Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (65 page)

PM East/PM West
was the brainchild of Jess’ crazy friend Mike Santangelo. Jess had jumped the gun on announcing the appearance twice already, first when he planted the item about an upcoming interview with Mike Wallace back in October, then when the
Hollywood Reporter
ran a similarly unsourced note in December that Westinghouse television was “putting together an hourlong spec to star Sam Cooke with Mahalia Jackson.” This time, though, it was for real, after Santangelo, an award-winning producer barely thirty years old (“Mike was a baby,” said Jess, who had known him for almost a decade, “when he started as head of PR for Westinghouse, brilliant, unbelievably good-looking, always in the right place at the right time, crazy but a fucking genius”), finally hit on the right format for Sam, an offbeat, late-night show focusing on popular music and the arts hosted for its first hour by Wallace and Joyce Davidson in New York, then by
San Francisco Examiner
television columnist Terence O’Flaherty for its concluding thirty minutes. Santangelo had met Sam a year or two earlier through Jess and was sold on him from the start, but he couldn’t figure out an angle until Jess, on impulse, took a glass from his desk and threw it on the floor. “What the hell was that?” said Santangelo. “That’s the sound of broken glass,” Jess replied, not quite sure where this was going. Santangelo stared at him quizzically. “That’s the opening of your show,” said Jess, with a PR man’s flair for instantaneous invention, declaiming in a television announcer’s voice, “Put on a Sam Cooke record, you’re going to hear a one-million-dollar sound.” And that, with some modifications, was the genesis of the show.

They spent a couple of days in New York rehearsing at the ABC studios on Sixty-seventh Street. The only other guests on Sam’s segment of the program, now entitled “Sam Cooke: Phenomenon,” were Hugo and Luigi and Jess himself, with Clif White leading a backup trio consisting of an upright bass player and top New York session man Panama Francis on drums. Sam showcased his new single and, including medleys, performed another ten or twelve numbers while easily fielding the puffballs that Wallace, ordinarily a combative interviewer, lobbed at him. Mike Santangelo had warned Sam in advance not to just sit there waiting for the next question, so Sam never let the conversation lag. He talked about some of the artists he had recorded recently—the Sims Twins, the Soul Stirrers, his brother L.C., and Johnnie Morisette—and spoke of the ambitious plans he had for his record company, laughing comfortably as Wallace asked for a thumbnail sketch of his life, and then providing it. He even jumped in when the interviewer was quizzing Hugo and Luigi about their role in the process. “I write some of the songs, too!” he said in that winsome way of his, and everyone laughed. All the men were dressed in business suits except for Sam, who was wearing a distinctively chic ribbed cardigan sweater. In the few stills that survive from the show, he appears attentive, alert, unquestionably
engaged
—but most of all he appears to be enjoying himself, as if somehow he can’t quite believe that he and Jess are actually pulling this off.

For Jess it was a rare point of stillness in a relationship more often fraught with conflict and mistrust. One time late at night, he and Sam had been in the studio, each puffing silently on a cigarette, and they both caught their reflection in the window of the control-room glass. “Looks like an old black-and-white picture,” Sam said to him in a moment of profound solemnity and profound casting off. That was a little bit the way it felt to Jess now, as though time hung suspended, all suspicion was erased, and he had momentarily earned Sam’s full and unqualified trust. They went out to P.J. Clarke’s after the show. Sam was carrying his guitar case, and as they walked in, some guy said to him, “What are you, a Freedom Rider?” Sam just looked at him and said, “That’s funny, man.” He said, “You’re funny.” And the way he said it, Jess knew if the guy opened his mouth again, Sam would gladly wrap the guitar around his head.

The reviews were uniformly glowing. This was “one of the few instances where a top Negro entertainer has been so honored by a network,” the
Hollywood Reporter
observed, while
Billboard
pointed out that “for Sam Cooke, without doubt, the show was an unalloyed smash which should pay off where it counts most—at the record counter.” Sam’s manager and producers were among the contributors, the reviewer wrote, but “taking nothing away from [them], the show was best when Cooke was on camera. He proved a relaxed, likable, intelligent performer, with genuine magnetism,” and the show itself was “apt to become a most sought-after promotional avenue for recording talent,” based upon Sam’s success. It was a great triumph for both manager and singer, a vindication in many ways for them both. With Jess in the midst of new contract negotiations with RCA, it seemed like it could only be a harbinger of things to come.

