Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (79 page)

The feeling was unmistakable, it came through with no need for explicit testimony, and when Sam returned to the studio the next night to record “Little Red Rooster,” his own “Laughin’ and Clownin’,” and two beautifully realized adaptations of gospel material, the traditional “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” (introduced by a bowed bass) and “Mean Old World,” which he had recorded with the Stirrers just six years earlier, that feeling was only extended. “Laughin’ and Clownin’,” in particular, served to define the album as a moment of genuine introspection, with Sam recasting Montague’s favorite poem, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask,” in the form of a love song. “Laughin’ and clownin,’” Sam sang, “Just to keep from cryin’ . . .

I’m laughin’ and clownin’

Just to keep from cryin’

I keep on trying to hide the fact

I’ve got a worried mind

Being the life of the party

Seemed to be my role

(Since you left me, baby) being the life of the party

Seemed to be my role

I keep on tryin’ to hide my feelings

Tryin’ to hide my soul

On the final day of album sessions, he recorded two more Charles Brown numbers, a sing-along version of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” and yet another gospel transposition. The song that seemed to sum up the mood of the entire album, though, and the one with which he concluded the evening’s session, was Alex’s “Lost and Lookin’.” It was a minor-key, gospel-based number, as spare in its lyrics as it was rich in inspiration, with Sam’s voice set against nothing more than Clifford Hils’ stand-up bass and drummer Hal Blaine’s delicate striking of the cymbals. It showed off every one of Sam’s characteristic vocal effects—his delicate falsetto, the way he would ride a syllable, elongate a vowel to suggest dimensions of meaning scarcely hinted at in the lyrics, the slight roughening that he could use to suggest intensity of feeling without raising his voice; he employed all of these effects without in any way suggesting, either to the listener or himself, that they were effects, so intrinsic were they to his feeling for the music, to the feelings he wanted to express. “I’m lost and I’m callin’ for my baby,” he sang, “Baby won’t you please come home / I’m lost and I’m callin’ for my baby / I need you ’cause I’m so alone.” It was in many respects the exact opposite of the show he had put on at the Harlem Square Club, but, like the humming he had done for Montague, it served to summarize his definition of soul.

Meanwhile, the SAR sessions continued, even as Sam remained occupied with his own recording efforts, because, for the first time, he and J.W. had delegated responsibility to someone else. Their new full-time employee, Fred Smith, was no stranger to them; he went back to Keen Records days and had carved out a good deal of success of his own with his songwriting partner, Cliff Goldsmith, starting with the Olympics’ “Western Movies.” He and Goldsmith, however, had had a recent falling-out, and he had gone to work for SAR at the start of the year as songwriter, producer, and promo man.

He and Alex had just started on the Billy Preston album on February 8. The two of them were also working with Mel Carter, a former gospel singer J.W. had heard at a jazz club in downtown L.A. Mel was a crooner who had taken his example from the highly influential Robert Anderson, a fixture on the Chicago gospel scene. The song on which they were pinning their hopes was “When a Boy Falls in Love,” the number Sam had told an English reporter so proudly back in October that Pat Boone would soon be recording. Evidently Pat Boone couldn’t get it right, and neither could Johnny Nash or Lou Rawls. But working from a demo by Sam, and with a full-scale orchestration by arranger Joe Hooven, Fred and Alex got a stellar performance out of Mel on the same night that Sam recorded “Lost and Lookin’.”

Two nights later, J.W. and Clif were working on the Soul Stirrers’ long-delayed second album in Chicago while Sam embarked on a two-day singles session in L.A., working without Clif for the first time since he had started recording pop under his own name. He cut an easygoing bluesy number the Prudhomme twins had originally written for Fats Domino, “I Ain’t Gonna Cheat On You No More,” along with “She’s Wonderful,” an almost note-for-note (and swiftly abandoned) transliteration of “Wonderful,” the gospel song that had provided him with the springboard for “Lovable,” his first secular release. The next night, Clif was back, and, with Barney Kessel, a full horn section, and a mixed male-and-female chorus all in tow, Sam finally cut “Another Saturday Night,” the lighthearted take on life, loneliness, and sexual frustration he had written in England, now set to a Latin beat. It was something very much aimed at the pop market, a novelty song with a universal theme (“I got in town a month ago / I saw a lot of girls since then / If I could meet ’em / I could get ’em / But as yet I haven’t met ’em / That’s why I’m in the shape I’m in”) that white audiences and black audiences alike could identify with. “It had what we were selling,” said Luigi, perfectly willing to indulge Sam in tributes to Charles Brown and explorations of his gospel roots so long as Sam continued to deliver the kind of good, solid, commercial material he was capable of. The night before, after finishing up his own session in the RCA studio at 11:30, Sam had prevailed on his producer to stay on for the session he had scheduled in the same room at midnight with Johnnie Morisette. Luigi went out for something to eat, and when he came back, the session was in full swing, with Johnnie in typically raucous good humor. “We’re going to Smashville,” announced Johnnie at one point, while at another, he addressed his song to Patience Valentine, interspersing bloodcurdling screams with a wicked laugh he had been practicing.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Sam said wryly to Luigi, shaking his head. “I’m not getting anything, and I got the same musicians, same studio, same engineer.” Luigi, who had always seen Sam’s label efforts as something of a harmless eccentricity, just looked at him and responded in kind. “I said, ‘Schmuck, I use the same people—but I got Sam Cooke!’”

