Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (51 page)

Even without Sam and Jackie it would have been an all-star bill. In addition to featuring the Midnighters, a strong draw on their own with their precise harmonies, energetic showmanship, and sharp, synchronized steps, the show consisted of a vocal group out of Detroit called the Falcons, whose lead singer, Joe Stubbs, had some of the same deep-throated gospel sound as fellow Detroiters Ballard and Jackie Wilson; Marv Johnson, another Detroit artist, whose big hit number, “Come to Me,” was the debut release on songwriter Berry Gordy’s new Tamla label; Sam’s Keen labelmate Johnny “Guitar” Watson; the ubiquitous Jesse Belvin, whose major-label deal with RCA had just produced his first pop hit; a haunting-sounding eighteen-year-old soul
chanteuse,
Baby Washington; an exotic pair of “shake dancers,” the Spence Twins; and Gladys Knight, a fifteen-year-old ninth-grader out of Atlanta who was billed with (and chaperoned by) a group made up of her brother and three older male cousins called the Pips.

Backing up all the featured artists was the twelve-piece band of Sil Austin, a graduate of the Willis “Gator Tail” Jackson school of honking sax, whose “Slow Walk” had been a big instrumental hit two and one-half years earlier. Different acts got different billing depending upon their popularity in a particular city or region, and, as with every package tour, the program was always subject to change. The one constant was that Sam always had to follow Jackie, who, with his patented splits, spins, slides, breathtakingly sudden knee drops, and slow, impossibly arching re-ascents, created a hothouse atmosphere that almost palpably exuded sex. Jackie was handsome, crude, brash, with a classically jaunty process and a playful curl to his lip that made him look more than a little like a bronze Elvis Presley. He was, in essence, everything that Sam was not: bold, feral, unrestrained, an extravagant showman with an ex-boxer’s lithe grace, a Dionysian celebrant so dedicated to a sense of orgiastic frenzy that he presented himself each night at the close of his act as if for sacrifice, flaunting himself at the edge of the stage until his female fans broke through security and clawed at his body, invariably leaving him bloody with their marks.

There was something else going on, though. Sil Austin’s band had been touring with Jackie off and on for the last few months—it might as well have been Jackie’s band, and, Charles said, “They wouldn’t play right for Sam. They deliberately messed him up. I got in a fight with the dude, man. I said, ‘I know you all can play better than that shit.’ I cursed them out.”

Billy Davis, who had known Jackie Wilson from the time he was a kid and would almost certainly have joined Jackie, not Hank, were it not that the Midnighters’ regular guitarist had just gone to jail, knew that Charles was right. “It was so obvious. Sil and them used to be talking about it backstage. I mean, I was mad, even though I knew Jackie way longer than I did Sam. It was just wrong, and Jackie didn’t [even] have to do it.”

But he did, perhaps as payback for Sam’s cavalier attitude, perhaps in memory of the way Sam’s bandleader, Bob Tate, had done
him
when they played Atlanta together the previous year on the Travelers’ tour. Night after night it went on, no matter how fiercely Charles or Clif, as commanding a figure as Charles in his own way, continued to object. Still, there were moments of transcendence, moments when Sam’s confidence in his own ability to get the crowd in his own way were borne out by an almost ecstatic result. Sometimes, Billy said, he would simply stand there, at the Houston City Auditorium, for example, “just popping his finger, holding his jacket, he just had that groove, and it looked like the whole building was moving with him, swaying with the rhythm. It was like I was hallucinating or something, ’cause I was standing backstage saying, Man, look at the people, they was just [in a trance]—and he was just standing there, he wasn’t doing nothing but straight singing.” To the Falcons’ Eddie Floyd, no one could beat Jackie, but then, on some nights, “Sam would come out, and Boom! he tops it. Every night on that tour, I would watch from the wings once we had finished our spot. Sit there and just watch.”

The tour was not without its lighthearted moments. There were the after-parties, advertised by local club owners and open to the paying public, for which there was frequently a bonus for any member of the troupe who could get Sam or Jackie to attend. Every night, there was gambling backstage and at the hotel, too, fierce games of craps in which even little Gladys Knight participated and Charles generally emerged the winner. Sam, according to Hank Ballard, would just “dip and dab,” probably because everybody else was doing it and he didn’t want to be left out.

