Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke (88 page)

But from where I stand

I can only hear Little Richard

And Fats Domino.

But sometimes,

I hear Ray Charles

Drowning in his own tears

or Bird

Relaxing at Camarillo

or Horace Silver doodling,

Then I don’t mind standing a little longer.

Roy Hamilton had attended the March on his own and was so inspired by it that he wrote to CORE national director James Farmer, “I still feel that there is something more that I can personally contribute. . . . Don’t hesitate to call on me.” But he didn’t hear back for almost five months, and then it was from an assistant community relations director, who suggested that he give her a ring so they could discuss just what he might have in mind. “We didn’t count,” was the matter-of-fact assessment of Lloyd Price, like Sam, an independent businessman and solid Movement supporter. “They wanted high-profile artists like Sammy, Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong, artists [who appealed to whites and the black middle class] like Nat ‘King’ Cole—but what could have been more high-profile than rock ’n’ roll singers selling millions of records and playing interracial music, interracial dances?”

“I’m going to write something,” Sam told J.W. But he didn’t know what it was.

A
LLEN AND J.W. HAD A LUNCH MEETING
with Joe D’Imperio and RCA’s hulking Division Vice President and Operations Manager Norm Racusin at D’Imperio’s invitation. It started off with an exchange of pleasantries, as D’Imperio reiterated how impressed he was with Sam and what great potential he had with the label. Allen readily agreed but then returned to the subject that had preoccupied him from the start: money. After carefully scrutinizing Sam’s financial records, he had come to the conclusion that if RCA owed Sam any artist’s royalties, they were negligible and offset in any case by the fact that Sam was in essence overdrawn on his account. But at the same time, it had not escaped his attention that, as both author and publisher of his own songs, Sam (and Kags Music) had supplied the lion’s share of Sam’s hits. A conservative estimate put that share at eight million sales of individual titles (whether as a single side of a 45 or a double-sided hit), not to mention album sales, including the previous year’s
Best of Sam Cooke
(with ten original titles), which, after nine months, had only recently gone off the charts. This should have generated at least $200,000 for Kags in mechanical royalties. But, so far as Allen could tell, Sam’s song publishing firm had received very little in the way of compensation. If RCA was somehow thinking that this was an acceptable way to balance their accounts, Allen was sure that they must be aware that they were supported by neither contractual nor statutory law. So unless they were willing to open up their books and pay Sam every penny he was owed, maybe they should all just pack up and go home.

But Sam’s record sales were disappointing, the RCA executives suggested conciliatorily. None of his singles had sold a million copies, his last few singles had not even hit the half-million mark. What they were talking about was
potential.
“They said to me, ‘Let’s make a new deal.’ I said, ‘Listen, you don’t want him, because he didn’t sell a million? [We’ll just] leave.’” D’Imperio tried to smooth things over but remained resistant to the idea of an audit—it simply wasn’t necessary, he said. Surely they could come to some kind of agreement without it. Allen didn’t back off one bit in his demands, brought up again the necessity for a self-contained artist like Sam to be able to “control” his catalogue, and the meeting ended on an inconclusive note. But Allen could tell, they were nervous.

Allen and Alex were in the lobby afterward having their shoes shined, when the federal marshal served the papers in the RCA offices upstairs. The first that they became aware of it, Norm Racusin, a former football player, came storming out of the elevator, waving the court order at them as if, J.W. thought, he was going to take their heads off. “How could you do this?” he was shouting. What kind of bullshit was it to come in for a so-called legitimate meeting and then follow it up with this kind of grandstanding crap? They could stuff their audit up their ass if this was the way they were going to conduct business. As far as Racusin was concerned, discussions were at an end.

J.W. chuckled to himself as Allen professed total surprise. There must be some kind of mistake, he said, let him just call his lawyer, and then, with Racusin looking on, he coolly upbraided Marty Machat on the phone. “I said, ‘Marty, how could you do this?’ He said, ‘What are you talking about? You told me to do it.’ I said, ‘It’s so embarrassing. I [come] here to have lunch, and you serve RCA with a federal marshal.’ I said, ‘Call it off.’ He said, ‘Well, I can’t.’ I said, ‘Yes, I know.’ And we went on [from there].”

