Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (81 page)

Then, when Sam came back to town, he took them around, but to different places: to the California Club, where he pushed them up onstage on Monday night “talent night” with a dozen other acts in the house (“We said, ‘But we already famous,’” laughed Bobby, “Sam said, ‘You famous in
Cleveland
’”), and to Martoni’s restaurant, the high-class Hollywood hangout on Cahuenga that Sammy Davis Jr. had introduced him to, where he presented them to the head waiter and ordered them charred steaks. They went to the SAR offices nearly every day, and Sam and Alex had Sy Devore shirts made up for them with open necks and puffy sleeves so they would look like romantic buccaneers, like
Valentinos.
Sam brought them out to his house, too, in a wealthy white section of town, where a very self-possessed Linda, just nine years old but clearly the apple of her father’s eye and at ease with both adults and adult conversation, brought them Cokes and had crème de cocoa and milk for herself. But their new single wasn’t doing anything, the session work that Sam had promised them wasn’t happening yet, and they continued to feel that they had been cheated somehow on “Lookin’ For a Love,” which had originated with their own gospel number, even if they hadn’t written it. And now with Bobby showing more loyalty to Sam than he did to his brothers, Curtis, Harry, and fifteen-year-old Cecil were beginning to wonder what exactly the future held in store.

C
HARLES GOT STABBED
at the Howard. It was a typical altercation for Charles, and it certainly wasn’t the first time. “In Brandywine [a black amusement park in the Maryland countryside] five dudes jumped me over some kind of misunderstanding and they cut me here and there and kicked out all my teeth before Clif could get down from the stage.” Clif had busted his guitar over one of the guys’ heads that time, and he and Sam had taken Charles to the hospital to get fixed up, but, as he viewed it, it was all in the game.

This time it was more serious. “I was at Cecilia’s Bar across the street, eating, and somebody come over to tell me that the doorman at the Howard wouldn’t let this business associate of Sam’s and his friends backstage. Now me and the doorman got along well, so I go back and tell him, ‘Look, man, these aren’t fans. These people have business to take care of with my brother.’”

For some reason, though, on this particular occasion, the doorman wasn’t receptive to Charles’ way of thinking, maybe it was due to what Hank Ballard termed his truculent manner, “that old ghetto gangster” in him.

“I said, ‘Wait a minute, let’s get this shit straight. He going backstage.’ He said, ‘There ain’t no goddamn body going back there.’ So me and him got into it, and somebody stepped between us and pulled a knife, which I didn’t see, and I knocked him down, but then I felt this blood just oozing out. They had to operate on me for about twelve hours, give me a fifty-fifty chance. But I know damn well I got a fifty-one-forty-nine.”

The whole family came down to Washington and prayed over him. When the band went to the hospital to visit him, said Bobby, “he was like a dead man, with all these tubes in him, and that shook me up, because [the night before] Charlie was working that motherfucker over.” He was still in the hospital when Sam closed out his D.C. run. But he swore he would catch up with them before they even knew it, sometime early in the fifty-one-day Henry Wynn Supersonic tour that was starting up at the end of the week.

Sam’s new single, “Another Saturday Night,” the number he had written in England and recorded at the end of February, had just come out and looked like it was going to be as big a hit as “Bring It On Home to Me.” Sam was about to embark on his biggest tour ever, in what amounted to a partnership with Henry Wynn. And his record label was having its most successful year. But while he was appearing at the State Theater with Jocko, Jackie Wilson was playing the Copa. And while Jackie was making his seventh appearance in two years on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
Sepia
magazine published a letter from one of its readers asking the question “Why doesn’t Sam Cooke appear on television?” He
knew
why it was. It was because he wouldn’t play their fucking game. Jackie had his Mafia management, but Sam had his pride. SAR Records, he announced to the black press in an April 13 press release that might have served as one of Magnificent Montague’s history lessons, was going to “resurrect much of the excellent song material written” by Negro songwriters like Shelton Brooks, Andy Razaf, Fats Waller, and Leon and Otis René. “It amazes me,” Sam declared bravely if quixotically, “to see music written by [presumably white] mediocres and neophytes” given precedence over such great black music. And he intended to do something about it. But he was aware that he needed some additional muscle of his own. Jess had not been able to deliver the way he and Alex had hoped. He just folded in the face of opposition. When they ran up against the conventional excuses for lowered expectations the white establishment was so adept at handing out, Jess told Sam he was going to have to learn to do business with people who didn’t share his enlightened views. Fuck that! He was not about to sacrifice his hard-won independence to gain a hearing at this late stage. But neither was he prepared to give up any of the money and respect he felt were his unquestionable due.

