Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (71 page)

The Upsetters were not on that date (the theaters had their own house bands), but they played with Sam on one-nighters all through the South—with their presence specified on the Universal contract either as an advertised act whose fee the club covered or as a $250 add-on for which Sam picked up the tab.

On July 7 they opened for three days in Atlanta, where the NAACP was holding its annual weeklong gathering for the first time since 1951. “Welcome NAACP Convention,” read the ad for the show at the Royal Peacock, which also included Lotsa Poppa, a good-natured three-hundred-pound Atlanta native who featured the songs of two-hundred-fifty-pound Solomon Burke in his act. There was a gospel program at the Auditorium with the Highway QCs the weekend before Sam’s appearance, and Martin Luther King addressed the convention on July 5, declaring that “true peace is not merely the absence of tension. . . . The tension which we see in the South today is the necessary tension that comes when the oppressed rise up and start to move forward toward a permanent, positive peace.” At the conclusion of his speech, historian Taylor Branch wrote, “he rushed feverishly to a closing, four-word slogan: ‘All. Here. And now.’” And between what Branch described as “rhythmic applause [that] allowed him to speak only one sentence between bursts of mass emotion,” he declared, “We want
all
of our rights. . . . We want our freedom
here.
. . . We want freedom
now!
” The crowd, inspired not just by the sense of the speech but by the stirring manner of its delivery, burst into a response that, Branch wrote, “King stilled only with a solemn reprise on the likelihood of persecution and death, and . . . a flourish of inspiration from the prophets. . . . [But] his NAACP speech did not register with the white world. As with many sensational scenes from his life, it remained a matter of journalistic whimsy whether interest crossed the racial line, and the only kind of event almost guaranteed to command an audience on both sides was the drama of white force seizing personally on King’s body.” Which happened when he was jailed in Albany, Georgia, five days later, a matter that was reported extensively, as Sam went on to play a self-booked date in New Orleans that got equally little attention outside the black community.

Barbara and all three children joined him on July 11 in Savannah, where he spent the afternoon bowling at the invitation of the manager of the Hi Hat Lanes. Over three hundred people showed up to watch, and Sam finished off the afternoon signing autographs, talking bowling, and giving an interview to a local reporter. “I have always had a rather bright insight on business,” the reporter quoted him as saying, while detailing some of the ventures that Sam described to him, including the record company, “vast realty holdings, and a new beer company slated to get started sometime in August.” From there, the whole family was off to Miami for the weekend, where Sam was playing three nights at the Knight Beat Club at the Sir John Hotel. Barbara spent most of her time in the room with the kids, and Sam got annoyed with her for that, but from what she could see, he had girls stashed all over the hotel. At the end of the weekend, she and the children flew to Chicago, and Sam was off for another ten days to places like the Evans Grille in Forestville, Maryland, the Harding Street Rec Center in Petersburg, Virginia, and Midway Park outside Portsmouth, Virginia, before he would have a chance to catch up with his family again in Chicago, where he was booked for a week at the Regal Theater.

It was a grueling schedule, as Johnnie Morisette had learned, but for tenor sax and de facto Upsetters leader Grady Gaines, it was like being at a party that never ended, on or offstage. As far as Grady was concerned, the road just provided you with the kind of extended family that you had no reason to want to leave, and of all the people he had ever worked with—Little Willie John, Dee Clark, Little Richard, all the big acts he had backed at the Club Matinee in Houston before that—Sam was the best. “He was the nicest, you couldn’t get no smoother than him, always a big smile—but he was real business.” As far as Grady was concerned, Sam put more of himself into the new single, “Bring It On Home to Me,” than any other song he did (“and he sang his heart out on everything he sung”). Sometimes, when he was feeling good, Charles would sing the Lou Rawls part, frequently Crain chimed in, too, and the song drew an ecstatic audience response everywhere they went. But it was “Having a Party” that was, invariably, the climax of the evening, as the other acts came out onstage, just like at a gospel program, and band and performers and audience alike all joined in. It was, as Grady described it, emblematic of the spirit of good fellowship and fun that Sam established for everyone within their little world. “People would come and say, ‘Sam, I need a hundred dollars, two hundred, whatever, and he let them have it. But good advice [can] be help. And he would take the time out and do that, too. We were like brothers, all of us was like one. We had lucked in, and that’s just the way it was.”

