Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (76 page)

S
AM WAS HOME
in time for Vincent’s first birthday on December 19, which arrived in the midst of a frantic burst of recording activity. He cut the standards album, with Luigi supervising and Horace Ott arranging, over the weekend of the fourteenth. Ott was the first outside arranger Sam had used since inducing Luigi to come out to California for his sessions, but he liked Horace’s sophisticated “uptown” orchestrations with strings and woodwinds, particularly his work for Scepter Records, and he had come up with a brainstorm for just how he wanted the new album (which was to be called
Mr. Soul
) to sound. The idea, he explained to his new arranger after Ott had flown to Richmond, Virginia, to meet him on tour, was to stitch together a kind of concept album from these traditional romantic tunes. “He said to me, ‘Hey, Horace, listen, let’s think of this guy that met this chick that he fell head over heels in love with, and we’ll do our album in such a way that [the two of them] are listening to the album, they love all the tracks, and it will help the guy get over!’” Horace was intrigued, and Luigi, who for his part was always trying to take Sam “another step up the ladder,” found a song called “I Wish You Love” that he felt could be Sam’s all-audience breakthrough (“It was a very pretty song, we were the first ones to do it, and we did it with a straight background, with Sam giving it the soul”)—but somehow the experiment didn’t work, the album came out sounding sterile and overproduced, and even Sam’s remake of his early Keen hit, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” ended up in a no-man’s-land somewhere between bland and overblown. RCA engineer Al Schmitt chalked it up to Sam’s restless musical spirit, his almost insatiable curiosity about new concepts and new sounds. As Al saw it, it was just something he had to get out of his system. Even Luigi had to admit that overall it was a failure; nothing against Horace Ott, who was a fine arranger, it just wasn’t a good fit.

But this was a rare misstep in an otherwise uninterrupted period of growth, exploration, and measurable success. Sam and Alex were
fired up
now not so much over what they had accomplished as with the distance they still had to go. They talked to Crain about an idea they had come up with in England: Crain could take over the booking agency they had recently established to book SAR acts. They would fund him for a year while he was getting the business off the ground, and then they would turn the company over to him. Crain turned them down flat. He seemed to take the offer almost as an insult, as though they no longer considered him competent to handle Sam’s affairs on the road. So they simply expanded Malloy Artists Management on their own. Alex was in the midst of starting up another label, too, to which he assigned the name Derby (“It sounded like an establishment name,” said J.W., who believed strongly in the importance of image), which would, naturally, be the outlet for all their pop-oriented releases. And finally, in the absence of any evident effort on Jess Rand’s part to bring Sam further film or TV drama roles, Alex announced to the trades earlier in the year that SAR Pictures had acquired the film rights to an unpublished novel called
Johnny Canyon
for Sam to star in.

They had given up on Jess at this point. On October 3 Sam had written to RCA on Kags stationery, directing that “all monies now and hereafter due me . . . be sent to my wife, Mrs. Barbara Cooke,” and when Paul Cantor, his old William Morris agent, approached him about becoming his manager, it was with the assumption that Jess was out of the picture. Sam turned him down, “but I would never have made that proposal if [I thought] Jess was his manager because Jess and I were really friends.” Cantor didn’t question Sam’s decision and eventually ended up going to work for Scepter Records. “I would have loved to have managed him, but Sam was on top of everything as far as his career was concerned. I’m sure he was looking out for his own best interests.”

Sam produced sessions on virtually the entire SAR roster in the week before Christmas. He practically lived at the United Recording Studio for the five days between the eighteenth and the twenty-second, starting out with the Sims Twins, then bringing in Johnnie Taylor, the Valentinos, Patience Valentine, Johnnie Morisette, and the Sims Twins again for a return session. Nearly half the songs were written by Sam; a good number (like “Ernestine,” a song Sam had cut unsuccessfully on Patience Valentine earlier in the year but was still convinced could be her breakthrough hit) were remakes; and the feeling in the studio was, as usual, overwhelmingly positive, though Sam did hear some grumbling from the Valentinos, who felt that as SAR’s biggest current hitmakers, they should be treated with greater respect. They had broken down driving out to California, had to get a new set of brakes, and were disappointed upon arriving at the studio that Sam had not seen fit to hire a horn section to complement their sound. Other SAR artists got an orchestra, but they got a drunken Johnnie Morisette singing a very shaky bass on “Tired of Living in the Country,” the New Orleans-styled blues Sam had written for Curtis to sing. “Sam thought it was funny,” said Bobby. “He thought it was great. ‘It’s great for the atmosphere.’ But he wouldn’t [have] let us mess up
his
record like that.” Still, it didn’t shake them for a moment from their firm resolve to move to California. Nor did it shake their fundamental faith in Sam.

