Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (67 page)

In the meantime, Sam had found a new home. Through his friend Lowell Jordan, a sometime songwriter, assistant engineer, and “technical advisor” on SAR sessions, J.W. discovered that the house of renowned Hollywood soundman Glen Glenn, who had died in an automobile accident the previous August, was being sold at probate. Through another of Lowell’s connections at the court, Alex had been able to determine the high bid submitted to date, and on October 27, Sam and Barbara’s higher bid of $58,250, offered through Sam Reisman’s law office with a $6,000 down payment, was accepted.

It was exactly the kind of house both Sam and Barbara had always dreamt of, the “mansion” they had fantasized about as teenagers and the “Hollywood home” Sam had described with such vividness in his earliest interviews that reporters for the black press could not help but believe that he already lived in one. It was a sprawling, vine-covered, cedar-shingled Cape with a swimming pool in the front, a four-car garage, a children’s playhouse, a small living room with a fireplace and a much larger one with floor-to-ceiling speakers that Glen Glenn had used for his movie work. There was a little house out back that Barbara thought they could turn into a guesthouse but that Sam was determined to have as his own rehearsal room and studio. It sat on close to three-quarters of an acre of land and was located at 2048 Ames in the exclusive, virtually all-white section of Los Feliz below Griffith Park. To Linda, just eight years old but with a precociously adult view of life, it was both a fairy-tale castle and a frighteningly austere setting, separated from the world she had always inhabited by figurative moats and all-too-real obstructions. “I think for him and the time and the stature of what he was building to, it was something that was very important. But, you know, [for me] we went from this warm, sweet little neighborhood, where you know the people next door and you have friends down the street, to this very isolated, insulated home, with everything closed off. You just don’t see people walking past anymore or holler at your friends. When you’re young, you know, it’s different.”

Alex got the Keen master tapes at the sheriff’s auction on November 1. Sam was in Puerto Rico, booked for two weeks into the exclusive El San Juan Hotel right after Nat “King” Cole had played there, when Alex called with the news. As it turned out, he had had to pay $13,000, $2,000 beyond the stipulated judgment, because for some reason Imperial Records owner Lew Chudd had decided to bid against him. But he was confident they could get the $2,000 back, and, in fact, recover the full $13,000, from RCA or some other interested party.

There was no love lost at this point between Keen Records owner John Siamas and Sam Reisman, the lawyer who had taken up Sam and Alex’s cause. Siamas bore no ill will toward Sam and Alex themselves, but he and his lawyer John Gray (who was also a principal in the record company and John Siamas’ best friend) both felt Reisman had treated them with disdain from the start, as if they were small-time crooks, not well-intentioned businessmen, with neither recognition nor sympathy for their plight. They took consolation, though, from the fact that Reisman, who had insisted on the sheriff’s sale, the bureaucratic equivalent of having them led away in handcuffs, didn’t seem to fully comprehend the limitations of this kind of forced auction—which John Gray and John Siamas definitely did. All that Sam and the Kags Music Corporation were acquiring was the physical property, the seven cartons of master tapes offered at the sale, along with the right to manufacture and sell records made from those tapes. The sale could not affect the licensing agreements that Keen Records already had with EMI in Great Britain, France, Germany, and numerous other territories, nor would it necessarily prohibit John Siamas or his corporate entity, Rex Productions, from licensing reference copies of the master tapes that he had retained—and that were never mentioned in the judge’s order—to unnamed other parties in future. “They bought what they bought,” John Siamas declared with some measure of satisfaction to his son. “And what they didn’t buy they didn’t buy.”

J.W. wasn’t thinking about any of this. What he was thinking about was how to get RCA to purchase the masters from them. He and Sam gave some thought to putting out the records on SAR, but they quickly decided that their own company wasn’t big enough to fully exploit the value of Sam’s old masters. They couldn’t get RCA to show any interest, though, and Jess Rand didn’t seem able to get his friend Bob Yorke to make them an offer, advising J.W. that he should just approach the record company himself, hat in hand, as Alex saw it, and more or less beg the label to take the masters off his hands.

