Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (56 page)

The song was nothing like the experience itself, emerging from Sam’s imagination utterly transformed. Despite its grim subject matter, it was, as Atlantic Records vice president Jerry Wexler would observe, an almost “happy-sounding song,” in which the prisoner’s imagined homecoming (“Mmm-hmmm, I’m going home / One of these days I’m going home / See my woman / Whom I love so dear / But meanwhile I’ve got to work right here”) overrides the cruel realities of the situation. Musically, you might have thought that Sam would choose a blues form, but instead, he sets the song to a jaunty Caribbean beat punctuated by the kind of grunts that just a year before had gotten Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” banned by many of the more squeamish radio stations. Here the grunts are presumably sex-free, stemming from the efforts of men at hard labor and punctuated by the hammering sound of a piece of pipe against a metal mike stand, with Sam’s voice incongruously riding over the melody as though he were crooning a love song.

All the elements were present (“We tried so many different things,” said Luigi, “[to get] that anvil sound”), but somehow it still didn’t work. They went through twelve takes with slight adjustments of lyrics and phrasing; once again the arrangement may not have been altogether right, but Sam’s enunciation was precise, each take possesses the same lilting charm, the same confident, conversational tone—and, indeed, it would be difficult for the casual listener to distinguish among them. What is missing is that indefinable sense of grace which Sam is ordinarily able to convey with the slightest inflection, what is missing is the sense that he is at home in his surroundings. So, after three and one-half hours, Hugo and Luigi called a halt to the session without a single song completed. They took a philosophical view: it had certainly happened before. “You know, many times we started with an artist,” said Luigi, “and the first session didn’t happen, [because] you have to know what would be good for them, you have to feel what is peculiar about their voice that if you put it with this song, it would make it. And you have to understand that as an artist they have their feelings, so you develop [those] feelings. You don’t tell them, ‘Don’t do that. Do this.’ You don’t give them orders, because it doesn’t work.”

Above all, they tried to avoid any suggestion of failure, not really all that difficult given the upbeat nature of their personalities and partnership. They had gotten the feel down, they told Sam. There was no point in wearing it out. They could just pick it up again in three days’ time.

And so they did. They ran through two new numbers, an English-language adaptation of a Jacques Brel ballad and an old Perry Como chestnut, before returning to “Teenage Sonata,” which Sam now polished off with a couple of vocal overdubs. Tellingly, the principal difference between the master take and the previous day’s efforts lies almost entirely in the outro (Sam’s instantly recognizable yodel occupies most of the soaring fade of the final version, which in earlier takes was filled primarily with clumsy verbal protestations). They finished with yet another undistinguished ballad, but at this point it didn’t matter. Hugo and Luigi had their single. There was still lots of work to do, with the record release date just weeks away, and the producers’ next immediate priority was to cut an album on Sam for the adult record-buying audience. There was no great hurry about getting back to that peculiar original of his.

S
AM WAS IN THE STUDIO AGAIN
just three weeks later, back in Los Angeles, but this time as producer, not artist. “The Patsy,” the
General Electric Theater
drama he had filmed with Sammy Davis Jr., had aired the night before and gotten him plenty of attention in the black press but no critical raves. It was a small part, and Sam could not have failed to be aware of the awkwardness of a performance whose chief virtue, and chief defect, was his own winsome charm (Sammy, by way of contrast, played a kind of holy fool with impassioned belief)—but Jess was confident it was bound to lead to bigger things, and so far everything Jess had told him had come true. With Sammy having just completed a movie in Las Vegas called
Ocean’s 11
with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and Jess’ new production company with Jeff Chandler about to get under way, who knew what the future might hold in store?

The February 22 session was Alex’s idea. They had had no additional SAR sessions since cutting the Soul Stirrers in September, and Alex had long contended that Kylo Turner, his old lead singer for the Pilgrim Travelers, was a prime candidate for crossover success. So they wrote some new songs for a pop session, contacted René to do the arrangements, and put together a rhythm section consisting of Clif, premier studio bassist Red Callender, and drummer Earl Palmer, along with a chorus made up of Alex and Gaynel Hodge and fellow Turks alumnus Tommy “Buster” Williams, and a full string section. But then Kylo showed up in a state of such insobriety that even J.W. had to admit defeat. And all they were left with were some instrumental tracks with a vocal chorus, a couple of barely usable vocals by Kylo, and scratch vocals on two songs that would have to be replaced.