S
AM OPENED AT THE FLAME
in Detroit on June 16 for an extended ten-day run. The Cook family and Sam’s friend Duck all came in from Chicago and took over the top floor of Sunnie Wilson’s Mark Twain Hotel. No one missed Barbara. There remained a distinctly chilly feeling toward her among all the Cooks, along with deep suspicion of her motivation. Sam didn’t even bother to tell them that his wife was three months pregnant, with the baby, Tracey, just nine months old. He had told Barbara she could come out on the road with him anytime she liked, but it wasn’t easy for her now, obviously, since he had sent her Grandmother Beck home to Chicago. Maudie Beck, her mother’s mother, had come out to Los Angeles around Christmastime to help with the children, but Sam found out that she was a drinker and told her he couldn’t trust her with them. “Don’t make no difference to me, son,” she said. “You sent for me, I didn’t send for you.” Which gave Barbara a big laugh but left her stranded when it came to joining her husband on the road. Because packing up the kids was tough, and she knew she couldn’t expect any help from him.

On the weekend of June 23, the Womack Brothers, a teenage gospel group from Cleveland, arrived in Detroit in a 1957 Dodge driven by their father, Friendly, a steelworker and sometime barber who served as their manager. They had come to town to talk with Sam about the possibility of a recording contract. The group was made up of nineteen-year-old Friendly Jr. and Curtis, Bobby, Harry, and Cecil, ranging in descending order from age seventeen to thirteen. They had originally met Sam when the Soul Stirrers played Temple Baptist Church in Cleveland nine years earlier and Sam had insisted that they be included in the program over the objections not just of the Temple Baptist minister but of Soul Stirrers manager S.R. Crain as well. He had even taken up a collection for them at the conclusion of their performance, and, after the congregation came up with $72, he had thrown in $28 of his own to make it an even $100. The Womack Brothers had played on other Cleveland programs with the Soul Stirrers and Pilgrim Travelers over the years, but it was Sam’s old friend Roscoe Robinson, whom he had known ever since the Highway QCs’ first program in Gary, Indiana, in 1948, who tipped Sam to the idea of recording them.

Roscoe had taken over the lead for the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi when Archie Brownlee died the previous year. “The Blind Boys were like members of our family,” said Bobby Womack, the middle brother. “They used to stay with us. My mother would cook for them, and they would just lay around until it was time to do the gig. We were saying, ‘Roscoe, we trying to get a record. We been singing all these years, but we ain’t never gonna be established unless we start recording.’ So Roscoe says, ‘You remember Sam Cooke?’ And we say, ‘Remember Sam Cooke? Yeah.’ And he said, ‘He’s my partner. I should call him and see if he remembers you.’ We all thought he was jiving and we were listening in when he called. First thing he says, ‘Sport, this is Sco. I think I got something for you.’”

Sam told Roscoe he remembered the group well. “He said, ‘They was bad, them little boys. Can they still sing?’ I said, ‘Can they still sing? They worse than that, man. Now they want to holler at you!’” So he told Roscoe to put together a tape, and, after he heard it, he called Roscoe from the road. “‘You right,’ he said. ‘They really
can
sing. Just help them get some material together and meet me in Detroit. We gonna
discuss
this.’”

The Womack Brothers and their father. Left to right: Bobby, Friendly Sr. (father), Curtis, Friendly Jr., Harry, Cecil.

Michael Ochs Archives.com

The Womacks caught up with Sam in his suite at the Mark Twain on Saturday afternoon. They had been in town since the previous evening but didn’t know how to get in touch with him. They ran into Sensational Nightingales lead singer June Cheeks in the lobby of the shabby hotel where they were staying six to a room for $3, but he wouldn’t give them any information about Sam because, they concluded, he was looking to score some money for himself and was afraid they might get there first. Then, when they finally got a call from Sam, they had to sit around his hotel room for a while before he emerged with a friend named Duck and his brother L.C. He was friendly, but he kept writing down things in a spiral notepad as they sang the three songs that they had prepared with their father and one that Roscoe had given them. L.C. sidled up to Bobby while they anxiously awaited Sam’s verdict. “Y’all bad, man,” he said. “My brother gonna do you right.” They didn’t believe him, though, until Sam himself said he wanted to cut them: could they meet him in Chicago in four days?