Scenes from Life

1 | JOCKO’S PARTNER

S
AM OPENED A WEEKLONG RUN
at the newly refurbished State Theater in Philadelphia on March 8. He did it as a favor to “Jocko” Henderson, the celebrated r&b disc jockey, and against the strong advice of Roz Ross, Jerry Brandt’s boss at William Morris. Ross didn’t think the theater would be ready in time, but, more important, she considered it unwise to go up against Jocko’s rival, Georgie Woods, “the Guy with the Goods,” who had had the Philadelphia rhythm and blues scene locked up for years with his monthly all-star revues at the Uptown Theater.

Barbara and Vincent, ca. 1963.

Courtesy of Barbara Cooke and ABKCO

Sam hadn’t played for either Jocko or Georgie Woods since the early days of his career (the financial terms were too onerous, the intangible rewards too few, and the DJ was the star of the show), but he was grateful to both, and particularly to Jocko, for giving him a helping hand when he needed it most. Jocko, the man who had elevated rhyming patter to a high art since his arrival from Baltimore eleven years earlier, had been successful first in his adopted hometown, then in New York a couple of years later, as he simultaneously established hugely popular afternoon and evening shows in both cities. A masterful radio personality with a flair for invention and self-promotion, he had started doing shows at the Apollo Theater in New York in early 1957 as WOV’s Ace from Outer Space (this, like the rhyming patter, was a direct crib from his chief mentor and influence, Maurice “Hot Rod” Hulbert, who had begun his own Rocket Ship show in Memphis in 1949 before moving to Baltimore the following year), and he even made a direct, head-to-head challenge to Alan Freed that same year. But he had never been able to break Georgie Woods’ hold on the lucrative field of live promotion in his own hometown, and it was only after losing both radio jobs a few months earlier (after an adulatory three-page spread in
Ebony
celebrating the Hendersons’ new $110,000 home and luxurious lifestyle had inadvertently raised questions as to where all this money might be coming from) that he began to seriously consider other sources of income.

He went to a friend of his, a thirty-one-year-old accountant named Allen Klein, who had helped him find money he didn’t know how to get from various publishing interests he had developed over the years. Jocko, who believed strongly in self-sufficiency and individual initiative, had not been slow to take the hint from his radio station employers that the public exposure they were affording him was not an end in and of itself (in other words, the minimal salary they were providing was not going to furnish him with the wherewithal for the sharp upward mobility he envisioned) but, rather, an invitation to explore alternative methods of remuneration. This he did, in the manner of nearly every other black—and white—jock (for some it came down to simply embracing a kind of “pay-for-play” system, which in its crudest form became known as payola), but as he would have been the first to admit, he was ignorant in the
business
of music. It was not until he met Allen Klein at a show he was promoting at the Apollo that he was able to establish his publishing interests in certain songs to which he had devoted particular attention in a manner that would ensure that henceforth he would be paid in full. To Jocko, Allen Klein was a right kind of guy, a sort of Robin Hood figure with a slide rule who simply by virtue of his disconcerting ability to shut out everything but the problem at hand could make powerful record industry figures knuckle under—he was the kind of person you definitely wanted on your side, a ferocious opponent but a man fiercely loyal to friends and family, his word, Jocko had learned from experience, incontrovertibly his bond. “He couldn’t lie if he wanted to,” Jocko said of this strange, seemingly humorless man whose emotions appeared to come out only in his work.

Klein, who might have been described in other terms by those in the industry with whom he had done battle, had reason not to value loyalty lightly. A famously focused man, he had spent much of his early childhood in an orphanage after losing his mother at nine months and then, at his father’s direction, being taken away from his grandmother, his mother’s mother, at the age of three and a half and placed with two older sisters in Newark’s Hebrew Orphanage and Sheltering Home. He would never forget his grandmother dressing him with tears streaming down her cheeks, as the station wagon arrived to take him to the Home. Nor would he forget his father, a butcher who had emigrated from Hungary at the turn of the century, coming to retrieve him six years later and presenting him with his new “mother.” Perhaps that was what accounted for the oddity of his manner, which could be read either as a brusque challenge or a defensive cover-up—but there was little doubt that he carried his wounds with him, though he rarely shared them with others. He waited till his bar mitzvah to ask his father the one question he had never been able to put out of his mind: Why, after placing his children in the Home, had he never come to visit them in all those years? His father was a blunt man, and the boy believed him when he said, “You have no idea how many times I came, but it broke my heart, so I drove away.” But what did that mean? asked the boy, in what amounted, for him, to almost an emotional outburst. He was the child, he told his father. “You were supposed to be the adult. You were supposed to look out for me.”

Except for two years in the army, he had lived in his father and stepmother’s house in Newark until he graduated from college at twenty-five, but he had always considered himself to be on his own. He had gotten into the music business almost by accident after working his way through Upsala College in three years and graduating with an accounting degree. His first job was with a firm that had the Harry Fox Agency account. The Harry Fox Agency then, as now, served as a licensing organization and collection agency for mechanical royalties for the majority of U.S. music publishers, and Klein took his first commercial plane ride—to Hollywood—to pinpoint the publishing liabilities of the independent Dot label in preparation for its acquisition by ABC Records. That was how he discovered the intricacies of the accounting system specifically developed for a music industry that had been fundamentally converted, sometimes with a good degree of opportunistic obfuscation, from sheet music to record sales over the previous half century.