Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (37 page)

Art was beside himself. He
knew
that Sam had written the song, there was no question about it in his mind, and he couldn’t believe that Sam would lie not only to him but to his new company. But the more he learned of Sam, the more his view of his devious, deceitful, and totally unscrupulous behavior was borne out. Just days before, he had received a letter addressed to Sam care of the Specialty Recording Company and, after getting past the opening salutation (“Hi Sweet”), discovered that it was from some poor schoolgirl from New Orleans whom Sam had made pregnant. “Look Sweet,” she concluded, “whenever you get a chance write me back because I still love you very much.” But Sam “did not [even] come for this letter,” Rupe wrote disgustedly on the envelope, one more proof of the way in which he believed Sam “squandered his intelligence and made unwise moral choices.”

On November 1 Art went into the studio with arranger René Hall and overdubbed the demo that Sam had cut on Bill Cook’s “I’ll Come Running Back to You” at the New Orleans session in December. He got the same mixed singing group that had backgrounded Sam on “You Send Me,” and René came as close as possible to replicating the hit record’s feel and sound not only on the Bill Cook number but, with new vocal overdubs by the same Lee Gotch Singers, on both “Lovable” and “Forever,” “Dale” Cook’s debut Specialty release. Art mastered the songs four days later, put “Forever” on the B-side, and had the new record out in two weeks. He took a hurriedly designed three-fifths-of-a-page ad in the November 25 issue of
Billboard
with a small circled head shot of Sam at the center and “New!” the only selling text. By the end of the month, Specialty Records’ “I’ll Come Running Back to You” was a hit.

Sam didn’t really pay much attention to any of it—or at least tried not to. Art wrote to him about his recording obligations care of Rex Productions on November 7. He was evidently hoping to appeal to Sam on a personal basis, but he could barely keep his rage in check. All this talk of fraud, duress, and menace was, as Sam knew, “a bald-faced lie. . . . When you signed the contract with me, it was done of your own free will; and in fact, you were more anxious to enter into this contract than we were. . . .

“You have probably not told your attorney,” Art continued, “about the first artist contract which our firm still has with you under date of February 1, 1956.” If Sam proposed to throw aside the validity of his present artist contract, then Specialty would hold him to the earlier one, “
and then you couldn’t record for anyone but us!

“Before you get involved in a lot of unnecessary lawyer’s expense, I suggest that you contact me immediately so that we can set up a schedule for the performance of the
eight
sides which we have coming from you; and, stop this needless bickering.”

It was Art, though, who couldn’t stop himself. He broached the matter sorrowfully to J.W., who by now was with the new label himself. “He said to me, ‘Alex, we’ve been friends for a long time, and I respect you enough not to ask you [about the authorship of “You Send Me”].’ So I never answered.” Somehow or other, Art seemed to feel that one of them would see the error of their ways. But if Sam had any second thoughts about it, he never gave any indication. As L.C. saw it, “He just wasn’t going to let Art Rupe get his songs.” Nor did it surprise L.C. that his brother should outwit the white man at his own game. “Sam was smart. He learned. He watched. He wouldn’t let nobody ever tell him nothing, but he’d ask questions. And he never would let you know that it was something that he really needed to know. He just said, ‘L.C., you wrote such and such a song.’ I said okay, and that was it.”

Sam was focused on the future. He spent time at Keen’s new offices on Hollywood Boulevard, made a guest appearance on the brand-new ABC-network Guy Mitchell television show on November 11 (for which he received $750, minus his William Morris commission), and two days later went into the studio to begin work on his first album. At Bumps’ direction, accompanied by the Bumps Blackwell “Orchestra,” which consisted for the most part of Clif, René, drums, and bass, augmented by the same vocal chorus that had played such a prominent part on “You Send Me,” he focused on standards like “Ol’ Man River,” “Danny Boy,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and “That Lucky Old Sun,” songs to which he had always been drawn but which had the added advantage, Bumps pointed out, of demonstrating his versatility, expanding his appeal, and helping to further the scenario that the William Morris agent had painted for them so persuasively.

On the strength of Sam’s success, Keen Records, too, was rapidly expanding. They had hired a combination promotion man / art director in Don Clark, formerly with Aladdin Records. They had set up foreign distribution through London American, a division of the English conglomerate Decca Records. They announced the upcoming release of the first two albums on their new Andex subsidiary, Bob Keane’s jazz outing and the Pilgrim Travelers’
Look Up!,
for which Bumps drafted Sam to sing tenor on one track behind a rare (and haunting) J.W. lead. In mid-November they signed Johnny “Guitar” Watson, a star on the L.A. r&b scene whose talent was exceeded only by his panache and by his ambivalence about whether he wanted to be a singer or a pimp. And not long before that, Keen put out its first release by the Valiants, “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” once again landing the label, and Bumps, in hot water with Art Rupe.

Bumps was scarcely a passive agent in this new brouhaha. He had worked with Little Richard on the song (for which he had cowriting credit) at Richard’s last New Orleans session, at the end of July 1956, when Richard was already beginning to balk about going into the studio under the terms of his Specialty contract. Art rerecorded the number at Richard’s last regular session for the label in October, but in the year that had passed since then, he had never released it, and now that Richard had dramatically announced that he was quitting show business (he had thrown all of his rings into the water at the end of a two-week Australian tour, during which he saw the Soviet satellite
Sputnik
pass over the Sydney stadium like a “fireball” and took it as a sign that the Day of Judgment was near), Bumps doubted that he ever would. In any case, doing the song with the Valiants was one more chance to stick it to Art, the former boss in whom he had once so fervently believed. And he never mentioned any of the possible complications to John Siamas—why should he? He just put the session together, got Don and Dewey, signed to Specialty as an incendiary teenage vocal duo but equally talented multi-instrumentalists, to back them up, along with an expanded rhythm section of Nicaraguan percussionists on congas and bongos whom Bumps had discovered in a Hollywood nightclub.

