Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (75 page)

Lithofayne Pridgon with James Brown, ca. 1962.

Courtesy of Lithofayne Pridgon

Hugo and Luigi came to see him at the Apollo and were knocked out by the new show. They planned for a singles session in Hollywood at the end of the month, with a new friend of Sam’s, busy New York arranger Horace Ott (whom Sam had met through Ott’s “cousin,” the up-and-coming young r&b singer and songwriter Don Covay) handling the orchestrations. They talked about an album of standards along the lines of Ray Charles’ recent efforts, and Sam thought he might like to use Ott for that, too—get himself a new studio sound, even as he was changing his whole stage act around. The only real fly in the ointment was the performance of the Upsetters, whose insistence on reinforcing their reputation as a premier “show band” was more and more in conflict with Sam’s vision of their role. “One of the fellows wanted to sing all the time,” said Charles, “and Sam said, ‘I don’t need no singer.’” The trumpet player never stopped talking, the bass player wasn’t picking up on Sam’s cues, and the way June saw it, the group was more concerned with its own act than they were with Sam’s. This was the first time Sam had had a chance to directly observe King Curtis’ band, the Kingpins, and they were a tight little unit—but, just as important, the way Sam figured it, they could not have become the number-one session band in New York City if they didn’t have the willingness, and the musical versatility, to deliver exactly what was asked of them. So he started talking with Curtis, an articulate, outgoing twenty-eight-year-old Texan with a passion for gambling, he asked him if he might not like to come out with them, playing behind Sam and with a featured spot in the show. At first Curtis said there was no way he could
afford
to go on the road with all the session work he had coming in—but, he said, it sounded like fun. He liked Sam, and he hit it off with Sam’s brother, Charlie, too, they played dice and cards backstage every night, as Charles told him about the good times they could have together out on the road.

S
AM HAD BEEN TOURING
for almost six months now, but he continued to take additional bookings. He appeared on
The Tonight Show,
with its brand-new host, Johnny Carson, a week after finishing at the Apollo, and he played a WAOK benefit in Atlanta with L.C., which station owner Zenas Sears recorded and tried to sell to RCA. It was a wonderful performance, said Sears, who had recorded the classic Atlantic album
Ray Charles Live
under similar circumstances in 1959 at Herndon Stadium, but what made it special was the way that Sam addressed the kids, “just talking to [them] and doing these gospel changes, it was the nicest thing.” He had a new driver, Clarence Watley, who had been driving for the Five Blind Boys of Alabama for years and was put in charge of the band station wagon while Charles continued to drive the Cadillac. Watley knew the road. “He didn’t need no map,” said Charles. “He was the best road man I ever run into.”

The Valentinos joined the tour after completing their stint with James Brown. Their initial week with James at the Apollo, while Sam was still in England, had provided all the educational opportunities Sam had said it would, in terms of both life and music. Bobby Womack and his brothers had arrived in New York City looking like country cousins, Bobby said, “we done just drove all the way, and we ain’t got but about a hundred dollars in our pocket, and we see this big old white chick standing out in front of the hotel. I paid the woman for me and all my brothers, but I was the last one that wanted to fuck with it, to be honest, ’cause I didn’t even know where to put it. I think she washed up [two of my] brothers, and they was just gone. So I told her, ‘I don’t want to be washed. I want the real thing.’ But two days later, man, we thought we were dying, we couldn’t piss. Solomon Burke was on that show—he used to cook chicken backstage, charge you a dollar for a sandwich, man, he could turn out the house, but he’d always be late getting onstage, because he was, ‘I can’t come now. The chicken is gonna burn!’—and we went to him, told him it was somebody else that was sick, and instead of helping us, man, he scared the living daylights out of us. He said, ‘Aw, man, tell that boy it ain’t that bad. The first two days just all your teeth start to fall out. But on the
fourth
day, when your eyes start to decay, that’s key—’cause then you can’t see!’ He finally let us off the hook and said, ‘Y’all have the claps. Go to the clinic, and they’ll get you straightened out. But I’ll tell you one thing, you got to learn to keep your dick in your pants.’”

They didn’t know they could draw on their salary, so when they ran out of money, they stole bread and bologna from the store around the corner. “I mean, we didn’t know anything, we were getting burned left and right.”

But their greatest education came in the field of music. They arrived in New York, thrilled that the Apollo band, with its full eight-piece horn section, would be playing behind them. Bobby found a guy in Cleveland, “he said, ‘I write music,’ and I had him write me the chord changes on the song and then [make] about thirteen copies, and we passed them all out to everybody onstage. And the horn player said, ‘I got a guitar part.’ Somebody else say, ‘
I
got a guitar part.’
Everybody
got a guitar part. And James come out and say, ‘Who did the arrangements?’ I said, ‘I did. I didn’t want to pay a lot of money, so I decided to [have it] copied just one time.’ And James said, ‘Aw, man, these guys ain’t never been out of Cleveland.’ So he rearranged it, wrote the parts out.”

James didn’t seem all that impressed that their first pop single had reached number eight on the r&b charts. He didn’t seem impressed with much of anything about them, in fact. “James was up on us every day. I mean, he was an evil man,
everything
made him mad—and he dwelled on perfection. He said, ‘You guys, y’all got to learn how to dance, you got to learn how to take your bows, didn’t you never hear of an encore in Cleveland?’ I said, ‘What is that, like a choir?’ And he take a drumstick and hit me on the head with it: ‘Listen to me when I’m talking to you.’”