For Gladys Knight, a conscientious student who had never been on a full-scale tour before, it was like a dream summer vacation—even if she
was
closely supervised, she couldn’t fail to observe things she would never have seen in school. Jackie was her “teen idol,” and she got as excited watching him perform as any of the women in the audience, “but he was always a gentleman to me.” It thrilled her when he invited the whole troupe back to his dressing room after one performance, congratulated them on a fine show, and then declared, “And you, little lady, you are really something with that powerful voice you got.” She was not as fond of the Spence Twins, the “hard-core” shake dancers on the bill, though, as she indicates in her memoir, she probably learned as much from them. “When they performed, they did the bump and grind until they bumped and grinded off every stitch of clothing on their twin-toned bodies. I swear! Aboard the bus, they were every bit as down and dirty. They could outcurse any of the men. They would sit in the front of the bus with their legs sprawled across the aisle, inviting and offering taunts of the worst kind [and] apologizing to the quiet little [fifteen]-year-old with her face buried in a comic book.” For a girl who “hadn’t been introduced to sex yet,” it was quite an education, and one she wouldn’t have given up for the world.

Billy Davis spent as much, or more, time with Sam as any of the other performers on the tour, primarily because he made it his business to. “I used to go to his room a lot, and he’d be sitting up in the bed writing songs. I remember one time in Dallas, at the Peter Lane Motel, I took him a song I wrote. I hadn’t really copied it from anything, but he said, ‘That’s just like such and such,’ and I said, ‘Oh, you’re right,’ and after that, I didn’t feel like taking him no more. I’ll never forget what he said about writing a hit song. He said, ‘Billy, all you got to do is look and see what’s happening around you. Look and see what’s happening every day. Something people know and can identify with. See, that’s where you get your hits.’

“He loved to party, but he was kind of shy. I never saw him be really aggressive with a woman. One time we were in a club after the show, and this club was just full of beautiful women. So I’m sitting at a table with him, and he wasn’t [doing nothing], and I said, ‘Sam what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Man, look at all these women, you could get any of them you want in here.’ And he just smiled, and I said, ‘Well, if you’re not going to get them, I’ll go get them [for you].’ So I find a table with the most beautiful women, and I say, ‘Would you ladies like to have a drink with me and Sam Cooke?’ So this lady says, ‘Aw, what you talking about? Sam Cooke wouldn’t be in here.’ So I took them over to the table, and the ladies went crazy, and Sam just pick whichever one he want.”

Sometimes they shared women, sometimes the women were more monogamy-minded for the night, but always the pattern remained the same: Billy made the introductions, Sam made his choice, and with the exception of the time that Billy’s girl took off in Knoxville with $400 of his money as he chased her down the street in his underwear, everyone ended up happy. Even then, Billy’s plight was at least good for laughs. “Sam had no problem with the girl he had, and he laughed at me for a week.”

A lot of the time, Billy rode with Sam in his new Cadillac limousine, keeping quiet while Sam studied his magazines or worked on his songs. Once, he persuaded Sam to ride on the bus. “Everybody couldn’t believe it. Most of the entertainers didn’t want to be around just the plain musicians, but me and Sam sat right up in the front of the bus. That’s just how he was. He was a gentleman in every respect.” Sam drank bourbon, so Billy drank bourbon, too. “At that time I’d drink anything, I’d get blasted in a minute, but [even though] he drank a lot, he always handled it well. He just got more happy, laughing and stuff. We’d sit up sometimes and kill a pint, but I never knew him to mess with marijuana or pills.”

They got to Atlanta on June 15, at the end of the second week, and Henry Wynn threw a twenty-fifth-birthday party for Jackie Wilson at his home. Henry’s nine-year-old daughter Claudia and her big sister, Henrietta, were enlisted to clean the house from top to bottom by their mother. “Polish the silverware,” Claudia recalled. “Wash the chandelier, we had cloth napkins—oh, Mama just spoiled those people!” The show was a spectacular success. Jackie had his chauffeur drive Gladys Knight and the Pips right up to the stage in the middle of the Herndon Stadium ball field so they could make a star’s entrance in their own hometown, while Jackie himself just tore the place up. “He fell on the floor with the mike,” said Claudia, “and those women attacked him. They pulled everything off him but his underwear!” But Sam, too, according to Lonnie Brooks, a blues singer from Louisiana who had come to town a couple of weeks earlier to open up the two-day fifth-anniversary celebration of Zenas Sears’ WAOK radio station, “flatfoot killed them, stood there and sung, and when he got off the bandstand, the ladies just started coming after him.” Brooks had driven out to Herndon with a cabdriver friend and watched those same ladies follow Sam as he jumped in his limo but didn’t lock the door. “So they got in, too, and he ran out the other side, got in our cab (I had never met him before), and said, ‘Do you mind if I share this cab? Drive off!’”

