Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (91 page)

S
AM OPENED AT THE APOLLO
on November 22, the day that President Kennedy was shot. He was just finishing his first show of the afternoon, with the whole cast (including the Valentinos) joining him in a reprise of “Having a Party” and throwing confetti into the crowd, when Apollo owner Frank Schiffman came out onstage to make the announcement. “Several women in the audience became hysterical,” the
Amsterdam News
reported. “There was noticeable sobbing throughout the theater—from men and women alike.” Frank Schiffman wanted to close the theater for the day, but before he did, “I had to consult Sam. He was working on a percentage, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without his consent. I went up to his dressing room, sort of framing words to say to him about it. Before I could open my mouth, he said to me, ‘Honest, I don’t feel like working today,’ [and] we closed the theater.”

There was widespread sorrow throughout the black community, the sense, as Mahalia Jackson put it, that “Negroes will mourn doubly the loss of the man who was their great friend.” Only Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, who maintained silence on the president’s death for ten days on orders from Muslim founder and leader Elijah Muhammad, violated the tone of decorous respect, when, in impromptu remarks to reporters following a carefully scripted public address, he suggested that, after all the violence America had unleashed on the world, after the assassination of Lumumba in the Congo, the killings in Vietnam, the ongoing attempts to kill Castro, the assassination of an American president was no more than a case of “the chickens coming home to roost.” He was immediately, and publicly, suspended from all Nation of Islam activities for ninety days by Elijah Muhammad, and
Muhammad Speaks,
the official Muslim newspaper, paid tribute to Kennedy, even as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, whose imaginatively worked-out evolutionary theory painted all white men as devils, privately snickered, “He wasn’t so bad for a devil.”

At the Apollo, business gradually returned to normal. As Frank Schiffman noted in his booking diary, had it not been for Kennedy’s assassination, “this could have been the strongest show yet for Sam. He and the show were superb.” Over the course of the week, Sam renewed his acquaintance with Cassius Clay, who had just signed for a title fight with Sonny Liston and was in town to promote
I Am the Greatest,
his Columbia LP, with an appearance on
The Jack Paar Show.
Clay was staying at the Theresa, where he spent much of his time with Malcolm X, whom he had come to know well over the last couple of years in his pursuit of Muslim teachings. He looked up to Malcolm almost like a big brother, and Malcolm for his part saw in Clay a “likeable, friendly, clean-cut, down-to-earth youngster . . . alert . . . even in little details.”

Sam had known Malcolm for years, ever since the first time he had come to the Apollo as a headliner, and he had always appreciated him as an accomplished street-corner speaker—he had known people like Malcolm all his life, caught up in the grip of a hustle they needed for their own personal salvation. He had never much cared for his Muslim beliefs, but now, with Cassius Clay serving as a kind of catalyst, Sam finally began to recognize the greater truth of Malcolm’s message. Black pride and self-determination, the principle of
ownership,
the need, above all, to control your own destiny—these were lessons he had learned at his father’s knee. Never be satisfied with scraps from the white man’s table; it was better to die on your feet than live on your knees—this was the essence of Sam’s personal philosophy. And Malcolm wasn’t one of these one-dimensional cats whose sum and substance were his lessons, either. Behind his steely gaze, Sam could discern a bright glint of humor, from talking to him he could tell that this was a man who could think on his feet. And, like Sam, he clearly saw some indefinable potential, independent of religious instruction, in young Cassius Clay. “He saw greatness,” said Malcolm’s daughter Attallah Shabazz, “and wanted to offer a focus for motivation.”

Sam saw Lithofayne Pridgon, too, who was in the middle of a “set,” or orgy, with a famous gospel singer, his girlfriend, and one of her “young tenders” when the news of President Kennedy’s assassination came on the radio. The famous gospel singer immediately grabbed all of their hands and intoned, “Let us fall down on our knees and pray.” It was ironic, laughed Lithofayne, how he could switch horses in the middle of the stream.

