Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  On Friday, May 3, Crain telegrammed Art from the Hotel Cecil in New York.

  MR RUPE SIR THIS IS IN REGARD TO THE RECORDS THAT YOU RECORDED OF SAM COOK. THE ONE ALREADY RELEASED (LOVEABLE) IS HURTING US IN THE SPIRITUAL FIELD. AND ANOTHER RELEASE WILL STOP US COMPLETELY SO PLEASE DO NOT RELEASE ANYMORE

  THE SOUL STIRRERS S R CRAIN MGR JJ FARLEY SECT

  CECIL HOTEL, RM 481

  They had arrived a day early, evidently, for the weekend programs in Newark and Philadelphia that promoter Ronnie Williams had set up for the Travelers and themselves. Things clearly must have come to a head for Crain to finally acknowledge the reality he was facing. He had thought the matter resolved several weeks earlier when Sam confronted him over the issue of royalties. Sam didn’t think it right to have to split his songwriter’s royalties six ways when he wrote most of the songs and he was the most popular member of the group. There had been an ugly scene, as Crain stuck to his guns at first, insisting that was the way the Soul Stirrers did it, share and share alike. That was the way the Soul Stirrers had done it from the start. “Well, do it your way,” Sam flung back at him. “But do it with another singer.”

  At that point Crain put it to a group vote—and to begin with, the group flatly turned Sam down. R.B. Robinson, who had brought Sam to the Stirrers’ attention in the first place, was the most adamant on the subject. Sam couldn’t be trusted with money. He gave it away when he had it, and he spent other people’s money when he didn’t. If Sam didn’t have a house and a car of his own, R.B. said, it was nobody’s fault but Sam’s. In the end, Sam got his way, but even Crume saw that the resolution represented an ominous trend. Just like Harris, “Sam wanted certain perks, but with the Soul Stirrers everyone was [supposed to be] equal.”

  Crain had hoped against hope that that would be the end of it—but clearly it was not, and he didn’t know who to turn to. He had believed Art was his friend, but Art, it seemed, was playing a double game. There was no question about his feelings toward Bumps. “I hated Bumps. He was taking my living. The Soul Stirrers was my creation. The Soul Stirrers was all I was thinking about.” But he couldn’t think how to fight back.

  J.W. meanwhile watched from his position on the sidelines, seeing the future more clearly perhaps than any of the direct participants, seeing the end of his own time at Specialty and the end of the quartet era rapidly approaching. He saw, too, how all this endless self-scrutiny was tearing Sam apart—and to no good purpose, either. Anyone with a brain in his head knew the inevitable conclusion. “So I talked to Sam back at the Cecil after our program in Newark. We were having dinner, and Sam said, ‘Alex, I want to ask you something. Do you really think I can make it?’ I said, ‘Sam, you can’t stick your head in the sand like an ostrich. You can’t be Dale Cook. You got to be Sam Cook as you are.’” If he did that, J.W. said, “I have no doubt you can make it.”

  Sam never told any of the other Soul Stirrers directly. Just as he had slipped away from the QCs without ever explicitly declaring himself, he approached each of the Stirrers in private conversations that suggested the matter would continue to remain open to further discussion. To Paul Foster he said that he was “thinking about going out for himself. He said, ‘I want to create something for myself, and I would like for you to come with me.’” He hadn’t made up his mind yet, he reassured Paul, but he was seriously thinking about it. With Crain: “He asked my opinion, and I told him [to] stay.” As for Crume, “He never even told me he was leaving. [By the time] I knew anything he was gone, and we were searching for a [new] lead singer. We were getting ready to go out on tour, and he just wasn’t there.”

  Once he made up his mind, he seems to have had few second thoughts. His father told him he owed no loyalty to the Soul Stirrers; just as with the QCs, it was simply a matter of self-interest: “I said, ‘Now, listen, that’s not your religion. That’s your job; you do that for a living. The Lord gave you a voice to sing to make people happy. And if you can make more money singing pop music than you can the church songs that you’re singing—don’t nobody get saved over singing.’” As far as the church people’s disapproval was concerned, “I said, ‘If you can make it where people are going to boo you, you made it. When you get out there, put all you got in there, just get in there with all your soul, mind, body, and strength. “A-l-l” spells “all.” And never be scared. Nobody can beat you singing.’ And he never failed.”

