Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (83 page)

J
.W. WAS AN AMELIORATING FACTOR
on Sam’s moods. The two of them, Bobby noted, were always conferring in muted tones, Alex with his little briefcase, his gray head bent over and nodding mirthfully, like they were shutting out the rest of the world from their private confabulations. “J. had been around. He knew the old show business before Sam came along, and he was very dedicated to seeing things go right for Sam and himself, too. A lot of people would come to Alex for advice, because they always said, ‘Shit, J.W. knows, and J.W. will tell you the truth, just pass on the information and keep on doing what he doing.’ [It] was inspiring for Sam, because they could relate. You know, for a guy as young as Sam, [it was like], ‘This motherfucker here, J., been around. I walk into certain places, and he already know. He know how to set up a show, and he know how to help you with it.’ In other words, Sam didn’t have no dummy sitting there. ‘What you think about this, J.?’ ‘Oh man, whatever you say.’ If anything, they would have heated arguments, to the point where Sam would say, ‘That gray fucker don’t know everything, Bobby, he’s on his way out.’ Sam be saying, ‘J.W.’s exaggerating about that shit,’ but J.W. could remember everything precisely, and if you ask somebody, well, J. was on it.”

Sam loved Crain, too, but it was more the indulgent love of a child for a parent whose platitudinous wisdom he had outgrown. Crain was always trying to impress young girls who didn’t have the slightest idea who he or the Stirrers were. “I can get you in the show,” was the line Bobby kept hearing him use. “Now, what you gonna do for Daddy Crain?” Crain’s weaknesses became all the more apparent as Alex’s strengths emerged, and Bobby watched wide-eyed as their long-dormant rivalry came out into the open. “They had their little war, but, you know, Crain was fighting it by himself. I don’t think Alex was paying any attention, but he would laugh about it, and that would make Crain even more mad.”

Crain for the most part kept his own counsel, not anxious to test either his power or his prestige with other members of the group. Charles, on the other hand, showed no such restraint. He didn’t like Alexander’s attempts to rein in his spending, he didn’t like Alexander himself, and he didn’t care who knew it. “Alexander come out,” said L.C., who clearly shared his brother’s views, “and he say, ‘Charles, you spending too much of Sam’s money.’ Charles said, ‘Wait a minute, Alexander. That’s my brother.’ Said, ‘You work for him, and I work for him.’ He took him right to Sam, and Sam set him straight. He said, ‘Charles, if
I
tell you it’s too much, that’s when you worry about it. You don’t work for Alexander, you work for me.’ He said, ‘As a matter of fact, Alexander work for me.’” After that, Charles refused to drive Alex unless Sam was in the car. He said, “I drive for Sam, Alexander. I don’t drive for you.” But Alex dealt with this, too, with the same easygoing manner that infuriated Charles even more. He saw Charles not as a freeloader but as someone who took advantage of Sam’s good nature by
encouraging
freeloaders. But if Sam wanted to tolerate that kind of attitude, that was all right with him—so long as Charles and L.C. had nothing to do with the business. Which they did not—and which was probably the original source of their resentment.

Charles didn’t have much use for Bobby, either, as Bobby was well aware. “Charlie was always saying, ‘He a slick little fucker, telling you all these little stories. Why he have to ride with you in the limousine all the time?’ But Sam just said, ‘Bobby? He’s green as a cucumber. If there’s anything he do, it’s not that he’s trying to be slick, he just don’t know no better.’”

There was hardly anyone on the tour, as Bobby saw it, who didn’t get mad at him at one time or another for his favored position. “Everybody would say, ‘Man, he gets under Sam.’ But Sam knowed I would be straight up with him about anything. Even if it meant somebody else getting busted, I would just tell him, you know, ‘That’s what happened.’ Plus, I always had my guitar, and we’d be kicking it. Now, you ride down the highway, just watching, hearing the sound, you got to get bored. But with me, it was always playing, plus he was always talking, we would always talk.”

