Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (78 page)

Sam and King Curtis, ca. early 1963.

Michael Ochs Archives.com

The Harlem Square Club was a big barn of a building owned by a local operator named Joe Marcus that, like the Royal Peacock in Atlanta and the Palms of Hallandale, was an obligatory stop on every high-profile r&b star’s tour. Sam got a guarantee of something like $1,500 plus a percentage of the door, and the club owner agreed to pay $250 toward the Kingpins’ salary. There was a poolroom and a long bar at the front of the building where you could buy setups, along with a kind of package store whose cashier sat impassively behind a steel grille. Upstairs, there was a balcony with tables for the patrons, and a small office in which the recording engineers, Bob Simpson and Tony Salvatore, set up their equipment. They monitored the sound at a fairly desultory teenage matinee, then adjusted the microphone placement for the first evening show, starting at 10:00
P.M.
Sam gave them a cheery greeting before going on, and then the place erupted in a manner that Salvatore, like his partner a neophyte in the world of rhythm and blues, was simply not prepared for. “There weren’t any brawls or anything like that, but I’ll tell you, it was like a scene out of a movie, the whole building was rocking, and I remarked to Bob, I said, ‘Oh Jesus, I hope this place don’t fall down.’” His colleague, who was on the board, sent him downstairs to try to balance the sound, but he could barely make his way to the stage and once he got back, the two engineers decided that, whatever the sonic shortcomings, they would just have to make the best of it, there was no point in risking life and limb for a microphone adjustment.

“Right now, ladies and gentlemen,” King Curtis announced in time-honored M.C. fashion at the start of the 1:00
A.M.
to 4:00
A.M.
late show, “we’d like to get ready to introduce the star of our show, the young man you’ve all been waiting for, Mister Soul. So what d’you say, let’s all get together and welcome him to the stand with a great big hand—how about it for Sam Cooke?”

Sam was, not surprisingly, a little hoarse, his voice somewhat frayed, but more to the point, he was singing in a guttural style that, as Jerry Brandt had immediately recognized at the New Year’s Eve gospel show, few white people had ever heard from him, not even those who had purchased Sam’s gospel records. Because the gospel records were tame in comparison with their live performance, and there was no way to get any measure of the ecstatic nature of the experience without being present at the event itself. There was nothing soft, measured, or polite about the Sam Cooke you saw at the Harlem Square Club; there was none of the self-effacing, mannerable, “fair-haired little colored boy” that the white man was always looking for. This was Sam Cooke undisguised, charmingly self-assured, “he had his crowd,” said Clif White approvingly—he was as proud as he had been raised to be, not about to take any scraps from the white man’s table.

Jerry and his fiancée, L.C., and Barbara all watched from the balcony. It was the same show that he had introduced at the Apollo, but, said J.W., observing from the wings and even coming out to twist for a while onstage, “Sam was really in his bag, you know. When he was really having fun, he could drive the women into a frenzy, it was almost like he was beating up on them to get an orgasm.”

Barbara viewed it with a somewhat different eye. Watching the whole scene with L.C., she joked with her brother-in-law about the good taste, and discretion, he had always shown. “She said to me, ‘L.C., you know one thing that’s different about you from your brothers?’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘You don’t want to be with no ugly woman.’ She said, ‘Now your brother Charles and Sam [will] mess with ugly women, but you won’t.’ I said, ‘That’s right, baby, you sure know me.’ She said, ‘Hey, you know I know you. You and me, we go way back.’ And we laughed.”

With the opening notes of “Bring It On Home to Me,” the crowd erupted in fevered shouts, as Sam led them in a sing-along that gained in urgency until he declared, in time-honored r&b fashion, “I better leave that one alone,” then entered into an even more transcendent “Nothing Can Change This Love.” “Let me sing that middle part again,” he cries out, as the crowd roars its approbation, and in the booth Bob Simpson and Tony Salvatore try desperately to get a balance that will convey some of the sheer commonality of the moment. They couldn’t quite get it right, the audience feel wasn’t anywhere near as clean as on
Belafonte at Carnegie Hall,
but they stayed with it right up to the end, which finally achieved the climax everyone had been working for all night long, as Sam kept urging them to go on having their party. “Sam Cooke, ladies and gentlemen, how about it, Sam Cooke,” declares the MC, taking the mike back from Sam even as the moment begins to fade into eternity. For that is what it is, and that is all it is, a moment that has been captured, like a snapshot from a photograph album: it was, Sam might have argued, not his art but his life.

T
HE TOUR CONTINUED
for another three weeks. Sam got into a showdown with Watley over keeping the station wagon clean (“As much goddamn money as I pay you, the next time my car look like that when we go to a gig, you ain’t got a job—’cause that’s a reflection on me”), but Watley straightened out. The game between Charles and King Curtis went on day and night, the party never stopped. Curtis’ guitarist, Cornell Dupree, observed it all with admiration and appreciation, both for the music and the life. “Simplicity is the most complicated thing you can get. It was pretty much the same rundown [of songs every night], but every time Sam would do it, it would be another feeling to it—everything would just somehow lock in to make the moment special. Clif told me what to play, I would do the little lines within the song, and he would do the rhythm to support it, but Curtis took the solos—it was a good marriage, you might say. Sam would capture the audience, have them crying and laughing, they loved all the songs he sang, and half the people would sing along, whether he asked them to or not. J.W. would come out at the finale and dance along and participate, and [because of his white hair] everyone thought he was Sam’s father. Crain was always there, and Charlie, and Sam was very generous, I just admired him and how he got through.”

