Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (102 page)

But he was still pissed off about “Yeah Man.”

T
HERE WAS NO TIME
to dwell on it, though, because, by the next week, Allen was in England, and Sam was out on tour with Jackie Wilson on what he had come to view as his valedictory to the whole Supersonic r&b world. It was billed, for once with little sense of hyperbole, as “The Greatest Show of the Year” and, occasionally, as “The Biggest Show Ever.” It included the Valentinos, the Upsetters, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, Jimmy Hughes, Mitty Collier, and perennial Supersonic MC Gorgeous George with his own “orchestra,” consisting of the drummer from the Royal Peacock and a flashy young guitarist he had picked up in Nashville and worked with off and on for the past year.

From the start, it was an incendiary combination. Every one of the supporting acts was capable of eliciting oohs and ahs from the crowd, but it was the two stars of the show that everyone came to see. They had not been out together since their original Supersonic tour in the spring of 1959, when Sam’s insistence on closing the show, not to mention Jackie’s spectacular showmanship and a recalcitrant band, had sabotaged both Sam’s performance and his pride in a way that had taken a long time to get over. Now, with a polished rhythm section of his own and the crowd-pleasing theatricality of the Upsetters, Sam felt confident not only of his abilities but of his capacity to fuck with Jackie’s head, if necessary, just like Cassius had fucked with Sonny Liston.

They opened in Mobile, and once again billing was a subject of contention, but this time, Alex said, he and Sam came prepared. “We had a clause in the contract about closing the show, and the very first night, Sam killed them, he just destroyed the house. So Johnny Roberts [Jackie’s burly road manager, who had started out as an enforcer for the New York Mob] came up to me and said, ‘What about Sam opening one night and Jackie another?’ I said, ‘Okay.’ He said, ‘Let’s talk to Sam.’ I said, ‘You don’t have to talk to Sam. Trust me.’ So the next night in Knoxville Sam opened, and he just destroyed them, and Jackie came on, and after about three songs they started leaving. I went to the dressing room and [busted out] laughing. I said, ‘Sam, they dismissing themselves.’”

Night after night it was the same. Jackie tried every trick in the book, J.W. said. “He would drag it out. He would have all the broads come up and kiss him.” He would take off his shirt, work himself into a frenzy, do the splits, lie down on the edge of the stage. But then Sam would come out, J.W. said with relish, and “he would put the whip to them.” By the time they reached Charlotte, Jackie was ready to hang out the white flag. “Man, you’re killing me,” he said to Sam. “You got me coughing up blood. What the fuck did you do?”

What made it different from the earlier tour was that Jackie seemed to finally come to an acceptance of his role in the new order of things. “Sam started singing million-seller after million-seller on my ass. I couldn’t get over that,” he told his own entourage. They were not at all alike. “Jackie was a party freak,” said Hank Ballard, something of a party freak himself. “Sam didn’t hang out too much. He would just get him a girl and a bottle and go to the room somewhere and freak out [himself]!” Jackie was “street,” where Sam was reflective, Jackie had accepted Mafia “ownership” in exchange for immediate rewards, while Sam had always proudly asserted independence and self-control. Where they connected was onstage, where each made the other reach down for “that other thing.” What finally won Jackie over was Sam himself. “Sam wasn’t a jealous kind of fellow at all,” he would later confide to L.C. “He always wanted to see you do good. I never could understand that, because I wanted to see the other guy mess up. But Sam just wanted to see you do your best.” On the other hand, not even J.W. believed that Jackie was going to be subdued by either competition or kindness for long.

Over and over again, they topped each other—and themselves. In Richmond, toward the end of the tour, they played 7:30 and 10:00
P.M.
shows at the thirty-two-hundred-seat Mosque Theater, with Sam closing the first half of the early show and the audience screaming for more. But then Jackie came out to close the second half, recalled Alan Leeds, an eighteen-year-old white college freshman who had just started deejaying on the local black radio station and would go on to become James Brown’s longtime road manager, “and by the middle of his set, he was rolling across the lip of the stage, and women were pawing him to a pulp. He finished the show with the house lights up and the audience standing in the aisles, on their seats, and crowding the orchestra pit beneath the front of the stage [in] pandemonium.”