He watched them every night from the wings, every show, four shows a day. “Something was always wrong, and when you came off, he was right there telling you. I hated it. I hated him. He had an attitude about us wearing our hair real long—you know, things like that. He was always talking about
his
show.” It was obvious from remarks that he made that he had his reservations about Sam, too, but Bobby and his brothers never had any doubt about why Sam had put them with him. “I heard Sam telling Alex, ‘I want them to go with James [because] I can’t be as hard on them as I need to be.’ Sam would try to be different. He was just intelligent. He was like, ‘Speaking from a psychological point of view, your virtuosity has dominated the ethereal spectrum.’ James Brown says, ‘Man, fuck that. Fuck all that shit. Just tell me I’m good, you know.’ Sam would laugh and say [about him], ‘You see that fucker right there? He’ll outlive us all.’”

It was like boot camp, Bobby said, but when they were done, the group was capable of near-military precision. They had also gotten to witness one of the greatest live shows ever put together, pop or gospel, as Brown went out night after night and, rain or shine, good audience or bad, killed the crowd. It was a show so carefully calculated that Brown’s band could turn on a dime (and draw fines on the spot if they didn’t), but so spontaneous that in the midst of Brown’s spectacular dance moves, his splits and twirls and bone-crunching knee drops, he could extend a song like his 1961 ballad hit, “Lost Someone,” to ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, drawing the audience in, teasing them with every gospel trick in the book, using moments of stillness to emphasize the astonishing subtlety of his stage movements, using moments of silence to show off the almost unearthly power of his June Cheeks-inspired screams. Just what they witnessed is still available in audio form, as, on October 24, the next-to-last night of the Apollo booking, armed only with his own money and his unassailable belief in himself, James brought in mobile recording equipment and, in a conscious attempt to capture history, recorded an r&b show as it actually was presented night after night all across the country, in the call-and-response fashion that made the audience as much a part of the show as the performer. “Don’t go to strangers,” James pleads in the “adlib” section of “Lost Someone,” the centerpiece of his show, “Come on home to me. . . . Gee whiz, I love you. . . . I’m so weak . . . ” The incantation is repeated over and over until it becomes almost hypnotic, and James knows he’s got the audience, he could point out to the Womack brothers just where he hooked them, he could analyze it, but he would never repeat it in exactly the same way, and then he tests the limits once again, declaring, “I feel so good I want to scream.” “Scream!” cries a voice in the crowd. And it goes on and on until at last he unleashes one last apocalyptic scream, and the music comes crashing down all around.

The Valentinos went on to play the Royal and the Howard with James, and by the time they finally joined Sam’s show, they were seasoned performers. Sam watched proudly as they executed their synchronized steps, dressed in their fire-engine red suits, and got the crowd. He had told them it would be different, it wasn’t like playing to a roomful of people who were already sold on salvation and all you had to do was quote the Bible and sing to those sisters and you had them. In the pop field, he told Bobby, “You got to give them a show, you got to perform. When you go out there singing boogie-woogie, you got to come with it.” Which is exactly what the Valentinos did, to Sam’s undisguised delight.

He took them all under his wing, but there was no way anyone could miss that Bobby was his favorite, least of all his brothers. When the Upsetters’ bass player, Olsie Robinson (“Bassy”), walked out of a sound check after a series of disagreements in which he felt he was being goaded by Sam for what Sam termed his refusal to play what was being asked of him, Bobby leapt unhesitatingly into the breach. “I said, ‘Well, I know all your songs, and I can play bass. I know every song that you ain’t never did onstage, ’cause I know everything that you cut.’ He said, ‘You going to play for me? You a star now.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t care about that. Shit, man, I’m with you.’ So when I hooked up and started playing that bass and didn’t miss a note, oh, man, it floored him. I knew his whole show. He said, ‘That fucker, he thought he had me in a position.’ He said, ‘Bobby, you want to keep playing with me?’”

His brothers were understandably jealous, and the Upsetters were definitely pissed off. Tenor player Grady Gaines had heard enough about Bassy’s shortcomings and the group’s deficiencies, and he didn’t miss the undercurrent of conversation about how tight King Curtis’ group was and how somehow things were going to have to change. Grady had known Curtis (as Curtis Ousley) since they had first played in competing high school bands in Houston and Fort Worth, and they had continued to run into each other over the years. He was playing Alan Freed’s Labor Day show at the Brooklyn Paramount in 1957 with Little Richard when Curtis was still in r&b saxophone legend Sam “The Man” Taylor’s band. “We talked a whole lot then, that was just when ‘Keep A Knockin’ came out, and I taught him that little pop in the back of his sax, tonguing them notes [that was] all over the Coasters [sound], everybody thinking it was me. See, I thought of that stuff, but I didn’t finish it.” Nor was it finished on this tour, which ended for the Valentinos with a Birmingham date that featured Johnnie Taylor, the Sims Twins, and Johnnie Morisette. They sold out two shows at the Birmingham Auditorium, and, as Friendly Womack, the oldest brother, recalled it, the Valentinos were the stars of the show, but, when they returned to Cleveland, they had less than $100 among them. That was the end of the line for Friendly. He hadn’t really envisioned show business being like this. He had just gotten married, he was angry at Bobby for taking over the group, and he agreed with Johnnie Taylor’s view that they were being taken advantage of, they were
all
being taken advantage of, by Sam. “We got a number-one record,” he told his brothers, “and we ain’t got enough money to check into a hotel.” Sam was steady talking to the group about moving out to California, he and Alex described it as the land of opportunity, but Friendly had made up his mind: his brothers could do whatever they wanted, they could go chasing after their fool’s gold, but he wasn’t no fool and he wasn’t going to go.

Fame and fortune have a tendency to create, within those [they] strike, the urge to run away from home, family and people who formerly made their world an enjoyable place in which to live.

— Sam Cooke quoted in the
Chicago Defender,
February 27, 1963