Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (63 page)

Like Jess, Luigi discounted J.W.’s role, despite his business partnership, his presence, and his numerous songwriting credits. “He was very nice, very affable—but he didn’t say anything. He stayed in the background.” From J.W.’s point of view, he was simply glad to have gotten Luigi out to California. “[He] gave us respect. He was smart enough to know a good song and just stay out of the way.”

The song that Luigi had picked for the hit this time was “Cupid,” a number that Sam had first demoed for Kags in the Capitol studio in the summer of 1959. He had brought it to New York with him when he was playing the Apollo at the end of February, not to record it himself but because he and Alex both thought it might be good for Sandy Stewart, the girl singer on the television series hosted by Perry Como, another RCA artist produced by Hugo and Luigi. They were sitting in Hugo and Luigi’s office with the demo still in J.W.’s briefcase when the two cousins played them some songs they had already cut on the girl. Sam and Alex didn’t even have to look at each other to know that this was not the right singer for Sam’s song. So Alex just handed Hugo and Luigi the demo and said, “Here’s one you can cut on Sam.”

The song was not all that different from “That’s It, I Quit, I’m Movin’ On,” the last, non-Cooke-authored single Hugo and Luigi had picked for Sam—it was in a sense no less formulaic, it was, with its invocation of the urchin greeting-card god, certainly no less sugary and no less oriented to the white pop market. But it was written
by
Sam, it was accented
for
Sam, it fit his phrasing and intonation as precisely as “Chain Gang” and any number of his earlier hits, it was the perfect representation of a pop sensibility in its own way as keenly developed as Hugo and Luigi’s but with a broader ambition, a greater sense of the way in which even the most inoffensive pop sounds can sometimes soar.

Luigi got ready to go into the studio on the morning of Friday, April 21, with “an old yogi trick” he had learned: “You lie down, and you think of nothing, and then you imagine the session and how well it’s going, and how everybody’s enjoying it a lot. Then I got up and I showered and I got dressed in black pants and a black shirt and a red Eisenhower jacket, and I walked into the studio and introduced myself to everybody. I said, ‘I know you. I’ve heard you. I’m glad you’re on the session.’ So that kind of broke the ice, and then Sam came in and said, ‘I got the best-dressed producer in the world.’ [So] it worked!”

The session itself had an easy, relaxed feel—Luigi was happy with the atmosphere, and Sam seemed utterly at home and utterly unembarrassed about indulging the perfectionism that attended the apparent simplicity of even his most transparent compositions. The song opened with the mournful sound of a French horn set against the steady chording of Clif’s rhythm guitar, an unusual voicing for an r&b number made even more unusual when the strings entered on the second chorus, and violins and French horn played a kind of muted call-and-response duet. The message of the song couldn’t have been plainer as Sam sang in his sweetest voice, “C-u-upid, draw back your bow / And let / Your arrow go / Straight to my lover’s heart / For me-e-e-e,” with the verses set off from the chorus not just by their more clipped conversational style (“Now, Cupid, I don’t mean to bother you, but I’m in distress . . . ”) but by the cantering calypso beat that Earl Palmer introduced with his drumming.

The first four takes were fairly straightforward, but on the fifth, Sam came up with an idea to dramatically underscore the lyrics. He had run into Bobbie and Kenneth Sims at the California Club the night before and asked them if they would be willing to sing backup on his session. The Sims twins were a gospel duo Alex had discovered singing pop (as the Silver Twins) at a local club around Christmastime. Then he had gotten Sam to come out and listen to them singing in church, and they had signed the brothers right after that to a SAR contract. Four months later, though, he and Sam still hadn’t figured out what to do with them, and the twins were a little hesitant about going into the studio as backup singers on a pop session without rehearsal or preparation. Sam told them they wouldn’t have anything to worry about, on one song all he wanted them to do was to come in on a couple of lines of the chorus, and, for the first few takes of “Cupid,” that was all they did.

Then he asked if they thought they could imitate the sound of an arrow in flight, and when they said they could, he had them duet on that. Kenneth mimicked the sound of the arrow as it left the bow, Bobbie as it reached its target, and when they did it each time at the conclusion of the phrase “And let your arrow go,” their harmony was so perfect in the whoosh-and-thwack they created by pressing their lips to the microphone (it sounded a little bit like the air going out of a balloon), it might just as well have been one person creating a single effect.