So J.W. suggested that they release one record on SAR, and they settled on “Just For You,” the Latin-flavored number they had cut at their own expense in the summer of ’59, backed with “Made For Me,” one of Sam’s favorites. J.W. was sure “Just For You” would get lots of attention. He was equally sure RCA would never realize that much of the attention would stem from the fact that it had never been released before and, since it was not a Keen master, was not even one of the titles RCA would be acquiring.

By three o’clock on the afternoon that he had a batch of DJ promo copies pressed up, J.W. said, “I had a dub on KFWB. Then I sent one airmail special delivery to San Francisco and one to Minneapolis—they had a sister station to KFWB there.” Despite the fact that there were no copies for sale to the general public, the record was reviewed in both
Billboard
and
Cash Box,
and
Cash Box
ran an item informing the trade that Sam and J.W. had bought back all of Sam’s Keen masters, including an unspecified number of previously unissued sides, for release on their own label. It was then, J.W. said with a laugh, that RCA finally called, and at that point, after eliciting his price of $13,000, he pulled the record off the air.

S
AM AND BARBARA PREPARED
to move into their new house at the beginning of December. Barbara was due in a couple of weeks, and they didn’t have anywhere near enough furniture, so Jess put them in touch with a pair of interior decorators, and his wife, Bonnie, once again helped Barbara out. Jess and Bonnie’s little boy was nearly a year old now, and Jess was managing a new white vocal group, the Lettermen, who had a big hit with “The Way You Look Tonight,” even as his latest signing, a veteran “girl group” called the Paris Sisters, had an even bigger one, the Phil Spector-produced “I Love How You Love Me.” Jess’ movie-production company had fallen apart with the sudden death of his partner, actor Jeff Chandler, earlier in the year, but as Sam saw it, his manager still had plenty to offer not just in the way of show-business connections like Michael Santangelo, who kept trying to get Sam interested in a new gospel-based show called
Black Nativity
he was putting together, but in the kind of solid new booking opportunities that were bound to open up through his clean-cut young white groups.

Sam was in and out as the house took shape. “It was really a project,” his daughter Linda recalled. “The house was just completely torn apart and renovated. He was on tour a lot, and he would have to come back and deal with the decorators. His favorite spot that he did was his bar [decorated] in silver dollars and black formica and mirrors, with all of his special glasses and martini stirrers and things. He taught me to make special drinks. Crème de cocoa and milk—
that
was my drink!”

The Denise Somerville paternity suit was finally resolved in an out-of-court settlement on December 4. With the blood test he had taken providing inarguable evidence that he was indeed the father, Sam agreed to pay $5,000 for all maternity and child care expenses to date plus court costs and $15 a week until his daughter reached the age of eighteen.

Barbara gave birth to a son fifteen days later, on December 19. They named him Vincent Lance Cooke, and Sam told everyone how happy he was, but Barbara thought it would have been nicer if he could have taken her to the hospital himself or spent a little more time with her before and after their son was born. Instead, he was in the RCA studio with that little Italian producer of his both the night before and eight hours after Vincent’s noon delivery at University Hospital. And then he was back in the studio with J.W. the following afternoon to try to get those goofy Sims Twins a follow-up hit. She saw more of her sister Beverly (who had recently moved out to Los Angeles with her two boys) than she did of her husband, and when she saw him, he just looked at the baby like he couldn’t believe it was his. It was true, Vincent was a pretty little boy—he was very light and very plump with big ears and a full head of brown fuzzy hair—but he didn’t look like either of the girls; if she was honest, she would have had to admit he didn’t look like he belonged. And Sam’s eyes bored into her with an accusation that didn’t have to be spoken for her to know what was in his mind.

L
UIGI HAD FLOWN
out to the Coast to record the new song Sam had played for him over the phone. The Twist had been all the rage among the kids for well over a year now, but it had suddenly taken off with the “society crowd” at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City, and Chubby Checker’s version of the Hank Ballard original was well on its way toward achieving the number-one pop position for the second time in sixteen months, while Joey Dee’s “Peppermint Twist” was also heading toward the top of the charts. Sam happened to catch a television show one day featuring scenes from the Peppermint Lounge. “Look at those old ladies dressed in diamonds, twisting away,” he said in amusement to J.W., then took out his notepad and wrote a song.

