Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (35 page)

In the meantime, Sam had finally gone back into the studio on August 23 and laid down three tunes under Bumps’ careful direction. Once again the emphasis was on ballads, once again the songs were transformed by Sam’s trademark vocal style, with gentle ululations, verbal repetitions, unexpected swoops, and melismatic elongations placing Sam’s unmistakable stamp on Nat “King” Cole’s first number-one pop hit, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons”; a rather jazzy, almost jaunty number by Eden Ahbez (author of 1948’s “Nature Boy,” Nat’s second number-one), “Lonely Island”; and “Desire Me,” a typical teenage pledge of eternal love, which might have been better served by the simplicity of Sam’s own songwriting approach and a less awkward hook. The sound was pure pop, with the same antiseptic chorus to which Art had so vociferously objected, and whatever the pedigree of the material, or its limitations, Sam carried off the performance without a hint of hesitation, condescension, or awe.

On September 7, with the release of the first two Keen singles momentarily at hand (his own “Summertime,” backed with “You Send Me,” along with a misguided marriage of rockabilly and football by Jack Rogers called “Hey Team”), Sam finally signed his contract. As Bumps had promised, it was better than anything Art would ever have offered, with a 3 1/2 percent artist’s royalty, though Bumps took his 10 percent manager’s cut off the top.

The single started selling right away. Dolphin’s of Hollywood had been well primed for the release both by Sam’s frequent visits to the store (with and without Bumps and Bob Keane) and by his record company’s generous contribution of several hundred free copies of the record. Lonnie Johnson and Lew “Moondog” Russell, the two DJs who were on from 10:30
P.M.
till seven in the morning, played it over and over all night long, even as they plugged Sam’s upcoming appearance at a promotional dance for Dolphin’s at the Elks Hall just three blocks from the store. The promotion was intended to spotlight Googie René’s new hit, “Beautiful Weekend,” and Sam arrived with a certain degree of trepidation. “Nobody,” said René Hall, a disinterested observer who could work with virtually any of the players on the scene without friction or rancor, “realized how big the record was until Sam got up there and sung. People had been brainwashed to hearing this record around the clock, and they just went crazy, they didn’t even want to hear Googie [after that]. That was it. Sam was a star.”

He played the Los Angeles County Fair in Pomona, too, for Art Laboe, the influential white DJ on KPOP who played rock ’n’ roll from Scrivners Drive-In at Sunset and Cahuenga, just down the street from Hollywood High, every afternoon from three till sundown. Laboe, a short, stocky, thirty-two-year-old first-generation Armenian-American named Egnoian who had taken his professional name from the secretary at his first radio job, met Sam and Bumps when they came to Scrivners to promote the record. He wasn’t too impressed with Bumps (“He had a little ‘star-itis’”), but he found Sam to be “very cordial and congenial, a real gentleman,” who walked around, like all the hopefuls, giving away his records and autographing them for the teenagers in their cars. “I interviewed him—the standard interview, you know, what he’d been doing, and then I’d say, ‘Well, let’s play “You Send Me,”’ and I’d play it, and everybody would cheer. I had my own kind of research, where I could tell if a record was any good or not. Six plays would get it started. If it didn’t, then it wouldn’t.” Evidently in Sam’s case it did, because Laboe invited him to play a date at the Los Angeles County Fair, a predominantly white venue. He never had any doubt which side was the hit. “You Send Me,” he reasoned, was a love song for teenaged girls, black
and
white.

The Prudhomme sisters, Beverly and Betty, identical twins who looked a little bit like the glamorous movie star Elizabeth Taylor, were playing the fair, too. They had a song out on Imperial, but they considered themselves songwriters primarily, and they had met Sam that summer at Bumps’ apartment, where they had gone to have Bumps write lead sheets for some of their songs. They were impressed with Sam right away. “We said, ‘Oh you’ve got to do our songs.’ He was a real gentleman with us, as sweet as he could be.” But onstage, while he conveyed those same qualities, “there was something very different about his style and personality. Women of all races were chasing him, beautiful, gorgeous women”—but he was never crass, never vulgar, there was an intimacy that communicated almost as well from the stage as it did in person. They were so impressed with him, in fact, that after the show, on their own initiative, they gave John Dolphin another $100 to keep playing his song. For no reason other than that he was “such an uplifting person.”