The tour played another four nights, then broke up with the usual mixture of good feelings and bad. They had covered Texas, the Carolinas, the mid-South, and Alabama, all in less than three weeks. Charles was still pissed off at the way his brother had been treated by Jackie, and he and Crain more than suspected that they had been shortchanged, too (“Jackie had some people working for him that wasn’t nothing but thieves. We caught them with their hands in the till”), but he was confirmed once again in his view that the straight life no longer held anything for him. “There was nothing compared to what was happening out there on that road, you know. I mean, we had a life out there.”

They all had a life, and they all got the most out of it. Everyone made fun of Billy because he liked his girls so young, but Billy didn’t notice anyone turning down his “tenders” when they became available. Everyone had their own way of doing things. Hank Ballard had an “affinity” for schoolteachers because he believed in bettering himself. Hank’s valet, Gorgeous George, so called (by Henry Wynn) because of a flamboyance in dress and manner that frequently overshadowed the stars around him and might very well have made
him
a star were it not for a discernible lack of vocal talent, had a workable theory about fat girls and the prosperity that they were eager to share with all those within their orbit.

The shows themselves were something like all-out, full-tilt medieval jousts, in which the sheer intensity of the competition was bound to lift the audience from the edge of its seat. It was a world in which experiences and emotions were tightly encapsulated, a merry-go-round that never stopped running so long as you kept having hits and one that nobody except Sam seemed to have any thought of ever getting off. If you had studied Sam closely, you might have wondered at the vague look of dissatisfaction in his eye, at the oddly dispassionate manner in which he took in everything going on around him without ever fully taking part. Observation, as Barbara had often noted, was a double-edged sword. Sometimes it seemed like Sam was looking past his immediate surroundings to a place that existed only for him, or one to which, for whatever reason, he was not able to go.

B
Y THE TIME SAM GOT BACK TO L.A.
, Barbara was pretty much running out of patience and ideas. Sam had told her she could stay in the apartment until he returned, but now that he was back, she didn’t really know what to do. He told her he just wanted her to be happy, all he wanted was for Linda and her to have a place where they could be comfortable and secure—but when it came to finding that place, he seemed to feel like he knew what would suit her better than she did herself, and every place she looked at wasn’t good enough for him. She didn’t know what else she could do. She agreed to whatever he asked of her. She had let him use her name on his songwriter credits without raising any questions about it, and now she signed a paper relinquishing all rights to the songs with equally little fuss. She knew what she wanted, and she even thought she knew what
he
wanted, but she couldn’t figure out how to get it. So she got herself a boyfriend, someone who just wanted to take care of her and Linda—it didn’t matter that he was married, he was willing to take her just as she was and set her up in a beautiful apartment of her own. She even met him in church, but there wasn’t anything surprising about that, because he was one of the biggest preachers in town.

The reason Sam wanted to get his songs back was that he was at last nearing a resolution of his legal problems with Specialty, even as he was reaching a point of crisis in his relationship with Keen. The Siamases’ lawyer, John Gray (who had also served as Sam’s and J.W.’s lawyer in various personal business of their own), had proposed a settlement to the Specialty dispute in March which Specialty owner Art Rupe seemed on the verge of accepting. In essence, it was predicated on balancing Rupe’s formal endorsement of the fiction that L.C., not Sam, had written “You Send Me” (as well as a number of Sam’s subsequent hits) with an acknowledgment by Keen that Specialty was due some form of compensation nonetheless. This would come in the form of $10,000 from the escrow account that had been set up almost two years earlier in the aftermath of the initial dispute over authorship and, more pertinently, publishing. Art Rupe forever gave up all claim to Sam’s songs but in turn was granted the right to release one last single by Sam (with an upgraded artist’s royalty of 3 1/2 percent) from the unreleased tapes from the 1956 New Orleans session. Specialty would get the publishing on the two songs that made up the single, plus two others already released, once a standard songwriter’s contract, worth twice what Sam had originally agreed to, had been executed with L.C. Finally, Bumps, who had been brought in as a party to the lawsuit by both sides, was to receive $10,038.70 as the sum total of any and all monies due him through December 31, 1958, and give up “any and all [future] rights which he may have in the copyrights and ownership to any musical selections or compositions” subsequent to that date. It was a well-crafted agreement in which everyone came away with something, and after a rocky beginning, Art’s lawyer, Dave Pollock, ended up with a lot of respect for John Gray, who had been instrumental in bringing the parties together. But by the end of July, when the agreement had reached its final stages, Sam had a new lawyer and a new agenda.