He talked to Alex about Jocko’s friend, the accountant, and Alex agreed: it couldn’t do them any harm to let the man look into their situation. If he could come up with some money from BMI or RCA, it would be money they would never otherwise see. With Jess no longer in the picture, Jess’ friend at RCA, Bob Yorke, was never going to return their calls. Alex’s idea was, let this new guy do an audit, and if he found anything, he could take his percentage.

Allen called not long after they had gone out on tour, and Sam told him to meet them in Tampa. “I flew down and asked, ‘Did you call RCA?’ He said he had, but he hadn’t heard back, and would I please call them. I said, ‘Why don’t you try one more time? Give them another chance. I mean, they should call you back.’” Once again it was the same story. Bob Yorke wasn’t there, no one returned the call. “Sam said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ I said, ‘I think they’re treating you like a nigger, and that’s terrible, and you shouldn’t let them do it.’ Sometimes, you know, you just say things—I didn’t plan that, I just spit it out.”

But it obviously struck a resonant chord.

“He said, ‘You’re right. I want you to go after them.’ I said, ‘I’ll need all your documents and contracts.’” Sam said that wouldn’t be any problem, Mr. Alexander could supply all the documents. And that was that. Except for two brief letters that Allen produced for Sam to sign, one addressed to RCA, the other to BMI, each dated May 1 and each stipulating in identical language that Messrs. Allen Klein & Company were his legitimate representatives and to “please make available to [Klein] all statements regarding myself that he may request. Please give him your utmost cooperation,” the thirty-seven-word document concluded, and with Sam’s signature neatly affixed, Allen got back on a plane and returned to New York.

2 | LESSONS OF THE ROAD

B
OBBY COULDN’T BELIEVE HIS LUCK
, playing behind Sam every night while his brothers sat stewing at home. The tour was scheduled to cover twenty-four states plus Montreal and Toronto in just over seven weeks, with the Upsetters back behind Sam, and Jerry Butler closing the first half of the show. Sam had three cars out on the road: the Cadillac, the Buick station wagon, and a new custom-made Checker (a cross between a station wagon and a limo that could hold nine people and all their luggage) which he had had specially built at the Checker taxi plant in Michigan. Charles was still recovering from his stab wounds (“I was hurting when I went back, but I just wanted to be out there on that road”), but Sam hired another driver to fill in, and Crain and Alex were always available in a pinch.

Sam and Henry Wynn.

Courtesy of the Estate of Clif White

Sam no longer had any need for a middleman in his new “joint venture” with Henry Wynn (“Henry,” said William Morris agent Jerry Brandt, “was a man of honor. His word was the Rock of Gibraltar”). The lineup included several acts Bobby had first met at the State Theater—Johnny Thunder, affable and easygoing, with his rock ’n’ roll adaptation of a nursery rhyme (“Here we go loop-de-loop”); the Crystals, “bad-girl” teenage temptresses, the fantasy objects of nearly everybody on the tour; and a touchingly amateurish Dionne Warwick, whom Sam had first met as a little girl at Soul Stirrers programs in Newark and Philadelphia that her mother’s group, the Drinkard Singers, frequently opened.