Christmas was coming, and everyone was in a good mood. Barbara was in and out of the studio in the midst of her Christmas shopping, with Linda frequently in tow. Aretha Franklin was playing the Alexandria Hotel; Lou Rawls was at the Memory Lane on Santa Barbara at Twenty-third; and Johnnie Morisette was appearing at
Los Angeles Sentinel
columnist Gert Gipson’s Nite Life. On December 19, word started to get out, in an orchestrated wave of publicity picked up by both the trades and the Negro press and clearly directed by Kags Music Corp., that “Sam (Mr. Feeling) Cooke, who left the gospel field when he was its number one star, will return to that form of entertainment as guest star of a star-studded gospel show in Newark, New Jersey, New Year’s Eve.” It would be, the
Los Angeles Sentinel
reported, “an entirely new program of song [for which] Cooke has composed several modern gospel songs” as well as such “generation-old heart touchers” as “Wonderful,” “Touch the Hem of His Garment,” “Nearer to Thee,” and “Were You There [When They Crucified My Lord]?” It would be, promised the
St. Louis Argus,
“undoubtedly the most sensational gospel show ever to hit the Newark Armory.”

On the final day of sessions, Sam scheduled Johnnie Morisette in the afternoon and the Sims Twins at night. For Morisette he got his old Keen label-mate Johnny “Guitar” Watson to play lead on a pair of blues, while the Sims Twins came back to redo two songs they had cut at their earlier session, plus a new one that Sam had written especially for them.

“That’s Where It’s At” was one of Sam’s prettiest songs, its chorus built almost entirely around the catchphrase that he and J.W. had come up with, the verses registering a broader mix of wistfulness, celebration, and specificity of observation. Bobbie and Kenny attacked it with wholehearted verve, while Sam seemed only halfheartedly to be trying to restrain the irrepressible
bounciness
of their enthusiasm. He focused instead on the lyric, which was supposed to start off “Lights turned way down low / Music soft and slow / With someone you love so,” except that the twins always left out the preposition. “Don’t forget that ‘with,’” Sam reminded them gently, “’cause it’s very, very important.” And when, by dint of much repetition, they finally got it, “Oh, that’s good,” he genuinely enthused. “Oh, that was cookin’. That’s cookin’, Kenny, Bob, that’s it!”

The musicians were packing up to leave when Barbara gave Zelda her birthday gift, an elaborate perfume set with a mirror and tray. Zelda was surprised, because Barbara had already given her a gift several days earlier, a hair dryer from Sam and her that she doubted Sam even knew about, but he picked up on it now, raising an eyebrow and saying, “Oh, it’s your birthday, ZZ?” When she indicated that it was, he pushed the call button and told the rhythm section, Earl Palmer and Ray Johnson, the piano player, and bassist Ray Pohlman, to stay out there. “Then he walked in the studio,” said Zelda, “we could hear it, because Bones kept the [pots] open, and he says, ‘Guys, give me this,’ you know, just snapping his fingers and singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and [the musicians] just followed.” It was undoubtedly the musical high point of the evening, proving once and for all what anyone who had ever listened to Sam should have known all along: that Sam could enthrall an audience by the sound of his voice alone. “I wish a lot of joy to you,” he bubbles with the rhythm section swinging along behind him, “Ohh, a whole lotta joy to you / I wish you no sadness / A lot of joy to you.” And when, after declaring, “Happy birthday once again, dear ZZ,” he draws out the ending with a magnificently melismatic effect, you feel as if you are caught up in a happy family drama in which Sam for once feels at home, beset by neither doubt nor conflict about his role.

