Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (89 page)

There was one additional catch. Allen recognized that RCA could not raise its 5 percent artist’s royalty because of favored-nations agreements with other artists, but it would not have a contract with Sam, it would have a contract with Tracey Ltd., for which, since there was no record-business parallel, there could be no favored-nations concerns. Allen wanted a 6 percent royalty for Tracey, and he wanted it paid on 100 percent of all sales. Sam’s royalties, like every recording artist’s, were calculated on the basis of list price minus excise tax (on a single listing for ninety-eight cents, the excise tax came to approximately four cents) and were paid on 90 percent of all sales, the assumption being that 10 percent represented “promotional” distribution and breakage. Sam’s royalty of 5 percent was thus, in reality, no more than 4.23 percent, and it was to be set against a substantial, still-to-be-agreed-upon advance (in other words, Sam would see no royalties until the advance was earned out), but under Allen’s proposal, Tracey’s 1.77 percent share (the difference between Sam’s actual royalty and Tracey’s 6 percent) would come off the top. So, if, for the sake of argument, Sam sold a million singles and three hundred thousand albums, Tracey’s royalty would amount to approximately $35,000. And Allen wanted to be paid not quarterly or biannually, as was customary in the business, but monthly, on the basis of verifiable sales reports.

To Allen’s surprise, not only did D’Imperio not blink, he seemed intrigued by the idea. What about Sam? Did Sam understand the full implications of the deal—they would need to have a piece of paper from him in which he assigned his RCA contract to Tracey and indicated his full knowledge that henceforth all monies that would have been paid to him by RCA would instead be paid to Tracey and that all past sums owed to Sam or to his publishing companies, Kags and Malloy, would go to Tracey as well. That, Allen said, would represent no problem. Sam’s partner, J.W. Alexander, would be president of Tracey (though he, too, would have no financial stake in the corporation), and both Mr. Cooke and his partner, Mr. Alexander, were sophisticated businessmen who, as Joe was well aware, owned their own publishing and record labels.

There remained, however, the continuing problem of back royalties. Allen was not in the least interested in putting the company through a lengthy auditing process, it would be a needless expenditure of time and effort (and, in the long run, money) for them both, why couldn’t RCA simply concede that there was a sizeable amount due and then work out a reasonable formula by which it could be calculated and paid out? Again to his surprise, D’Imperio agreed. It appeared as if RCA owed Sam and his publishing company back royalties of at least $125,000, D’Imperio conceded, and if Allen would be satisfied to allow RCA to make a good-faith final determination based upon the internal audit it was currently conducting, he thought that a good portion of that sum could soon be released. That was all very well, Allen said, but if they were going to make a deal, he needed a deal memo right away, because Tracey’s fiscal year had already begun, and if he didn’t have something by the end of the month that could be backdated to September 1, RCA could just forget about the whole thing.

This was pure bluff. There was no fiscal year, there was no need for anything but a quick close (“I wanted to get it done fast so that they couldn’t change their mind, I just wanted to make sure I had it”), but in this, as in everything else, D’Imperio proved the soul of gentlemanliness. Whether or not he believed in the literal truth of Allen’s fiscal year was no longer the point. They both wanted to make a deal. He overruled his sales force, which argued that blacks didn’t buy LPs, by insisting vehemently that it was up to the record company, then, to change that. Sam, he declared, was a major talent on the order of Harry Belafonte, who had undeniably sold a lot of albums for the RCA Victor label—and with the proper exposure, on television and in showcase bookings, Sam would, too. D’Imperio’s interests coincided even further with Allen’s in that by being prepared to make so substantial an investment—an investment that could never be recouped in singles sales—he was virtually guaranteeing a label commitment that no r&b artist other than Ray Charles had ever received. By endorsing this kind of deal, Allen recognized, there was no way D’Imperio could survive if Sam didn’t succeed. The whole idea was to make Sam Cooke into a major star.

