Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (55 page)

Sam and Barbara at home: Leimert Park, 1960.

Photographs by Jess Rand, © Michael Ochs Archives.com

For Sam there was no question of the distance he had traveled in the two years since “You Send Me” had been released. He had only to look in the mirror to measure the difference, he had only to look around him to see all that he had gained. He drove around in the Corvette and stopped by the Specialty office in Hollywood to see Art Rupe. Art asked him how he was doing, and he just reached in his pocket and took out a big roll of bills. He could tell Art got the message, and he could see the way Art looked down his nose at him—but what the fuck was Art looking down his nose about? What made him think he was better than anybody else? Sam knew he was just after the same thing that Sam was.

For Christmas that year, he sent out a card that he designed himself. The front showed a crooner of indeterminate race, with a bow tie, formal striped pants, and a microphone that looked like a vertical arrow, from which emanated, as though wafting on a breeze, a general-purpose “Season’s Greetings,” along with the song titles “You Send Me,” “Summertime,” and “Tammy.” Then on the left inside the card, a somewhat comical-looking crown sits atop an escutcheon bearing the initials “SC,” while, on the right, a tiny white tuxedo-jacketed figure, arms extended, darker, and more proportionally drawn, offers an eighth-note-dotted rendition of the single line, “You Send Me,” with the seasonal greeting conveyed in a carefully practiced but distinctly amateur calligraphic hand.

May the

Coming year

Be your greatest

One that

REALLY SENDS YOU

And signed at the bottom: “Sam, Barbara & Linda Cooke.”

Having Fun in the Record Business

S
AM MET HUGO AND LUIGI
for the first time shortly after the start of the new year. He was playing a series of East Coast dates prior to his initial RCA session and stopped by on instructions from Jess to meet the men who would now be guiding his fate in the studio.

The two cousins sat facing each other across large matching desks, with visitors (who were placed in the middle) reduced to turning their heads back and forth, like spectators at a tennis match. Luigi at thirty-eight was the younger by five years and the more outgoing of the two. Hugo, with his pencil-thin mustache and pronounced resemblance to the British actor David Niven, had more of a continental air, but the two of them were not above changing the nameplates on their desks to the confusion of the unwary visitor or, strictly for their own amusement, switching off on the telephone without the caller ever becoming any the wiser. And occasionally they greeted visitors while standing on their heads, an outgrowth of the yoga study they had begun several years earlier.

Although they were first cousins and had known each other since childhood from big family gatherings, they only met as adults at a piano recital given by Luigi’s oldest brother, Ezio, in 1948. Hugo, a veteran of the Charlie Barnet and Guy Lombardo bands, was playing trumpet in the pit orchestra of the Broadway show
Hellzapoppin’,
while Luigi, an aspiring writer (his war novel,
This World Is Mine,
had been published the year before to good reviews but poor sales by Rinehart, the same publisher who, despite misgivings about the market for another war novel, was about to bring out Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
), had been working as a speechwriter for the fledgling United Nations and doing independent publicity work. They went out for coffee after the concert, and Hugo proposed that since Luigi was a writer, maybe he could write some lyrics for the children’s records that Hugo and his wife, the singer June Winters, were just beginning to put out.

Sam with Hugo (left) and Luigi.

Courtesy of ABKCO

That was the start of their partnership. It was ironic that Luigi should not have been at least an equal musical contributor, since his father, Giuseppe, known as “The Great Creatore,” was a contemporary and rival of John Philip Sousa who had come over from Naples in 1902 at the age of thirty-one to play the recently opened Steel Pier in Atlantic City. He had subsequently gone on to record for RCA with great success and traveled the country with a fifty-piece band he brought over from Italy and his own personal barber. Alone among his siblings, though, Luigi had shown no gift for formal musical training, and, in fact, for his eleventh birthday, in 1932, when the family had fallen into impoverished circumstances, his father gave him a present of inestimable value: “He said to me, ‘From now on you don’t have to take any music lessons. That’s your birthday present.’ I don’t remember what I got for my tenth birthday, but I remember what I got for my eleventh!”

He and Hugo quickly learned to operate independently, writing, producing, and selling their children’s records on their own (“If we wanted to do something, we did it,” said Luigi, “because if you ask people to let you do it, it doesn’t happen”), and Luigi soon discovered that while he possessed no formal musical talent per se, he did have an ear for what worked. He and Hugo were able to support their families through their freelance endeavors, but then they came to the attention of Mercury Records in Chicago, and, after a brief stint in the children’s division, in 1954 they were offered the opportunity to run Mercury’s pop department in New York. The salary was only $75 a week, but they jumped at the chance.

They had hits with Georgia Gibbs and Sarah Vaughan right off the bat, then in 1955 topped the charts with two cleaned-up covers by Georgia Gibbs of r&b hits by LaVern Baker (“Tweedle Dee”) and Etta James (“The Wallflower,” otherwise known as “Dance With Me Henry”). From their point of view a hit was a hit, they were as proud of taking Sarah Vaughan pop (“Nobody ever heard her sing like that,” said Luigi. “That’s what we did. We did pop”) as they were of mining the r&b field for Georgia Gibbs. “In those days if anything stirred, you covered it—bam! We weren’t making art. We weren’t doing anything like that. We were making records to sell.” And they were having fun doing it. They had the perfect partnership. They had the perfect perspective. If a record failed, it was only a record. “Sometimes,” Luigi said, “Hugo and I used to close the door to our office and get hysterical laughing, we were having so much fun.”