To Alan Leeds and his friends, that was it, there was no way for Sam to beat that, but when, after another explosive set by Jackie, Sam closed the second show, he destroyed the audience with a medley of his hits, “then the band struck the intro to ‘Twistin’ the Night Away,’ and without resorting to disrobing or even teasing the front rows too obviously, Sam managed to attract as many of the females in the audience as could possibly mount the stage. They tore
his
shirt off and God knows what else. The house lights went up, and local security pulled the curtain and prematurely ended the show. The last vision I had of Sam, he was being escorted backstage by his road manager and a bodyguard; his walk still seemed casual, and his face read somewhere between a smile and a knowing laugh.”

For weeks afterward, Leeds and his friends were still talking about what they had witnessed. It had all the finality of the climactic game of a seven-game World Series, but what they failed to understand at the time, Leeds would later come to realize, was that the same thing was going on every night of the week—and sometimes, as in Richmond, twice a night. It was a cataclysmic experience that took place on an earthly plane, an earthly plane that required bills to be paid, payrolls to be met, and where, even at $1,500 a night and a percentage of the gate, you could do little more in the long run than make ends meet. It was not a world Sam was going to be sorry to leave behind. And yet it still thrilled him to be able to harness all that energy, it was like an electric current passing back and forth between him and every single member of the audience, as they sang his lines back to him amid all the clamor and celebration. It amazed him sometimes, the difference you could make in people’s lives, if only for a moment, if only for a night. It was like the circus coming to town.

G
ORGEOUS GEORGE WAS, AS USUAL
, in charge of the after-show. The way it worked, there was always one club in town tied in with the promotion, and it was the MC’s job to put out the word that the stars of the show would be there, so hold on to your ticket stubs, ladies and gentlemen, for reduced-priced admission. “That was my side hustle. Usually the man would slip me a hundred bucks to announce and didn’t nobody know. You do that five, six nights a week—that’s good money, man, ’cause the money I was making as MC I could put in my watch pocket. I would just tell [all the performers], ‘Look, we ain’t eat no fresh food except them sandwiches and stuff we been buying. And this man say he gonna have some barbecue and corn on the cob and chitlins.’ So they say, ‘Where is that, George?’ And I say, ‘He gonna send for us.’ And when the bus pull up beside the club, that place be jammed.”

In Greensboro, though, George slipped up. The promoter approached him at the Coliseum to propose the usual modest deal, but George, knowing that the Carlotta Club could seat up to fifteen hundred, held out for $150 up front plus a percentage of the door. George rode over with Sam and Jackie and was sitting in between the two of them when they pulled up in front of the club and found a line stretching around the block. “Then this big old greasy cat who was the manager come out and say, ‘You can’t hardly get in. But I’m gonna arrange for you and Sam and Jackie to come in the side.’ And then he reach in his pocket and say, ‘George, here’s your money.’ And he gave me a roll, man, all these twenties and wrinkled fives and ones, and Sam look at Jackie and Jackie look at Sam, and they caught me by the neck and said, ‘Boy, you one smart little nigger. We ain’t going in, motherfucker, unless we get half.’ I laughed so hard, and they was laughing, too. But from then on, we split the money.”

Gorgeous George onstage.