Jerry Brandt, in the meantime, watched from the sidelines with a mixture of skepticism and resentment. He hadn’t liked Allen on first acquaintance. More to the point, like nearly everyone else in the record business in a position to offer Sam advice, he didn’t trust him. “I tried to talk Sam out of it. I thought Allen was not up to it, and Sam would get hurt. Prior to that, Sam wanted to open an agency with me for his acts. I said, ‘No, let’s open up a management company,’ [but] he didn’t want me to manage him. [At first] I didn’t see Allen moving in. I think he just overwhelmed Sam. His whole ploy was, ‘You’re broke.’ But then he smoothed me, too.”

Jerry’s plan for bringing Sam into the money, not surprisingly, had its own element of self-interest. He and his boss, Roz Ross, had gotten involved in the Sweet Chariot, a brand-new gospel nightclub on Broadway owned by Crystals manager Joe Scandore (who had previously owned the Club Elegante in Brooklyn), which was bolstered by an exclusive deal with Columbia for on-site recordings that Jerry had set up with Dave Kapralik. Gospel nightclubs, with waitresses dressed like Playboy bunnies with wings, were the latest rage, and Jerry’s idea was that this would be a safe way to introduce Sam into a mainstream Manhattan showroom without risking the kind of public humiliation that failure at the Copa or Basin Street East could entail. With Sam’s unimpeachable gospel roots and appeal, Jerry was confident of Sam’s success at the Sweet Chariot, and the attention he would surely attract there would pave the way for a return to the supper-club circuit from which in recent years he had been largely absent. Sam and Alex thought it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard. It was against everything they had been working for, no competition, certainly, for the money Allen was talking about but, more important, a scrimped vision compared to the grand schemes that Allen had advanced. Jerry finally just gave up the fight. Sam, he decided, was simply not manageable, and Allen was another overbearing hustler who thought he could roll over everybody. “He was bright, aggressive, he pulled the wool over my eyes and everybody else’s. He’s a charming asshole, you know. But he was just a homo to Sam. We all were. Straight guys who became homos. No question about it.”

S
AM HAD BEGUN HIS NEW TOUR
, with Bobby “Blue” Bland, Little Willie John, Baby Washington, Freddie Scott, and the white rock ’n’ roll star Dion, on September 14. They played Nashville the following day, just after getting word of the Birmingham church bombing in which four little girls had been killed. It was like a constant assault, an almost stupefying catalogue of mindless racial insult and injury. “What murdered these four girls?” declared Martin Luther King in an uncharacteristically angry public outburst. “The apathy and complacency of many Negroes who will sit down on their stools and do nothing and not engage in creative protest to get rid of this evil.” It hung like a shroud over the whole tour—the cops in Louisville who stopped the show because two white girls in front got up and started dancing, the teenage white boy in Charlotte, North Carolina, they chased up the aisle simply because he was having a good time. “It was not only against Sam or the black acts,” said J.W., “it was against the music. Period.” And, of course, it was against the mixing of the races that the music inevitably provoked.

Onstage.

Courtesy of the Estate of Clif White

But the music always offered some reprieve. Bobby “Blue” Bland, a stand-up singer, stolid in appearance but much like Sam in the way he could turn an audience out just by the sound of his voice, was riding the crest of a remarkable wave of gospel-inflected hits (“He knows consciously what he’s going to do in advance,” Sam said to a white interviewer, suggesting that Bobby’s music was perhaps a little too “premeditated . . . but it comes across effectively”). One night Bobby and his opening act, singer Al “TNT” Braggs, teamed up with Little Willie John to—as J.W. put it—“gang up” on Sam onstage. “They really planned to cut Sam up on the finale,” J.W. said, which was, as usual, “Having a Party.” They all got out and did everything they could to take the song away from Sam, and Sam acted like he was simply going to quit and leave the stage to them, when, by prearrangement, J.W. came in from the side, and, “you know, I could always dance, and a lot of the girls thought, ‘This must be Sam’s dad,’ and I just brought the house down.” It was so successful, in fact, that it became part of Sam’s nightly act, and it broke the crowd up every time.