Art Rupe would have painted a very different picture, as he watched the song break with a mixture of frustration and regret. There was no question that it had been an error on his part to let Sam go. He had allowed himself to be misled by emotion, a cardinal sin in his principles of business—but he had at least kept his wits about him by retaining the publishing, and, if the song was a hit, he could hold Sam to his contractual commitment of eight additional sides at no additional cost or obligation. The way Art saw it, he couldn’t really lose, no matter what happened. The label credits were little cause for concern (Sam’s brother L.C. was listed as songwriter, with publishing assigned to Keen’s publishing company, Higuera). Bumps had assured him that this was no more than a simple clerical error, a product, he figured, of equal parts greed and naïveté. It was an oversight, Bumps told him; he didn’t know where anyone could have gotten the idea that L.C. had written the song.

T
HE RECORD JUST KEPT ON CLIMBING
. It was touted as a Territorial Tip for Los Angeles in
Billboard
on September 30. In San Francisco, Magnificent Montague, who had masterminded and managed L.C.’s group, the Magnificents, was riding it to a fare-thee-well, introducing each play with the kind of erotically charged romantic poetry that had become his trademark, as he declared, “If I could touch your hand and feel your soul / If I could look into your eyes forever more / Darling, you send me.”

That was the one thing Bumps couldn’t quite figure. The damned thing had already sold almost a quarter of a million copies, it was taking off everywhere, but to Sam’s and Bumps’ disbelief, nearly all the jocks were playing the B-side. In Cleveland, Bill Randle, the influential white DJ who had helped break Elvis Presley’s career, turned the record over, the same thing happened in Detroit, and in St. Louis, top r&b jock E. Rodney Jones played “Summertime” to a lukewarm response, but when he played the flip, the phones really “exploded.”

In the gospel community, word spread like wildfire. To Jimmy “Early” Byrd, the Durham, North Carolina, gospel jock who always partied with Sam when the Soul Stirrers were in town, “I thought it was the worst thing, I admit it. The man was up there singing the blues. Preachers all across the country predicted that he would not be successful. There was a lot of rejection.” Brother Joe May vehemently expressed his disapproval, and the Cook family heard that Mahalia Jackson was upset with Sam, too. Marvin Jones and Creadell Copeland, his old colleagues in the Highway QCs, were both devastated. They couldn’t imagine how Sam could ever make the change when “he was such a king out in the spiritual world.” Thirteen-year-old Bobby Womack and his brothers, with their own stature in the gospel world just beginning to grow, had a slightly different perspective. “We were sad that he had to leave the fold, because we thought it [gospel] was going to go back to the old way—I mean, it’s still all right to make people shout, but don’t do nothing fancy. Don’t do anything that looked like it could be rock ’n’ roll!” At the same time, though: “Everybody was afraid. That’s just the way we were taught. If you betray God, stop serving Him and start singing the devil’s music, then something terrible’s going to happen to you. So everybody was just waiting on the day.”

There was no such ambivalence in the Cook family. Charles, still in jail but awaiting his release, bet some of his fellow inmates that Sam’s record would be number one by the time he got out, while to Agnes “it was just a way for Sam to make more money, we were all happy for him.” L.C. figured Sam’s growing fame could do nothing but improve his own fortunes. Everywhere he went he had always been the beneficiary of Sam’s reputation—with girls, with club owners and DJs, even with Elvis Presley. There was just one time, in Pittsburgh, that it failed to work, when the Magnificents were playing a sit-down gig and “this one girl was there four nights straight. So I told [group leader] Johnny Keyes, ‘Man, you see that little girl right there? Tonight she’s going back to the hotel with me or I’m going home with her, either one.’ [Later that night], after we laid in the bed for a while, she said, ‘You know what? You sure remind me of somebody.’ I said, “Baby, who is that?’ She said, ‘You remind me of Sam Cook.’ I laughed and said, ‘That’s my brother.’ She looked at me, and then she jumped right up out of that bed and said, ‘L.C., get out of my house. Don’t you come back to see me no more.’ And she put me out, wouldn’t give me no more pussy.” But that was the only time he could remember that Sam’s magic hadn’t worked; otherwise Sam had never failed to take care of his brother, and L.C. tried to do the same. As far as L.C. was concerned, Sam’s reputation could do nothing but grow and grow.

