Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (94 page)

He and Alex brought the dubs from the previous week’s sessions to New York, where Allen heard the material for the first time. Sam arrived in town on February 4 to promote the new single, “Ain’t That Good News” and “Basin Street” from the December sessions, and to appear on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
at the end of the week. Allen was delighted with everything that Sam played for him; the range of material, Sam’s willingness to take chances were exactly what he had been hoping might result from this new artistic freedom. But when he heard “A Change Is Gonna Come,” he asked to hear it again. And again. “It was just my favorite record. It was chilling. And he was telling a story. A personal story. It wasn’t complicated, and it wasn’t repetitious. Simple words. [But] it was a great piece of poetry.”

Sam took in the praise without comment. Despite any reservations he might have expressed to Bobby, he knew the song was probably the best thing he had ever written, and it was, of course, an integral part of the album. But when Allen said that he wanted Sam to sing it on
The
Tonight Show
—the hell with the single, this was the statement that he needed to make—Sam raised every objection he could think of. The album wasn’t going to be out for another two months.
The
Tonight Show
was only three days away. He didn’t have an arrangement with him. And besides, he couldn’t present the song the way it needed to be presented without exactly the same instrumentation that he had on the record; the
Tonight Show
band, as good as it was, wasn’t going to be able to give him a French horn, three trombones, and a thirteen-piece string section.

Allen met every one of his arguments with a forceful counterargument. René could send the arrangement. He would get RCA to pay for a full string section and all the extra musicians Sam needed, and if Joe D’Imperio wouldn’t spring for it, Allen would pay for it out of his own pocket. Sam could sing “Basin Street” to promote the single. But he had to remember one thing: he was promoting
himself
at this point, Sam Cooke, not RCA. Joe and the record label were behind him all the way: look at the full-page ad in
Billboard
the previous week. Big things were in the offing. They were going to get LP sales. They were going to get the supper clubs and Vegas, just like Sam wanted. But to get all those things, Sam had to believe in himself. And, not entirely coincidentally, he had to do the song on Johnny Carson.

They all went to the Copa to see Nat “King” Cole—Sam and Alex and Allen and Joe D’Imperio. They lingered upstairs in the lounge, where there was generally a younger crowd and a more contemporary up-and-coming act. Sam hadn’t been back to the club since his failure there in 1958, and, he said, he was surprised, seeing it now, how small it was. But he was clearly nervous—for all of his self-conscious bravado, for all of his confident talk about being ready, both Allen and Alex could sense his almost visible hesitancy. They watched the young girls doing the Twist, “all them chicks just shaking their butts,” said J.W., “and I said to him, ‘What makes you think the people downstairs are gonna be any different?’” That seemed to break the ice a little, and they went down to catch Nat’s act, easy, relaxed, full of the universal-emotion ballads and sophisticated banter that made it as accessible to a white audience as to a black. Sam turned to Allen and nodded. Allen took it as a signal. “He saw how easy it was. It was no big deal.” But to Alex he leaned over and said, “I can stand this fucker on its ear,” and they both burst out laughing.

He did an interview with the
New York World-Telegram
the next day that focused almost entirely on his ambition to return to the Copa. Sam was RCA’s second-biggest singles artist after Elvis Presley, the story pointed out, “but on the night club and TV circuit he is virtually unknown. How come?” It all stemmed from his failure at the Copa six years (the
World-Telegram
had it four years) earlier. “I only had a couple of little record arrangements,” Sam said. He was amateurish and had gotten scared. “At the end of three weeks, I was a pretty good entertainer, but I wasn’t a smash.” For the last four years, he had been quietly perfecting his act—this time he wanted to be sure “they’re ready for me!”

On Thursday, RCA threw a press luncheon at Danny’s Hideaway for nearly fifty DJs and radio reps, plus reporters from
Billboard, Cash Box, Seventeen, Look, Ebony,
and
Jet.
Sam charmed them all. He was planning a different direction for his career, he told the trades. He wanted to cut down his in-person activities to two or three months of selective show dates and concentrate more on his creative role. “[He] said he would rather be the creative producer in the control room than be the worn-out singer in a bistro spotlight,” reported
Billboard.
He spoke extensively of SAR, his partner, J.W. Alexander, also present at the luncheon, and his extensive ambitions for all of the artists on their roster. He wanted each of them to “try for a different sound or approach. . . . ‘I want my artists to evolve something different, based on their own philosophies,’” he said, providing a convincing display of the scope of his own philosophy and ambition.

