Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (34 page)

S
AM TOOK ACTING LESSONS
that summer at the Phil Carey Jones Drama School, both with an eye toward the movies and, as he later told a reporter for the
Chicago Defender,
to improve his “speech, enunciation and poise.” And he added a letter to his last name. Bumps thought it would be “classier” to spell Cook with an
e
on the end, and Bob Keane, whose original name was Kuhn, agreed. So Sam got in touch with his friend Duck back in Chicago, who through his court stenographer’s training knew the system cold and told Sam how to go about making the change legal.

He observed closely, too, the changes on the current music scene. Harry Belafonte, the lithely handsome young West Indian folk singer, on whose success he had told Soul Stirrer Paul Foster he wanted to model his own, was still near the top of the album charts with his
Calypso
album more than a year after its initial release; in addition, at thirty he was about to star in his second major motion picture, was an outspoken voice in the civil rights movement, had produced his own box-office record-breaking national tour, “An Evening with Belafonte” (the live recording of the show had recently joined
Calypso
at the top of the charts), and was reported to be looking at a $1 million gross in 1957. All with a sexy and sophisticated style and deliberately soft-spoken presentation that went directly against every stereotype that white men like Art Rupe seemed bound and determined to perpetuate. And Johnny Mathis, the living embodiment of the romantic brown-eyed crooner whose arrival Bumps and Alex had insisted was inevitable, was challenging the very premise of rock ’n’ roll with one dreamy, color-defying ballad after another. With the Montgomery bus boycott settled and integration generally acknowledged by men and women of good will as the law of the land, there were no limits to be placed on a forward-thinking young man of determination and ambition.

Bumps, meanwhile, was hard at work building up Keen Records for its September launch, doing all he could to help make that ambition a reality. He scheduled sessions and scouted new talent, contacted artists he had worked with in the past, and confidently predicted the demise of his former label. To Sister Wynona Carr, whom he and Art had been encouraging to “cross over” for several years now, he let it drop that not only would Specialty be losing “a lot of [its] spiritual artists” but Little Richard, too, would soon be leaving. He rehearsed the Valiants sometimes at his sister’s house at Forty-second and San Pedro, more often at Rip’s cousin Brice’s house on Twenty-third. He had acetates cut on “Summertime” and “You Send Me” at Radio Recorders at the end of July, and when Sam grew impatient and complained that nothing was happening, he hadn’t been in the studio since that fateful day in June, Bumps jollied him along with paternal good humor, addressing him as “Goodfellow” and telling him with that characteristic air of breezy assurance not to worry, there would be plenty happening soon.

But Sam couldn’t help but worry as he watched Roy Hamilton come back from his long illness under the continued guidance of Bill Cook. The phone lines of Hamilton’s booking agency, the
Los Angeles Sentinel
reported, were swamped with requests for dates, and as a kind of test run for a summer-long tour, he had done $12,000 worth of business for B.B. Beamon in Atlanta alone. It would have been difficult for Sam not to wonder at this point whether he had made the right decision. When he went to J.W. to ask his advice, Alex had urged him to go with Bumps because, he said, Bumps would focus on him, and Bill hadn’t really done all that well for Roy. But now Roy and Bill were being talked about all the time in the news, and he had passed up Bill’s powerful connections at Atlantic and Roy’s own label, Epic, for a record company that did not yet even exist. Clyde McPhatter, with his third Top 10 r&b hit of the year currently climbing the charts, was about to begin an eighty-day tour of one-nighters with Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, and half a dozen other acts under the banner of the Biggest Show of 1957, while eighteen-year-old Little Willie John had been out with Arnett Cobb all summer, playing everywhere from Seattle to the tip of Florida. Sam knew everything was being set up for him—but what if it didn’t work? He watched the Soul Stirrers struggling with their own problems and, as difficult as he had always known it would be to go back, he was now forced to wonder if there would even be anything to go back to.