It was a thrill, said Bobby, but at the same time, it was something of a disappointment, too. “We said, ‘Oh, man, we thought you was gonna bring us to California.’ He said, ‘Yeah, but it’ll be closer for me to cut you in Chicago. And it’ll be cheaper, too.’” Their father, who had seen Sam’s departure from the gospel world as betrayal, had reservations of his own, but there wasn’t much he could say. “Sam was just a likeable person,” said Bobby. “I mean, he made you like him without even trying. Because as big as he was, he made you feel like, Damn, he don’t seem standoffish. I feel like I been knowing this guy all my life.” And no matter what the preachers might say about how God was going to cut him down, you only had to look at him to see, “This guy ain’t going nowhere. He looks healthy to me!”

Sam gave them a contract on the spot. He told them to look it over if they wanted, but it was a fair deal, as good as anyone starting out in the business would ever get. They were hardly about to go out and hire themselves a lawyer, but Bobby and his brothers agreed they shouldn’t look too eager, so they took the contract back to Cleveland with them “and put marks on it to get it real dirty and funky” so it would appear to have been carefully reviewed. “Then our dad called Alex, because they was both high up in the Masons, and I remember, they made some secret signs, and he told Alex, ‘I don’t know about Sam, but I’m looking for you to be responsible for my boys.’ And we signed.”

Meanwhile, Sam quizzed his brother and Duck about the group they had just listened to. Which was the better singer, he asked them: Curtis, who took the majority of the leads, or his rougher-voiced younger brother Bobby? “Sam said, ‘Which brother do you like, C.?’ I said, ‘Shit, man, no contest. Curtis.’ And Duck said the same thing. Sam laughed, and he said, ‘You like Curtis, because he sings pretty, like me.’ I said, ‘You’re damn right.’ But Sam said, ‘Now let me show you something about Bobby. It’s different when you close your eyes and listen. When Bobby sings, he demands attention—whether you like him or not, you’re going to listen to him.’ He said, ‘Bobby is the star of the group, you just watch.’”

T
HE WOMACKS SHOWED UP
in Chicago on Wednesday, June 28. Sam put them up at the Roberts Motel, where he stayed whenever he was in town. The session was booked at the Universal recording studio in the evening, after Sam had finished a full day of promotion work for “Cupid,” which had already outsold any of his previous RCA releases except for “Chain Gang.” They started off with “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” a showcase for Bobby’s throaty, almost pinched lead vocal, then took up “Somewhere There’s a God,” the number Roscoe had written for them, which featured Curtis singing lead and sounding as close to Sam as an eighteen-year-old not fully in control of his voice could do. Sam coached him a little on his phrasing and diction, but after five takes, he pronounced himself satisfied and then asked if they would background him while he altered one word in the song. Clif chorded discreetly behind him, and the Womacks sang the same exact backup that they had for Curtis on “Somewhere There’s a God,” but the song was wholly transformed as Sam sang a romantic ballad called “Somewhere There’s a Girl.”

It was more than just a single word—but not much. There was a sense of yearning altogether different from the feeling of the gospel number, and the Womack brothers stood almost transfixed at the change. What gave it its special feel, Bobby thought, was that Sam was singing not about some real-life girl but about the
perfect
girl, an idealized girl. “You know, ‘Somewhere there’s a girl, and she’ll know everything about me.’ And he was talking about, ‘She knows when I’m right, she knows when I’m wrong’—this perfect girl, the one that’s gonna be the one.” He did just one take but appeared to be very moved by it, and when he got back in the booth, he announced excitedly to L.C., “I don’t have to hear that back. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna release that.” Whether or not he was entirely serious, it was an object lesson to the Womack brothers, a simple demonstration of how easy it would be to switch over.