In early 1957 they went into the newly formed Roulette record company in partnership with twenty-nine-year-old Morris Levy, a ubiquitous figure in the music world, known for his extensive Mafia associations, his explicit strong-arm tactics, and his ownership of the legendary Times Square jazz club Birdland, the home of bebop. For an investment of $1,000 they acquired 50 percent of the label and a free hand in running it, and although they were aware that Morris was “connected,” they took the view that his “connections” had nothing to do with them and, furthermore, that Morris, who for all his crudeness could charm, as well as threaten, the birds out of the trees, was a “diamond in the rough.” When two years later RCA made them an offer they couldn’t very well turn down ($100,000 salary apiece for the next five years; their own floor in the RCA building; their own promotion staff), they had no hesitation in going to Morris and telling him of their good fortune. He said, “Okay, give me back my stock.” Which, for their original investment of $1,000, they did, wisely choosing not to calculate any appreciation in its value and going with his blessing.

They liked Sam from the start. He was polite and personable, well aware of their track record, and, though he seemed a little shy at first, affable enough that they were confident he had what it took. But they had to find him a hit. As Luigi saw it: “We knew he was talented. We knew he had one pop hit, ‘You Send Me.’ But the others didn’t seem [like] such hits to us, because they were within the r&b field. They were not pop hits, which is what we made.”

They had gotten some songs together in preparation for the session, and Hugo sat down at the piano to play them for Sam. Sam started humming along, but his voice cracked. “He said, ‘I got a little kind of cold.’ We said, ‘Okay,’ and Hugo said, ‘Why don’t you look at this?’ Then he started to sing the other thing, and he cracked again. I said, ‘Shit, they sent us the wrong guy!’ So that kind of broke the ice, and I don’t know whether we picked anything out that night or we met again, but [at some point] he said, ‘You know, I write.’ We said, ‘Yeah? Have you got anything?’ So he sang a couple of songs that we were not impressed with. They didn’t sound like hits.” Then, perhaps stung by their indifference and driven by his own pride, he sang part of a song he had put together with Charles while they were out on tour the previous year. He had just about persuaded Charles to record the song for SAR and was dismayed when Hugo said right away, “Let’s do that one.” Sam protested weakly that the song wasn’t finished yet, but the two cousins just said, “Well, go finish it, then. Because that’s a sound.”

B
UT THE JANUARY 25
session did not go as smoothly as everyone had hoped. Hugo and Luigi had hired Johnny Mathis’ new musical director, Glenn Osser, one of their favorite string arrangers and someone with whom they had worked since the Roulette days, to conduct and do the orchestrations. With their careful approach to preproduction (“We were not the kind of producers who left things to chance”), they had gone over each of the five songs they had okayed for the session (including three standards and Sam’s original composition) with both Sam and the musicians. Sam had picked out the other original, “Teenage Sonata,” at an audition by the songwriter himself in Hugo and Luigi’s office.

“He loved the song,” said Jeff Barry, twenty-one at the time and just breaking into the music business both as a writer for E.B. Marks Music and as a singer recently signed to RCA by Hugo and Luigi. “I had never done anything like that before, played a song for a real live artist, and especially one like Sam Cooke. I sat at the piano and played this real slow ballad, and when I was finished, I turned around on the piano stool, and the publisher said, ‘Anybody want to hear it again?’ And, you know, the silence in the room was deafening, [but] Sam Cooke said, ‘Yeah, I want to hear it again.’ It wasn’t like I was some big established writer. He just loved the song. It had a certain charm and innocence, I guess.”

In the studio, though, it turned out to be hard to get that charm and innocence across, whether because of the arrangement (the strings sounded shrill, never blending in with Sam’s voice) or the vocal itself, which, however practiced, precise and professional, failed to achieve the warmth of a Sam Cooke original on Keen. Or maybe it was just the transparent attempt to cash in on two markets. “Teenage Sonata” was, as the title suggests, a direct appeal to the teen demographic while at the same time an attempt to elevate the subject much in the same way that Hugo and Luigi recently had with Della Reese’s “Don’t You Know” (derived from Puccini’s
La Bohème
) and Jackie Wilson would three weeks later with an operatic rendering of a melody from Saint-Saëns’
Samson and Delilah
called, in its English adaptation, “Night.”

In any case, they quit on it after five takes (it was, after all, a very simple song, and there was no point, they reasoned, in beating a dead horse into the ground) and went on to Sam’s song, which was as odd in every way, including provenance, as “Teenage Sonata” was conventional. “Chain Gang” stemmed from a very specific scene that Sam and Charles had witnessed in the Carolinas several months earlier. “We was driving along the highway, man,” said Charles, “and we saw these people working on a chain gang on the side of the road. They asked us, ‘You got any cigarettes?’ So we gave them the cigarettes we had. Then we got down the road about three or four miles, and we saw a store. Sam said, ‘Go in there and get some cigarettes for them fellows’—you understand? To take back to them. So I went in the store and bought five or six cartons, and we carried them back to the dudes that was working on the gang, it wasn’t but a few miles—and I asked the guard if it was all right to give them the cigarettes, and they thanked us, and that was it. And Sam said, ‘Man, that’s a good song. Right there.’ And just started singing, and then we went to the hotel and I put in a few words, and Sam said, ‘Why don’t you do it, man?’ But he was so good singing it I never did.”