The Soul Stirrers themselves were beginning to wonder the same thing. They were so unprepared for Sam’s departure that they had had to go out without a lead singer at the beginning of their June tour. They played a few dates with Paul Foster doing the best he could, but they soon found that the promoters didn’t want to pay the agreed-upon fee for a group that couldn’t adequately perform its own songs, and the people just kept calling out, “Where’s Sam?” Then in Augusta they picked up Little Johnny Jones, the lead singer with the Swanee Quintet, who was in many ways the perfect substitute: he knew all of Sam’s material, had sung with Sam occasionally, possessed a similar vocal style with a spectacular falsetto and a wider natural range, and, best of all, he had learned from Sam “how to carry myself, [he] gave me a lot of advice about singing [and] was the first to appreciate that I was not trying to sing like him but had my own style.” They brought him back to Chicago at the end of the tour, but Johnny got homesick for Augusta, and for his girl, and he left as quickly as he came, on the eve of their upcoming July tour.

Gospel promoter Herman Nash was still advertising the “inimitable Sam Cook” when they played Atlanta on July 14, and the angry reaction that they got from their audience, despite the presence of an exciting new lead singer, led Crain to give an interview to the
Atlanta Daily World
the next day. The Soul Stirrers, “[he] told disappointed Atlanta gospel music lovers . . . would be more ‘beloved and respected than ever’ . . . despite the loss of star vocalist Sam Cook to the popular music field.

An audience of some 5000 at the City Auditorium earlier had learned that Cook had quit the group Thursday and was in Los Angeles, Calif., where he will receive coaching and study bookings for a national tour.

The Soul Stirrers rejected an offer to join the rock ’n’ roll ranks along with Cook because “We’ve always sung gospel music. Our lives are dedicated [to] spreading His word in the highways and byways. It will be impossible to change our style now.”

Their new vocalist, the paper pointed out, was “almost a carbon copy of Cook in looks, voice and style [and] performed flawlessly all of the Soul Stirrers recorded hits.” He possessed all the talent that Sam did, Crain insisted, “and I think will be even more popular than Sam once the public gets used to him and respects his ability.” Sam, Crain said, “has our best wishes. We know the public would not expect us to try to hold on to a man who wanted to do something else. If the people love us then they will not let one man stand in our way.” Crain requested all “well-wishers of the organization,” the article concluded, “to write the group at 4526 South Woodlawn [his home address] to affirm their confidence in the group.”

The newest Soul Stirrer was the same singer who had taken Sam’s place in the reconstituted Highway QCs just two years earlier. Johnnie Taylor continued to possess the same uncanny vocal similarity to Sam that he always had, and the other Stirrers for that reason had always viewed the QCs as serious potential competition, but now, they realized, Johnnie’s mimetic skills could be turned into a real asset.

Crume had gone to see him at two in the morning, right after Johnny Jones had decamped for Augusta. “I drove over to his house, and we sat out on the steps, and I explained everything. Johnny was temperamental—he was a hard guy to deal with—and I said, ‘You got to be one of the guys,’ and he agreed that he would cut his little temper. So he says, ‘How much time have I got?’ I said, ‘Till you can put a few things in a bag. I’ll be waiting downstairs for you.’ He got his clothes, and we went to Atlanta.” Johnnie had the whole act down, all of Sam’s gestures, yodels, and seemingly spontaneous interpolations, he even said the word “fucker” in casual conversation just like Sam. He was a nice-enough-looking young man, but he didn’t have Sam’s warmth, he didn’t have Sam’s charm, and, even though he went over well with the audience, everyone in the group pretty much agreed that Johnnie was a cold-hearted motherfucker.

Still, things really started picking up after he joined them, and they were all looking forward to the Big Gospel Cavalcade, the first all-star gospel revue set up along the lines of the enormously successful rock ’n’ roll package tours, which was scheduled to start in Baltimore on August 15 and play nothing but ballparks, auditoriums, and stadiums with seating of at least five thousand over the course of an eight-week national tour. Clara Ward was the headliner, but the Soul Stirrers were at the top of a quartet lineup that included the Caravans, Dorothy Love’s Original Gospel Harmonettes, the Swanee Quintet, Julius Cheeks and the Sensational Nightingales, the Harmonizing Four, and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. Like the rock ’n’ roll touring shows, they had their own specially equipped, streamlined tour bus, which was augmented by whatever vehicles individual stars chose to drive (including Clara Ward’s $12,000 twelve-passenger, cream-colored, eight-door Chrysler purchased specifically for the occasion). For the first time the popularity of spiritual music was being tested in head-to-head competition with touring packages like Roy Hamilton’s all-star revue. Which may have been one of the reasons Sam approached Crume at around this time and asked what he thought the other fellows’ reaction might be to Sam coming back to the Soul Stirrers.

