Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (66 page)

Whatever his vision of a perfect girl and a cloudless future, Sam got in trouble again when he played Dayton four days later. There had been a “bastardy” warrant out for his arrest in Cleveland since January 27, 1958. It was over the little girl, Denise, whom he had fathered in 1953 just two days before Linda was born, and for one reason or another, it had never been served. Now it was, when he played Wampler’s Arena on July 2—and, after pleading guilty through counsel and making a motion for a blood test to prove paternity, he was forced to put up a $1,000 appearance bond before he could move on to the next show.

They worked hard all through the summer, one-nighters mostly in the Northeast and Southeast but in the Midwest, too, stopping off in New York long enough for him to record “Feel It,” the song he had put out on the Sims Twins, once it became clear that their version, the B-side of the 45, was not going to get any airplay. “Soothe Me,” the A-side, was just beginning to break into the charts, so he set up a session for the twins to record “I’ll Never Come Running Back to You,” the Sam-and-Alex collaboration that had served as Johnnie Morisette’s debut on the label, as the substitute B-side on a reconstituted single.

Barbara had joined him on the road by now. She was almost five months pregnant and determined to give him a boy. She knew how much that would mean to Sam, and she thought maybe that could solidify her position with her husband once and for all. But she really didn’t know. He had been acting more and more strangely toward her since he had seen her leaving June Gardner’s room by herself on the last tour. She liked June, he was dear to her heart, but she and June and Sam’s brother Charles had only gotten together to smoke some good weed, and then Charles had to go and take care of something about the cars, and when she emerged from June’s room, Sam happened to be coming down the hall just at that moment. He blew up and as much as accused her of cheating right then and there. She drew herself up to her full height and said he was judging her by his own standards, did he think she was
crazy,
did he really think she was that low and immoral—but he sent her home on the spot and would probably have fired June, too, had it not been for Crain’s intervention. Ever since, he had muttered dark accusations about the paternity of her unborn child and made her feel like she was on some kind of damn twenty-four-hour watch on those rare occasions when she traveled with him.

Lithofayne Pridgon came to see him when he played Newark on August 12, because she had heard Barbara was out with the show. Never one to subscribe to the picture-postcard view of life, she was curious as to just what kind of woman a footloose man like Sam could be married to, but she didn’t get much of a chance to find out because she spent most of the evening running back and forth between the dressing rooms of the two stars. The show had been advertised as the “Big Rhythm Show of ’61,” and at the top of the bill, it pitted an elegantly tuxedoed, neatly afroed Sam against a drape-suited James Brown with his customary and spectacular processed pompadour. Brown was very much on the rise in the world of rhythm and blues (he was about to have his third straight Top 10 r&b hit in 1961), but it was his explosive stage show, his breathtaking dance routines and unmatchable theatrics, along with his tireless dedication to the road, that had long since earned him the sobriquet of “The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business.” There couldn’t have been a greater disparity of styles between the two performers, and there was real resentment on James’ part, not so much due to any overt action of Sam’s as to the combative view of someone who had come up the hard way and could only imagine that Sam, with his looks, education, and infuriating air of sophistication, must be looking down on him. He was not in any case going to surrender top billing—to
anyone
—and he made a big fuss about who was going to close the show, getting right up in Sam’s face and seemingly almost disappointed when Sam, who had evidently learned his lesson on the 1959 Jackie Wilson tour, said he’d be glad to go on first.

Lithofayne, who knew both men well (“James was a good friend, that’s all”), was drafted by Brown toward the end of the show after people started calling for Sam and he still hadn’t gone on. “James asked me to go over and feel the situation out, and when I hit the door, Sam said, ‘Hey, Chinese-y’—that was what he called me sometimes—but it didn’t seem like he was in any big hurry. So I played it off and went back and told James what was going on, and eventually Sam ambled out—but then he wouldn’t get off, he just kept singing and singing and tore that stadium up, and James could [hardly] go on.” She was neither shocked nor wholly unsurprised by Sam’s actions, but she did get her look at Barbara, and she got a big laugh out of the way Sam had outwitted James and landed, like Bre’r Rabbit, right in the briar patch.

