Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (74 page)

Spotting John Braine’s latest novel,
Life at the Top,
on Sam’s bedside table, “‘You read books?’ I gasped, for Mr. Cooke is a pop singer.”

“Excessively,” was Sam’s response. He read all the time, he said, history mostly, because he “wanted to know how to appeal to people, and books teach you that.” He read Winston Churchill and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (presumably on the Second World War and Franklin Delano Roosevelt respectively), but his current favorite was James Baldwin. He spoke a little about business, about the fact that “his recording label think highly enough of him to put him on the same royalty basis as Elvis Presley and Harry Belafonte, which is high thinking indeed.” He spoke of SAR, too, and his brother L.C.’s latest release. Why the initials? the reporter asked. What was his Christian name? “He never did have a name, and I’ll tell you why,” said Sam in a tone the reporter does not choose to characterize. “Ignorance. You see, my great-grandmother was a slave in Mississippi. She had no education. Neither did my father. He was a self-made man. But he saw the disadvantages to the Negro child in the South, so he . . . went north to Chicago. In many ways I’m very like my father. He has this intense drive that I’ve got, and I think it’s this drive that makes stars out of people. You want to stay at the top.”

He designed all his own clothes, he said, because he always wanted to differentiate himself from the current fad. The reporter had to take his word for that, because, as she wrote, “I had only seen the dressing gown.” And what of his music? Rock ’n’ roll was a highly emotional kind of music, which suited him fine, he said, “because I am a bundle of emotions. I write songs that start slowly and then work in little by little to this pounding beat. That is where the excitement is. But I still have my religious beliefs. Our forebears thought you couldn’t sing [both] pops and spirituals, but I have rationalized this. I can do anything I want and still have my religious beliefs. My philosophy of life is: Do whatever is best for Sam Cooke.”

The last week of the tour was marked by the turmoil of the Cuban missile crisis. Little Richard reacted in much the same way that he had to
Sputnik
five years earlier: he saw the end of the world approaching largely due to his own embrace, once again, of secular music. “He was praying all day, six or seven hours a day,” said June Gardner, “because he figured he was supposed to be preaching—but Sam was cool. It was kind of like Come what may [with] all of us. Come what may.”

On Sunday, October 28, with the weeklong crisis finally resolved and the tour proper over, Sam played a stand-alone date in Manchester with Sophie Tucker, the seventy-eight-year-old “Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” who was a special favorite of Don Arden’s for her unabashed, often bawdy, showmanship. Arden had never seen anyone able to follow the American vaudeville star, and he asked Sam to do so as a special favor only after her original supporting act had dropped out. “Sam said, ‘I want you to know, my mother’s not Jewish, so I won’t be singing “My Yiddishe Mama,” but she’s a great artist—does she know that I’m on?’ I said, ‘No, she doesn’t care who’s on the bill with her, in actual fact,’ and he said, ‘I think I like it better that way.’ But he closed the first half to a Jewish audience at the Palace Theater in Manchester, the top theater in the north of England, and he just slaughtered them. When Sophie came on, she was stunned; in all the years I [booked] Miss Tucker and foolishly idolized her, that was the very first time she failed to follow another artist. She couldn’t do it. He had her audience in his grasp, and he didn’t let go.”

Little Richard, meanwhile, was playing the Empire Theater in Liverpool, where the second act on the bill was the Beatles, whose debut single, “Love Me Do,” had just entered the British Top 30. Richard had played one previous date with the Beatles, and, despite all of his conflicts with Don Arden and the emotional turmoil of the past week, he called the promoter after the show. “He told me, ‘You’ve got to grab them. There’s nothing to touch them.’” But Arden couldn’t do it. He was friendly with the group’s manager, Brian Epstein, he explained, though he was very appreciative to Richard and well aware that this might be the only time he would ever see humility from a man who proclaimed himself loudly and repeatedly to be more explosive than the atom bomb.

After the Manchester date, Little Richard went on to Hamburg, Germany, with the Beatles, and Sam and his party flew to New York, where he was scheduled to open at the Apollo in five days. Everyone else stayed in Harlem, but Sam and Alex continued on to Los Angeles so that René could write Sam a new act. Alex had been advancing the argument for some time that Sam needed to develop a set that reflected the gospel
fervor
of his music. “In England Sam could [finally] see the truth of that, and we started reworking his act [with] that gospel approach, and then we came back to California and had René write it into the show.”

S
AM OPENED AT THE APOLLO
on November 2, and the difference in his entire aspect and presentation was immediately apparent. He was backed once again by the Upsetters—with the Coasters, a teen girl group from Brooklyn called the Crystals, and saxophonist King Curtis, who had defined not just the Coasters’ yakkety-sax style but the heart of the Atlantic label’s “rock ’n’ soul” sound, also on the bill. Whereas Sam had been criticized in the not-too-distant past for sitting on a stool on the Apollo stage and adopting the casual approach of a Perry Como, this time, said J.W., who was actively cheerleading from the wings, “he really turned the Apollo out.” At the heart of the new act was a medley of his hits presented not in their familiar format but, in some cases, turned almost upside down. It was introduced by a teasing gospelized version of “It’s All Right,” the B-side of 1961’s “Feel It,” followed by raucous, good-time renditions of “Twistin’ the Night Away” and “Somebody Have Mercy.” It is at this point that the show really changes direction, as Sam cries out over and over, “Oh, yeah, oh yeah,” egging the crowd on, egging the crowd to respond, with just the punctuation of a fanfare from Clif’s guitar, the clatter of the cymbals, a drumroll that accentuates the unrestrained urgency of his tone. “I said I believe we’re gonna have a good time,” Sam calls out as he launches into the carefully crafted climax of the act. “I feel like you in the mood for me to tell you about my baby,” he chants in the kind of loose, free-flowing imprecation that can be cut off or extended at will and suggests a degree of spontaneity that is entirely dependent on the feeling that is put into it. He is singing in an almost pinched tone, with a hoarseness that suggests the intensity that few audiences have heard from him since he left the gospel field. “Well, you know sometimes my baby, we fuss and fight . . .

