Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (98 page)

I asked if he resented it, particularly as he has not had a big hit for some time. . . .

“Resent it? No. The British acts who have made it here have injected that fervour into their music that makes people want to dance. . . . Ever see anybody who digs a record? Bet your life he’s tapping his feet.

“I like the Beatles. . . . Know why? Because the things they sing rock. And they’re melodic too. You can take the songs they write and sing them solo, as ballads.”

Did Sam do that?

“No, but it’s an idea,” he replied. He prodded my lapel with one hand, gulped his Bloody Mary with the other, and muttered something about making a Beatles song, solo. . . .

“I’m emotional myself,” he continued. “You have got to move some emotions to get to know music. If you can move emotions, you’re home free. This is where the Beatles are clever. They sell emotion.”

At this point the bartender made it clear that he was not interested in selling emotion OR any more drinks. He switched off the lights, and the end of our talk was in total darkness. According to my notebook, which has a Bloody Mary spilled over it to prove it, Sam Cooke wandered out of the darkness saying something like: “Real gospel music has GOT to make a comeback.”

He never mentioned to the reporter one of the principal reasons he was in town a full week ahead of his Copa opening. Allen had set up a couple of weekend bookings for him in the Catskills. Sam didn’t understand the point of it. Allen kept asking him how the show was going, and he kept telling Allen the show was going great. He had Sammy Davis Jr.’s arranger. Did Allen think Sammy Davis Jr.’s arranger didn’t know how to stage a Copa show? He had even gotten Sammy to tape an introduction that they could play every night before he went onstage. But Allen wouldn’t leave him alone. And Sam knew Allen well enough by now to realize that he wasn’t
going to
leave him alone. So, eventually, he gave in.

Allen, for his part, had no idea, really, what you were supposed to do to prepare for a big club opening. He had never been involved in anything remotely like this before, and he was adamant that he had no interest in interfering with Sam’s music. But at the same time he was as concerned as in every other aspect of his life to make sure that everything was done right. And he was not reassured in the least by Sam’s bland platitudes. So he talked to Buddy Howe, and Buddy said it sounded like Sam was nervous. Anyway, you always had an out-of-town tryout for a new act. It was usually just a matter of ironing out a few kinks, and it would give Sam greater confidence at the opening. So he said, “All right, where do you do that?” “Well, you go up to the Catskills,” Buddy Howe said.

If Sam was nervous, he certainly didn’t show it at the sign-raising ceremony. And Bobby could detect nothing but eagerness on Sam’s part to get the preliminaries out of the way. They sat around listening to records on a little portable record player in Sam’s suite at the Warwick. The album that they kept listening to over and over again was
Getz/Gilberto,
with the smash bossa nova hit single, “The Girl From Ipanema” by jazz saxophonist Stan Getz and vocalist Astrud Gilberto. Bobby had heard the album many times before—Sam and Barbara were all over it in California. But now all of a sudden Sam asked him what did he think of the song, just out of the blue. “And I said, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ He said, ‘Ain’t she bad? Listen to this chick. Can you imagine me doing that? I could dance all around that feel.’” Bobby nodded. He was only half-listening. Yeah, yeah, he could hear Sam doing that—but what would be the point? He was just glad Sam was relaxed and feeling good. There was no doubt they were going to turn the Copa out.

The Piper

1 | THAT’S WHERE IT’S AT

B
OBBY WOMACK COULD SCARCELY BELIEVE
his eyes and ears. He had heard Sam talk about “The Girl From Ipanema” often enough, he had listened to the girl sing it on the record, with Sam singing along behind—but when Sam called it out as their opening number at the Laurels on Sackett Lake, their first Catskills show, he had to turn around and look at Sam twice before he was convinced that the man was serious.

They had rehearsed the show till they knew it backwards and forwards, the new arranger that Sam had gotten from Sammy Davis Jr. left little room for guesswork; in fact, Bobby felt, he hadn’t left much room for
Sam,
every time he tried to yodel or do one of his little trademark tricks, he found himself in the middle of some complicated horn part or rhythm arrangement. But now it was as if Sam had just decided to throw all that rehearsing out the window, calling for a song they hadn’t even fooled with, let alone worked out an arrangement for. They did the best they could under the circumstances—Clif knew the chords at least, Bobby played off Clif, and June and the new bass player could lock in on almost anything—but it was a disaster by any standard. And things just went downhill from there.

Allen Klein gives Sam a Rolls-Royce, with J.W. Alexander looking on, June 24, 1964.

Courtesy of ABKCO

Allen and Jerry Brandt and GAC vice president Buddy Howe, sitting at a front-row table, were equally aghast. “I couldn’t believe he did it,” said Brandt, Sam’s recently deposed William Morris agent, still unofficially in business with Allen on any number of other projects but present tonight purely as a fervent fan. “You know, none of us understood what he had in mind, and Sam could never tell you why. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen; he went back to why he bombed at the Copa in the first place, and we were scared to death.”

The audience, too, a convention of firemen from the city, grew increasingly restive. There was a buffet outside, and more and more of them started drifting toward the exit with their wives, but Sam refused to break or back down, he just went on with his show. For the first time since Bobby had known him, he failed to connect with his audience. Instead, he just got tighter and tighter, almost openly defiant of the chaos that was erupting all around him, and by the time the set was over, there was almost no one left in the room.

Allen didn’t know what to do. He knew how much this meant to Sam—he was scarcely able to acknowledge how much it meant to
him
—and he couldn’t figure out where it had all gone wrong. This had been Buddy Howe’s idea, but it was
his
act and Sam was embarrassing not just Allen but himself. When Sam came offstage, Allen was waiting for him with a towel, like a fight manager, and like a fight manager, he wiped Sam down as they went back to the dressing room. But then he couldn’t restrain himself any longer. “What the fuck were you doing?” he blurted out in that brusque, almost reckless manner that seemed so out of place in a business that was generally carried out with bullshit, bravado, and smooth self-assurance. “You were fucking terrible.”