This was how he earned his living, he told the
New York Sunday News.
He was gone two months out of every three, maybe more, but this wasn’t the way it was always going to be. He didn’t speak of civil rights or racial issues, though they were never far from his mind. He couched his ambition in business terms that anyone could understand. “I want to sing,” he told reporter Don Nelsen, “until I have enough money to invest in something else. I own two music publishing companies now. When I get a little older, I’d like to leave the singing to the younger fellows.”

For now, though, he was doing his best to improve his own situation. Jess Rand had been negotiating with his friend Bob Yorke, RCA’s new a&r head, for months now, but the tone had turned increasingly bitter. “I feel that we left our discussions in New York somewhat unresolved,” Yorke wrote in June, “[but] I cannot help but feel that you prefer it this way. . . . I have tried, Jess, to be fair, honest, and direct with you. I have to confess my uneasiness about the future; but I am virtually out of suggestions on how to proceed.”

What Sam wanted, Jess worried, was more than the market in which he found himself could bear. Sam wanted quarterly royalty statements, a greater amount of money upfront, higher monthly payments, a higher royalty rate, and a lump sum that would allow him to buy a house, since with the new baby the apartment was going to be too small. “Bob Yorke knew I wasn’t [necessarily] for the way Sam wanted to proceed. But Sam was my client, and I said, ‘Bob, I’m just doing what my client wants me to do. Bottom line, it’s Sam’s decision. That’s the way it has to be.’”

In the end, they came up against favored-nations clauses in other RCA recording artists’ contracts, particularly Elvis Presley’s: for that reason, Jess convinced Sam, there was no way they were going to get a royalty rate higher than 5 percent—and neither Capitol nor Atlantic, the only other companies even considered, were going to give them that. After a while, Jess began to worry that it was starting to feel like liar’s poker. “So finally I called Bob and said, ‘Let’s make a deal. We can trim some if you want, [but let’s] get it done.’ And I got a lot of things for Sam.”

What he got as of the middle of September was a cash advance of $30,000 (nonreturnable but recoupable against artist’s royalties) and monthly payments of $1,875, adding up to a recoupable sum of $22,500 a year for the two-year duration of the contract, with that amount doubled for the third year if the option was picked up. Sam’s songwriter’s royalty was increased from $.015 to $.02 per side, unless RCA opted to advertise the single with a color sleeve. And only LP recording session costs—not singles sessions—would be charged against Sam’s account. Plus Jess got an off-the-books commitment on RCA’s part to help with Sam’s house if and when he located one—if only with some of the furnishings, a color television and sound equipment that could come from the RCA line of products. Sam felt he should have gotten more, and Luigi agreed that despite his track record as a consistent hitmaker, Sam was being taken for granted. Still, it was a reasonable resolution for both parties, and Sam directed RCA to send the $30,000 advance to his manager, because, Jess assumed, Sam didn’t want Barbara to know his business.

At the same time, unbeknownst to Jess, Sam and Alex were preparing once again to go to court. The lawsuit that they had filed against Keen eighteen months earlier for all royalties accrued (artist, songwriter, and publishing) since the settlement in December of 1959 had so far done little but prompt more filings and counterfilings. With the failure by Keen to pay anything toward the $13,000 cited in the March 1960 filing, Sam’s continued catalogue sales, and the enormous success of “Wonderful World,” there was now a good deal of money at stake, but Sam and Alex were no longer looking for money; their aim was nothing less than ownership of Sam’s Keen masters. Like the protracted battle with Specialty, it had to do with issues of fairness and artistic control, but equally important, J.W. felt, was that they be taken seriously as
businessmen,
that the music world understand that, nice guys or not, he and Sam were going to assert their rights, just like RCA or any other music manufacturer.

“Soothe Me,” by the Sims Twins, continued to build momentum. It hit first in New Orleans, and
Cash Box
reported that the record was breaking nationally in the same September 9 issue that included a full-page ad for Sam’s new RCA release, “Feel It.” Two weeks later, SAR Records ran its own tiny ad for the Sims Twins, with the single word “Tremendous” festooned with nine exclamation marks, while the record itself was listed at number twenty-eight on the “Looking Ahead” chart and was inching ahead of Sam’s single in actual sales. Alex put the twins with Sam’s agent, Dick Alen, at Universal Attractions, who took them on strictly as a favor and promptly booked them into the Regal with LaVern Baker. Bobbie and Kenny Sims took it all in stride. “Being on the road wasn’t about nothing but singing and making money,” they concluded. “That’s it.”