There was another new face on the scene, a brash young booking agent who had just come over to William Morris from GAC (General Artists Corporation) and was so taken with both the music and the life that, after wresting the account from Sam’s longtime agent, Paul Cantor, he almost immediately started flying in for gigs. Jerry Brandt had first seen Sam while working as a waiter at the Town Hill Club in Brooklyn. He was the only white waiter in the place, he claimed, and was intrigued by the atmosphere, knocked out by the music of all the big names—Roy Hamilton, Jackie Wilson, Dinah Washington—but he was
“mesmerized”
by Sam from the moment he first saw him. “I was standing there with a tray, and people were yelling for their drinks, and I just couldn’t move. To me, Sam was the most real thing around. No tricks, couldn’t move his two feet—[he just had] that fervor that makes you believe in Jesus, but since I didn’t believe in Jesus, it was him. Him.”

Brandt was twenty-four years old, and, however he may have justified it to his superiors at the talent agency, “I was out for an experience. Are you crazy? I was getting laid twice a day.” Perhaps just as important, he was getting a chance to hang around someone he truly revered. He saw Sam’s temper flare up on occasion, but mostly he admired his cool. “He was on top of everything attitude-wise. I loved going on the road with him, I loved going
anywhere
with him. They made fun of me, they used to call me the light-skinned fellow, but I never heard Sam speak of [race]. There was them and us, but that’s just the way the world is.”

S
ALES OF THE NEW SINGLE
had at last gained Sam new status at RCA. With three Top 20 pop hits in the past year (“Cupid,” “Twistin’ the Night Away,” and now the double-sided success of “Bring It On Home to Me” and “Having a Party”) in addition to the appearance of
Twistin’ the Night Away
on the LP charts, Hugo and Luigi had started referring to him good-naturedly as “The Consistent One,” but now even top RCA executives like Record Division president George Marek were waking up to his financial value to the company. “Do you know that Sam Cooke is the second-biggest moneymaker at RCA [with singles sales] after Elvis Presley?” Marek asked Luigi one day. “I said, ‘Of course we know that. We make the records.’ But they were just discovering it.” At an RCA Records convention at around this time, Sam had the industry crowd wrapped around his little finger just as surely as if it were a packed house on a steamy night at the Palms of Hallandale or the Flame Show Bar in Detroit. “It was like a party,” said RCA engineer Al Schmitt, who had yet to see him perform for a black audience. “He would get people up to dance and sing along, always [with] this great smile on his face. [It was] like having Sam in your house, or you being in his.”

Sam was the only one who remained unsatisfied. “Bring It On Home to Me” never quite sold a million copies, and while Ray Charles’ country crossover “I Can’t Stop Loving You” topped the pop and r&b charts all through June and July, Sam had to be satisfied with an unqualified r&b smash, whose A- and B-sides reached numbers thirteen and seventeen respectively on the pop charts. “We’re not getting number ones,” he said to Luigi. “That’s right,” his producer replied, trying to mollify him with humor. “We’re getting number four, number six on the
Billboard
charts, and as long as we get that, nobody’s gonna bother you. But if you get two or three number ones in a row, then you got no place to go but down. Then you’re competition, and they’re just going to do everything they can to knock you off.”

It was cold comfort to someone who could mask everything but his ambition, but Sam still had to laugh at the funny way Luigi was always able to put things. It did not fully assuage his impatience, but he had long since proved his staying power as an artist, and he and Alex had long-term business plans of their own. They were confident that the Valentinos’ debut single, which was poised to enter both the pop and r&b charts at the end of July, was going to usher in a whole new era at SAR. They were going to expand the company. They were going to add to their roster, start putting out albums on more of their artists. And Sam was going to start taking advantage of some of the business opportunities that were coming his way.