It was all part of his strategy of bringing people down to size. Hardly the most socially confident man himself, Klein was determined to eliminate class, convention, or social status as any advantage in negotiations. He might not be able to compete in the corporate boardroom or the country club, but if these people wanted to deal with him they were going to have to learn to operate on a level playing field. J.W. couldn’t get over Allen’s nerve; he laughed out loud later in recounting the scene to Sam. But there was no question in Allen’s mind that he had gotten the record company’s attention. D’Imperio, a down-to-earth man himself, informed Allen in no uncertain terms that he would brook no further stunts like this one, that if they were going to do business, they would have to learn to work together. But as Allen saw it, “When they got served, they saw I wasn’t fooling around. I hit them and woke them up. And they turned over and gave us the information.”

S
AM ENJOYED HIS BRIEF RESPITE
at home. He recorded an L&M cigarette commercial (and shot an accompanying photo spread with the band) that he got through the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. “When a cigarette means a lot,” he crooned to a fully orchestrated background that could have been used on one of his own hits, “More body in the blend / More flavor in the smoke / Get lots more from L&M.” He drove around town in the Maserati he had just purchased from Eddie Fisher for $14,000. And he invited Jess Rand to lunch at the Brown Derby for a very belated reckoning. “Sam said, ‘You did a lot for me. But maybe you took me as far as [you thought] I could go.’ I said, ‘Where do you want to go?’ I could see he was very uncomfortable. He was tap-dancing all over the place. He said, ‘I want to give you something. We’ll straighten it out.’ I was terribly hurt. I kept looking at the picture of him on the wall of the Brown Derby with the gold record for ‘You Send Me,’ saying, My God, what am I listening to here?” But Sam kept after him, almost desperately exerting all of his charm, because, said Jess, “he still wanted me as a friend. And, you know, it was very strange: we
stayed
friends.”

New SAR business was at a standstill, as all efforts were focused on Mel Carter’s “When a Boy Falls in Love,” which continued to sell in the pop market. Mel was playing the top nightspots around town and was prominently featured in a big rock ’n’ roll show at the Sports Arena on August 31 with the Beach Boys, the Righteous Brothers, and Marvin Gaye. Zelda Sands, who was taking an increasingly active role in Mel’s career, teased Sam that this was the direction in which Sam’s career could be going, if he would only adopt more of her advice. “I said, ‘I’ll show you [by] putting him where you should be.’ ’Cause I always felt that Sam should be with the pop crowd.”

The Sims Twins and Johnnie Morisette weren’t selling any records. L.C.’s latest single, “The Wobble,” had sunk without a trace. And Johnnie Taylor, the
Sentinel
reported, was cruising around town in the new Buick Riviera he had gotten as a gift from one of his female “admirers,” still unable to choose between the life of a singer and the life of a pimp. The Soul Stirrers, meanwhile, were in a limbo of their own with the arrest of their lead singer, Jimmie Outler, for kidnapping, robbery, and rape, and their indispensable second lead, Paul Foster, forced to miss an increasing number of recent dates due to illness. J.W. announced to the press that Jimmie, whose troubles stemmed from a Stirrers party at the Dunbar Hotel, was not the lead singer on the group’s best-known coupling, “Stand By Me Father” and “He’s Been a Shelter,” though he didn’t bother pointing out that that particular record had been released in 1959. Still, he and Sam were not about to give up on the Stirrers. Nor were they about to give up on Jimmie, whose last name was transliterated not entirely inappropriately to “Outlaw” in print and popular pronunciation. Sam liked Jimmie, just as he liked Oopie, the former Pilgrim Travelers bass singer, and Johnnie Morisette. There was something about the rough life they led that he was clearly drawn to; denying them would have been like denying an ineluctable part of himself.