Sam went back to the control room, lit a cigarette, and turned his attention to the playback, bending his head down and rocking back and forth as he listened for something that engineer Al Schmitt was convinced nobody else could hear. Then he laughed, and they wrapped the song in two more takes: the unexpected juxtapositions, the melancholy sound of the French horn set against the jaunty Caribbean rhythms, the almost ethereal loneliness of the vocal in stark contrast to the deliberate plainspokenness of the words, the cartoonish sound effect from the Sims Twins all creating a richness of texture that went almost unnoticed but that represented exactly the
feel
that Sam was looking for.

Luigi was certainly pleased. He knew in his bones that this time they had themselves a hit. There would be discussions down the line as to how Sam thought the actual record should
sound,
Sam would suggest that it might have more of a contemporary r&b flavor if Luigi placed Sam’s voice further back in the mix. Some of his friends had suggested the idea to him, was the way he phrased it in a phone call several weeks later. As Luigi recalled, “I said to him, ‘Sam, do any of these friends of yours make hit records?’ And he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, I do.’ And that was that.”

The rest of the session was taken up with yet another version of “Tenderness,” Sam and J.W.’s 1959 adaptation of “Try a Little Tenderness,” to which the Sims Twins contributed a harmonizing chorus. Sam and J.W. evidently continued to think that the song could be a hit given the right treatment, but Luigi didn’t care. Sam could do whatever he wanted at this point as far as he was concerned. Luigi had what he had come for. At some point, Sam started fooling with “Soothe Me,” a new song he had written that took off from the familiar folk melody “(Run Along Home) Cindy, Cindy.” As he worked on it with the twins, though, he was so taken not only with their upbeat approach but with the supercharged energy of their vocals (“Just the two of them,” said J.W., “had a sound like a whole group because of [their] overtones”), that he let them take over and, after they had turned the song inside out, asked how they would like to record it on their own as their SAR Records debut. Not surprisingly, Kenneth and Bobbie expressed unreserved enthusiasm for the prospect, and Sam promised them a session in June, as soon as some time opened up in his schedule.

T
WO WEEKS LATER
, after a brief series of engagements in Nassau and the Bahamas, he started on another Henry Wynn Supersonic tour, accompanied once again by such familiar performers as Clyde McPhatter and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters but with the addition this time of nineteen-year-old Aretha Franklin as well. Aretha, who had ended up signing with Columbia Records the previous summer, had already had two Top 10 r&b hits but was experiencing some of the same difficulties in making the transition from gospel to pop that Sam initially had. After a number of polite supper-club bookings, two consecutive one-week engagements with Sam at Baltimore’s Royal and Washington’s Howard Theater in March had provided her with her first extended exposure to the chitlin circuit. She was awkward and self-conscious onstage, and Sam did his best to help her, offering useful tips on where to stand, how to phrase, how to get across, while, on her own, she studied his show with unswerving dedication every night. It was plain to anyone who observed this gawky, almost coltish young mother of two, with her spectacular three-octave range and deep-set sorrowful eyes, that she was hopelessly in love with Sam—and had been ever since they first met at a Soul Stirrers’ program at her father’s church in Detroit. She gave up Kools for Kents, she liked to say, because Sam smoked Kents; she kept a scrapbook of clippings about him, going back to his earliest pop days, and even saved a crumpled cigarette package of his from the first time he had played the Flame. She knew that if Sam had twenty girls in a room, each one would leave feeling that she was the only one—“he just made you feel like it was all about you.” But she knew, deep down, it wasn’t all about her. And so she asked L.C. to accompany her on the road.

She told him her father wouldn’t allow her to take his ’61 Lincoln out on the tour if L.C. didn’t drive it for her. L.C. wouldn’t have hesitated to accept, “but Sam didn’t want me to. He said, ‘Man, you’re a star. I don’t want you driving nobody.’ He said, ‘You got a career to think of. That’s why I got Charles to drive me instead of you.’ He fussed at me for a while, but then [after] I calmed him down, he said, ‘Well, if that’s what you want to do, go ahead and do it with your crazy self. You’re going to do what you want anyway.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I am, Sam.’ And he laughed. And I had fun on that tour, I had a good time with both my brothers and Aretha, too.”