That was how he got involved with the beer company he had told the reporter in Savannah about. Alex was not too clear on all of the details, but he knew better than to question his partner’s business acumen. From what he understood, Sam had met a gentleman named Herbert G. Cook while playing the Royal in Baltimore in June. Cook, a “popular and dynamic nationally known promoter,” according to the
Philadelphia Tribune,
“who [had] made a name for himself [with] the Revolutionary Coffee Distribution Company, which made sensational inroads in the Negro coffee trade,” established the first Negro firm “for the distribution of beer under his own label” in Philadelphia in 1960. Two years later, he appears to have moved his operation to Baltimore and as of mid-July announced that his company, Cook’s Beer, would add an
e
to its name, that Sam had become its new president, and that “entertainer Johnnie Morisette [would] be affiliated with the firm.” J.W. didn’t like the smell of it—he could only imagine what it had cost Sam to become president, and he had heard rumors that Herbert Cook was mixed up in the numbers racket. But he didn’t say anything until Sam invited him to a board meeting in Baltimore sometime later. All it would take for J.W. to participate, Sam told him, was an investment of $1,000. “He said, ‘Alex, I want you to get in on this damn thing. Why don’t you take a check out of SAR, and you can [attend].’ So okay, I got a certified check, caught a plane, and went to Baltimore.” And after he heard exactly how much more it was going to cost them just to be able to continue to participate, “I unveiled those shysters. I tore up the check, and lowered the fucking boom.” It was one of the few times Alex had ever seen Sam taken in by someone else’s line of talk, but evidently he was ready at this point for reeducation. He just laughed at his own foolishness and said, “Well, partner, let’s go to New York and have some fun.” Which is precisely what they did, grabbing a flight to New York and riding off into the sunset like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and all those other western heroes Sam had watched on the screen and read about so avidly as a kid.

Another Saturday Night

S
AM OPENED AT THE REGAL THEATER
in Chicago on July 27. Although he wouldn’t be staying at home (he had reserved his customary suite at the Roberts Motel on Sixty-third Street), his mother cooked for a week in preparation for his arrival. She made chicken and dressing, her famous dinner rolls, red beans and rice, and ham hocks and greens for the family and friends she and her husband would be entertaining during their son’s annual weeklong homecoming. All of the nieces and nephews would be there—Sam called them the Gas House Gang, after the daffy 1930s St. Louis Cardinals baseball team—and sometimes, with their friends, there could be as many as fifty of them, but Sam just plunged into their midst, like another kid, and would take them all out to Riverview Amusement Park for the rides. It was a weeklong party for everybody, said Sam’s youngest sister, Agnes, now twenty-seven and a mother of two. “We would be up all night long, talking, singing, doing whatever—we just enjoyed each other.”

Nobody wanted to miss a single show. The whole family would gather backstage with Duck and his wife, and Sam would keep up a furious game of checkers with Hattie’s son Maurice right up until the moment he had to go onstage. Maurice could easily have won, his mother insisted, except that Sam always distracted him with his animated chatter. The other kids would all be saying, “Don’t listen to him, Maurice, don’t listen to him,” but Sam just kept talking at him, talking him right into defeat. Then he really did have to go on, but not before he made sure that the kids all got their seats in the front row, or sometimes right onstage, where one time they even got their picture in the paper.

He’d organize singing contests, the boys against the girls—his twenty-year-old brother, David, coached the boys and Mary’s oldest, Gwen, coached the girls, as Sam went back and forth between the two until he determined that they were ready for the competition. Then he’d bring them all out in front of his brothers and sisters to judge, but the girls always had their dance steps down, laughed Hattie, and they would always win. “And Sam would say, ‘I got to work with you over here, you can’t be letting them girls win all the time!’”