Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (72 page)

Twistin’ the night away: Sam with his niece Ophelia Woods, Regal Theater, Chicago, end of July/beginning of August 1962.

Courtesy of ABKCO

Linda watched with a somewhat jaundiced eye. She and her sister, Tracey, had spent much of the summer in Chicago, shuttling back and forth between their paternal grandparents, various Cook uncles and aunts, and their mother’s older sister, Ella. The Gas House Gang was for her cousins, she sniffed, “they didn’t see him as much as we did, we had a different thing.” What Linda prized was the time she spent with Papa and Mama Cook, and the way her grandmother and her father would be when they got together sometimes. “My grandmother was very quiet, she never talked, [but] she and my father used to laugh. She was very Indian-looking, and one time I remember him putting a blanket around her, and he made up this song [about] a papoose, and she just laughed and laughed. She used to grab me and hug me—she was a big woman, real loving—and I remember [thinking] she was going to smother me in her breasts!”

Everybody laughed when second-billed Chuck Jackson split his pants onstage, but Linda didn’t think it was funny when Sam invited her cousin Ophelia to come out and twist with him as the Upsetters kicked off “Twistin’ the Night Away.” She said she hated him, and when Barbara tried to soothe her ruffled feelings, she announced that she was never going to speak to her father again. She got over it, Sam made it right with her just like he was able to make it right with everybody else, she adored her daddy. But she was just like him, too, Barbara thought. He could try to safeguard her from this world all he wanted, he could insist that his daughter was going to get an education and do something different, something better, with her life, but in the end she was going to do just as she pleased. Because she was stubborn, Barbara thought. Just like her daddy.

“When Sam come to town,” said L.C., “it was like a holiday. If you had to go to work, you wouldn’t go, because you wouldn’t want to miss the party. When Sam come here, he wouldn’t buy no bottle of gin, he would buy a case. Every kind of whiskey, man, Charles would have it in his dressing room—by the case. Sam told Charles, ‘Charles, don’t never let me get out of whiskey.’ Charles said, ‘Brother, you don’t have to worry about it. I can spend your money.’ Sam used to spend so much money when he came here—he didn’t care. ‘Just be sure and get the receipt.’ And then when we leave the Regal, we would go to Crain’s house at Forty-fifth and Woodlawn and continue to party. Like I said, it was always a party.”

Marvin Jones, the peppery little baritone singer from the original Highway QCs, hadn’t seen Sam in a long time. He and his wife, Helen, went backstage after the show, and “the room was full of people, all of Sam’s sisters was there, and when he saw my wife, Sam come out from behind a screen in his shorts and said, ‘Lord, that’s Sookie.’” Then he asked them to come back to the hotel, “and he took me in the bathroom, left fifteen or twenty people just sitting there, and we had a drink and talked about old times—he was sitting on the bathtub, and I was sitting on the toilet—and finally when we started to singing, that’s when they come banging on the door!”

The leukemia rumor first cropped up around this time. “Unconfirmed rumors swept the Eastern Seaboard,” reported the
Philadelphia Tribune,
along with nearly every other Negro newspaper in the country, “that popular singer Sam Cooke is suffering from leukemia, a dread blood disease which is incurable and always fatal.” J.W., who could only postulate that it might have stemmed from the inclusion of “Somebody Have Mercy” (with its lyric “Tell me what is wrong with me”) on Sam’s
Twistin’ the Night Away
LP, denounced it repeatedly as “one of the meanest and lowest canards I’ve witnessed during many years in show business and public life.” Nevertheless, the story persisted and grew to the point that much of the black community believed that Sam had willed his eyes to Ray Charles, and William Morris agent Jerry Brandt was still vehemently denying the rumor when Sam appeared at the National Association of Radio Announcers (NARA) convention in St. Louis the weekend of August 17.

The National Association of Radio Announcers was a professional organization that had been founded by thirteen prominent black DJs in the mid-1950s (as the National Jazz, Rhythm & Blues Disc Jockey Association) and by 1962 had gained a membership of over three hundred, including a few whites, like all-night r&b DJ “Hoss” Allen, who was deemed an honorary “ace boon coon” by his fellow jocks. The organization’s original impetus had been to combat some of the fundamental inequities of the job: what black-radio historian William Barlow described as everything from “low salaries to lack of employment opportunities in mainstream radio to the uneven distribution of payola along racial lines.” The record industry’s response to these complaints had been, essentially, to bankroll the conventions, which, as Barlow wrote, were transformed by this cash infusion “into a weekend of around-the-clock revelry and highjinks.” In the words of one of its founding members, “Jockey” Jack Gibson: “We partied until it was time to go to church.”

