Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (70 page)

He pitched the song excitedly to Dee Clark in the dressing room after the show. Dee hadn’t had a hit since “Raindrops,” number two on the pop charts the previous summer, and Sam felt like the new tune was perfectly suited to him. But Dee, who had covered a couple of Sam’s songs already, couldn’t hear it no matter how many times Sam played it for him—he said it just wasn’t for him. So Sam called Luigi and sang the song for him over the phone along with “Having a Party,” another new number he had just written. Luigi was instantly sold and set up an L.A. recording session in two weeks, once Sam told Henry Wynn that he was going to have to take a brief break from the tour.

The atmosphere at the April 26 session matched the title of Sam’s second song. The Sims Twins were there at Sam’s invitation to sing backup. So was Lou Rawls. Sam and Alex’s lawyer/advisor Walter Hurst, was present, along with Sugar Hall and Fred Smith, the former Keen assistant a&r man who with his songwriting partner, Cliff Goldsmith, had had one hit after another from “Western Movies” on. Zelda wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and Alex remained constantly by Sam’s side, but it was a surprise to RCA engineer Al Schmitt to see Barbara, too, an occasional visitor at best and one who did not always contribute an upbeat note. Tonight, though, she was just one more part of an uninhibitedly festive mood. “It was a very happy session,” said Schmitt, a twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker who had grown up in his uncle’s recording studio. “Everybody was just having a ball. We were getting people out there [on the floor], and some of the outtakes were hilarious, there was so much ad lib that went on.”

They started with “Having a Party,” the “lighter” of the two songs, written in the reportorial manner of “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha” and “Twistin’ the Night Away,” except that this one injected a more personal note. René had assembled an eighteen-piece backing group composed of six violins, two violas, two cellos, and a sax, plus a seven-piece rhythm section that included two percussionists, two bassists, two guitars, and a piano.

It opens with Cliff’s countryish guitar brightly echoed by the violins, then, as Sam’s voice comes in, the cellos and violas supply a mournful counterpoint to the vocal. “We’re having a party,” Sam declares in a deliberate, almost wistful way:

Dancing to the music

Played by the DJ

On the radio

The Cokes are in the icebox

Popcorn’s on the table

Me and my baby

We’re out here on the floor.

The tempo picks up a little as they run through a dozen takes, with Lou’s voice joining in on the chorus, just out of synch enough to suggest spontaneity but totally attuned to Sam’s lead. “So, Mister, Mister DJ,” the two of them sing together, as though recalling times that would be no more, “Keep those records playing / ’Cause I’m having such a good time / Dancing with my baby.” The sax takes its second solo on the outro, while the strings, almost unnoticed, keep up their stately threnody and Sam and Lou go out over the instrumental with a recapitulation of the song’s original message.

It was, as engineer Al Schmitt said, a happy, feel-good kind of session, and as they listened to the playback of the twelfth take, Barbara and Sugar Hall started to do a slow twist, and J.W. and some of the musicians joined in. Then they overdubbed the additional voices and hand claps of just about everyone in the room, and the music swelled and took on an almost anthemic quality—it had all the uncalculated fervor that defines a group of people who have lived through good times and bad times together and cherish the good times despite the near-certain knowledge that they are not going to last. Except that this was calculated, and calibrated, down to the last rough harmony. “These were easy, natural things,” Luigi said, but it’s doubtful that Sam would have agreed.

The bittersweet mood of “Having a Party” seemed to merely set the stage for the second song, the Charles Brown-inspired “Bring It On Home to Me.” The song opened with piano and drums taking the lead and Lou dueting with Sam in the foreground as Sam declares in full gospel mode:

If you ever

Change your mind

About leaving, leaving me behind

Ohh, bring it to me

Bring your sweet lovin’

Bring it on home to me.

Then the strings come in with their by now familiar undercurrent of melancholy, and Sam goes into the call-and-response that is the heart of the song (this was something notably absent from the much smoother Charles Brown original) as he emphasizes his message with a forceful “Yeah,” and a chorus that now includes J.W., Fred Smith, and probably the Sims Twins in addition to Lou, delivers an equally forceful response. “We were after the Soul Stirrers-type thing,” said René Hall, “trying to create that flavor in a rhythm and blues recording.” It was, said J.W., an entirely conscious decision. “We felt that light shit wouldn’t sustain him. We felt he needed more weight.”

They nearly got it all in one take. This was the closest Sam had come to the classic gospel give-and-take he had once created with Paul Foster, and the only adjustment that he chose to make on the second, and final, take was the decision to use Lou alone as the echoing voice and dispense altogether with the background chorus. What comes through is a rare moment of undisguised emotion, an unambiguous embrace not just of a cultural heritage but of an adult experience far removed from white teenage fantasy. There was nothing to add or subtract. There was no thought on Luigi’s part of trying to fit in another song or extend the session. He was convinced by now that Sam knew his own talent best. And he was equally convinced that they had a pair of hits on their hands.

Sam rejoined the Supersonic tour two days later in Birmingham, where, for the first time, the
Birmingham World
reported, Rickwood Field employed “Negro citizens [as] ticket-takers, handlers, and sellers” after it had been suggested that, without such measures, the show “could possibly prove a financial flop.” There was a new kind of pride in the air and a new kind of proclamation. Sam’s “natural” hairstyle was finally beginning to catch on (“People used to say to him, ‘Why don’t you get a haircut?’” said June Gardner, who had wondered the same thing himself when he first joined in 1960. “All this was virgin territory at the time”), and a few months later, the
Philadelphia Tribune
defined “soul,” a term confined for the most part at this point to the downhome instrumental sounds of jazz musicians Bobby Timmons, Horace Silver, and Cannonball Adderly, as “the word of the hour . . . a spiritual return to the sources, [an] emotional intensity and rhythmic drive [that] comes from childhood saturation in Negro gospel music.” “Oh, we all heard it,” said onetime “Wonder Boy Preacher” Solomon Burke, a lifelong Soul Stirrers devotee who had positioned himself somewhere between Sam and Brother Joe May in his own persuasive style, of Sam’s new soul sound. “Pop audiences heard that yodel . . . like it was a shiny new thing. But if you knew Sam from gospel, it was him saying, ‘Hey, it’s me.’”