  He had come to a parting of the ways with Dolores, too. He was leaving Joey and her back in Chicago. He was giving up a life in which it seemed everything had always fallen into place for him, everything had been taken care of, from the time he first joined the Highway QCs at the age of seventeen.

  On May 28, 1957, his friend Duck, whom he was helping send through court stenographer’s school, drove him to the airport in his ’54 Oldsmobile. The family had all said their good-byes. They knew Sam was moving to California for good. At the airport Duck accompanied him to the gate, and they talked excitedly about the new life on which Sam was about to embark. He was twenty-six years old and had never really been on his own before. He was about to take his place in the world.

  How He Crossed Over

  The expression “rhythm and blues” originally was a musical designation that was synonymous with an important segment of the music market. Today, for almost no rhythm and blues manufacturer, however, is the Negro consumer the prime target. His operation is typically geared economically to anticipated sales to both white and Negro customers, with definite emphasis on the former. . . . Racial identification with either the pop or r&b idiom is gradually but steadily coming to a halt—and this is a great economic boon not only for Negro artists and writers and r&b diskeries. The traditional pop field’s horizons have also been broadened.

  — “On the Beat” by Gary Kramer, Billboard, March 9, 1957

  ART RUPE WAS UNCHARACTERISTICALLY LATE for the Saturday afternoon session. Those in the company who had known him longest were well aware that he had been distracted by his pending divorce from his second wife (and former secretary) Leona in order to marry his present secretary, Dorothy. But there were other matters, business matters, having to do with the future of the music, the future of the company, the ever-increasing pressure of payola (paying the disc jockeys to play the records), and the escalating problems he was having with his principal star, Little Richard, who had refused to come into the studio for the last seven and one-half months and was now making increasingly public threats, mixed with demands to renegotiate his contract, that he just might quit the business altogether to become an evangelist.

  Bumps in any case had his instructions. Art had gone over the ground with him very carefully, and they were in full agreement that what Sam needed for immediate identification was something more like his gospel sound—that was what had been missing from his first pop release, and that was the way they were going to cut him now, along the lines of Ray Charles, with a male quartet that sounded as much as possible like the Soul Stirrers.

  Sam and Bumps, fall 1957.

  Photograph by William Claxton © William Claxton/ABKCO

  Sam had been staying temporarily in a little room over on Avalon ever since his arrival from Chicago four days earlier. Bumps had stopped by to visit him with Clifton (“Clif”) White, the Mills Brothers’ longtime guitarist, who had landed in L.A. three years before, on quitting the enormously popular singing group (the Mills Brothers were the first black group to appeal widely to whites, and among their earliest hits was a 1931 collaboration with Bing Crosby). In Los Angeles, Clif had renewed his acquaintance with Bumps, whom he had originally met in Seattle, and he started working sessions at Specialty almost from the time Bumps first arrived there in February of 1955. Bumps was accompanied by his pretty, young wife, Marlene, whom everyone called “Little Mama,” and Clif had his wife, Judy, with him, too, so by the time they all squeezed into the tiny space, there was barely enough room to breathe. “The girls were nearly sitting out in the hall,” Bumps recalled. “I
was over the back end of the bed, Sam was near the head, and Clif was sitting on the bed like a Hindu playing the guitar.”

  White, a big, bluff man of the world, was understandably frustrated. Thirty-five years old, raised in the cosmopolitan cultural setting of Monterey, California (where his mother worked as a domestic, his father as a carpenter and stonemason), he was a devotee of Count Basie and Count Basie’s rhythm guitarist par excellence, Freddie Green—and he had never been more baffled in his life. He had always had his reservations about Bumps, whom he viewed on the one hand as “the worst musician in the world” but on the other as someone with “a great sense of what was going on,” with a notable ability to “put things together.” But for the life of him he couldn’t understand what Bumps saw in this kid who, for all of his likeability and brash self-assurance, seemed to be “in tune [only] with himself.”