Courtesy of Gorgeous George

There was usually a band at the club, and everybody from the show did a song or two, but the after-party gave George a chance to shine, with his own guitarist backing him, who turned out to be the same kid Sam had met with Lithofayne Pridgon the previous year when he was in New York looking for a gig. George had run into the kid, a goofball from Seattle named Jimmy Hendrix, while passing through Nashville on one of the Supersonic package tours. Jimmy was playing at the Club Baron with a group called the King Kasuals, whom he had hooked up with after mustering out of the army in nearby Fort Campbell in the summer of 1962. George saw the advantage of getting someone to play behind him on the show for practically nothing and got the tour manager, Henry Nash, to take the kid on the bus as a kind of all-purpose factotum. Jimmy had continued to bounce around between New York and Nashville ever since, doing a little recording and touring with the Isley Brothers and joining George on various Supersonic tours over the past year. He was shy and reserved and seemed standoffish, which had not earned him a lot of popularity on the present show. In fact, he was very quiet, except in his eccentric dress (which had earned him the puzzled scorn of all the sharp jitterbugs on the bus as “some kind of beatnik nigger”) and onstage, where he was so insistently flamboyant that George one night was prompted to declare, “Next time I catch you with that guitar in your mouth, you gonna eat it. It’s my motherfucking show.” No one was more put off by his unconventionality than the Womack brothers, who seemed to take his youthful naïveté, impressionable manner, and an unorthodox left-handed playing style that could have been plagiarized from their own as a personal challenge. One time Harry, the bass-playing brother, missed his money and immediately pointed the finger at Jimmy. “Look at that beatnik,” he said, “he ain’t got no money, he stole it.” “Well, you don’t know that,” his brothers said, but Harry insisted that there was no doubt as to who was the culprit, he could tell just by the way Jimmy was looking at him, and later that night, when Jimmy was asleep, he threw his guitar out the bus window.

In St. Louis Jackie Wilson was arrested after first trying to get away by leaping out of a second-floor window while the rest of the troupe joined Sam onstage for the show finale. Everyone thought it was because of a woman, but actually it was a default on a $2,200 judgment that went back to Jackie’s failure to show up for a club date in 1959. A large crowd watched him jump from the ledge outside his dressing room and get picked up by the police as soon as he started to run away, but everyone on the show would later recall either that Sam walked him down the aisle and out the door, or that Sam successfully fooled the cops into thinking
he
was Jackie by going out onstage and singing all of Jackie’s hits, until Jackie was able to make his escape. In yet another variation of the story, all the performers joined hands to form a human shield and prevent the police from getting their hands on Jackie. But in every version Jackie got away scot-free. Which was understandable enough, given that he rejoined them in Nashville the following night after Henry Wynn posted $3,000 bond.

They were in Memphis on Election Day to play an integrated Ellis Auditorium, the same hall where Sam and Clyde McPhatter had refused to perform three years earlier because of its segregated seating policy. Sam got a call on the afternoon of the show from popular Memphis DJ George Klein, requesting him to appear on Klein’s new Dick Clark-styled TV
Talent Party,
on which guest stars lip-synched their hits. Sam was glad to oblige; Wink Martindale, an ex-Memphian and prominent West Coast DJ, had told him that George was a good guy, and a close friend of Elvis Presley besides. Sam got Jackie to do the show, too, and as he and George drove to the station together, he surprised the Memphis DJ by calling attention to various points of local interest along the way. How in the world had he gotten to know the city so well in such a short period of time? George asked. Sam shrugged. He had lived here for six months with the spiritual group he had been with before joining the Soul Stirrers, he said, as if it were a matter of common knowledge. Then he expressed admiration for George’s sharp new Beatle boots, and George got his size and promised to send him a pair.

When they arrived at the studio, for some reason George asked Sam to do “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha,” maybe because Sam’s 1959 hit remained a big Memphis favorite, maybe just because the station happened to have a copy of the record. Sam was running through the song, doing his best to match up the miming of words and gestures to recorded sound while George and Jackie watched. George couldn’t help but notice that Jackie was softly singing along, and suddenly the idea struck him: Why not have the two of them do it together? Sam and Jackie were game, and in the televised performance, Sam has barely gotten through the second chorus when all of a sudden Jackie glides out gracefully and lip-synchs the next verse while Sam indicates eye-rolling surprise. They are a study in similarities and contrasts, each wearing tight, beltless continental pants and an open-necked shirt (Sam’s striped, Jackie’s black), but Sam’s “natural” hairstyle is longer and nappier than we are accustomed to seeing, while Jackie’s slick conk gives him the appearance of a bronze Elvis Presley. They take turns mouthing the words, and they take pure pleasure in each other’s company, laughing, slapping hands, showing unabashed appreciation for each other’s moves, as Jackie’s twirls and athletic boxer’s shuffle affectionately complement Sam’s more carefully practiced steps. Both are unassailable pictures of youth; at the end they bow and make as if to exit, laughing and holding hands.