Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (100 page)

H
E WAS SCHEDULED TO OPEN
at Club Harlem in Atlantic City in two weeks, but first he had business to take care of on the Coast. He conducted a Soul Stirrers session on the twentieth, came to a reluctant final decision with Alex to let the Sims Twins and Johnnie Morisette go, and committed to a brief tour with the Valentinos, in part to make up to them for the disappointment of having had their hit taken away from them.

“It’s All Over Now” had entered the pop charts at the end of June but dropped off again two weeks later when a cover version by a new English group called the Rolling Stones was released. The Rolling Stones had heard the single at the beginning of June while paying a visit to New York DJ Murray the K (“the Fifth Beatle”) at the start of their first American tour. Murray had gotten the record from Pete Bennett, Allen’s independent promo guy, who was really pushing it in the pop market. The Rolling Stones picked up on the number right away. As their then twenty-year-old manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, said, “They were like an airplane without a parachute at that time. They hadn’t mastered the writing of their own material, and [the song] really fit them like a glove”—and they recorded the song the following week at the Chess studio in Chicago. The record was rush-released by both their British and American labels, hitting the streets in England with an advance order of 150,000 on June 26, the day before the Valentinos debuted on the American pop charts.

The Womacks could scarcely believe it. Once again they had been betrayed by their brother’s employer and hero, Sam. Bobby was no more sanguine about the situation. To Bobby, the Rolling Stones were a joke. “I kept saying to Sam, ‘This guy [Mick Jagger] ain’t no singer.’ Because I’m comparing him to a real singer, like Archie Brownlee or June Cheeks. But Sam was hearing something completely different. He said, ‘I won’t see it, but you’ll see it down the line. These guys are gonna change the industry.’ I said, ‘Let them get their own songs. They mean nothing to me.’ But he said, ‘No, Bobby, you don’t understand what I’m saying. This song is gonna take you—you’ll be part of history. You’ll go over to England, man —’ he [was] laughing, I
knowed
he was joking—‘they’ll be knocking down doors to get to you.’ But he was right, man. He was always in the future.”

Even Alex didn’t fully comprehend it at first. He knew they would all make money off the publishing—he was pretty sure Bobby would be happy when he got his first songwriter’s check—but he didn’t see the change coming like Sam did. As Bobby finally came to understand it: “Sam was just saying it was something new getting ready to happen in the business, and his music was too adult to be caught up in it, but ours was just —. He said, ‘You all fit.’ He said, ‘If you stay with the two guitars and the long hair, you guys ought to be the first to get in.’”

S
AM OPENED AT THE CLUB HARLEM
on July 23, the same day that Allen and Joe D’Imperio signed an agreement on behalf of Tracey Ltd. and RCA authorizing the use of “A Change Is Gonna Come” on an album entitled
The Stars Salute Dr. Martin Luther King.
The stars included Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Harry Belafonte, Nat “King” Cole, Brook Benton, Ray Charles, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Jr., and Frank Sinatra, and all proceeds were to be earmarked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Riots had broken out in Harlem the weekend before the Atlantic City opening, and racial strife continued to erupt throughout the week in one city after another along the East Coast. Race could not fail to be far from any thinking person’s mind, as Lyndon Johnson signed the first comprehensive federal civil rights legislation in nearly a century on July 2 even as the search continued for the three civil rights workers who had disappeared at the start of the Mississippi voter-registration project dubbed Freedom Summer. “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany,” wrote black baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, an Eisenhower Republican, of the recent Republican Convention that had nominated Barry Goldwater, while the Impressions’ “Keep On Pushin’,” written by Curtis Mayfield, the group’s great falsetto lead, who had gone to school on Sam and the Soul Stirrers, was climbing the pop charts. “I can’t stop now,” Mayfield sang with a purity of tone that left no doubt as to where the singer or the Movement stood. And as far as that “great big stone wall” of prejudice that blocked his way, “I’ve got my pride / And I’ll move it all aside / And I’ll keep on pushing.” When a reporter for the
Atlantic City Press
asked Sam if he was surprised at the increasingly volatile political atmosphere, he said he was only surprised “that the American public failed to anticipate it.” After all, discrimination existed on every level of society. He continued to experience it himself. Then, perhaps as a sop to his “older” audience, he declared, “It’s getting better. . . . Love will conquer violence.”

It was the same show with virtually the same repertoire as he had presented at the Copa (his “hootenanny” treatment of “If I Had a Hammer” remained the highlight), but here the audience was looser, blacker, and, when Sam asked them to join in, they really had something to contribute. Sam told Clif and June to invite their families, and he had Charles chauffeur Philadelphia DJ Georgie Woods down to Atlantic City in the Rolls. The highlight of the week was always the 6:00
A.M.
“Breakfast Show” on Sunday, which every entertainer and player in town, black or white, generally attended after all the other clubs had closed. Sam knocked out the elegantly dressed Sunday-morning crowd, eating their breakfast of grits and wings, but he did something else besides. “They came out of the kitchen,” said Lloyd Price, who was playing the Riptide in nearby Wildwood, “the waiters, the waitresses, even the girls in the line, and he stood there with that big bright smile, took his coat off, and he
rocked
—you could actually feel the building shaking. He didn’t have to dance, he didn’t have no tricks—you know, we all had to have tricks—he just did the same thing he did in the church, and by the time he finished, I don’t think there was a person sitting down in the room. I’d seen Sammy Davis there, I’d seen Billy Daniels, but this was one of the greatest events I’d ever seen in my life. I [thought], You know something? I must be doing something wrong.”

