Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (93 page)

The Johnnie Morisette session on which the AFO Executives made their official SAR debut on January 21 may not have altogether exemplified that spiritual atmosphere, but it did nothing to discourage Sam’s faith in the band, either. They proved their adaptability and versatility in addition to their unquestionable musicality, as Johnnie displayed his usual mix of natural boisterousness and inebriated good spirits on a variety of songs, including an out-of-tune but supercharged remake of “You Send Me.” “Brother Bat!” said Johnnie to Harold. “I see you’re slick.” “Lord have mercy,” said Sam, as the room echoed with Hallelujahs and good-natured soul screams.

Although he wasn’t making any personal appearances, Sam kept not only Clif, June, and Bobby on salary but his brother Charles and Charles’ fellow driver, Watley, as well. He himself reveled in the unaccustomed role of gentleman of leisure. The Thursday before the Johnnie Morisette session, he and Barbara attended Johnny Mathis’ opening at the Cocoanut Grove and the after-party hosted by the high-flying young Hollywood couple Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee. Nat and Maria Cole were there, Liberace, jazz critic Leonard Feather, and film stars Rock Hudson and Connie Stevens. The following night Sam was at blues balladeer Arthur Prysock’s celebrity-packed opening at the California Club and, after being called up to sing “Little Red Rooster,” couldn’t get offstage again without performing two encores. He caught the Soul Stirrers that weekend in a “Gospel Hootenanny” with the Consolers and June Cheeks at Olympic Auditorium, and he spoke to Crume about the Stirrers’ and his own upcoming sessions the following week. He wanted to give the Stirrers a real pop sound this time, he said, and to that end he was going to use the same New Orleans backup band for them that he was planning to use on his own session. They could pay him back in kind, he told Crume, by singing background for him on a couple of numbers that he wanted to infuse with the real gospel sound.

“Sam said, ‘You know, I try to get those other background people to sound like the Soul Stirrers, [but] I got the real deal here!’ He said, ‘Now you gotta talk to J.J. [Jesse J. Farley, the group’s oldest member and nominal leader]’—because J.J. really didn’t want to do it. He thought it would spoil the Soul Stirrers’ image. I said, ‘Jesse, they won’t put our name on the record. Nobody’ll know.’ But they knew it was us [even though] we denied it for a long time.”

Tracey and Linda Cooke with Eric, with Beverly Campbell’s sons Michael Halley and Don Coles (left to right) on the right.

Courtesy of Barbara Cooke and ABKCO

Lou Rawls was at the Purple Onion in Hollywood promoting his brand-new Capitol single, “Tobacco Road,” with
A Night on Tobacco Road.
Little Willie John was playing the 5/4. Johnnie Morisette was at the Club House on Western, opening for Bobby “Blue” Bland. Sam and Barbara were out almost every night, sometimes together, more often than not on their own. Things were still not right between them. Barbara doubted they ever would be. Sometimes, after a long night of drinking, they might make love, and he would ask her if he still made her feel like she used to—and she would restrain her incredulity and tell him what she knew he wanted to hear. She didn’t care. She had found a little boy, just about Vincent’s age, he was a sweet round-faced little boy, light-skinned, with a fuzzy head of sandy hair just like Vincent had. His mother was a hooker friend of Barbara’s who had lots of kids, and she said, “Well, you can have any one you want.” So she took Eric home and dressed him up in Vincent’s clothes, bought him some new outfits, and told the girls he was their new baby brother. Sam objected at first, but he saw how happy Eric made her, and she said, “Sam, you’re not here that much anyway.” Then the house was a jovial place again, filled with kids, her sister Beverly’s and her own. Until her girlfriend got greedy and Sam balked at paying a king’s ransom for this child who was not his own. So she lost Eric, too, and she was left with a husband who was more like a little boy, in her view, than a man. Sometimes he would take the Maserati and drive until he ran out of gas and then call her to come bring him money so he could go on and drive some more. She always did it, she told him she would do anything he asked, she said, “I’m your mate. But that’s all I am.” It was like a long-standing business partnership that couldn’t be broken, one friend of theirs observed. It seemed obvious why Barbara would stay. And Sam? “He made her a promise,” said the friend, “and that was it. He did it for the baby [that they first had together] and for the promises he didn’t keep. He said he would never leave her.” But Barbara had her tubes tied anyway so she couldn’t have any more babies with Sam.

