Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (82 page)

I stayed sharp. That was the thing to get you over, man. You had to be sharp to be in show business. We all had a thing going, man, and then the little money we had, half the time you’d be borrowed up, but I was more fortunate ’cause Mr. Wynn would keep most of my money, so I wouldn’t be broke. And when I’d come back to town, I’d have a pocketful from shooting dice and swindling at the clubs and performing—and the chicks I met would buy me anything. I found out in show business, the fine chicks with the long, lanky hair, they stayed broke. But the fat chicks with the big hips and three or four pieces of wig on their head, they had the prettiest houses, they drove the best cars, they got the highest positions, they have more finesse—and they
loved
entertainers. I wasn’t trying to be no hound, but they would buy me anything. And I didn’t care who [else on the tour] hit on my chick, because I would always make them give me some loot.

Gorgeous George, who, in addition to all his other income sources, made good money from costume repairs and nonstop gambling as well, approved Sam’s own sense of style in every respect. “He always dressed nice, with custom-tailored shirts with the wide sleeves and three buttons open like Roy Hamilton and Harry Belafonte—they were
like
calypso shirts, even though they actually weren’t. He was a size thirty-eight suit, had German-cut coats, and wore the neatest Afro. Sam was so smooth, man, that whatever he did, he wasn’t going to get caught.”

The only person on the tour who exhibited as much faith in the free-enterprise system as George was Solomon Burke. Solomon, too, recognized the realities of segregation, but as heir apparent to the House of God For All People, the church that his grandmother had founded in anticipation of his birth (with one hundred fifty branches all around the country), father of nearly a dozen children, and occasional proprietor of drugstores, candy stores, and funeral homes in his native Philadelphia, Solomon had long ago applied his resourcefulness to areas well beyond the scope of his indisputable musical talent.

I had a cooler, and it would be full of sodas and orange juice and tomato juice, and I would make sandwiches and stuff. It was funny, man. I never will forget, one time I was back there saying, “Get your sandwiches from me, get your soda and potato chips free,” and nobody want those bologna sandwiches, they all say, “We gonna eat down the road here.” We got about halfway down the road [with no other place to buy food], and there I was, selling those dollar sandwiches for seven dollars and fifty cents!

Lotsa Poppa and some of the others got a big kick out of Solomon’s confidence in his system. “One time,” said Lotsa, “he went to get some sodas, and me and Dee Clark and [Upsetter front man] Gene Burks stole all of Solomon’s food. I was giving it out, and they was keeping a lookout, and Gene holler, ‘Here he come.’ We ran and got in our [places], everybody cool, everybody chewing, and Solomon looked in the bag—he had one sandwich, one doughnut, and he threatened to get a gun! He say, ‘Who got my stuff? I know you won’t tell no lie, Poppa, who got my sandwiches?’ I said, ‘I don’t know’—but I was chewing, too!”

Solomon didn’t drink, and he didn’t gamble, which put him in a unique position on the tour. At first “if they were all gambling, they’d say, ‘Oh, Doc’s coming, Bishop’s coming,’ and everybody’d stop, ‘Yeah,’ ‘Hey,’ ‘Yeah, how’s it going?’ and I began to catch on—you know,
I’m holding up the game.
Which made me feel good, because it said, Hey, they’re giving you the respect.” But it made him feel better when they started giving him their money to hold:

One time Lotsa walked away with a ring of Jerry Butler’s, a diamond stickpin of Dee Clark’s, and six thousand dollars that he won from that crap game. “Now,” I say, “Lotsa, you had a successful night.” He said, “What should I do with it, Doc?” I said, “What you should do is send some money home, buy yourself a house.” He say, “I’m gonna get me a Cadillac.” I say, “Get you a nice house. Call your wife and let her buy a nice house.” You could get a nice house down in Georgia for three or four thousand dollars then. Well, Lotsa wouldn’t listen. Lotsa went out the next day and bought this and that. That night we were someplace else, another city, and he wanted to start the crap game again. I said, “Lotsa, don’t get into that crap game again, forget it, you got lucky.” Well, that night they wiped poor Lotsa out. Sam was throwing, he got on a streak, he made, I want to say, eleven straight passes—before he went onstage he must have gotten those guys for twelve grand. And he comes to me and says, “Doc, you hold it.” And I said, you know, “Where’s J.W.?”