With the growth of the civil rights movement, however, NARA was beginning to see itself as occupying if not higher at least more socially significant ground. It was still a trade association, according to prominent New Orleans jock Larry McKinley, in which the idea of self-help predominated. “It was just an idea of camaraderie. All of us had some interest maybe in a song, maybe in publishing, or in the act itself, the artist, and as we got older, we started to learn how to network. I mean, I could call Houston, get Boogaloo, get Hot Rod [Hulbert] in Baltimore, Al [Jefferson] up in Detroit, and Rodney [Jones], of course, in Chicago—Jockey at that time was in Cincinnati, and, of course, Hoss Allen and [fellow white r&b jock] John R. were crisscrossing all over [on Nashville’s “clear-channel” WLAC]. There was never any money exchanged, we just did favors for each other that no outsider could do.”

And as the Movement gained a foothold, those favors extended almost necessarily to the entire community. “You have to understand,” said Jockey Jack, “that we were the voice that the people listened to, and if you gave us a message to say, ‘There will be a meeting tonight of SCLC [Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference] at the First Baptist Church,’ we would go ahead and elaborate all around it, [saying], ‘Now, Dr. King says to be there at seven sharp, no CP [colored people’s] time, and you know what I mean . . . ’cause this is important for you and me and our children.’ . . . And it worked. People came out on time.” It was, said Philadelphia DJ Georgie Woods, like having a “freedom mike” over which a secret message was being sent out directly to the people, with little or no interference from white ownership or the white world, which was for the most part either ignorant or indifferent.

Harold Battiste, who had gone to work for Specialty in 1957, written the vocal arrangement for “You Send Me,” and returned to his native New Orleans to run Specialty’s office there for the next three years, attended the St. Louis convention with trumpeter Melvin Lastie. Together with three other fellow New Orleanians, they had formed a musicians’ cooperative, a production company called AFO, or All For One, whose avowed aim, in Harold Battiste’s 1959 Manifesto, was for the “laborers,” or musicians, to take back the means of production and distribute the profits equally among themselves. This the AFO label had done with its second release, Barbara George’s “I Know,” which had gone to the top of the r&b
and
pop charts earlier in the year, and Melvin and Harold attended the St. Louis convention in the belief that its stated theme, “A Time to Speak,” meant just what it said. “We thought they had the same kind of motives that we had about utilizing [their] strength as a group to make inroads into ownership.” In the event, they may have been disappointed, but, like Sam, they were not about to give up. There was room, Harold Battiste felt strongly, for practical black idealism in the world of business, and he felt that AFO, along with established pioneers like Sam and Alex and Berry Gordy in Detroit, could show the way.

Sam entertained at the RCA reception on Saturday night, and Crain had his money and briefcase stolen. He had had a party with another couple and a woman named Peaches in his room at the Sheraton-Jefferson, the convention site, and “early the next morning,” the
St. Louis Argus
reported, “he discovered that more than $250 in cash and an expensive camera were missing.” Sam was barely able to contain himself as he gave the older man a stern lecture about responsibility and Crain complained bitterly about how this chick had ripped him off. “That chick just wore you out,” the others all ragged at him. “She knew right where the money was at. What did you do when you were finished? Just close your eyes and go to sleep?”

Sam spent five days at home after the convention, and Luigi flew in for a session the night before he was scheduled to go back out on the road. They couldn’t get into the RCA studio until midnight, but Sam was determined to record “Nothing Can Change This Love,” a recent composition that he had first attempted in February with Oopie singing bass behind a bouncy doo-wop beat. This time he took an entirely different approach, sketching out a lushly orchestrated string-laden arrangement for René that transformed the song. It opened with a piano introduction by Eddie Beal, then unfolded with a sorrowful deliberation so at odds with the cheeriness of the earlier version that it almost seemed as if some life-changing event must have intervened.