They talked about anything and everything, just the two of them riding along in the limo. Bobby would have Sam in stitches with stories about growing up in the Womack household in Cleveland, where “you weren’t allowed to do nothing but sing gospel. My father, man, you ask him about the facts of life—when you wake up from being knocked out, he say, ‘
That’s
the facts of life.’ We had a TV, but my father called it ‘the one-eyed monster,’ he say, ‘Why you watching that TV, the white man invented that, he stealing everything around you while you’re watching.’” Bobby would come up with the most naive questions, like: why did they always stay in “motels,” not “hotels”? And Sam would patiently explain, carrying him through the etymology of the word, pointing out that “mo-tel” was coded language for “mo’ tail,” until Bobby started nodding sagely and Sam just cracked up. He had fun with Bobby, maybe, because in Bobby he saw his younger self—that’s what Bobby thought some of the time. But above all Sam seemed to want to give him advice, to offer the kind of advice that he himself might have liked to have had when he was starting out.

Bobby still wore his hair in an upswept process, and Sam told him he was showing his ignorance. “You know, we’ll never be those people. We black, and we’ll stay black,” he said. “I’ll never straighten my hair again.” Bobby said he wanted a big Cadillac, just like Johnnie Morisette, and Sam and Alex both laughed at him—they told him to keep that pencil in his hand, his writing could get him whatever he wanted. “Sam always have a flask, he always sip on it. He start [to] reading black history, and you couldn’t get him out of it.

He never got above people. He be driving down the street, and some cats gambling in an alley. He get out and say, “Hey, man, what the fuck is that shit? Let me shoot out.” I’m saying, Sam is going to get killed in that motherfucking alley. That’s no class. What’s he doing in there with the winos. But he say, “Man, I had uncles, I had people that ended up like that, ’cause they couldn’t ever get their niche, they didn’t go to school, or whatever. They ain’t gonna do nothing to you, ’cause they know they can ask you for it. It ain’t like you gonna lock all the windows and roll by them. This is where I come from, and if I get scared to come down here, then I’m in trouble.”

He would always tell me the position he would be in. He would say, “You be in this position one day, and you’ll understand. You know. Mom fix you that favorite bread pudding you like. You know how much you like that bread pudding?” He said, “That bread pudding will cost me ten thousand dollars.” He say, “I want to go [visit them] so bad, but, see, they don’t see me as Sammy no more, I’m the one that save the world.” I was saying, “Yeah, but that’s your family.” He said, “Man, you’ll understand once you get there.”

I said, “Sam, I never see you mad, I never see you bothered.” He said, “Bobby, I don’t come out of my room when I’m in a mood. I don’t share it with nobody else. ’Cause when I’m uptight and down, why would I depress everybody else? When people believe in you and you give them such a lift, why show your attitude? You know, it can almost stop a person’s world.”

He always had this way of making you feel like you were the one; I don’t care how you were feeling, before you know it, you was laughing and feeling up. That was the thing that was so special about him. He had the charisma, but he knew [how] to use it. He would say, “Bobby, always have your bad guy. You be telling [people], ‘Oh, I want to do it,’ and [your] guy say, ‘No, he can’t do that. I’m not going to let him do that.’” Sam was always a good guy—see, the good guys, they’ll wear you out. But then Alex or Crain would be talking about, “Naw, you ain’t gonna do nothing. Just shut up.” And Sam would say, “Come on, man”—he would fuck around like that, and they’d get back in the car and laugh about it.

You couldn’t get him out of his books. We’d go to a motel, and Charles and them would be wanting to get chicks, and they’d be saying, “We have to get all these goddamn books for Sam.” When he wasn’t chasing, he was reading. And the more history he read, the more [he would talk about it]. “Do you know about this? Do you know about that?” He said, “Bobby, if you read—the way you write now, you writing songs you ain’t even lived. You ain’t even been with a woman, so how you gonna write about a woman?” I said, “I know people that have, and I see what they go through.” But he said, “Bobby, if you read, your vocabulary, the way you view things in a song—it’ll be like an abstract painting, every time you look back, you’ll see something you didn’t see before.”

He say, “You have to be universal. You have to be all the way around. You just work every day at your craft.” It wasn’t like he was trying to sell nothing, he was out having a good time. He kept saying, “Bobby, a star, that’s the one you can touch.” He would just sit up and listen to people, listen to people talk. He said, “That’s where you get your hooks.” He said, “It’s easy to write the truth, it’s hard to tell a story. You’ve only got three minutes. You gotta hit ’em, it’s gotta be strong, and you’ve got to stick to the script. It’s got to be about feeling, but if you’re telling a story, you’ve got to make a believer out of the person that’s listening.”