That, of course, was not the way Lotsa Poppa remembered it. Lotsa, who generally followed Gorgeous George’s opening with a blues set consisting mostly of Chuck Willis and Bobby “Blue” Bland hits as well as Solomon Burke tunes, saw Sam as something of an amateur at dice—“he just shoot for luck, he wasn’t no compulsive gambler like me.” But he admired Sam in every other respect. “He had so much class, and he sang so relaxed.” Every night except Thursday, payday, when everybody was shooting dice in the dressing room right up till the moment they were called to go onstage, Lotsa would study Sam from the wings and sing along, providing the familiar gospel response to “Bring It On Home” himself, even as the audience shouted it back at Sam. As far as his winnings were concerned: “I was always carefree, I was real lucky, and I had plenty of nerve. I had Solomon keep my money, and then, when we got back to Atlanta [a month into the tour], I bought a new Cadillac and had a friend of mine drive me out onto the field, Ponce de Leon, where the [Southern Baseball Association] Atlanta white Crackers played. I was the only one on the show from Atlanta [except for Gorgeous George], and everybody was there. It was a real good feeling.”

Lotsa tried to help out Dionne Warwick, the gawky twenty-two-year-old Scepter artist with the odd, almost antiseptically classical voice, who, even with her mother chaperoning her, seemed ill at ease both on- and offstage. Dionne, according to Sam’s drummer, June Gardner, would be singing her one hit, “Don’t Make Me Over,” and suddenly, inexplicably, start to cry. She adopted a kind of standoffish attitude with the rest of the troupe, maybe just to cover her discomfiture, but Lotsa felt sorry for her and broke the ice by complimenting her on her sweaters. That seemed to do the trick. “She couldn’t help but like me—and Solomon told her jokes.” But she still felt as if she was missing out on most of the fun. One night she ventured out to the party she knew was taking place in Sam’s room, and Sam, whom she had known since the age of eleven, met her at the door “and promptly escorted me back to my room. That was the gist of my being involved in any of the activities. The one thing that stands out vividly in my brain was an auditorium we played, I believe it was in South Carolina, and the stage was in the middle, black on one side, whites on the other, and I asked Sam, ‘Well, what do you do?’ He says, ‘You do what you gotta do, that’s what you do.’”

Everybody remembered something different about that date, including the location. As Johnny Thunder recalled it, there was more applause from the white side than the black, a fact as puzzling as it was disconcerting. Jerry Butler, perhaps thinking of Jackie Wilson’s arrest in New Orleans a couple of years earlier, painted a picture of Sam defiantly jumping into the crowd. June recalled the music bringing everyone in the audience together, black and white. But Sam, who showed none of his anger to his fellow performers, always displaying that cheerfully cool facade by which he was determined to be known, recalled only the police dogs roaming the aisles on the black side of the auditorium, a clear signal on the part of the authorities that they were not going to let their nigras get out of hand.

“Our people are not allowed to do nothing but applaud,” he told Bobby when they were alone in the car afterward. “If they stand up and scream, the dogs are gonna get ’em. People don’t know how to react, and then they can’t even leave until all the white people are gone.” “That’s some fucked-up shit,” Bobby agreed, without fully recognizing the dimensions of the problem—it was, he said in retrospect, “like waiting for war to break out. And Sam said, ‘We the gladiators out here. I can’t do this no more.’ He wasn’t talking to me, just saying, ‘I can’t do this no more.’”

Much more characteristic of his public stance was his reaction to the reception that Johnny Thunder got in Montreal. Johnny, born Gil Hamilton in Leesburg, Florida, and recently rechristened by his manager, had left Florida three years earlier, at nineteen, to join the Drifters, then, after a brief stay in New York, had signed on with one of the several touring groups of Ink Spots, spending weeks at a time in the French-speaking province of Quebec. “I’m a person who adapts, I love languages and I learned to speak French fairly fluently. I was so into the French Canadians, when someone would say, ‘What are you doing, Johnny?’ I would say, ‘Well, you go up there—eh?’

“Anyway, we played this huge stadium in Montreal, and when Gorgeous George announced me, the audience went absolutely apeshit. I thought, Oh no—because he had mentioned something about Sam [coming up later in the show]. I said, ‘George, I’m not going out there.’ He said, ‘Man, they’re waiting for you.’ I said, ‘They think you announced Sam Cooke. You got to go out there and say it again.’ So he [did], and they did the same thing, and that’s when I realized we had a predominantly French audience. And I played it for everything it was worth!”