The Keen crew, fall 1957: Paul Karras, John Siamas, Rex Oberbeck, John Gray, Sam Cooke.

Courtesy of John S. Siamas

The entire emphasis was on speed. With their talented lead vocalist, Billy Storm, setting the pace, they started fast and, at Bumps’ urging, just kept gathering velocity. “Pick it up, pick it up,” he kept yelling at the four Valiants, determined that no white boys would be able to take this song from them. In the end, they carried it off better than any of them would have believed possible, and for the other side, Billy laid down “This Is the Night,” a beautiful ballad penned by all four, which just went to show their versatility on top of Billy’s Hollywood good looks.

“ANOTHER KEEN HIT, taking off like a rocket” was the way that Keen Records was promoting its new release, and though “This Is the Night” appeared to be the A-side, Art was not the least bit sanguine about what he took to be another stupid provocation coming from an all-too-familiar direction. He suspected, he wrote to “The President” of Rex Productions Incorporated on November 7, the same day he wrote to Sam, that “you do not have all the accurate and honest facts about this whole mess. I’m certain that most of your information [has come] from ‘Bumps’ Blackwell, our former employee whom I was forced to discharge.” The release of “Good Golly, Miss Molly” by Keen, Art informed them, “reflects an out-and-out violation of our property rights” because of the fact that it had not been released to date by its owner, Specialty. “I cite this as an example,” Art continued, “to show you that you are making decisions without all the facts.” And he then went on to suggest that “if you had all the honest facts, I’m sure that you or any other ethical business man would do the right thing, which in the long run is the most practical and profitable for all concerned.”

He proposed a private meeting at which they might iron out their differences, but when he and John Siamas met eleven days later, he found that Siamas, while a perfectly pleasant man, was willing to discuss only the matter of licensing “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” When he brought up Sam and the eight sides he owed to Specialty, Siamas was “evasive,” said that Sam was “back east” (which Art didn’t believe), and told him, somewhat insultingly, that Sam would be happy to take a lie detector test if Art would.

Art was suddenly tired of it all: he was tired of Sam and Bumps, he was tired of Richard, he was tired of the endless wrangling, he was, in fact, tired of the business. The impression that he got of Siamas was that here was a businessman perfectly willing to fight over business issues, a self-made man with the attitude that he had come into this world with nothing, that he would go out with nothing, and that “what happens in between doesn’t count.” Art wasn’t about to give up, but neither was he going to hold a grudge against a man who had been purposely misled, a man in some respects very much like himself. So he agreed to the license, continued to make plans for his upcoming European vacation, and prepared a rush release on Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly” that would blow the Valiants’ version out of the water.

If Sam was affected by any of this, he didn’t show it. To thirteen-year-old John Siamas Jr., Sam remained the most thoughtful and down-to-earth person in the world—“and
interested,
in situations where there was nobody around to impress. Sam would shoot baskets in our backyard. He tried to teach me how to play the guitar, which was his one miserable failure. One of the things I vividly remember was when he came and performed at the junior high school I attended, Audubon Junior High, south of Crenshaw, which was racially diverse at the time—he just sat there with his guitar and sang songs and invited me to come up onstage with him and introduced me as his friend.”

The single most dominant impression that John Siamas Jr., a bright, serious young man destined to become a lawyer, took away from his contact with Sam was of his warmth, his kindness, his “love of life.” And why not? He was at last in the place he had so long wanted to be. He had gained not just the financial wherewithal but the “legitimacy,” the respect, the
identity
that his father said you must always seek (and never settle for anything less) in the white man’s world. Following Bumps’ lead, he began to cultivate a collegiate look: V-neck sweaters and pleated beltless pants for casual situations, a growing number of modestly elegant business suits for more formal ones. He was wearing his hair more and more close-cropped with less and less straightener, in direct contrast to all the elaborately processed fashions of the day.

For all of the fact that his fame and status were growing so rapidly (“In just three sensational weeks,” reported the black wire service, ANP [Associated Negro Press], with some hyperbole at the end of November, “he has become the ‘top man’ in all popularity departments . . . and has zoomed from a $150 a week performer to one who can ask and get a cool $1500 every seven days”), what stood out most was the easy grace with which he accepted it all, almost as if it were something about which he had had no doubt all along. “He was very conscious of [who] he was, what he looked like, how he was groomed,” said Herb Alpert, who had just gone to work at Keen with his friend, twenty-four-year-old Lou Adler, as one of Bumps’ three “junior assistant a&r men” (Fred Smith, who had come over with Bumps from Specialty, was the first, and the only, one with any real experience in the business). “He made everyone feel at home, he had lots of charm, was full of smiles, and seemed to be enjoying himself. And yet he was intimidating at the same time. He seemed to suck up all the oxygen in the room—I mean, the focus would go right to him.” It wasn’t that he sought it out, Herb was convinced. It was just that he had “this larger-than-life quality about him, he had stardust on him.”

Fred Smith, who had met Sam at Johnny Otis’ talent show at the Nite Life that summer and whose mother was a well-known blues singer, saw it a little differently. An accomplished songwriter himself, he was unreserved in his admiration for Sam, but at the same time, he recognized in Sam an element that neither of Bumps’ two young white assistants was likely to pick up. “Sam was a genius. He’s one of those people who when he walks in the room, you almost get cold chills, but he had an attitude: Hey, man, I deserve this. And he did deserve it, because of who he was and how he got there. But in some cases he wouldn’t back down.”