And my baby leave home

’Cause things ain’t right

Oh, but I get to feeling—ha ha—so all alone

And I dial my baby on the telephone

I finally get the operator on the telephone

And I tell her, “Listen here, operator,

I want my b-a-a—aby,

Ohhhh, operator, I want my baby.”

Finally the operator get my baby on the telephone

And I tell her, “I got something to tell you, honey.”

The minute I hear my baby say hello

S-s-s-s-something start to move deep down inside of me

And I tell her, “Listen to me, baby,

I know I didn’t treat you right sometimes

And I want you to know one thing”

He has them now. There’s no doubt about it. With all the tried-and-true methods of his gospel training, he has drawn out the tension until it is almost unbearable, people are screaming, they are crying out for release, the level of emotion almost visibly rises, the audience becomes his congregation.

“I just want you to know one thing

And that’s . . .

Darling,

You-u-u-u-uuuu, ohhhhhhh . . . you SEND ME

Oh-ohhhhhh, you
send
me

Ha ha, that’s what I want to tell you, baby,

Oh, oh-oh you-ou, awww, you send me

Aw, let me tell you one more time

Oh, yo-u-u-u-u-u

Oh, baby . . . you send me

Oh-whoa-oh-ohohhhhhwowohhhh—Ha ha —

Ohhhhwhoawhoaoh

Honest you do”

It is a version of the song that has never been heard before, a version that denies all prior mood or meaning that Sam’s most readily identifiable hit has ever had. It is an ecstatic moment in and of itself, and then pandemonium breaks loose as he hits the familiar opening notes of his biggest crowd-pleaser, “Bring It On Home to Me.” Night after night it builds into a mass sing-along in which there is no need to mention church, everyone knows they are
having
it, and the only way to top this communal feeling is to extend it, first with the romantic sway of “Nothing Can Change This Love,” then with the ultimate existential statement of what is going on right here, right now, in this theater as seventeen hundred people join in on the chorus of Sam’s most universal song: “We’re having a party / Dancing to the music / Played by the DJ / ON THE RA-DI-O.” There is no one, it seems, who isn’t singing or cannot picture themselves in the scene. “The Cokes are in the icebox / Popcorn’s on the table.” And with that, Sam delivers his masterfully open-ended final line:

Me and my baby,

We’re out here on the floor

“Keep on having that party,” he calls out over and over as the curtain comes down, “no matter where you’re at, remember, I told you, keep on having that party.” Through his music, he declares, he will continue to be with them—it’s as close to eternity, in their unvoiced understanding, as any of them are ever likely to come.

H
E CONTINUED TO EXPERIMENT
with it night after night, raising the level of audience response, inviting women up onstage to do the Twist, but most of all inciting the kind of mass hysteria that James Brown and Jackie Wilson customarily got from their audiences, that June Cheeks had brought to the Soul Stirrers’ show nine years earlier and Little Richard had reminded him of with an English audience that couldn’t even clap on the beat. It was in many ways the kind of devotional response he had always gotten, even as he insisted to Jess Rand or Hugo and Luigi that he was “just shuckin’,” but it was accentuated now by a return to the riveting intensity of the gospel approach that had led Lloyd Price to muse on how “he just stood there flat-footed and
rocked
them. He didn’t have to do nothing but sing.” A lot of people were going to be surprised by Sam’s new act, reported the
Philadelphia Tribune,
even as
Variety
described “his rapport with the femmes, letting them hug him as he belts ‘Bring It to Me,’ tossing out his tie for a bit of localized femme fisticuffs . . . and the like.”

L.C. and his girlfriend had driven in from Chicago with Duck and his wife in Duck’s new Chevrolet convertible. They were staying at the Cecil, where Lithofayne Pridgon had first met Sam when he was still with the Stirrers and just thinking about going pop. L.C.’s new SAR single was doing no better than his previous ones, but L.C. gave the same impression of success that he always did—he might not be worth a million bucks, but he
looked
like a million bucks, and you always knew he was somebody because of what he himself termed the “likeability factor.” He still wore his hair processed, like Charles, and he was not as slender as Sam, but his voice and manner were almost identical to his brother’s, and the impish delight he took in all of life’s manifold pleasures was even more pronounced. Sam reminded his brother of how Lithofayne had taken a liking to L.C. way back when he had first accompanied Sam to the Apollo and told L.C. then that she was going to get him someday. “Oh no, you ain’t,” L.C. had laughingly replied. “Oh yes, I am,” said Lithofayne with her little smile, but nothing had come of it so far.

This time Sam came knocking on L.C.’s hotel door. “He said, ‘Come on, C., I want you to go with me.’ He told my girlfriend, ‘Me and C. will be right back.’ I had no idea that Sam’s got Faye and three more girls in the room. We go to the room, and there are the girls, naked, waiting on me and Sam. Faye said, ‘I
told
you I was gonna get you.’ And, look, me and Sam didn’t have to do nothing, just lay back, two ladies apiece working on us, one sucking our titties, one sucking our dicks, I swear to God, we just lay there in the bed with our hands behind our backs.” It may well have been on that same trip that L.C. took the opportunity to remind Sam, as he frequently did, of what his brother had told him when they were little boys. “I said, ‘Sam, you know you told me you were never going to work.’ He laughed and said, ‘Man, you remember that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I remember that.’ He said, ‘Did I ever have a job?’ And I said, ‘Not that I know of, Sam.’ And we both cracked up.”