Then he and Alex were in New York for an assortment of business between Christmas and the New Year. The gospel program, with an all-star lineup that included the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Swanees, the Caravans, and, of course, the Soul Stirrers, was coming up in a few days, but in the meantime, the two of them put together a song for the Shirelles session they were about to produce for the Scepter label. The session had come about through an improbable set of circumstances, which began with Florence Greenberg, the middle-aged New Jersey housewife who had started Scepter in 1958 in order to record four of her daughter Mary Jane’s classmates at Passaic High School, a black girl group who won the school talent contest as the Shirelles. Mrs. Greenberg had in the past four years assembled a stellar r&b roster that included Chuck Jackson, ex-Flamingo Tommy Hunt, the Isley Brothers, and a newcomer named Dionne Warwick, but she had had her eye on Sam for some time. Several months earlier her longtime partner and a&r head, Luther Dixon, left the label in what amounted to both a personal and professional split, and she offered Sam the job of producing her “top disk team,” the Shirelles, who had had two number-one pop hits in the last two years. He would start,
Billboard
reported on December 1, “on a sort of freelance basis, and if things work out will become a regular a&r man for the firm. He will continue, however, for RCA Victor as an artist.” What she really intended, though, said J.W., was apparent even before they entered the studio. “She had in mind that she could get Sam to come on Scepter.” The success of the session (“Sam took us to a different area [with] that gospel vein,” said Shirelle Beverly Lee, “and it was brilliant, that song he [wrote], ‘Only Time Will Tell,’ using our song titles [for lyrics]”) only reinforced her resolve, and when Sam balked, that was the end of the deal—before it ever had a chance to get off the ground.

Sam saw King Curtis, too, whom he had finally persuaded to come out on the upcoming tour. It was going to take more money than the bookings—clubs and auditoriums in Texas, Louisiana, and Florida—could sustain, but once Sam made up his mind that the Kingpins had the sound he was looking for, he was no more to be deterred from his goal than he had been with the Upsetters six months earlier. In the end, money wasn’t the determining factor anyway. There wasn’t money enough to pay him what he could make at home, King Curtis told Sam, but he had one rule of thumb: “I only ever travel with those I like. I never work with them I don’t.” And after the way Sam had tipped his hat to him in “Having a Party” (“Play that song called ‘Soul Twist,’” he had sung, plugging King Curtis’ first big hit)—well, he didn’t see how he could do anything but return the favor. They were in certain respects kindred spirits. Each was dedicated in his own way to professionalism, organization, and self-advancement (what he tried to do with his studio work, Curtis said, was to negotiate a business arrangement that allowed him to “completely fit the vernacular of the record,” thereby ensuring not only financial and musical growth but an increased share of the market as well). What seemed to have brought them together in this instance, however, was a particular delight in seizing the moment, their willingness to trust to instinct (bred of well-earned experience) that they were going to have a good time together—and make good music, besides.

Sam felt similarly drawn to the prominent r&b DJ Magnificent Montague—but in a more conventional personal and business alliance. Montague, born Nathaniel Montague in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1928, had helped break “You Send Me” and championed L.C.’s career from the start. He had moved to the New York area just two and one-half months earlier, where he was broadcasting from Woodside, Long Island, on WWRL. Well known as a rhyming jock, he had taken his cue initially from romantic poetry and then from the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, distinguishing himself from his peers not just by his verbal dexterity but by the formal introduction of black history lessons into his programs (he had a regular segment called “Can I Get a Witness?” dedicated to that purpose). A determinedly free spirit who refused to be categorized in any way (he had converted to Judaism in 1960 and considered himself a “landsman”), he alternated his own seemingly extemporaneous verse with lines from poets like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes and took great pride in “swooning” his predominantly female audience whom he addressed as “My darlings” and for whom he created introductions to some of the more romantic songs that often exceeded the passion and seductiveness of the songs themselves.

But Montague had a secret that few of his listeners (and few of the stars whose records he played) were aware of. A bristling little cockatoo of a man (“He was one of the most pure hustlers I’ve ever seen,” said a fellow black jock, no mean hustler himself), Montague was a collector, a pursuit he had stumbled upon by accident when he wandered into a secondhand bookstore in 1956 and discovered a book of pioneering black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar’s dialect poems. “Never had I read words that sounded so real, so raw, so different,” Montague declared, particularly struck by Dunbar’s seminal statement of the plight of the Negro in the twentieth century, “We Wear the Mask.” He was hooked and started his collection of Africana almost immediately thereafter. That was when he was working in Chicago and put together the Magnificents, the group that L.C. joined after their hit “Up On the Mountain” was already on the charts. That was how he had met the Cook family, and that was how he first met Sam.