Rounding out the bill were baby-faced two-hundred-fifty-pound Solomon Burke, the self-proclaimed “King of Rock ’n’ Soul” (“Onstage there’s nobody who can touch him,” Sam told Memphis’
Tri-State Defender
); Sam’s old pal Dee Clark, who, after rejecting “Bring It On Home to Me” the previous year, had recently recorded a new Prudhomme twins-authored, Kags Music-published song; and the Drifters, solid staples on any Supersonic tour. The MC was, once again, Gorgeous George, who fascinated Bobby (“He was such a good-looking guy, the girls would just drag him around like a rag doll. Sam said, ‘He can dress a guy into bad health’”). Sam picked him up in Atlanta, along with Lotsa Poppa, whose deft appropriation of Solomon Burke’s music delighted not just audiences but the free-spirited King of Rock ’n’ Soul himself. “I always liked him,” said Solomon, “’cause he made me look small. I was crazy about him.” According to Lotsa, billed for some reason on this tour not under his better-known stage name but under his real one of “Little” Julius High: “Sam said, ‘First thing, I want to put you on the tour ’cause you make me laugh. Next thing, I want to beat your butt in craps!’” It was, said Lotsa, “like a family. It wasn’t about money. It was about everybody enjoying their work and going out every night and just destroying the audience. The people got their money’s worth.”

Henry Wynn regularly checked in with the tour, flying in and out occasionally, driving to whatever dates he could. Henry by now was in charge of a loose confederation of black promoters covering both the Northeast and Southeast and reaching into Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. He still booked most of his big acts through the Universal agency but more and more was developing a stable and style of his own, which led to his being regarded as the kind of “race man” whose down-to-earth manner (“Don’t steal it all,” he would tell his employees, “or there won’t be any job left”) and entrepreneurial ambitions were matched only by his commitment to the community. The secondary acts and the musicians traveled for the most part in a big forty-six-passenger Greyhound bus, but all the headliners had their own cars. For Bobby, who had rarely traveled in the South except as a member of a family gospel group that never left the black community, playing for a mixed audience was a real revelation. “I guess the things I remember most is sitting on the bus, one guy get off and everybody be cool, see if we can get some food. And staying in them dumps. Sam said, ‘You know, it’s okay for me. I can live like I live, hang out here, and then I can go back home. But [black] people that come to hear me sing can’t even [do] that.’ He’d say, ‘You can hang with them [white folks], they’ll let you hang with them—as long as they ain’t got to worry about you.’” But at the same time, he told Bobby, if it seemed like you were looking to move up in their world, not only would those white motherfuckers throw you out on your ass, your own people would begin to wonder if maybe you weren’t walking away from them. “He said, ‘It’s a hard spot to be in, knowing what the situation is and pretending everything is great.’ He just didn’t feel comfortable making music under those circumstances. But if you’re a true actor, you’re gonna play the role.”

G
ORGEOUS GEORGE ALWAYS
opened the show with a flourish. In addition to pimping, tailoring, and delivering the stars to the after-show party at the local promoter’s club for a fee, he had developed the role of MC to a high art. “He was the world’s greatest MC,” said New Orleans DJ Larry McKinley. “He just couldn’t sing.” Gorgeous George might have demurred about the singing part, but he was in full agreement about his sense of
style:

If there was twelve acts on the show, I would change twelve times. I had about forty-some outfits, shoes, socks, rings, everything matched to a T. I had artists pay me $40, $50 not to wear certain suits [so he wouldn’t outshine them], and my hair—you ain’t never seen no hair like I had, like them Spanish cats, [except] I used to spray it blond, I could walk in, and it would bounce on my head.

I was MC on every tour because Henry Wynn was my manager. Henry named me. My real name is Theophilus Odell George—Theophilus means “God’s best friend.” My mother and grandmother named me out of the Bible, it’s Greek. Henry started calling me Gorgeous George [because] I was sharp. But the way I spelled it—my manager didn’t pay any attention—G-E-O-R-G-E-O-U-S. You understand?