Crume could understand Sam’s dilemma, and he was fully sympathetic to it. “It was before he got the record going, and nothing was really happening for him.” Nor would anything have made Crume happier than to see Sam return. He certainly held no grudges. “That sort of thing never did bug me. Like I say, we were free spirits.” But at the same time, he didn’t want to serve as Sam’s emissary either. “I told him, ‘Hey, man, just come on back and talk.’” But Sam evidently was either too embarrassed or too ambivalent to bring himself to do that.

Sam said something else to Crume, too, that didn’t really register at the time. He asked Crume if he could put Crume’s name on his new song. The way Crume understood it, it had something to do with Sam not wanting to share songwriting income with the Soul Stirrers, and he wouldn’t really be asking very much of Crume except to allow his name to be listed as songwriter and to turn over the money to Sam when he got his royalties. “I just want you to give me my money when the checks start coming in,” Sam joked. Then he sang the song to Crume over the telephone and said he was going to send him a tape of it, too, “so if anybody questioned you about it, you wrote it, right?” Crume said okay, but he never got the tape or heard anything more about it, so he assumed Sam had worked out the problem, whatever it was.

B
OB KEANE WAS GOING THROUGH
vicissitudes of his own. He had spent much of the summer working the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas with his wife’s act (she recorded for Capitol with her twin sister), but now that he was back in L.A., he couldn’t get any answers out of the Greeks about what was going on with the company. He had started work on his album,
Solo For Seven,
which was planned as the debut release on Keen’s Andex subsidiary (“And” for John Siamas’ uncle Andy, “ex” for his employee Rex Oberbeck), a mix of Dixieland, pop, and Artie Shaw. He had another session on August 22, but by this time, he could see that his position was beginning to seriously erode. A bright, quick-tempered, somewhat choleric man, Keane had never really put much faith in Bumps, but now he was certain that he lacked brains, talent, trustworthiness, and integrity—everything, in fact, except ambition. The way he saw it, Bumps had usurped his position, and when he took it up with the Greeks, they just pretended not to know what he was talking about, especially when he brought up the whole matter of his share in the company, the ownership inducement he believed he had been promised from the start. His situation was under such severe strain that he went to see Art Rupe somewhere in the midst of all this, with the idea that if things weren’t going to work out with that double-dealing prick Siamas, he might have something to offer Rupe, who looked like a man who was up the creek without a paddle. Rupe seemed perfectly happy to meet with him but, as it turned out, more from the standpoint of pumping him for information than to offer him a job. They badmouthed Bumps for a while, and Rupe went on a little about Sam’s untrustworthiness, but then Art asked: if a record release by Sam was really imminent, why hadn’t Keane’s record company requested a publishing license from Venice Music, which held the rights to all Sam’s songs? That really took Bob by surprise. He hadn’t been aware that Sam was under contract to Venice, but Art showed him the agreement and told him he’d better go back and advise his bosses so they could dot all their
i
’s and cross all their
t
’s properly on this first release.

Bob spoke with Andy Karras, Siamas’ uncle, and told him he had seen Sam’s songwriting contract with Venice and it looked kosher to him, so they’d better go ahead and apply for a license. When Andy countered that this just sounded like sour grapes on Art’s part and that Bumps had assured them they had nothing to worry about, Bob exploded that Bumps didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about—but what was new about that? It became almost immediately irrelevant in any case, as the ill will that had been building over Bob’s partnership status swiftly came to a head. That was all as it might be, John Siamas patiently explained to him—but when they had first talked about it, the company was going to be set up on a shoestring investment. It had quickly required more capital than anyone had anticipated, and for Bob to take his place as an equal shareholder now, he would have to put up $5,000, too. But he didn’t have $5,000, Bob screamed at his erstwhile friend. John
knew
he didn’t have $5,000. John was just acting like some kind of Little Caesar, but he wasn’t going to get away with it—he would be hearing from Bob’s lawyers. The next day, August 27, he got a registered letter from Siamas, formally stating the nonnegotiable terms of his participation, and within days after that, he found himself locked out of his own office. So Bob Keane left the company that he considered he had started before the “Greek gang” even put out their first release—but with a plan to start his own label from which no one was going to be able to evict him.