“If I go / A million miles away / I’d write a letter / Each and every day / ’Cause nothing can ever change the love I have for you,” Sam sings as a swirl of violins, cellos, and violas washes over his voice. It sounds for all the world like the most clichéd version of romantic love, but then as the song develops, you realize that what you are hearing is not the embrace but the denial of illusion, set forth in a tone of deeply ambiguous regret. “You’re the apple of my eye / You’re cherry pie / And, oh, you’re cake and ice cream,” is the explicit message of the bridge, even as the singer’s world-weary mood, the unspoken layers of irony, yearning, and knowledge that accompany his heartfelt declarations, work to undercut any suggestion of belief. It ends with as straightforward an admission of the lover’s plight as you’re ever likely to get from Sam (“Mmmm, make me weep / And you can make me cry / See me coming / And you can pass on by / But nothing can ever change this love I have for you”), followed by the whisper of strings, a muted clash of cymbals, and trailing notes from the piano that recapitulate the opening passage of the song. Eight takes merely refined the message, and RCA put the record out on the street two and one-half weeks later, where its sales swiftly rivaled “Bring It On Home to Me.”

With the Valentinos’ “Lookin’ For a Love” really beginning to take off, Alex got the group booked on a James Brown theater-circuit tour starting at the Apollo in October, and he was already planning an all-out promotion campaign for the Sims Twins’ next single in the weeks following that. Sam pointed a reporter for the Raleigh-Durham area black weekly,
The Carolinian,
toward the Valentinos’ hit while playing a September 17 Supersonic date with Clyde McPhatter in Raleigh. “I was also informed by Sam that [his] brother L.C. Cooke . . . will have a release very soon called ‘You’re Workin’ Out Your Bag on Me,’” wrote
Carolinian
reporter Oscar Alexander in his “Diggin’ Daddy-Oh!” column. But what Sam really appeared to be excited about was his upcoming European tour. He would be going, he said, for “both business and pleasure” and spoke of visiting the French Riviera, though, in fact, his month abroad would be confined to a week of one-nighters at American military bases in Germany, followed by a three-week tour of England October 8-28. What, asked the
Carolinian
columnist with a verbal wink, would he do about the exotic fare he was likely to encounter over there? “Man,” said Sam, replying in kind, “I’ll stow away as much as I possibly can, and when I get [back] to the States, I’ll find the first real home cooking restaurant and order some real ‘soul food.’” But there was no disguising his genuine excitement about the trip, Riviera or no Riviera.

B
RITISH PROMOTER DON ARDEN
had been courting Sam for some time. Arden, born Harry Levy, was a thirty-six-year-old show-business veteran who had originally made his mark as Europe’s best-known folk singer in the newly revived Hebrew language. He had started producing shows in 1954 and had come over to Los Angeles at the beginning of the summer specifically to sign Little Richard for a tour. Richard had not sung rock ’n’ roll in almost five years, and Arden, the only promoter in England seriously committed to importing authentic American rock ’n’ roll, felt he could make a killing if he could just persuade the star to return to his former field of glory.

“I made a couple of journeys to L.A. to get hold of him, and eventually he said, ‘Very well, I’ll sing rock ’n’ roll again for you. But,’ he said, ‘the Lord will punish you, because I’ve always believed it’s somebody evil that’s going to bring me back.’ And I loved that. I thought it was great.” Arden’s view of promotion was, quite simply, to create a stir. Controversy was nothing new to him, and he knew the British press would become aroused at the first sign of conflict. But he didn’t trust his star—“I didn’t dislike him, I
distrusted
him”—and right up until opening night he was uncertain what exactly he would do.

With Sam he harbored no such doubts. He had posed the terms of the engagement straightforwardly to Jerry Brandt, explaining that there would be two shows a night at venues seating between two thousand and twenty-five hundred and that Sam would be the co-star, closing out the first half of the bill, but Richard would unquestionably be the star. Then he met with Sam. “A perfect gentleman, exceptionally good-looking and [well-spoken], I’m sure he was highly educated, and he had confidence in the people he was working with.” J.W. accompanied Sam to Arden’s hotel, and Don found him to be a perfect gentleman as well. “I felt he knew all about Sam’s talent and was capable of telling people what his artist needed without being a heavy.” To Arden, Sam “probably had the best voice I’d heard in over twenty years, artistically I was jealous of him,” but the delightful surprise was his sophistication and curiosity. “He said, ‘I want you to tell me about England. I think we must have spent three or four hours together.”