Sam and Alex surprised Zelda by flying into New York for the BMI Awards dinner on an off-date in the middle of the tour. Sam had sent her to New York to pick up his songwriting awards for “Bring It On Home to Me” and “Twistin’ the Night Away,” and when he and J.W. showed up in their tuxes, Sam’s double-breasted and custom-made with prominent buttons of mother-of-pearl, it shocked the hell out of her. Sam was one of six writers to get two “Citations of Achievement” in the pop field (Carole King got five), and he mingled with old friends and new, looking suavely resplendent and entirely at ease. Twenty-eight-year-old country songwriter Merle Kilgore was thrilled to meet Sam, but he was even more thrilled when Sam offered up not just a passing version of Kilgore’s own award song, “Wolverton Mountain,” but a whole host of country hits. Lou Adler flew in for the ceremony, Zelda wore a tight tan sheath that showed off her figure, and in the photos everyone is raising a glass and grinning to beat the band.

J.W. Alexander, Lou Adler, Sam, Zelda Sands, BMI Awards dinner, January 23, 1963.

Courtesy of BMI

Then they rejoined the tour, playing Jacksonville, Florida, on the twenty-fifth and Atlanta’s Royal Peacock the next night, this time with Gorgeous George, the spectacular dresser who had started out as Hank Ballard’s valet, as MC. Lotsa Poppa, the affable three-hundred-pound Solomon Burke disciple, opened the show, and Sam got an even bigger kick out of him than he had in July, telling club owner and promoter Henry Wynn that he thought Lotsa would be great for their next Supersonic tour. Watley got into more hot water, this time with Clif, who picked him up and flung him out the door like a limp rag doll in a disagreement over a craps game at the Forrest Hotel. L.C., meanwhile, had a visitor at the Forrest. Aretha Franklin was passing through town, “and I just come out of the shower and was singing this new song I had written, ‘Please Answer Me,’ and I walked out, and she said, ‘Whoo, that’s a pretty song.’ I said, ‘I know. It’s one of the things I’m getting ready to record right now.’ She said, ‘L.C., give me that song.’ I said, ‘No, girl, you crazy. I can’t give you my song.’ But she just kept on: ‘L.C., please give me that song. Just let me sing it.’ And she kept beating on me so that I finally gave in.”

L
.C. DIDN’T GET TO SING
his new song at his February 15 session in L.A., but Sam did give him a new number, “Put Me Down Easy,” with Sam and Crain joining in on the backup. Sam had been working on the song in the limo while L.C. was asleep, and when L.C. woke up, he said, “That’s mine,” and Sam just gave it to him. He did another song of Sam’s called “Take Me for What I Am” and one called “The Wobble,” after a new dance craze that some said was going to take over from the Twist. He had a full chorus behind him on this one, and J.W. taught him the dance in the studio. When it came to “Little Red Rooster,” though, a raw blues that Howlin’ Wolf had put out the previous year, L.C. drew the line. “I said, ‘I’m not a blues singer.’ So Sam said, ‘Well, I’m gonna do it, then.’” It was as overt a disagreement as the two brothers had yet had over the direction of L.C.’s recording career, and certainly it was overshadowed by the scrupulous attention that Sam gave to every aspect of L.C.’s sessions, but each was dissatisfied in his own fashion: Sam by what appeared to be L.C.’s manifest lack of ambition, L.C. by the fact that he hadn’t had anything resembling a hit since signing with SAR, or anywhere near as good a record as “Do You Remember?,” his debut release on Checker in 1958, when Montague was still guiding his career. The principal, unspoken point of contention, though, was how much L.C. felt he was being forced into Sam’s mold (“[L.C.] didn’t want to sing like him,” said René Hall, “[but] strange as it may seem, Sam made all his artists sound like him”), and recently he had started thinking about going back to Montague, with whom he could simply be himself.

Sam secured an $8,000 advance from RCA two days before his brother’s session. He had six other SAR artists either in the midst of recording or about to go into the studio, and that may well have been the reason he needed the money. Barbara in any case was furious at him for continuing to finance the record company out of his own pocket. She argued that it made no economic sense and that this was starting to be a hobby that he could no longer afford. She felt a certain resentment of Alex and Zelda, of Johnnie Taylor and Johnnie Morisette and the Womack brothers and all the rest, for leeching off of her husband. But she knew there was nothing she could say to keep him from putting even more of his money into what he had made very clear to her was his own private domain. Sam for his part blamed RCA for placing him in this position—here he was, their most consistent seller behind Presley, and they were still just nickel-and-diming him to death.

He went into the studio himself the following week to cut a new album, despite the fact that
Mr. Soul,
the LP he had cut with Horace Ott in December, had just been released. It was almost as though he had had second thoughts about the previous enterprise, as if he wanted to erase anybody else’s definition of soul (“‘Soul,’ Hugo and Luigi wrote in their liner notes, “you know it when you hear it. It’s about abandoning the formalities . . . and going to the
truth
as the performer feels it”) and substitute his own.

This session bore very little resemblance to the previous one. René was once again back in charge, the accompaniment was nothing more than a rhythm section with two keyboard players (New Orleans-born Ray Johnson on piano, and Billy Preston, the sixteen-year-old organist who had accompanied Little Richard in England and just begun work on his debut album for SAR’s new Derby label) and a guitar chair occupied, as always, by Clif, but augmented by jazz great Barney Kessel. They started off with three old Charles Brown numbers that set the tone; each was relaxed and mellow in the manner that was almost unique to Brown, but each was infused at the same time with the kind of effortless vocal flights unique to Sam. You could read it, in a sense, as a musical debt repaid: if Brown couldn’t find the time to make the session at which Sam had recorded “Bring It On Home to Me,” then Sam would pay homage in this fashion to a musician who had educated everyone from Ray Charles to Sam himself in a more refined style of the blues.