“Let me tell you about a place / Somewhere up in New York way / Where the people are so gay / Twistin’ the night away,” it began, moving on to a description of the scene itself:

Here’s a fellow in blue jeans

Dancing with an older queen

Who’s dolled up in her diamond rings

Twistin’ the night away

Man, you ought to see her go

Twisting to the rock ’n’ roll

Here you find the young and old

Twistin’ the night away

Like nearly every one of Sam’s songs, it was so simple, both lyrically and melodically, as to defy analysis—but so carefully put together at the same time, so perfectly matched in meter, melody, and rhyme as to be instantly memorable and, once heard, virtually unforgettable. For all of the self-evident silliness of its subject, Sam probably put more of himself into this number, to which all of the first night’s session was devoted, than into any of his previous RCA efforts. To the casual observer, there was little evidence of any unnecessary expenditure of energy. Indeed, in Walter Hurst’s eccentric account it was all about “getting the musicians used to the song arrangement and sound. . . . Sam Cooke’s knowledge of music makes it easy for him to tell René Hall what he wants, and Mr. Hall, whose hobby is electronics, can easily communicate with the A&R man [Luigi].” Sam himself got an obvious boot out of the usual handpicked band, which included the masterful Earl Palmer on drums, Jewell Grant anchoring the rhythm section on baritone sax, and Jackie Kelso taking the tenor solos. But the real push came from Sam, whose vocal strained against the beat and gained in emphasis and enthusiasm with each successive take.

No one would have compared it to gospel in either subject matter or format, but it harkened back to some of Sam’s most spirited moments with the Soul Stirrers in two essential ways: the skillfulness of its storytelling and the fervor with which the story was told. Sam purposefully roughened his voice at times to convey an excitement that seems almost at odds with his reportorial technique. “We’re gonna do one more right away,” Luigi announced over the PA after the sixth take, “’cause you got the spirit about the second half.” “All right. Got the spirit, huh?” said Sam sardonically. But he threw himself into a seventh take, which did, indeed, turn out to be the master—after Sam directed an overdub of hand claps and a chorus calling out what sounds like a cross between football signals and dance commands that was built into his original conception of the song.

Most of the same musicians were back in the United Studio at three o’clock the next afternoon for the Sims Twins session. Sam and Alex had brought in three strong originals, the Simses had been working steadily and were booked into the Tivoli in Chicago as headliners the following week—everything was right, in other words, for a repetition of their previous success, but the session just didn’t catch fire. There was no lack of electricity in the air, everyone was up, and Zelda (who had a cowrite with Alex on one of the songs) lent an air of expectation simply by her presence. But somehow it all came out sounding like a roughened-up Sam. “I think Sam just heard the music in his head, and he couldn’t hear it any other way,” said session engineer Bones Howe. “He’d go out in the studio and sing it for them, and I’d hear him come through the microphone, and I’d go, ‘That’s the way it should be.’” “If you took their voices out, and then you put Sam on the track,” said Bobby Womack, “there wouldn’t be any change.”

It seemed like everybody stopped by the house to see the new baby in the last days of the year. Lou Rawls, whom J.W. continued to advise in the same way that he had once advised Sam, had recently signed a recording contract with Capitol Records. Lou Adler, after producing Rawls, the Valiants, and Jan and Dean for the independent production company he and Herb Alpert had formed after the dissolution of Keen, had gone off on his own now, while Herb was pursuing a performing career. René Hall’s wife, Sugar, was almost like a surrogate mother to Barbara, and Jess Rand and his wife brought a housewarming present, while Sam’s buddy, Oopie, who, without Sam’s knowledge, always brought Barbara a little weed, was constantly in and out. There still wasn’t enough furniture for any kind of a crowd, so everybody sat on the floor with the lights turned down and the music playing, drinking just enough to feel good. Maybe it was Sam’s voice drifting out from the giant speakers, singing his brand-new song about “Twistin’ the Night Away” that got them up and dancing. “Here they have a lot of fun,” he sang, “Putting trouble on the run.”
Los Angeles Sentinel
columnist Gertrude Gipson, a friend of Sam’s and something of a mentor to Barbara, reported to her readers that she had heard that “Barbara Cooke, whose new heir is 2 1/2 weeks old, is already down to a size (7) and was twisting a while with hubby Sam Cooke.” Barbara just wished she could engrave this moment in memory—because before long, all their friends would leave and she would be left with a man who did not even seem to want to look at her or his new son.