In the wake of the Sims Twins’ success, SAR Records scheduled a flurry of sessions and moved into new quarters just down the hall from the cramped space they had inhabited up until now. Sam and Alex would each have his own office, and Zelda was given a free hand in decorating the entire four-room suite, picking out a coral-and-white desk for herself against a coral wall, while Sam’s office provided a stark study in contrasts, with one black wall and one white and plush black-and-white drapes. She was determined, she said, to let her natural antipathy to bureaucratic decor run wild.

Sam asked Bumps to produce a session on their one female artist, Patience Valentine, in Los Angeles on September 20, over J.W.’s strenuous objections. Bumps was still busy trying to break the gospel sound on the nightclub circuit. His show,
Portraits in Bronze,
with New Orleans gospel singer Bessie Griffin, had become something of a cabaret hit in Hollywood, and this past spring he had even taken it to Vegas. He cut three sides on Patience, one of them cowritten by J.W. and Zelda, but his attitude, J.W. felt, was insufferably condescending, as he lectured Alex with a convert’s zeal on the commercial promise of the gospel sound—all the while acting as if he were the one doing
them
a favor. “Sam was always trying to do something to help Bumps,” J.W. reflected philosophically, “and Bumps read it the wrong way. He figured that we needed him, that we were coming to him in trouble, you know,” and, the way J.W. saw it, Bumps fully expected eternal gratitude as his reward for a record that wasn’t going to sell two copies.

One reason Sam had given the producer’s job to Bumps was that he was in Chicago with Alex, supervising a Soul Stirrers session on the same day. He had persuaded Leroy Crume that writing gospel lyrics to the melody of “Soothe Me” could provide them with the follow-up they had been looking for to “Jesus Be a Fence Around Me.” Crume wrote the song, it was a catchy melody, but with “Soothe Me” rapidly rising in the charts, now he wasn’t so sure. Sam waved aside his objections, they’d wait until “Soothe Me” had had its run—did Crume think that Sam lacked all common sense?—but three weeks later, “Lead Me Jesus” was the A-side of the Stirrers’ new single, and one month after that, Crume was facing a very angry Herman Nash, the longtime Atlanta promoter, at the Municipal Auditorium. “When we got there, he was just standing out on the steps, didn’t say hello or nothing, just said, ‘Crume, why in the world did you guys do that?’ I said, ‘Do what?’ He said, ‘You all recorded a rock ’n’ roll song.’ I said, ‘No, man, we didn’t record a rock ’n’ roll song.’ He said, ‘Well, it’s just
like
a rock ’n’ roll song. It’s not gonna work, man. You guys used to be number one around here, but you can forget it, you might get booed off the stage.’

“Well, I put on my little happy face and told Nash, ‘Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right,’ but, man, I was so scared. I took Jimmie Outler, our lead singer, in the dressing room and said, ‘Jimmie, let’s don’t even touch that song. Just sing one line and let’s walk.’ And that’s just what we did, and, man, the crowd went crazy, and Nash came up to me and said, ‘Damn, you guys can do anything.’ I said, ‘I told you not to worry.’ But we didn’t go back out onstage. I didn’t want to press our luck.” And in the back of his mind, Crume could hear Sam saying, “I told you, fucker. Didn’t I tell you?” And, as always, he had no reply.

The business with Keen, too, came to a fortuitous conclusion of its own while Sam was still on the road. On October 16, judgment was delivered in California Superior Court that the plaintiffs were owed $11,000 and that according to a compromise agreed to by all parties, “this judgment is granted and is expressly conditioned upon the condition that plaintiff will satisfy the judgment by levying on and causing the sale of [Sam Cooke’s] master recordings [in] Full Satisfaction of Judgment regardless of the price realized on such sale.” In other words, Sam and Alex could reasonably expect to be able to purchase the masters for the money that they were owed. Three days later seven cartons of Keen master tapes were taken away by the sheriff’s office in preparation for the stipulated sale.