S
AM HAD CRAIN SING TENOR
with the Soul Stirrers at their session at United on the afternoon of January 28. He had worked up a special arangement of the old spiritual “Oh Mary, Don’t You Weep,” but it was Brook Benton’s “Looking Back,” a huge hit for Nat “King” Cole in 1958, that was the centerpiece. A heartfelt ballad with a thoughtful philosophical message, it was just the kind of number that Sam had been looking for to break the group pop, and he patiently instructed Stirrers’ lead singer Jimmie Outler on the meaning of the words (“‘Looking back over the
slate,
’” he explained. “Like a chalk slate, you know? Like you done chalked everything down. It’s in your memory”). With Clif, Crume, Stirrers bass player Sonny Mitchell, the core of the AFO band, plus flautist William Green, the Soul Stirrers finally achieved the kind of “crossover” sound that Sam and Alex had been aiming at for so long. “Clif, play with all your fervor,” Sam exhorted at one point, and while there may have been an element of self-mockery in his tone, he was absolutely serious about the feeling and effect he was striving for.

Three hours later, in the RCA studio at Sunset and Vine, he had Crume and Sonny Mitchell playing on his own session for exactly that reason. He instructed the Stirrers and Crain in the precise vocal arrangements and harmonies he wanted them to employ on each song, and he made it clear that what he was looking for was that same gospel fervor. The first number was “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day,” the Prudhomme twins’ collaboration that he had unexpectedly bestowed upon Johnnie Taylor a year and a half earlier. It had a nice easygoing feel to it, as Luigi kidded the Soul Stirrers about their off-the-beat hand claps and the full AFO band churned along behind Sam with that infectious New Orleans sound. The second number, “Meet Me at Mary’s Place,” was a reworking of Johnnie Morisette’s “Meet Me at the Twistin’ Place,” another original by Sam, transformed this time into a vivid evocation of the past. The Mary in question was Mary Trapp, a gospel fan and promoter whose big house in Charlotte, North Carolina, was a kind of hangout and guesthouse for all the traveling quartets (she loved both the singer and the song, according to one prominent gospel lead). At Sam’s direction, the Stirrers backgrounded him with a cheery “Over at Mary’s place—ho!” while the song, like so many of his celebratory compositions, was bathed in an almost indelible atmosphere of regret. “Rome” took almost no time to get a satisfactory master take; “Mary’s Place” took even less (just two takes, with the tempo picking up briskly on the second, as if to deny the intrinsic tone). And with that, Sam was off on a gospelized double-time version of “Tennessee Waltz,” the country standard, on which the horns replaced the Soul Stirrers with a driving, off-rhythm response, and Sam’s achievement of the high note called for in the chorus (“I never thought he was going to make it,” said Crume, who was standing right beside him, “he let out a little laugh when he did”) provided an ironic counterpoint of triumphant emotionalism for a sad song originally written in three-quarter time.

All three songs were effortless exercises in transformation, all three (unlike several recorded at the December sessions) were clearly intended for inclusion in the album—but it was the session two nights later on which Sam was really pinning his hopes.

He had given René Hall the “civil rights” song he had played for J.W., with no specific instructions other than to provide it with the kind of instrumentation and orchestration that it demanded. René was in no doubt as to the momentousness of the charge. “I wanted it to be the greatest thing in my [life]—I spent a lot of time, put out a lot of ideas, and then changed them and rearranged them, because here was an artist for whom I’d never done anything with my own concepts [exclusively], and this was the only tune that I can ever recall where he said, ‘I’m going to leave that up to you.’” René wrote the arrangement as if he were composing a big movie score, with a symphonic overture for strings, kettledrum, and French horn, separate movements for each of the first three verses (the rhythm section predominates in the first, then the strings, then the horns), a dramatic combination of strings and kettledrum for the bridge (“I go to my brother and I say, ‘Brother, help me, please’”), and a concluding crescendo worthy of the most patriotic anthem, as Sam extends his final repetition of the chorus (“I know a change is gonna come”) with a fervent “Oh, yes it is” and the strings offer a shimmering sustain, while the kettledrum rumbles and the horns quietly punctuate the underlying message of hope and faith.