As she recalled, it was on this trip, too, that she introduced Sam to another of her friends, who, as it happened, she had met in the midst of an earlier “set.” This was a young guitarist named Jimmy Hendrix, who, as Lithofayne understood it, had been brought to New York from Nashville by a gay promoter who Jimmy had only recently begun to suspect might be more interested in his person than in his talent. Jimmy was desperately looking for work, and Lithofayne got him backstage and introduced him to Jerry Cuffee, a little man with a raggedy process and bad skin, who took care of Sam whenever he was in New York. Jerry got him into Sam’s dressing room, but Jimmy didn’t last long, “and he didn’t want to talk about it afterwards—he obviously didn’t get the gig.” That sent him home to Nashville, but he quickly turned around and was back in New York not long after Christmas, and he and Faye soon became the best of friends and starting hanging out together at Small’s Paradise and the Palm Café.

With Sam, Faye noticed even more of a change than the last time he had come to town. He seemed sadder, more distant, but coarser, too. “I started to hear little things that started to raise my eyebrows, like, oh my goodness. I knew plenty of whores and pimps, because they were all over the place, they’re human beings, like anybody else. I just didn’t want to believe he had to go there.”

At the end of the week, Allen told him, “Listen, I want you to go home. You got the money. You don’t have to worry about money. Go home. Spend time with your wife and kids. You don’t have to do this shit anymore.”

B
UT THERE WAS NO REAL HOME
to return to. Barbara no longer even bothered to hide a lifestyle that was as far removed from Sam’s as his had always been from hers. She defied his carefully constructed image of domesticity, the pains he had taken to separate their home life from life outside the home, by plunging into her own chaotic maelstrom, by disappearing without explanation and jettisoning any pretense of personal control. When she returned, she brought the street unmistakably back with her, as her mood became darker and darker and more and more openly hostile toward a husband she both blamed and desperately missed.

Sam restlessly made the round of the clubs. He saw old friends, stopped by Gertrude Gipson’s Nite Life for an evening of poetry and entertainment with Cassius Clay, checked out Dinah Washington’s closing at Basin Street West. But, said Lou Adler, “for the first time, you could detect that he was carrying something other than the person that he was. There was a [sorrowfulness], a leveling out.” He was drinking more, and his smile seemed forced at times; without his ever explicitly acknowledging it, the change was evident to every one of his friends.

For Jess’ birthday on December 2 he gave his former manager a fourteen-karat solid gold Dunhill lighter with the masks of Comedy and Tragedy overlaid on the front and the inscription “You’re TOPS. Sam.” He did
The Jerry Lewis Show
(“Starring The Nut Himself,” the printed program announced) with Cassius Clay on December 7, introducing Linda to Cassius at the afternoon rehearsal and inviting him out to the house. Jerry Brandt had gotten Sam the booking on the strength of Clay’s current celebrity. With the title fight coming up and his album on the charts, Cassius, said the William Morris agent, “had the fucking world in his palm,” and Brandt simply insisted to the show’s booker, “You want this guy, you take this guy.” Sam talked to Cassius about maybe doing a record together someday, and the kid’s eyes lit up. Jerry Brandt was not surprised. Sam was the kind of guy who never took his eye off the main chance—and, while it was perfectly evident that Sam got a tremendous kick out of him, Cassius Clay was the main chance right then. “I mean, we never discussed it. He just thought this is something to attach yourself to.”

Sam came out at the front of the show after a perfunctory introduction by Jerry Lewis, looking a little puffy in an abbreviated dark continental suit jacket and pants. He opened with an elegantly exuberant version of “Twistin’ the Night Away,” undeterred by audience apathy or the orchestra’s Dixieland groove. Then he performed a starkly theatrical reading of “The Riddle Song,” an Appalachian ballad recently revived in folk circles, while sitting on a stool and caught in dramatic profile by an overhead spot. Someone who knew Sam’s recent history might very well have supplied a deeper emotional subtext as his voice wrapped itself around the lyric’s paradoxical simplicity (“I gave my love a chicken that has no bone / I gave my love a ring that has no end / I gave my love a baby with no cryin’”), then supplied the answer to the riddle’s ultimate contradiction: “A baby when it’s sleeping has no cryin’.” For the casual viewer, though, there was only supreme confidence and supreme control, an actor’s sublimation of personal experience to express universal feeling. It was, like the refined version of the Twist that he and J.W. had worked out for presentation to this national television audience, a Twist that emerged from the subtlest of gestures and the most carefully choreographed little steps, a declaration on the one hand that he could command any stage, and, on the other, an act of secret complicity with himself.