Joe D’Imperio was certainly convinced. Against all his better instincts, he had given in to Allen’s relentless lobbying for the song—it seemed crazy to throw away an opportunity to promote both sides of the single, and he had serious reservations about the impact of Sam’s “social statement” on the Southern market, but how could you argue with the conviction expressed in the lyrics or with the almost equally passionate conviction of Allen’s advocacy? He agreed to put up the money for the extra musicians. He agreed to take responsibility for the decision at RCA. He believed in Sam.

S
AM DID
THE TONIGHT SHOW
on Friday, immaculate in a dark suit and skinny tie, with a neatly coiffed Afro very much at odds with the conventional image of the Negro entertainer on national TV. He performed “Basin Street” on an economical “New Orleans” stage set, relaxed and confident at the start but letting loose as the song built to its big finger-snapping climax, until at the end he was practically strutting—but in a distinctly Sam Cooke way. It was a masterful performance, and a clearly appreciative Johnny Carson acknowledged it not only with verbal praise but by shaking his shoulders in imitation of Sam’s showmanship. “You’re going to stand there for the rest of the show,” he called out to Sam from his desk, before announcing to the audience that, of course, Sam Cooke would be back in the second half.

Joe D’Imperio was so nervous that he walked out into the hall before Sam took the stage to sing what an NBC timekeeper marked down in the logbook as “It’s a Long Time Coming.” Allen and J.W. remained in the audience, each convinced in his own mind that this was a moment that would surely go down in history as well as serving as a milestone in Sam’s career. Unfortunately, the tape appears to have been lost, so one can only imagine the way in which Sam must have transformed the number in live performance, caught in a single spotlight perhaps, his face alight not just with the inspirational fervor of the song’s final declaration of belief but with the fierce determination and unrelenting anger embodied in each of its verses. “It almost scared the shit out of me,” he told his drummer June Gardner afterward. But for Allen Klein, there were no such ambiguities. To Allen, this was the reason he had ventured into the entertainment business in the first place; it offered an opportunity for self-expression, certainly, but more than that, it provided vindication not just for his belief in Sam (though that was a big part of it) but for his own involvement in the process. It was his business acumen, his own unflagging zeal for the creative business solution, that had freed Sam to do this. And when Sam sang the line about “my brother,” Allen didn’t hear the note of rejection in the following line, all Allen heard was Sam’s plea (“I go to my brother and I say, ‘Brother, help me, please’”), and he identified with the situation, he believed that Sam meant him to be that brother, but unlike the brother in the song, he would never turn his back on Sam, he would never knock him to his knees.

Sam flew to Cleveland the next day to appear on the nationally syndicated
Mike Douglas Show.
Douglas, who had first met Sam in Chicago in 1958, was not simply gracious but unfailingly appreciative of his guest, both musically and personally. “It’s good news!” Sam announced after an utterly relaxed performance of the song, as he met guests Howard Keel, the Broadway basso profundo, and comedienne Eleanor Harris. “Let’s do a little capsule version of the Sam Cooke story,” said Douglas, and Sam jumped right in.

“The capsule version,” he said. “Born. My father was a minister. I started singing in the church, naturally, because I was exposed to gospel singing first. Hmmm. Came out of school, went with a professional gospel group called the Soul Stirrers, sang around the country with them for about five years. Decided to go on my own. Made a song called ‘You Send Me.’ It sold about a million and a half copies for me, luckily enough. Went into the Copa, bombed —”

“You bombed?” said Douglas in disbelief, as the others murmured equal incredulity. But Sam was insistent. “Unless you give it a real adult approach, you’ll bomb.”

“Why do you think you bombed?” Eleanor Harris persisted.

“I know why I bombed,” Sam said. “’Cause I wasn’t ready.”