J
OHN SIAMAS WASN’T
sure just how to respond to the overwhelming success of his first record release. He had been as unprepared for it as anyone; according to his just-turned-thirteen-year-old son, “he was stunned.” One of the first things he did was to rent offices on Hollywood Boulevard near Gower, so that his little record company, which still occupied a corner of Randall Engineering on Hygereia Boulevard in Culver City, could have its own Hollywood home. Then at Bumps’ urging, he turned over $5,000 to his a&r director, promotion genius, and chief cook and bottle washer so that Bumps and Sam could hit the road and promote the record. The idea, as Bumps explained, was to get it to certain key jocks all across the country. Then it would be just like a snowball rolling downhill. Once Bugs Scruggs got on it in Cincinnati, Okey Dokey in New Orleans, King Bee in Houston, and Jockey Jack Gibson in Atlanta, the disc jockeys in the secondary markets would jump all over it, and the record would separate itself out from the rest like wheat from the chaff.

They started out in the Midwest at the end of the month. In Cleveland, Bill Randle, the erudite self-styled hit picker whose instincts were so finely tuned that he boasted, “I can tell my listeners, ‘This tune will be number one in four weeks,” set up some record hops around town while remaining resolutely on the flip side (“Bumps was on the wrong side, but how could you hear the first sixteen bars and not know it was a hit? The public knew instantly”). They visited Casey Kasem, another big rock ’n’ roll jock, in Detroit. And in Chicago, Bumps used Marty Faye’s show (which generally thrived on controversy) to launch an attack on pop star Teresa Brewer for trying to steal not just their song but Sam’s style, right down to his patented “Whoa-oa-ohs.” There were two other cover versions out, both in the L.A. r&b mold (one was by Jesse Belvin, the other by Cornel Gunter), with a third, instrumental treatment by transplanted New Orleans sax man Plas Johnson on the way, but none seemed to rouse Sam’s and Bumps’ ire like Brewer’s polished pop version, which was rising fast on the charts, perhaps because of its technical skill, perhaps simply because the singer was white. Teresa Brewer may not have realized it, Bumps declared on the air, but what she was doing was nothing less than stealing. “Because Sam’s style, like Billie Holiday’s, is so distinct that anyone who copies the song is actually singing Sam Cooke.”

They came into Philadelphia on their way to New York and visited with Georgie Woods, “the Guy with the Goods,” at WDAS, setting up an appearance with Georgie at the Uptown Theater over Christmas. Woods, who had come out of the Georgia cotton fields, joined the navy at sixteen, and then taken advantage of the GI Bill to attend broadcasting school, had a virtual monopoly on the Uptown, the site of almost every big r&b revue, but they wanted to see his chief rival at the station, Doug “Jocko” Henderson, too. Henderson had already left for his 10:00
P.M.
to midnight shift on WOV in New York, so, making allowances for a social hour or two, they calculated his likely return and then showed up at his affluent suburban home at four o’clock in the morning.

Henderson, a rhyming jock with a flair for humor and an entrepreneurial bent (his
Rocket Ship Show
offered endless opportunities for both invention and self-promotion, particularly in an era of space travel), came from a very different background than Georgie Woods. An accomplished athlete and tennis champion whose father was superintendent of the black city schools in Baltimore, he had been studying biology at Tuskegee when he fell under the influence of pioneering rhyming jock Maurice “Hot Rod” Hulbert. Jocko and Georgie had been in competition, each with his own striking style, ever since Woods’ arrival in the city in 1953, but Jocko’s inability to break Georgie’s lock on the live r&b scene had led to his becoming a “rail jockey,” commuting nightly to Manhattan, mostly by train. Now, as one of the top three rock ’n’ roll jocks in New York (Alan Freed and Harlem’s Tommy Smalls were the others), he had a whole new market to exploit as he put on shows at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, went head-to-head with Freed at the Loew’s State on Broadway, and was about to have his own teen dance show on television.

Henderson, not surprisingly, was sound asleep when Sam and Bumps arrived. “Somebody’s kicking on the front door, and I said to my wife, ‘Who in the world is that?’ So I put my bathrobe on, put my gun in my pocket, and went down and put the light on and saw two fellows out there, looked like very nice guys. I hollered through the door, said, ‘What do you want?’ Said, ‘Jocko?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Said, ‘My name is Sam Cooke, and this is Bumps Blackwell, my manager. And we have a record we think is going to be a big smash. And we just wanted to let you hear it. And pardon us for coming out here at four o’clock in the morning.’” What could he do? He listened to the record, pronounced it a smash, and promised to have Sam on his new TV show as soon as it went on the air.