It was heavy competition onstage. Hank Ballard never failed to get the crowd going. And Clyde, who had started drinking more and more and was sometimes preoccupied with matters he shared with no one else, could still bring the audience to its feet with his delicate falsetto. But for Aretha “it was Sam’s tour as far as I was concerned. He followed me, and he just wore people out, he wrecked every place that we went. He could stand on one leg and wipe you out. When he would come on, the building would just erupt.”

There was a not dissimilar element of competition offstage as well. Sam, of course, always got his first choice of girls, but L.C. and Charles were not far behind, and L.C. saw it in many ways as a kind of family enterprise. One night Charles spotted a girl in the front row, “and he came backstage and said, ‘C., boy, I saw a fine broad out there. I’m taking her home with me.’ I said, ‘Where she at?’ And Charles pointed her out to me. Well, I went right up and stole her, fine as she was. You see, Charlie, once he whispered [into a girl’s ear], you couldn’t do nothing. But I didn’t give him a chance to whisper. Another time on that same tour, I had a little dark girl, she was bow-legged, built, and had hair on her legs sticking all out of her stockings—she was
bad,
man, that little girl had everything. Well, Sam saw her and said, ‘C., I like that girl.’ You know what I did? I just took her hand and put it in Sam’s hand and said, ‘You got her, Sam.’”

Maybe that was what led Aretha to seek romance elsewhere after being out with the Cooke brothers for a little while. Even with the most “forgiving” attitude, it would have been impossible not to become aware that L.C. was no more likely to be faithful to her than his brother and, perhaps hoping to get the attention of both, she took up with Hank Ballard, who had made his feelings known from the start. “I fell in love with her when she had her first crossover, ‘Today I Sing the Blues’—she sung the shit out of that song. Then, when I saw a picture of her in
Jet
magazine, I mean, she was superfine, I said, I got to have her. And, you know, I got her.” But he was soon disillusioned not just by her obvious preoccupation with the entire Cooke family but with her drinking (“I found out she loved her I. W. Harper”) and the burden of sadness that she bore. Like many people, he put that down to her father, the Reverend C.L. Franklin, who, despite his prominence in both the church and the civil rights movement, was widely perceived as a hustler, a “slick,” who exerted undue influence on his daughter. The effect on Aretha, as Hank saw it, was that due to her “low self-esteem she was really into a lot of pain and shit, and I couldn’t handle it.” So he invited his wife, Helen, a candidate for her masters in education, to join him on the tour.

For all of her pain, Aretha’s devotion to Sam never wavered. It wasn’t as if he had promised her anything, and he always treated her with consideration and respect, throwing up a partition for her to dress behind when they played some of the field houses and gymnasiums where the entire troupe might share a single dressing room, never failing to address her particular fears and concerns. She continued to study the way he was able to hold a crowd, “the polish and the savoir faire [and] immeasurable charm onstage [that had] people just falling by the wayside.” But she studied other aspects of his personality as well. “He was reading a book called
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
[a twelve-hundred-page history of Nazi Germany], so I went out and bought
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
too. I never read it. I couldn’t tell you today what was on page one or two. But because he had it, I wanted to have it.”

His brothers were no less befuddled by Sam’s reading habits. He was going to ruin his eyes, Charles told him, when Sam ordered a swivel light, like the kind they had on airplanes, so he could read in the car. It seemed as if he was determined to absorb everything all at once, magazines, newspapers, a book on slavery by the black historian John Hope Franklin, Tolstoy’s
War and Peace, The New Yorker, Playboy,
and Aristotle’s
Poetics.
“We’d go into a drugstore,” said Charles, “and Sam would come up to the counter with so many books people would be laughing. He’d get every magazine that was in there and then say, ‘Take care of it,’ and I’d have to stand there and take care of it.” “He was,” said the drummer June Gardner admiringly, “well versed on many subjects. He was aware of what was going on. He could sit down and explain himself.” His thirst for knowledge had been with him since earliest childhood. It had always been something of a mystery to L.C., but it was one of the many things that made Sam different, that L.C. felt placed Sam on a higher plane not just from Charles and him but from almost anyone else out there. “Sam was more than me. Sam was a thinker. He could see the whole picture. He didn’t go by anyone else. He did things exactly the way he wanted. He had the looks, the personality, the education—Sam had it all.”