Bobby was always playing for Sam in the car, just fooling around on guitar, coming up with little riffs and melodies that sprang into his head. He never thought of them as songs—they went right out of his head almost as fast as he played them. But often the next day Sam would ask, “What was that you were playing?” And if Bobby didn’t exactly recall, Sam made him keep playing until he did. “He could remember it so well [for] not being a guitar player. And he’d say, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll tape the fucker next time.’”

Gradually it dawned on Bobby that he was supplying Sam with song ideas, and he got into it one time with Sam directly, how he had let Zelda and Alex steal songwriters’ credits from the Womacks on “Lookin’ For a Love.” At first Sam denied it. “He said, ‘You took that song [from someone else]. You took a few [others], too.’” But Sam could never take a hard line with Bobby for long, and after a while, he owned up with an impish grin. “He said, ‘Okay, I’m taking your shit, but I’m doing you better than James Brown [would].’ He said, ‘At least I’ll fuck you with grease. James’ll fuck you with sand.’” Bobby had been on the verge of telling him off once and for all. “I was like, I’m gonna tell this motherfucker, ‘If it’s good for you, [how come] it ain’t good for me?’” But when Sam put it to him like that, he found himself totally disarmed and came to see it as part of his education, part of the same growing-up process that Sam, and all the others, had had to go through. And now that it had at last been openly acknowledged, he assumed that Sam wouldn’t be fucking him any more, grease or no grease.

It all got spelled out over the incident with Jerry Butler. “I was in Jerry’s room just playing stuff, all these cats going, ‘Whoo, this motherfucker’s bad,’ and Sam said, ‘Bobby come on out of there.’ He said, ‘You never go around playing with these people and just give it to them.’” When Bobby acted innocent—all he was doing was playing for Jerry, just like he did for Sam—Sam really ripped into him. “He said, ‘Bobby, you’re a writer. That fucker ain’t got no melody, he can’t sing nothing. That’s the reason they want you in the room.’ He says, ‘They’re ripping you off, they’re taking your shit. You know what I mean.’ I said, ‘I could do this all day long.’ He said, ‘But I don’t want you to do it all day long—okay, I’m taking your shit [too], but I’ll tell you what, anything we do together [from now on], we’re partners on it fifty-fifty.’” Which may not have been exactly the way it worked out, but Bobby took it in the spirit in which it was offered, as evidence of Sam’s implicit faith in him. He would tell Bobby, “As you grow, you’ll write. It’ll come out. You’ve got things to write about.” And Bobby had no doubt that this was true.

Jerry Butler’s presence on the tour led to Sam reconnecting with Leo Morris for the first time in years. Leo, the New Orleans drummer who had worked with Sam in the summer of 1960 just before June joined, had been playing with Jerry for the last couple of years but had successfully avoided Sam for the first week or two of the tour. His feelings were still hurt about the callous way he believed he had been let go, “but then one night as I came offstage, Sam was standing there in his robe, and he said, ‘Come here, I want to talk to you.’ He said, ‘Why did you leave me?’ I said, ‘I didn’t leave you, you fired me.’ He said, ‘I didn’t fire you, you quit.’”

As they talked, Leo for the first time was able to pour his heart out about an incident that had wounded not just his pride but his sense of self-worth, and Sam was able to persuade him that he had known nothing about it, that it must have been Clif who had let Leo go—for whatever reason—and then told Sam that his drummer had quit. “So we became good friends—I was kind of [devastated] to find out that he didn’t fire me, but [what] was already done couldn’t be reversed.”

Leo had more pressing problems at this point, anyway. He had brought his wife out on tour at the invitation of his employer, and now he had concerns about both his wife and his employer. He sent his wife home but fell into bad habits and started entertaining fantasies of revenge. It was not-yet-sixteen-year-old La La Brooks, the youngest Crystal, who saved him. “My crazy mind was saying, ‘Shoot him, shoot him tonight.’ So I drown myself in drugs, trying to get away from it. And La La would sit by me and talk to me about this shit. She’d say, ‘Why are you doing this? You going to kill yourself over a woman. It doesn’t make any sense.’” The rest of the girls in the group were all fooling with someone on the tour, but La La didn’t have a boyfriend, and all the guys were after her. “She said, ‘Just pretend that me and you are tight’—you know, to kick these guys off of her—and we got to talking [all the time]. She was fifteen years old, but she was telling me stuff I had never even thought about.” And so Leo fell in love, and while it took him a while to straighten out his life, he made a pledge to himself that he would never compromise La La and that he would marry her one day. And, two years later, that is just what he did.