And when he left for the West Indies with Barbara and Linda just five days later for the start of a two-week tour, he finally had a band of his own.

T
HE TOUR WAS BILLED
as Sam Cooke’s
Twistin’ the Night Away Revue,
Featuring the Upsetters, who had been teamed with Little Willie John until just a few months earlier. Sam had had his eye on them ever since first touring with Willie in October of 1960, but he hadn’t made a move until Willie, never a model of professional or personal responsibility, proved no longer capable of maintaining a band and the Upsetters had gone out on their own. The band was built around a core of two or three saxophones, a trumpet, keyboards, and a rhythm section whose bass player, Olsie Robinson (known as “Bassy”), Sam would put to work with Clif and June. They were a show band who could do a strong set of their own with unison steps, costume changes, and instrument twirls, and, more important, once Clif schooled them, they should be able to deliver the rhythmic kick and tonal variety he was looking for to put the music across. Crain objected strongly to their addition, it would only add an unnecessary expense, he said, for something that would not translate into either greater ticket sales or higher ticket prices, but Sam was not about to be deterred by anything as immaterial as money. He was prepared to pay anything it took, he told his brother Charles, to get that sound behind him.

Sam, Barbara, and Linda arrive in the West Indies, May 1962.

Courtesy of ABKCO

The show was as big a hit as ever at The Cat ’n’ the Fiddle in Montego Bay. Sam was hailed as “Sweet Man” everywhere he went, and drummer June Gardner was once again led to wonder at Sam’s uncanny ability to mix with beggars and kings, as he proved himself equally at home with stagehands, bellboys, and the aristocracy of island life. But, as Barbara was well aware by now, Sam set his own limits. She was having a good time on her second Bahamian trip. The worst problem she had encountered so far was that Linda got so covered with mosquito bites that they wanted to quarantine the child until they could be sure it wasn’t anything contagious. Then one night after the show, a nice-looking man offered to take Sam and her to the club where he was singing, and he made the mistake of trying to pay her a compliment. “You have a lovely wife,” was all the man said to her husband, but that was it. Sam grabbed her by the arm, took her back to the hotel, and beat the living hell out of her because, he said, she had been flirting with the guy. She couldn’t understand it coming from a whorehopper like him. All that poor man was trying to do was to compliment
you,
she told Sam. But the fool wouldn’t listen, the only thing that stopped him was that Linda woke up and started crying. He stormed out then, and she was left to console her daughter until Crain arrived and looked at her and just shook his head. She knew Sam had sent him, she knew Sam felt bad. He alternately tried to comfort her and dissuade her from leaving. Sammy had had too much to drink, he hadn’t meant to do this, Crain said, he was sure Sam was sorry. Barbara had stopped crying by now. She knew she wasn’t perfect, she didn’t doubt that she had given her husband reason to be disappointed in her, and she recognized, finally, that she could never be all that he wanted her to be—but that freed her, too. Because there was nothing more he could do to her. He was only educating her to hurt him as much as he had hurt her.

For Sam it was an encounter with an identity that he would never willingly have chosen to reveal, even to himself. He was deeply embarrassed, and deeply ashamed, but there was nothing to do about it other than to pretend that it had never happened. Crain was loyal, the people around him were loyal, and he believed deep down that Barbara was loyal, too. But he no longer knew if he could make this marriage work. He had believed so strongly that he could. He had believed that, with the right approach, he could turn Barbara into just what he wanted her to be, the girl who knew everything about him and understood—
the one.
He didn’t know anything to do but to go on. It was a situation he no longer knew how to control.

S
AM TOOK JOHNNIE MORISETTE
out on tour with him in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana when he got back. Johnnie’s single, released in late January, had just crested at number eighteen on the r&b charts and number sixty-three pop, and Alex had finally put out Johnnie Taylor’s “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day.” The Sims Twins joined Sam, Johnnie Morisette, and the Upsetters on a few dates. They were always a hit in person, “Soothe Me” invariably got the crowd, but it was proving difficult to get them a follow-up, and Sam was beginning to suspect that they might be too hardheaded, and insufficiently disciplined, to adapt to the rigors of studio recording. The Valentinos’ record was the one he and Alex were counting on, anyway. Sam was convinced that with their youthful good looks, high-energy stage act, and eager educability, they could be stars of a magnitude that none of his other artists could even imagine.

The road was a little too much of the straight-and-narrow for Johnnie Morisette, especially with a string of whores back home to worry about. “I was living in California, used to all that good shit, [and] back in them days, they’d give a nigger ten years for a roach, you dig? You’d go through Mississippi in one of them new cars, they pull you out and beat you damn near to death. Stay in fleaboxes, eat out of little stores on the highway, be onstage singing, and you’d be funky as a motherfucker, ’cause you had to ride all day to make the job. I couldn’t cut that shit.” Still, Sam didn’t stint on anything, and Sam was not above having a good time himself. “Everything he did, he did first class. But he was a businessman, business come before pleasure with Sam.” When they played the Howard in D.C. in mid-May, Sam furnished Johnnie with all of his arrangements for a ten-piece band, and when they played Baltimore’s Royal Theater the following week, Sam surprised him with a red-and-gold Cadillac for his upcoming birthday. Which gave Johnnie such a kick he missed one of the scheduled shows just driving around.