Then Sam ran into Johnnie Morisette.

Johnnie Morisette, known professionally as Johnnie “Two Voice” for his propensity for establishing a dialogue between his natural voice and a throaty falsetto register, had started out with the Bells of Heaven in Mobile, Alabama. He had first met Sam at the Twilight Café on Davis Avenue, a regular hangout for every entertainer who passed through Mobile and every jitterbug in town. Sam had just joined the Soul Stirrers. He was twenty, and Johnnie some four years younger but already an impressive street personality with a powerful imagination of his own (one of his more fruitful imaginative exercises was the composition of his own biography, which placed his birth sometimes on “Montu Island” in the South Pacific, sometimes in American Samoa). Sam was immediately taken with him, and continued to be upon Johnnie’s arrival in L.A., where he combined a singing career (for the Specialty label, among others) with a street life, leading to the logical sobriquet “The Singing Pimp.” He had, as J.W. observed, a genuine aptitude for pimping. He was handsome, free-wheeling, and bold. But he was a talented singer, too, and it was only natural that Sam would think of him in that regard when he ran into Johnnie coming out of a breakfast club called Master’s.

They hadn’t seen each other in a while, and they had some catching up to do. Johnnie brought Sam up to date about his string of girls, while Sam told Johnnie about his new record label. As a matter of fact, Sam said, he had a couple of songs he thought might be just right for Johnnie. So they went over to René’s office on Selma, and Sam played him the two instrumental dubs from Kylo’s session, with voices and full string section—which definitely impressed Johnnie that Sam and J.W. meant business.

Then Sam picked up a guitar and started singing the words to one of the dubs, an “answer song” that he and J.W. had written to his own Specialty hit “I’ll Come Running Back to You.” Johnnie said, “Yeah, I like that,” and they decided right then and there that Johnnie Morisette was going to be SAR’s newest star. Within days they were at Radio Recorders to put Johnnie’s voice on the two tracks. Sam had to explain to Johnnie about overdubbing, because “I had never heard of that. I’m looking at this big studio, and he said he didn’t want nobody there but us. Damn, I’m used to singing in front of a crowd!” But he nailed the “answer song,” “I’ll
Never
Come Running Back to You,” fitting his energetically bluesy voice into its peculiar combination of a childlike New Orleans melody, a cha-cha beat, marching band-style drums, vocal chorus, and percussive strings. It was the kind of big pop sound that Hugo and Luigi had spoken about putting behind Sam—but with none of the awkward concessions to bland emulsification that you hear on Sam’s session. On the second number, J.W.’s secular adaptation of the old spiritual “Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” it is just gospel with strings, as Johnnie sings in his theatrical second voice, and Sam lets him adlib an outro that feels so good it ends in a laugh. All in all, it was the kind of record that Sam and Alex hoped they could keep on putting out, one on which they could proudly emblazon the assurance that it had been made “Under the Personal Supervision of Sam Cooke and J.W. Alexander.” “We felt like we could do things ourselves that were taboo to a company like RCA. It was all about people, really,” said J.W. “We just recorded people that we more or less liked.”

S
AM WAS BACK ON THE ROAD
in March but still able to fit in recording sessions for the two “theme”-oriented albums that Hugo and Luigi had conceived for him.
Cooke’s Tour,
with songs like “London By Night,” “Under Paris Skies,” and “Arrivederci, Roma,” was a standard variation on Frank Sinatra’s 1958
Come Fly With Me,
while
Hits of the ’50s
could just as easily have been called
Hits From Your Father’s ’50s.
It was the time-honored strategy for broadening an r&b singer’s appeal by reaching out to a mainstream white audience (“Albums weren’t really a factor in the black market,” said Shelby Singleton, soon to become Clyde McPhatter’s producer at Mercury), though with the exception of Ray Charles, who was just beginning to sell albums on a consistent basis to his white fans, the crossover-album approach had never really worked for any major r&b star.