That same day, a picture of him appeared on the cover of
Cash Box,
seated behind an expansive executive desk and leaning over impishly toward RCA president George Marek beneath a portrait of Giuseppe Verdi. “The two are discussing the continuance of Cooke’s highly successful relationship with RCA,” reads the caption, “which the artist has just sealed with the pen he is holding.” Currently “fire-hot . . . Cooke [is] one of the record industry’s most consistent hit-makers, riding an unbroken chain of eight smash singles.” A bright future for record company and artist was clearly in the works.

Barbara took the kids to Chicago for a visit not long afterward. Crume and the Stirrers were out on the Coast for a series of programs, and Sam and Crume got together with a pair of cousins they had met at a club earlier in the year. Sam had had to borrow Stirrers baritone singer Richard Gibbs’ room at the Dunbar for the earlier date, but this time they went back to the house to fool around. Sam was in a funny mood, he seemed as eager to talk with Crume as to spend time with his girl, and he called Crume on the intercom early the next morning and said, “Let’s take the girls home.” When they got back to the house, he played Crume three or four numbers that he had been working on for his upcoming session: a song called “Good Times” that was based on an old Louis Jordan hit; a variation on a gospel number, “Ain’t That Good News,” that they had all grown up singing; plus one or two others that didn’t make as much of an impression.

Then Sam told him about his new RCA deal, and how much money he now had in the bank. “He said, ‘I don’t want you to tell nobody about this. Even Barbara don’t know what kind of money I got. If I hear it [from her], I’ll know where it came from.’” He was going to take some time off, he said, “because what he wanted to do he couldn’t do as long as he was doing one-nighters. He said, ‘I’m just another rock ’n’ roll singer if I keep doing that.’” But, he said, he was going to keep on paying Clif and June and Bobby, just as if they were working every night.

And he wanted Crume to write him some new songs. What he wanted were r&b numbers that sounded like gospel. “He said, ‘Crumé, this is what I want you to do. Put everybody out of your room for two weeks and write me some fuckin’ songs.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be out of your mind, man. You mean to tell me you just want me to sit in a room by myself for two weeks and write songs?’ He said, ‘But this is important. This is your fucking career.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but Sam, it don’t take no fucker that long to write a song.’ He said, ‘Well, just write me some fuckin’ songs, man.’” Crume said he’d give the matter some serious thought. But by the time he got around to it, Sam had already put together all the songs he needed.

Long Time Coming

For people fighting for their freedom there is no such thing as a bad device.

— Malcolm X

T
HE FIRST TWO SONGS
he recorded at his December 20-21 album session were the ones that had most impressed Crume earlier in the month. “Ain’t That Good News” had, in all of its earlier incarnations (including a 1949 version by J.W.’s group, the Pilgrim Travelers), hinged on a variation on the familiar line “Jesus said he’s coming again / Ain’t that news, ain’t that good news.” Sam substituted his own secular introduction (“Well, my baby’s coming home tomorrow”) as the occasion for rejoicing and added a jangling banjo lead, congas, and a horn chart that pushed hard against the banjo’s country twang to change both song and message, while his vocal subtly undercut the song’s cheerful flavor and upbeat lyrics. He polished off the tune in three takes, then spent the rest of the evening experimenting with “Good Times,” the Louis Jordan-inspired number that took up the chorus of Jordan’s enormously popular 1946 hit, “Let the Good Times Roll,” which had served as an inspiration to a whole generation of singers, from Sam and James Brown to B.B. King and Ray Charles, with its anthemic call. Sam’s version, once again, suggested an elegiac tone absent in the original, but his approach was less strictly defined than the one he and René Hall ordinarily took, experimenting with a variety of tempos and instrumentations, bringing banjo back in along with marimba only with take seven, and breaking off the three-hour session without achieving a master take.