Whenever he opened his mouth onstage, Sam told an informal press conference of local newspaper reporters midway through the two-week run, he was trying “to grab hold of someone’s heart.” He was, wrote Paul Learn in the
Atlantic City Press,
“more alive than most people. To him, jokes are funnier, the music more enchanting, the leaves on the trees more in bloom.”

Like his friend Cassius Clay, the reporter wrote, “Cooke is a healthy young man who still squirms in his chair [and] will perch cross-legged on a divan, and when he moves, his body flows with tiger grace. He’s happy as a boy pushing skyward on a swing.”

On the subject of Cassius:

“He beat [Liston] once, and he’ll beat him again. And do you know why? Because he makes Liston afraid of him.”

Cooke bounced out of his chair to illustrate how Cassius scared the big lumbering Liston into losing.

“Liston has just showed up for the fight, see?” said Cooke in recounting the day of Clay’s glory. “Cassius comes over to him, and he puts his head real close to Sonny’s, and he says, ‘I didn’t think you were going to show up. I’m sure glad to see you. You’re mine tonight, baby.’”

Cooke put his face close to a reporter’s head and grinned fiendishly.

“That’s how he scared Liston,” said the . . . singer.

He added that it accounts in part for his [own] ability to communicate with his audience.

“I have no doubts about myself,” he concluded. “I have no fear. Doubt will kill you. Fear will kill you. The worst enemies are doubt and fear.”

H
E SHOWED LITTLE EVIDENCE
of either doubt or fear in the full-scale screen test that immediately followed the Atlantic City engagement. There had been universal enthusiasm at Fox about the way he photographed in the preliminary shoot, so Earl McGrath set up a dramatic audition in which Sam traded lines from a Clifford Odets play with an experienced Broadway actor. He acquitted himself well in a five-minute scene that focused, like all of Odets’ best work, on issues of social justice. What impressed Earl most, though, was how comfortable Sam seemed with the camera. He was eating an apple in his scene and, McGrath noticed, got a piece stuck on his upper lip. Earl had seen veteran actors thrown by less, but Sam just reached up lazily with his tongue and flicked the apple away, as if it were just another small dramatic “bit” in his delineation of the character.

Sam took Earl and his wife up to Harlem while he was still in town, waving off any concerns they might have about the recent rioting and introducing them to the DJ Fat Jack Walker, who made them a big soul-food dinner. They went to a few bars, and everywhere they went, Sam was greeted like a long-lost friend. It was, Earl later came to think, a kind of lesson. “Sam was a very optimistic person, and when those riots happened, he was just saying, ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’” At the same time, Earl realized, he wasn’t simply going to come right out and say it. “By taking us up to Harlem, he was
showing
us without proselytizing. He was pointing [us] in that direction, so the thoughts would be [our] own.”

With Al Schmitt still in New York mixing the Copa tapes, Sam scheduled a double session at RCA’s Twenty-fourth Street studios on the night of August 7. For the first session, from eight to eleven, he got a hot new arranger, Torrie Zito, who specialized in complicated string arrangements, to write a delicate, deliberately bossa nova-ized orchestral treatment of “I’m in the Mood For Love,” the universal standard with which Louis Armstrong had had one of his biggest popular hits in the thirties. None of Sam’s musicians played with the twenty-seven-piece ensemble, not even Clif, and if in the end the song came off as more mannered than successful, it was striking for its delicate instrumental voicings and bold vocal coloration.

The eleven o’clock to two
A.M.
session, with only his own rhythm section to accompany him, focused on almost as unlikely a choice. “He’s a Cousin of Mine” had originated with a 1906 Broadway musical,
Marrying Mary,
written by two black songwriters, Chris Smith and Cecil Mack, and popularized by Bert Williams, the greatest of all the Negro blackface comedians and vaudevillians. Sam had first heard the song among the piano rolls, cylinder recordings, and old 78s in the collection of his and L.C.’s longtime friend the DJ Magnificent Montague. “He would go through my piano rolls,” Montague said. “I have the original sheet music of ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny’ and ‘In the Evening By the Moonlight,’ so he knew that they were written by James Bland—a black man. He found out that most of your Tin Pan Alley hits were written by blacks. And he wanted to do an album.”

He appeared, in fact, to be finally making a start at the program he had announced the previous year of “hit[ting] the trail on behalf of Negro writers . . . who are and have been idling on the shelf,” but he didn’t bother to clue in the band, who, with the possible exception of Clif, knew nothing of the origin of the song. Bobby had no idea what to make of it musically (“Play the guitar like a banjo,” Sam said to him), but Sam had him convinced that the story—with its episodic narrative about talking your way out of a compromising situation by suggesting that the man or woman you happened to be with was actually your cousin—was a true one. “He was saying that this girl really was a cousin, and he wanted to fuck her,” declared Bobby, who never noticed that Sam had reversed the storyline but played his guitar part persuasively nonetheless. The whole rhythm section acquitted itself admirably—it was the first time in all the years they had been together that June had played with Sam in the studio, and the addition of Sticks Evans on bongos only added to the eccentric flavor—as Sam put the song across with a sly wit and genuine relish that almost allowed it to be perceived as a contemporary number, despite its hoary origins.

He spent nearly the entire three-hour session on this one simple song, then gave Bobby an even odder assignment, with an insistent thick-toned lead on a new number called “The Piper,” for which he had provided the words and melody of a children’s song. “Up and down and through the town,” Sam sang with curious wistfulness, “The piper plays today / Doors and windows open wide / To greet him on his way.

He’s dressed all up

In little boots

And green and yellow clothes

And when he plays his little heart

Away your trouble goes

Hi, everybody, I didn’t come to stay

I just came to let you know

The piper’s on his way

Up and down and through the town

The piper plays today

Doors and windows open wide

To greet him on his way

Hi, everybody, I didn’t come to stay

I just came to let you know