Little Willie John, who hadn’t had a big hit in three years, was as irrepressible as ever, and Baby Washington invited Linda onstage for the finale, when she and her mother joined the tour briefly one weekend. A teenage white girl who saw the show with a friend in Columbus, Ohio, remembered Little Willie John’s childlike charm and the thrill she felt when Sam spotted her girlfriend and her doing the twist in their fourth-row seats. “Sam pointed at us and said, ‘Those girls are doing some twisting,’ and we just went out of our minds.” But when Bobby “Blue” Bland did “Stormy Monday,” and his guitarist, Wayne Bennett, played the liquid notes of the solo, “I just slid down into my seat and felt like I was dying.”

T
HE RACIAL CLIMATE IN NEW ORLEANS
was tense when they came into town on Thursday, September 26. There had been a series of marches protesting discriminatory voter registration procedures, which had culminated in the arrest of ninety members of the Youth Crusaders’ Corps the previous week. In Shreveport a scheduled Sunday march in memory of the four little girls killed in Birmingham was blocked by the police, and more than five hundred black churchgoers were attacked by armed riot squads, deputies, and a mounted posse as they left a memorial service, with the Reverend Harry Blake, president of the local NAACP “dragged out of [his] church, clubbed to the ground” and taken to Dallas for treatment, the
Louisiana Weekly
reported, due to “fear of foul play at Shreveport hospitals.”

On the other hand,
Weekly
writer Elgin Hychew noted in his “dig me!” column: “We congratulate the mixed crowd which turned out at the Auditorium the other night for the James Brown Show. . . . Our hearts really throbbed at seeing the people of this community enjoying themselves without incident. [The police contingent of fifty] did not harass the rock and roll fans who just could not sit in their seats during the four-hour show. We saw white girls and Negro girls, white boys and Negro boys seated side by side and together whooping it up. . . . We were proud because this was the New Orleans we love . . . the city which for so long enjoyed the reputation of being so cosmopolitan until the hate factories started working overtime. [The upcoming Sam Cooke/Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland double bill] promises to be the biggest rock and rollarama presented in the Municipal Auditorium in many years. Both sides of the auditorium are expected to be filled to overflowing [for this] ‘battle of hits.’”

Allen Klein arrived the night of the show. He flew in with his lawyer, Marty Machat, and a check for $110,000. RCA had issued the check accompanied by a four-page document which stipulated that the $110,000 was “the approximate aggregate of all and any amounts due and owing to Sam Cooke, Kags, and Malloy [Publishing] up to and including August 31, 1963,” that the sum could be modified upward or downward by further forensic accounting, all parties would be bound by such final determination, and that in the event that the anticipated agreement “is not formally executed on or before October 31, 1963, Tracey agrees to return forthwith the said sum of $110,000.”

“I didn’t go to the auditorium,” said Allen, “because I flew in late. I met Sam at my hotel after the show. It was the day before
erev
Yom Kippur, and I could only stay overnight, I had to get a flight back to New York early the next morning. I remember Alex sang me a song they had written together, ‘Memory Lane.’ I showed Sam the check, and he was thrilled. I had gone out there and done this, we were going to get the contract done soon, and he was going to get $100,000 for his first-year guarantee. He said, ‘What do you want?’—and it was awkward for me, but I told him, because I needed the money. He wrote out a check for twenty-five percent [Allen’s one-time “finder’s fee”] without any question. It was more money than I had ever seen [at one time], and we had done it without a piece of paper. Then he took me into the bedroom, I remember Machat was out on the balcony overlooking Bourbon Street, and there was a living room, but we were in the bedroom just by ourselves, and he said, ‘Hey, listen, Allen, why don’t you manage me?’ I said, ‘Look, I never managed anyone before.’ I wasn’t being clever. I just felt awkward about it. But he looked at me and said, ‘Well, before I wrote my first song, I’d never written a song before.’”