turned out to be well founded. None of the legitimate theaters would book a rock ’n’ roll show, so Arden was forced to slot the revue into movie theaters for the most part, with the Granada chain (which had more than half the dates) more or less “sponsoring” the tour. He had assembled a program that included “Gag Slinger” Bob Bain as comedy act and compere; twenty-three-year-old Jet Harris, who had recently left Cliff Richard’s band, the Shadows, as co-star of the second half; a saxophone-heavy instrumental group called Sounds Incorporated to back the various acts; and American expatriate rocker Gene Vincent serving as impromptu audience “plant,” since, with the expiration of his British working papers, he could only sing his seminal 1956 hit, “Be Bop a Lu La,” from the same seat in the orchestra from which he would then introduce the two stars.

Opening night, October 8, was scheduled for the Gaumont in Doncaster, a small, out-of-the-way northern venue that Arden had picked for its very obscurity (“It was a shocking place—I don’t think anybody’d ever heard of it”), because, he calculated, any kinks in the show or in his star’s attitude could safely be ironed out there. He had left little to chance, but he could scarcely have anticipated Sam’s plane from Germany being so late that he would miss the first show of the evening altogether. Nor could he have been fully prepared for the strange turn that Little Richard’s stubbornly recalcitrant piety would now take.

He was not surprised when Richard showed up with a huge Family Bible, nor when he started quoting Scripture at him. He would not have been taken off-guard if Richard had demanded more money, and he had already planned his own response, which would have been to threaten to send his reluctant star home with no money for his return fare—which Arden was perfectly prepared to do. There was little at this stage that could have shocked him. But he was genuinely taken aback, and
helpless,
at the performance that Richard put on at the early-evening 6:15 show.

“As soon as he walked out, I knew we were in for trouble,” said Arden. Richard was wearing what looked to the promoter like religious robes, and he started off singing gospel songs exclusively—“Joy Joy Joy”; his own brilliant original “He Got What He Wanted (But He Lost What He Had)”; and the inspirational number “I Believe”—as his accompanist, sixteen-year-old Billy Preston (making his first appearance on the secular stage more than ten years after his debut on piano as a gospel child prodigy) took a featured turn on organ. It was only at the end of a very abbreviated set that Little Richard allowed the band to play what they had been rehearsing for most of the day, presenting a rapid-fire medley of his hits that ended with “Jenny, Jenny” and got a somewhat sparse house on its feet. “But even at this point,” wrote Chris Hutchins in the
New Musical Express,
“it seemed we were something short of the great artist who once rocked the world with his records.”

Don Arden was fit to be tied. He pleaded, he cajoled, he threatened Little Richard to no effect (“I said, ‘Now look, don’t double-cross me. That’s a naughty thing to do.’ He said, ‘You’re the devil’”)—and then he rushed outside to reassure the queue for the second show that, despite what they may have heard from the departing crowd, they were not going to be shortchanged. But he held out little hope until Sam and J.W. finally arrived. He asked if there wasn’t
something
they could say to Richard. He begged Sam to intercede, even after J.W. pointed out that Little Richard would most likely just respond to the competition that Sam had to offer. So in the end Sam agreed, as a favor to the promoter, to speak with Richard in his dressing room.

Sam reasoned with Richard. He said they had both come a long way to do this tour, that this was his first trip to England, and that maybe Richard thought Don Arden had used some kind of trickery to get them over here, but that as far as he knew, they had both signed contracts and he was certainly going to honor his. Arden simply watched in astonishment. “Sam said, ‘You’re a man. Why didn’t you say, “No, I can’t,” if you didn’t want to do it?’ And, you know, Little Richard melted. He said, ‘I’m only doing this because I respect you as an artist.’ And they both shook hands, and Richard decided to shake hands with me. But even after all [that], he still opened up the second show by saying, ‘I am here by courtesy of the devil, Don Arden!’”

J.W. was not convinced it wasn’t Little Richard’s competitive instinct as much as Sam’s persuasive powers that prompted him to put on what Chris Hutchins described as a “roof-raising act that began and ended with rock.” Sam, according to both Alex and Hutchins, killed the house, but then Richard came out at the end of the show, just as J.W. had said he would, “he came out with a damn chair in his mouth, and he pulled off that robe, and he literally slayed them.” He sang all of his hits, ran screaming up and down the aisle, and whatever peak Sam had been able to achieve, Richard was able to overcome with what J.W. called his “energizing approach.” It was a lesson in humility for Sam, but one that J.W. felt was not about to be lost on him.

The rest of the tour had its own internal dramas, though none quite so electrifying as the first. Little Richard continued to put on an arresting performance night after night, and Sam and J.W. continued to have the same lesson drilled into them. “No matter how Sam killed the house,” said Alex, “Richard could always come back with that energizing approach.” Most of the audiences were there for Richard, who was far better known in England than Sam and who continued to introduce new and exciting elements into his act. Perhaps the climax came when, in the midst of a piano-pounding “Lucille,” he keeled over at the piano and fell to the stage as though struck dead. Amid cries of “Is there a doctor in the house?” Richard lay prostrate on the stage, while the audience fell silent, and band members, stagehands, and a bewildered security crew anxiously gathered around the fallen star. Then suddenly a sound emanated from him. “A wop bop a lu bop, a lop bam boom,” screamed the resurrected Little Richard, and the audience greeted his revival with a fervor that generally brought the show to a close. It was, said Bill Millar, seventeen years old when he attended the show at the Maidstone Granada, “the most exciting thing I’d ever seen, a never-forgotten moment.” Forty years later, a passionate and perceptive chronicler of rock history, he could scarcely even recall Sam.