  The first song they did, “You Send Me,” Sam sang for him at first just to give him the idea, “and I thought it was the most ridiculous song I ever heard in my life. Simply because it wasn’t saying anything. I mean, he just kept on singing, ‘You send me,’ and I thought he was out of his fucking mind. I said, ‘When is the song gonna start?’ I thought he was lost. I said, ‘Hell, I think he forgot the words to his song.’”

  Next they tried “Summertime,” the Gershwin standard, and Clif played it the way it was supposed to be played, “but Sam said, ‘No, man, you’re playing the wrong chord.’ Well, I don’t play no wrong chords, you know, particularly to a song like that. He said, ‘Lend me your guitar a minute.’ So he starts playing, he didn’t know a heckuva lot, but he knew enough to fiddle, and he plays this major chord in front [of] this minor chord, and, man, it’s like the harmony was entirely reversed, it’s like a piece of chalk on the blackboard. [But then] I began to hear what he was doing, because the two chords are basically the same, the major sixth and the minor chord, the notation of them is basically the same. And he said, ‘Now that’s what I want.’ So I started playing it.”

  Almost in spite of himself, Clif found that he was being drawn in, first by the indisputable beauty of Sam’s voice, then by the way he was able, like so many great gospel singers, just to grab the changes out of the air. But it was the power of his personality that got Clif in the end, that peculiar mix of shyness and a self-confidence bordering on arrogance, the sly self-deprecating humor coupled with an awareness of everything that was going on around him. He possessed, Clif observed, the kind of playfulness that a kid could get away with—but this wasn’t no kid, and this wasn’t, as Clif quickly came to realize, no game.

  The next day they laid down the songs in Specialty’s basement rehearsal studio, working from approximately a dozen that Sam and Bumps had zeroed in on, some from the New Orleans session, several from Sam’s recent demo tape, some still in the process of development. Art came in, monitored the rehearsals, listened to the tapes, and eventually, with Bumps, picked four songs to focus on: “Summertime,” Sam’s two compositions “You Send Me” and “You Were Made For Me,” and “Things You Do to Me” by Bumps’ new apprentice a&r man and protégé, Sonny Bono. The small room over at Radio Recorders on Santa Monica was booked for the next day, Saturday, June 1, and Sam signed a new contract as a solo artist which, as Art explained to him, with a 1 percent royalty, would pay him twice as much as what he had been getting with the Soul Stirrers, whose 3 percent royalty was divided six ways.

  Sam also got a $400 advance on his artist’s contract, plus a $100 advance on a songwriter’s agreement, which he signed at the same time. The songwriter’s agreement stipulated that he would split his one-penny-per-side mechanical royalty with Venice Music, Specialty‘s publishing division, which, according to the terms of the 1909 Copyright Act, received a manufacturing fee (the “mechanical”) royalty of two cents per side, that was generally collected from the record company (in this case Specialty) by the Harry Fox Agency, a licensing organization. According to custom, the mechanical royalty was then split fifty-fifty between the publisher and songwriter or writers. By accepting a royalty of half a cent, Sam, like Little Richard and most of the other Venice writers, was in effect embracing an unacknowledged partner who was entitled to half his income on all of his own recordings of his songs. This was by no means an uncommon arrangement, but it meant that on a million seller, the songwriter would earn approximately $5,000 in mechanical royalties, the publisher $15,000, with the three-to-one ratio only escalating the gulf in income as sales increased.

  Sam readily assented to the new arrangements, and by the day of the session, Rupe was confident that “as per our procedure, the actual recording session would merely be implementation of our well-planned rehearsals.”

  That isn’t the way it turned out. The session was in full swing by the time that Art arrived. Bumps was at his flamboyant best, conducting the small rhythm section and four backup singers with a mixture of extravagant gestures and upbeat advice. The band consisted of Clif and arranger René Hall on guitar; Ted Brinson, a longtime fixture on the Los Angeles r&b scene and a postal carrier who often wore his uniform to sessions, on bass; and Earl Palmer, the driving force behind Cosimo’s fabled New Orleans session band and, like Sam, a recent arrival in L.A. himself, on drums. But it was the singers that Art fixed on the moment he walked through the door. They were white, they were singing in a light, poppy style, and, worst of all from Art’s point of view, they included two female voices. It was all wrong—it was against everything he and Bumps had agreed upon—and to Art’s ears the sound of those female voices clashed with Sam’s rich tenor in a way that was both personally offensive and distinctly unmusical.