Sam, who had almost as many pieces of good advice for Johnny as he did for Bobby (when Johnny came to him, stung by his dismissal in certain quarters as “the nursery-rhyme man,” Sam told him, in words that echoed his father’s, “Just get out there and be yourself. Don’t try to be anybody else. Be the best you that you can be on any given night”), was absolutely fit to be tied. “The
Montreal Matin,
” said Johnny, laughing, “had five columns about the show, and three of the columns were about Johnny Thunder!” “Where’d that fucker learn to speak like that?” Sam demanded of everyone who would listen. “Man, I thought I’d learned all the tricks. I’m going to have to learn to speak four or five different languages now.” He was, everyone realized, both joking and absolutely serious at the same time.

Sam was the one measure of success for them all. He was the coolest. He was the sharpest. You never saw his down side. He would show Johnny Thunder his books while sipping on his little cups of Beefeater gin, and while the rest of them were driving Cadillacs and Lincolns, he had his hip little Jaguar XKE sports car delivered to him on the road. “Some people are intimidated by people who have a smile all the time,” said Johnny Thunder. “They think they are covering [up] something. But [with Sam] the warmth of his presence just came through.”

The proof, in any case, was onstage. None of the rest of it would have made any difference if Sam hadn’t been able to deliver. “He had a wonderful way with an audience,” said Dionne, who was just finding her way to her own. “You felt sometimes as if he was almost a part of the audience, he enjoyed doing what he did so very much. And that translated to the reception he got.” His new single, “Another Saturday Night,” was by now a smash, pop
and
r&b, and, even though Bobby dismissed it as a concession to the white side of the aisle, June saw the reaction it got night after night from Sam’s black audience. “It’s just a backbeat, the wood blocks give it the Latin flavor, but it was a very big song with the public, I guess, because everybody can relate. He would always start [the night] very smooth, you know, but then at the end, with ‘Bring It On Home to Me,’ or ‘Having a Party,’ the finale, he would have church, everybody would be singing along.”

Barbara came out at various points in the tour, sometimes with Linda and Tracey, more often by herself, and Bobby watched in fascinated incomprehension as she continually gravitated toward June’s room, where all the weed smokers congregated. “They say, ‘Man, you get out of here’—Charles and them. They say, ‘Go to your room.’ Man, it pissed me off. I didn’t want them motherfuckers telling me what to do. But they knew Sam would have a fit if he found out, [so they] wet a towel and put it under the door. Sam always thought something was going on, but they be hiding everywhere—you know, one weed smoker see another, oh man, they as tight as the bark on a tree.”

Bobby watched Sam’s own clandestine operations with at least equal fascination. For someone who was himself just trying to get laid, it was a frustrating experience to see Sam with all of his different women. “One time there [must have been] twelve of them standing at the bathroom door, each of them go in and spend five minutes and come out. Like they got their blessing or something. And I’m sitting there mad, because I couldn’t get none. One chick say, ‘I got a nice daughter for him.’ I said, ‘Yeah? I’m a man when I’m up there playing with y’all.’ But the only time I could shine was when I was onstage. Sam knew how bad it bothered me. He said, ‘Bobby, listen, there’s gonna be a lot of chicks tonight. Now you don’t smoke, and you don’t drink, but I’ll tell you what, get you a cigarette, you’ll look a lot older. And order a martini. That’s a nice little drink. You just sip on it. You don’t need but one for the night. And grow your mustache.’ So I’m sitting there, I’m standing up against the wall, doing exactly what he told me to do [except] I’m drinking this martini too fast. And Sam has this chick, and he says, ‘Bobby, why don’t you take her? Baby, why don’t you go with him to his room?’ Shit, I was so fucked up, I couldn’t get up off that wall. The woman had to practically carry me to my room. She said, ‘It’s a shame letting this little boy to drink.’ I mean, I almost killed myself trying to be old.”

Bobby saw Sam with white chicks, with black chicks, with two beautiful blond twins, but the assignation that registered most strongly in his memory was one fueled by rage, not desire. Somewhere down in Texas, the program director for a local white station came by the motel with his wife. It was hot, and the men were drinking, and the program director started feeling woozy, so Sam suggested he lay down on the bed for a little while. Then Sam took his wife in the bathroom and turned on the shower, and they fucked without even taking off all their clothes. And when the man woke up, said Bobby, “that woman was fully dressed, like nothing had ever happened. She said, ‘Come on, baby, we got to go.’ I said, ‘Damn, that’s crazy.’ But Sam resented the fact that ‘these motherfuckers come down with their women and shit, and their women looking at me—yet I can’t stay [on their side of town], I gotta stay in this motel.’”