Jet Harris, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Sam: England, October 1962.

Courtesy of Trevor Cajiao, Now Dig This!

For Jet Harris, on the other hand, who studied both headliners closely from the wings each night, Sam’s act was a lesson in polish and sophistication. Harris, a rocker with peroxide-blond hair, had come on the tour as a kind of protégé of Gene Vincent, with a nod to James Dean, and was absolutely fascinated with Little Richard. “Richard used to watch my show, and when I’d come off, he’d say, ‘Now, look, you’ve got to make love to the guitar, treat it like a woman.’ He gave me loads of advice. But some of the things he wanted me to do, in my mind, were outrageous. So I didn’t bother.”

Sam, by way of contrast, was quiet, polite, almost unapproachable because of the way in which he marked off the boundaries of his world both by his manner and by the coterie that surrounded him. Crain and Alex, his brother Charles, his musicians Clif White and June Gardner, all silently served his needs and responded to his direction without his ever having to raise his voice or make a single untoward suggestion. “I was quite in awe of what a sort of gentleman he was. But when he went [onstage], he was a man in his own complete and utter style—he couldn’t go wrong. Most of the audience were waiting for Little Richard, but Sam just captured them—you know, ‘Here I am, get hold of this, I’m on.’ He really just hypnotized—with his hands, his voice, I can’t stop using that word, he
hypnotized
the audience.”

To Don Arden, too, Sam was unquestionably the class act. “He walked out as easy as anything, like somebody preparing to tell those people his life story. That was his attitude.” From Arden’s point of view, there was no real comparison with Little Richard. “Richard was a different type of actor. He went out hoping that he was going to make people laugh. And he succeeded in that—and he succeded in making them appreciate his songs. [But] there was nobody to touch Sam.”

Of course Arden may have been prejudiced. In addition to the trauma of simply setting up the tour, he had encountered more than a small amount of private trauma of his own. Arden believed in involving his family in his business—contrary to the thuggish public image that he had always cultivated (“In those days, if I lost my temper, you know [there’d] be headlines about it, and I kind of took advantage of that”), he often had his wife and children with him backstage, and on this tour he had his ten-year-old daughter, Sharon, and nine-year-old son, David, accompanying him. Little Richard’s oversized Bible had been a subject of abiding fascination to everyone on the show (“It was never away from him,” Jet Harris observed. “He carried it everywhere”), not so much what he was reading as what he was writing in it all the time. He kept it under lock and key whenever he was onstage, and, Arden said, it had become a kind of contest as to who was going to get a look at the book first. It turned out to be Arden’s nine-year-old son, when one of his longtime employees got a key to the star’s dressing room and, as a joke, gave it to the little boy. David brought the Bible back and was present for the revelation of a very graphic sex diary, with male lovers rated for their specific skills, names and dates included.

Arden was mortified that his son should have been exposed to something so salacious, primarily through the irresponsibility of one of his own employees. He was taken aback as well by what he viewed as Richard’s blatant hypocrisy, even though “when you start in show business at thirteen, there’s very little that you miss.” But most of all he relished the opportunity that this gave him for the perfect conversational comeback, and the next time that Richard started in on his familiar sermon that it was Don Arden who was responsible for all the sin in the world, since he was the Devil incarnate, “I said, ‘Yes, and I know about another little devil [who] writes rude things in Bibles.’ Well, he went hysterical, but—and I must say, that’s what I admire about him—he finished off laughing about it. He knew that he’d been caught out, you see.”

It was sex that was the inspiration for Sam’s latest song, too—or, rather, the comical deprivation of it. He and Alex had been staying at the aristocratic Mayfair Hotel, but the first time they brought back some girls (“Sam was a guy in great demand,” said a bemused Don Arden of Sam’s many social conquests), they were informed by the management that they were prohibited by hotel policy from entertaining female guests in Sam’s suite. Alex immediately went out and booked another, smaller hotel where they could do whatever they liked, but the incident lingered, and one night in the dressing room, Sam picked up his guitar, said J.W., “and he started strumming. ‘It’s another Saturday night, and I ain’t got nobody / I got some money ’cause I just got paid / How I wish I had someone to talk to / I’m in an awful way’—you know, it was like a joke!” Which was perhaps just another way of expressing what Sam told a
New Musical Express
reporter, who informed his readers that Sam had simply “dreamed up” another hit out of a sleepless night at his hotel.

Sam also spoke to
Melody Maker
about his writing methods and success, pointing out that Jackie Wilson had already recorded one of his songs (“I’ll Always Be in Love With You”) and that Pat Boone was planning to record another, “When a Boy Falls in Love,” in the very near future. In response to a question about
Black Nativity,
the gospel musical drama that Mike Santangelo had recently brought to London for a triumphant West End run (with the same note of thanks to Sam and Jess Rand that had appeared in the original American program book), he said, “I started as a gospel singer, you know. Doesn’t [that] music just swing?” All rock, Sam declared, sprang from gospel music, but, no, he didn’t include any gospel songs in his act, just his pop hits. So far as his first British tour was concerned, “Honestly, I have never come across audiences like the British ones. They give you so much rapt attention. . . . [But] I don’t get time to see as much of England as I want to. . . . I can see myself going back home and people asking, ‘What’s London like?’ And I’ll have to say, ‘I don’t know—we didn’t stop long enough!’”

With Maureen Cleave of the
Evening Standard,
he was somewhat more revealing. Dressed in “red-patterned pyjamas, a black dressing gown, and a beaten gold ring, which he wears,” Cleave wrote, “because he doesn’t like diamonds—or any precious stones for that matter—he lounged about on his bed and when something amused him, which was often, he threw his head back and roared like a bull.”