He had his first session under the aegis of Allen’s new company, Tracey, on September 11. The idea behind Tracey, Allen explained to him, was to provide a kind of holding company for his income, which would allow him to pay taxes only as he drew money from the Tracey account. Allen would own Tracey (otherwise it would be regarded as Sam’s
personal
holding company, which would be taxed no differently than an individual), but J.W. would be president and Sam’s daughter’s name would stamp it as his own. Allen was working out the details with Joe D’Imperio—if all went as planned, this would give Sam full control of his masters, in addition to a substantial improvement in his financial situation. But even if it didn’t work out, it gave them a model for independence; it established a kind of prototype for future negotiations. And by doing the session under the umbrella of Tracey, without any input from Hugo and Luigi or RCA, they let the record company know they really did mean business.

Sam went in with a new arranger, Jimmie Haskell, who had done most of Ricky Nelson’s hit sessions, along with a sixteen-piece string section and a big pop chorus. The result was not particularly scintillating, a florid remake of Harry Belafonte’s “I’m Just a Country Boy,” which Sam had cut three years before (and with which Oopie had recently had a hit under his real name of George McCurn, on Herb Alpert’s new A&M label), and a cheerful retrieval of his own “Sugar Dumpling,” which he had originally recorded for his
Twistin’ the Night Away
LP. Three days later, he was back on the road, with nothing officially resolved but two songs in the new Tracey catalogue.

Allen was by now fully settled on his plan. Despite the little misunderstanding over the process server, there was no longer any question in his mind that Joe D’Imperio was a Sam Cooke fan, so there was no further thought of going to Columbia, even if he was not yet prepared to admit that to RCA. The template for the deal was based on a simple manufacturing and distribution agreement but was dissimilar in most other respects from any of the normal ways in which a record company did business. The idea had evolved from bits and pieces of his own accounting experience, but it was based on something in between a misconception and a blinding flash of illumination. From the time that he had first moved into the former Hecht-Hill-Lancaster offices in the United Artists building on Seventh Avenue in 1960, he had been fascinated by the concept of independent production. To make a movie, you needed a director, an editor, a writer, and a star, and if you had all of those in one package, as Burt Lancaster and his partners in Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had proved, what did you need a studio for? Solely to distribute your product.

Then he recalled what he had heard about Frank Sinatra’s Essex Productions, which Sinatra announced boldly to the trades in 1957 would be his own “full-fledged independent record company,” with Capitol merely serving as its distributor. In reality, Capitol owned Sinatra’s records outright and rejected any modification of that arrangement, because, as Capitol vice president Alan Livingston observed, it would have been “totally contrary to everything going on in the record business then,” but Sinatra continued to trumpet Essex not just as a holding company but as a record manufacturer. Allen also knew of a partnership between Harry Belafonte and Nat “King” Cole, which was actually intended for extra-musical ventures and which turned out in any case to be extremely short-lived, but which Allen for some reason took to be an arrangement by which each manufactured the other’s records, thereby escaping IRS classification as a personal tax dodge.

That was the genesis of his idea for Sam, cobbled together, as Allen himself would have been the first to admit, from nothing more conclusive than imprecise scholarship, his own instincts on the subject, and a willingness, actually a
desire,
to try something that had never been tried before.

Here was how it would work, he explained to Joe D’Imperio, something of a maverick thinker himself within the music world. Tracey would be neither a production company nor a personal holding company, since Sam would not own, hold stock in, or serve as a controlling officer of the corporation. It would, in fact, function as a full-fledged record company, assuming the burdens and responsibilities of Sam’s artist contract with RCA, taking on the status of record manufacturer, and, of course, owning the masters of the records that it manufactured. But it would assign to RCA exclusive distribution of those records for some indeterminate period of time—Allen suggested five years, D’Imperio came back with a nonnegotiable thirty—and RCA would in turn provide Tracey with free studio time and, in addition to purchasing the records from Tracey at a price that allowed Allen’s company a reasonable rate of profit, reimburse Tracey for its recording costs at a fixed rate of $2,000 for a single, $6,000 for an album.