“Where is the good new music?” was the question on the lips of every “sensitive citizen,” according to Hugo and Luigi’s liner notes for the second record. “Where are the good young singers? Well, this album gives the answer.” And, indeed, in the liner notes to each LP, they tried to point sensitive ears toward a genuine appreciation of “a new style of singing [which] might be described as playing with a melody or a series of notes (but always coming back to the original melodic strain) in order to heighten an effect.” But whatever their good intentions, artistic or commercial, nothing could mask the sessions’ uninspired point of origin, and Sam’s “simplicity and directness” were almost drowned in the sludge of Glenn Osser’s arrangements. It might be argued that Sam’s voice occasionally rose above the tawdriness of its surroundings, but the tawdriness was the single inescapable factor.

“Teenage Sonata” came out in early February, supported by a full-page ad in
Billboard
saluting Sam Cooke’s “Glorious Golden 60’s Debut on RCA Victor.” A month later it had barely cracked the charts and never got any higher than number fifty pop while lingering only two weeks on the r&b charts. “You Understand Me,” the throwaway final ballad from the second session, was released as the follow-up single in the first week of April and never made the charts at all. Meanwhile the “demo” version of “Wonderful World,” the collaboration with Lou Adler and Herb Alpert that Sam had recorded at Keen more than a year earlier, had just been discovered by label owner John Siamas among the tracks that Sam had left behind. It came out on Keen the same week as the second RCA single and quickly rose to number twelve pop and number two r&b, his best overall showing since “You Send Me” and one that easily outsold both RCA singles combined.

This couldn’t help but add to the pressure Hugo and Luigi were already feeling from the RCA executive committee downstairs (“They met once a week in a boardroom and played the records that were going to be released,” said Luigi, whose general opinion of the RCA higher-ups was that they were “unhelpful, unimaginative, and uncooperative, a lot of ‘uns’”). And it could only exacerbate the resentment that Sam and J.W. were feeling toward Keen, who, in the same way that Specialty Records had once ridden Sam’s Keen success, were now riding, not to mention threatening, Sam’s good fortune in signing with RCA—and still not paying him. Sam and Alex had already initiated another lawsuit against the Siamases a few weeks earlier, this time for $8,000 in publishing money that was owed to Kags and close to $5,000 in artist royalties that had accrued to Sam since the December settlement. But now the matter seemed to be taking on an even greater urgency of its own.

S
AM HAD A TWO-WEEK
Supersonic Attractions tour for Henry Wynn coming up in mid-April, then a month of theater and club bookings, and various other dates that would keep him busy through mid-August. Before setting off on his four months of touring, though, he went back into the studio for a singles session with Hugo and Luigi on April 13.

It was a different kind of session. To begin with, instead of an orchestra, the producers had assembled a rhythm section made up of New York session stalwarts, with Clif, as always, supplying the solid underpinning, and Hugo pitching in on organ. Perhaps because of the absence of strings and horns, they used a different arranger, and, more significantly, Sam brought all the songs to the session. One in particular, “Sad Mood,” sounded to Hugo and Luigi like it could be a smash, but after four takes, they recognized that the feel wasn’t right and set it aside. For all of its differences, the session would have been counted no more of a success than its predecessors had it not been for one central element: they completed “Chain Gang.”

They used the twelfth take from the January session as the instrumental master, and Sam ran through three vocal overdubs, each gaining in mastery and assurance (“Oh wow,” Sam declares as he breaks off the second with an easy peal of laughter) until he sails through the last as if there could never have been any doubt. Once again much of the difference appears in the fade, where Sam’s improvisational skills are fully engaged and the length of the song is increased by a full nine seconds, but the subtle alterations he has made to the lyrics (no longer are these prisoners at hard labor “thinking of their women at home / In their silken gowns”; instead, they are “working on the highways and byways / And wearing a frown”) further add to a recalibration of sound and meaning that can neither be precisely defined nor denied.