Sam didn’t even blink, he just stared at him like ice water. It didn’t matter, he said coldly. This wasn’t the Copa. Everything would be fine at the Copa. The fuck it would, said Allen, wild-eyed. It was like the Three Stooges, Bobby thought, the silent observer. It would have been funny except that “it was so scary, because Sam was desperate and very scared and I [thought], If he blows the Copa again, he’ll commit suicide.”

Still, Sam continued to put up a good front. It was the musicians, he said. There was no point in even playing the Raleigh the next night. Allen could see for himself: if tonight had proved one thing, it had proved that without the proper musicians, he couldn’t do his show. All right, Allen said, what did he need? Sam just glared at him. Obviously he needed a full horn section to play the arrangements. Fine, Allen said, exasperated now, he would get a full horn section—but Sam was
going to
play the Raleigh. And while they were talking about arrangements, the new arrangements were horrible! All this fancy bullshit only succeeded in making Sam sound like someone else. Who the fuck’s idea was it to get Sammy Davis Jr.’s arranger? Why didn’t he use his own arranger? Sam just shrugged. Allen could call René Hall if it was so goddamn important, he said. René would probably come if the price was right. The set didn’t work, either, Allen said. The material was fine except for that fucking bossa nova, but Sam was losing the audience with the order he was presenting it in. Well, why don’t you just make up a set list, then? said Sam with more than a hint of sarcasm. And with that, their colloquy was over. At least, Bobby thought, they hadn’t killed each other. But for Allen the issue was more serious than that. They had come this far together. He couldn’t let Sam fail.

He and Jerry Brandt stayed up half the night redoing the act but mostly—since there wasn’t much to it other than moving songs around on the set list—stewing over the way things had turned out. There was a tense moment early on when Buddy Howe, Jerry’s employer at GAC until his defection to William Morris two years earlier, told Allen he didn’t want anyone from a rival agency working with his act. But Allen said Jerry was there strictly as a friend, something Buddy, an easygoing guy under most circumstances, could see for himself, and Allen and Jerry scribbled their notes on the back of a menu once Allen had called René and arranged for him to fly in from California on the red-eye that night.

René worked all the next day on revamping the show. The airline had lost his luggage, but he had his arrangements in his briefcase, and he knew what Sam needed anyway. His philosophy of orchestration was simple. “A lot of cats try to show off their arrangements. They think
they’re
singing lead. But there’s only one lead guy. What you put around him is what makes it really happen.” When Allen presented him with the new set list, “I didn’t argue [because Allen was paying the bills]. He said, ‘I want you to create a first-class show.’ So I rewrote everything.
Everything.
” But then he faced the real challenge. Which, as he had recognized all along, was inevitably going to be Sam.

There was no problem with the show itself, Sam protested. The reason it hadn’t worked the night before was simply that he had had his gaze set on the Copa, he wasn’t thinking about any fucking Laurels. René was polite but firm. “I said, ‘If it doesn’t make it here, it’s going to flop in the Copa, take my word for it.’” Then Sam started complaining that this fucker who called himself his manager was trying to tell him how to sing, and René responded, as calmly as Alex would have in the same situation, that at least the guy wasn’t afraid to spend his money, look at the publicity buildup he had given Sam. In the end Sam gave in, as René knew he would, and by the evening, everyone was confident they had a show.

It went off at the Raleigh without a hitch. “The Girl From Ipanema” was gone—they opened with the showbiz staple “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” just like they had rehearsed it, and the performance built, as Sam had taught Bobby a performance should always build, “till we started getting it in closer, bringing it all closer to home, and then he started doing [the civil rights folk favorites] ‘If I Had a Hammer’ and [‘This Little Light of Mine’], and everybody was going crazy, and I just kind of [tried to] keep the enthusiasm going.” But Bobby was still wide-eyed at the near-mayhem he had witnessed.

Sam and Allen very nearly staged a reenactment on the afternoon of the Copa opening. The musicians were all in the dressing room in the hotel above the club after completing their sound check when Allen barged in and started spouting off about the way Sam was dressed. “I made the mistake of criticizing him in front of the others. I told him I didn’t like him in light gray. I wanted him to wear a red jacket—I got the idea from a Harry Belafonte album cover, the way it brought out the skin tones. He said, ‘What the fuck do you know in your seersucker suit? My fucking shirt cost more than everything you’ve got on.’” Bobby watched in disbelief as Charles put Allen out of the dressing room in much the same way that he had evicted the RCA flunky in Atlantic City the year before. Allen didn’t see it as a forcible expulsion exactly; in his view, he had assessed the situation early enough to leave under his own steam. But as Jerry Brandt, another witness to the scene, observed, it certainly made Allen uncomfortable, and, given his generally insecure nature, it had to make him uncertain of where he really stood with Sam.

But it didn’t stop him from coming back just before the first show. Under other circumstances, he might have chosen to delay his surprise until after the performance, but as things stood, he had no choice but to reveal it now, if only to try to get Sam out of his funky mood. Sam had little interest in talking to him, he didn’t even want to
see
him, but Allen let J.W. in on the secret, and Alex helped smooth things over. Allen had a very important guy downstairs that he wanted Sam to meet, J.W. said, and after grumbling about the poor timing of the whole thing, Sam accompanied Alex and Allen down the narrow staircase. When he got to the bottom, he looked around. Where was this guy? he asked Allen. Well, actually, Allen said, he was outside. Sam looked at him skeptically. Outside? Was he fucking crazy? In all this rain?