He stayed out on the road with Alex, promoting the single with a series of Midwest appearances as Barbara joined them in Chicago. RCA was putting more into the promotion of this record, it seemed, than the sum total of all their previous efforts, and Allen left no stone unturned in his determination to get Sam a number-one hit. At the suggestion of
Cash Box
editor Ira Howard, he hired independent promo man Pete Bennett, who had broken “Lazy Crazy Hazy Days of Summer” pop for Nat “King” Cole the previous year. Pete told his new employer that the only way they could really get Sam into the pop market was with free goods for the DJs and the stores that reported their sales figures to the trades. That way, he explained to Allen, who had never been on this end of the business before, the DJs had something to sell, and the stores had an incentive to push a record for which they had paid absolutely nothing. Allen immediately went to RCA and told them he needed five thousand records to give away, but, whether because he was too explicit or too naive, they told him he would have to pay the same price as any other wholesaler. So he purchased the records and gave them away. “I said, ‘Okay.’ I did it.” But from then on, he made sure to put a free-goods allotment in all his contracts.

In Allen’s world, there was little room for any deviation in course. Now that Sam had made up his mind that he was ready for the Copa, Allen’s sights were set on the Copa and the Copa alone. But then, to his astonishment, Jules Podell, the Copa’s brusque manager, turned him down. Podell’s memory of the original engagement was, evidently, just as vivid as Sam’s, and he told Allen and William Morris head club agent Lee Solomon bluntly that Sam Cooke was not a Copa act. Allen looked to Solomon for support, but it became immediately apparent that the William Morris agent, a Broadway habitué with a sharp tongue who Allen thought might have been better suited to be a comedian, was no more on his and Sam’s side than Jules Podell. He felt sandbagged, he told Jerry Brandt, with whom he had recently forged an improbable business alliance. They had even talked of the possibility of a partnership, and Brandt was steadily steering William Morris clients his way, most notably Bobby Vinton, for whom Allen had just completed a renegotiation with Columbia that would net Vinton, the hottest young singles artist of the moment, a new $553,000 contract. But Jerry and his boss, Roz Ross, couldn’t do anything about the Copa, and Jerry still wasn’t sold on the idea anyway. His new thought was to book Sam into Basin Street East as an opening act for Sophie Tucker. Which Sam took as a personal insult, and Allen did, too. Allen didn’t want Basin Street, he wasn’t interested in Basin Street, what he wanted for Sam was the Copa. So he made up his mind that, regardless of personal friendships or business connections, he was going to change agencies.

J
ERRY BRANDT GOT THEM ALL TICKETS
for the Clay-Liston fight in Miami on February 25. Allen brought his wife, Betty, Sam took Barbara, and J.W. came by himself, with Allen arranging for accommodations at Miami’s resplendent Fountainebleau Hotel. Allen had already registered and was in his room when Sam arrived, only to be told that there had been a mix-up about the reservations. It was not as blatant as Shreveport, but Sam had no reason to take it any more lightly. Miami Beach, like Las Vegas, had never made a habit of accommodating Negro guests. It might present the best in colored entertainers, but until very recently those entertainers had always come in through the back door. Sam called Allen, and Allen came down to the lobby and made a scene. “I just lost it. I screamed at them, ‘Don’t you know what prejudice is? How can you people, after all the discrimination we’ve been through, do the same thing?’ It was an embarrassment to me—Jewish place, Jewish people, and they didn’t want to give him a room?” Allen threatened to camp out in the lobby until they sorted this thing out. And in the end, the hotel came up with a nice suite on the second floor.

Malcolm X, too, was in Miami, as Cassius Clay’s personal guest. He was staying across the bay, at the Hampton House Motel, in a black section of town. Malcolm had arrived with his wife and three little girls over a month earlier for a brief family vacation (the first one they had ever had, Malcolm wrote in his autobiography), a gift from the challenger. Clay had then broken training and flown back to New York with Malcolm for a Muslim rally, where, speaking for the silenced minister (Malcolm was still under the interdiction imposed by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad in the wake of his remarks about President Kennedy’s assassination), Clay told “cheering Muslim members,” the
Amsterdam News
reported, “that ‘Every time I go to a Muslim meeting I get inspired,’ [then] predicted to the audience that he would win the fight because ‘I’m training on lamb chops and that big ugly bear [Liston] is training on pork chops,’ in reference to the fact that Muslims don’t eat pork.” “Cassius Clay Almost Says He’s a Muslim,” was the disapproving headline in the
News,
a story that was picked up in newspapers all across the country and brought ticket sales to a grinding halt. The promoter threatened to cancel the fight unless Clay agreed to eliminate any further public reference to Islam or visible contact with his mentor, and Malcolm did not return to Miami until February 23, two days before the fight.