It was all carefully considered. The French horn, René explained to J.W., who was as surprised as René himself by Sam’s singular abdication of control, would give it a mournful sound. The orchestral arrangement would match the dignity of the song. As Harold Battiste, who played keyboards on the session, observed, “All of us have a vision of what we think we are. Sometimes we have an idea about something that we think we need to try to reach. We may overshoot, but I guess we all trying to get that acceptance where Mama and Daddy say, ‘Okay, yeah, it’s good.’”

Everybody executed his role flawlessly with the exception of AFO drummer John Boudreaux, who was evidently so intimidated by the orchestral makeup of the session that he simply announced, “Man, I can’t go out there and play,” and refused to leave the control room, impervious to the pleas of his fellow musicians. Fortunately Earl Palmer was working next door, and he came and filled in. But otherwise the recording process went as smoothly as it might have for any of Sam’s little “story songs.” Then Luigi, as though acknowledging the momentousness of the occasion, asked Sam to give him one more, and after a couple of false starts, the eighth take was nearly perfect. Luigi told Sam how much he liked the song, and Sam, who knew this was going to be their last session together, acted almost surprised, as if, Luigi said, he might think that his “New York producer,” the consummate hitmaker, wouldn’t approve of a song that sought to make a social statement. “But I
did
like it. It was a serious piece, but still it was him. Some of the other stuff was throwaway, but this was very deep. He was really digging into himself for this one.”

W
ITHIN DAYS
Harold told Sam he thought he had found a location for the first Soul Station, but when they all went to the real-estate office, as Chuck Badie recalled, saxophonist Red Tyler wandered behind the counter to get a look at some of the pictures on the wall, “and the man said, ‘Hey, you can’t come back here.’” Sam, whom the outspoken bass player liked to refer to as “Little Caesar,” was carrying an attaché case full of money and visibly bristled at the remark. “He said, ‘What did you say, brother? He can’t go back there? Well, then we ain’t got no business in here.’ He said, ‘Come on, fellows, let’s get the fuck out of here.’ That’s exactly what he said. And he walked out the door.”

That was how they found themselves on the corner of Thirty-seventh and Vermont, where they spotted a little storefront with a “For Rent” sign in the window that seemed like it had been just waiting for them to come along. “It was a cool neighborhood, kind of on the wild side but no problems,” said Chuck. They took out a lease on the spot, then went back to Sam’s house, where Sam showed them around and, on a whim, gave them the run of his extensive clothes closet. Chuck picked out a blue serge suit for himself and, when Sam said, “Is that all you want?” took a couple of Saks Fifth Avenue sweaters to boot. As they were leaving, Boudreaux, the drummer, said, “Man, you sure is lucky,” but Harold, who was not unaware of Chuck’s bold proclivities, laughed and said, “He ain’t lucky. He’s cheeky.” It was all in good fun, and Sam had proved himself to them not only as a man of his word but as a good fellow. Now they could get down to the business of fixing up their new headquarters.

Sam told Bobby all about the Soul Station right away. He said it would offer the Valentinos an opportunity to rehearse whenever they felt like it, they could go try out song ideas, put them down on tape, and have the benefit of Harold and the other fellows to critique and help them out with their music. He told Bobby about the new song he had just recorded, too, and played it for him in the darkened music room, with René’s swelling arrangement booming out of the giant movie speakers. He explained it all to Bobby like he had explained it to Alex. But there was a note in his voice other than just pride of authorship. It was almost, Bobby thought, as if he were feeling some kind of premonition. He said, “The song just came to me. I never scuffled with the words or anything. It was like it was somebody else’s song. What do you think of it, Bob? Just tell me whatever comes to your mind.” “It feels like death,” said Bobby, never overly troubled with the need for reflection and seemingly sensing the same premonition himself. “He asked me, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘No, I’m gonna take that back. It don’t feel like death, but it feels eerie, like something’s going to happen.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but that’s the same thing.’ I said, ‘It’s just the way it feel to me. The strings and everything is creepy, something’s going on, it sounds like somebody died.’” Sam nodded gloomily. That was why he was never going to sing that fucker in public, he said. But as it turned out, he had very little choice.