  There was no mistaking Art’s reaction on the part of anyone in the room. “I just knew Bumps was in trouble,” said Harold Battiste, yet another New Orleans native and a schooled jazz musician, who had been working as Specialty’s “talent scout” in New Orleans for the past year and a half. He was present, almost accidentally, to observe the Specialty operation firsthand before setting up a small office (and going on the payroll as a full-time Specialty a&r man) in his own hometown. They had already completed Sam’s little number “You Send Me,” for which Harold had sketched out a simple “jazzy, sort of hip” vocal arrangement on the spot because nobody else had bothered to address the background singing and, with his own predilection for jazz and no specific direction from Bumps, he just figured, “So what, they don’t really care about this tune.”

  René, forty-six years old and another native New Orleanian, with extensive grounding in every aspect of the business going back to the twenties, had come into the session with a fully developed arrangement for “Summertime,” the number that everyone, including Bumps and Sam, clearly thought was going to be the hit. He, too, had only recently arrived in Los Angeles, having just left a longtime position as guitarist and arranger with Billy Ward and His Dominoes. He had, in fact, just done a big-band arrangement of “Stardust” for the Dominoes and, keeping in mind Sam’s own idiosyncratic feel for the Gershwin tune, had worked up a somewhat similar small-group approach to “Summertime.” They were on the third or fourth take of the song, just closing in on what René felt was really going to be “something new in the creative world (we didn’t want to do it in the classical Gershwin style, [it was] pop music with a gospel flavor),” when Art walked in the door.

  Art clearly was not concerned with sparing anyone’s feelings as he launched without preamble into a tirade that included Sam, Bumps, René, the backup singers, and the whole highfalutin approach that presupposed that there was an audience for this junk. “You’re going to try and turn everything into Billy Ward’s Dominoes with your ideas,” he yelled at René. “This is not a symphony. I don’t go for that stuff!”

  They all sat there in shocked silence, with singers, musicians, and Sam, too, all seemingly in a state of suspended animation. But no one could have been more shocked than Bumps. From his stunned expression it seemed to everyone present that Bumps had not expected Art to show up at all. And if he
did, Bumps had certainly not anticipated this kind of reaction. For Bumps had had a vision. And from his long experience as a bandleader and musical entrepreneur, and more particularly from his growing stature and success at Specialty, Bumps had learned to trust his own instincts, his ability to talk his way out of a jam as easily as he could get himself into it, over the kind of careful rote planning and analytical white-man’s bullshit that Art favored in nearly every situation.

  It had happened like this at least once before. Bumps was on a plane to New Orleans to record Little Richard in May of 1956 with all of Art’s carefully written-out plans and instructions. One of the principal songs they were going to cut was a new number called “Rip It Up,” for which Art had worked out a carefully articulated approach, but then Bumps fell asleep on the plane, “and when I woke up, I had a different concept of the song. I fell asleep, dreamed it, woke up, sketched it [out], and when I got into New Orleans I really did it. When I came back, I just knew I had a smash, [but] Art was very unhappy because the piano triplets was gone, I had the hi-hat and a whole different concept behind the song, and he was going to fire me—but I bet him it would be a hit, just put it out. So he did, and I won the bet, and I won a suit from [Hollywood clothier] Sy Devore. The first time in my life I had a suit that cost that much.”

  In this instance Bumps had had a similar vision: to set Sam’s gospel-trained voice against the unmistakably white sound of the Lee Gotch Singers, L.A.’s number-one pop session group—they would be, as he and René saw it, “the classical frosting on the cake,” the “refinement” that would make Sam acceptable not just to his old fans (who Bumps was convinced would never desert him) but to the new white audience that he knew was out there just as much for a romantic talent like Sam’s as for an outlandish one like Little Richard’s. Bumps was so convinced of the correctness of his concept that he never gave any thought to the consequences of countermanding the plan that Art had devised and to which he had so blithely agreed—and he might even have succeeded if, as in the case of the Little Richard session, it had simply been a matter of bringing back a tape from New Orleans and presenting Art with a fait accompli.