Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 25

  When Sam asked him where he could get his hair processed, Rip took him to the Élite Coiffure Men’s Salon, just down the street from the Watkins Hotel, which manufactured its own brand of hair straightener, King Conk, and where you could see Nat “King” Cole and all the stars. Sam took Rip to a church in another part of town where they were having a gospel program, and he introduced Rip to the various groups—Rip couldn’t remember them all because he wasn’t into gospel at the time, but the one quartet that Sam really wanted him to get to know was the Pilgrim Travelers, led by an immaculately dressed, soft-spoken, gray-haired older gentleman with a smooth manner, and featuring a dapper, razor-thin young bass singer named Oopie and a new lead singer, a close friend of Sam’s just out of the army named Lou Rawls.

  That was a rare foray into Sam’s old world, though. Mostly Sam wanted to meet Rip and his cousin Brice’s friends on the Los Angeles music scene: twenty-year-old Cornel Gunter, who in 1953 had joined a group called the Flairs at the invitation of his Jefferson High School classmate Richard Berry, whose current group, the Pharaohs, was enjoying a local hit with Berry’s Caribbean-flavored composition, “Louie Louie.” Gunter, who would go on to join the Coasters, had been one of the founding members of the Platters, too, and both Gunter and Berry had long-standing roots in the burgeoning L.A. r&b community.

  Then there was Rip’s uncle Marvin Phillips, who with Jesse Belvin (as Jesse and Marvin) had had a number-two r&b hit on Specialty in 1953 with “Dream Girl” and then, as Marvin and Johnny (with various partners, including Jesse, serving as Johnny), had continued to have various hits and misses, including Phillips’ notorious signature tune, “Cherry Pie.” There were Obediah “Young” Jessie, another original Flair from Jefferson High and Jesse Belvin’s singing partner in the Cliques; Eugene Church; Gaynel Hodge, with his brother Alex an original member of both the Platters and the Turks; and countless others, all frequenting the clubs up and down Central Avenue, all haunting the publishing houses that lined a four- or five-block stretch of Selma Avenue in Hollywood (or hanging out at the Nickodell restaurant on Argyle, just around the corner), where the record company a&r men all came looking for songs.

  At the center of it all was Jesse Belvin, a young, somewhat Hispanic-looking, extraordinarily talented twenty-four-year-old with a slick process who had cowritten both “Earth Angel,” the Penguins’ 1955 number-one r&b hit, and “Goodnight My Love,” recently adopted by Alan Freed as the sign-off song for his nationally syndicated show. Jesse had had a direct hand, as either writer, performer, or both, in virtually every major development on the L.A. r&b scene over the last five years. It was Jesse whom Bumps had first had in mind for the kind of balladeering stardom for which he was now grooming Sam, and Clif White had made his first Specialty appearance on guitar on one of Jesse’s early records. But Jesse Belvin, as René Hall pointed out, was not exactly a model of focus or responsibility. “Jesse would record for anybody. I don’t think he ever had a contract with any one company in those days.” Nor was he particular about his songwriting royalties. “Jesse could sit down and write songs on the spot, but he’d always turn around and sell ’em outright for $100 or so.” He didn’t even seem to care if his name went on the record, cutting demos to which strings and horns could be added and then “teach[ing] the lead to another singer,” so that singer could go out on the road and front the group. “That way he could sit there in the studio and crank out records. . . . That cat [just] loved to record.” “We worshipped Jesse,” said Gaynel Hodge. “He was like a big brother to all of us. We never questioned the things he did, even when it went against our own interests.” Sam for his part merely observed. He was in no position to do anything but watch and wait, and he eagerly soaked it all in.

  It was a wholesale introduction to a world which, as Rip recognized right away, Sam knew very little about. But it was an education which he picked up very quickly, and a world which he found to have more layers than he could ever have imagined. Rip, and Bumps and J.W., too, introduced him not just to singers like Jesse Belvin who were his own age or younger but to black entrepreneurs of an earlier generation as well. Bumps took him around to meet John Dolphin, a big, burly, cigar-chomping larger-than-life former car salesman, whose record store was one of the principal hangouts for the young singers and songwriters and a key source of education in the record business in one way or another for them all. Dolphin, who had opened his first shop in 1948, when “race records” were still being sold almost exclusively out of barber shops and shoe-shine stands, had named it for what he considered its two star entities, “Dolphin’s” for obvious reasons and “of Hollywood” because, for one thing, he considered Central and Vernon, where the store was located, to be as glamorous as any white-folks’ neighborhood, but also because, as he boasted, if black folks couldn’t go to Hollywood, “then I’ll bring Hollywood to the blacks.” He started his own record labels, too, Recorded in Hollywood first, then Lucky, Money, and Cash, and his own song publishing operation, which, in keeping with the philosophy of his two most recent label names, was notorious for benefiting its owner far more than the young songwriters he was constantly discovering and signing up.

  He could discourse for hours on the business, and for a discriminating listener like Bumps or J.W. Alexander he was an invaluable source of information and advice. What he and his shop were best known for, though, was the all-night radio show that broadcast from the record-store window over KGFJ, L.A.’s most popular black station. It had started with a two-hour purchase of time in 1950 and had now grown to the point where not only was it a highly effective means of advertising the store, it had proved the perfect vehicle for “market research.” Distributors were not about to miss the point, said Huggy Boy, the white jock who had the show for a couple of years before going out on his own. “I could break a record—a good record—if I played it enough, and distributors learned that if John Dolphin would get a [free] box of a certain record, he’d want to play that record on the show until the box was sold out. . . . After two o’clock in the morning when the bars let out, Dolphin’s was jam-packed, especially on weekends. We’d invite everybody down to the party—I’d say, ‘Turn the car around, don’t forget we’re on the corner of Central and Vernon, Vernon and Central, ten magic paces from the corner of Central and Vernon, meet Lovin’ John Dolphin, the man with the big cigar.’ Dolphin loved it. He’d tell me, ‘Lawdy be, Dolphin’s of Hollywood is the greatest record store in the whole United States of America. Now Huggy, baby, all I want you to do, you tell those people, those little white kids, to turn their cars around, get their butts over here, and buy Lovin’ John Dolphin’s records, and I’ll make it right with you.’”

  There was Ted Brinson, the bass player on the “Summertime” session, who had arrived in L.A. with the Andy Kirk band in 1939 and, a dozen years later, purchased some recording equipment and built his own home garage studio at 9514 South Central, where “Dootsie” Williams, another longtime fixture on the scene, recorded “Earth Angel” for his DooTone label, by now almost equally well known for Redd Foxx’s under-the-counter “blue” comedy routines. Then, too, there was Rafael “Googie” René, a versatile young piano player with a flair for record producing, who oversaw (and was supported as an artist by) his dad Leon’s Class Records. Leon René and his brother Otis, Creole songwriters from New Orleans originally, who went back in the business to the 1920s, had been operating their own labels since 1942, and between them had written such pop standards as “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano,” and “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman.”

  It was a whole world of music, a homegrown recording scene of such diversity and sophistication that it made Chicago look like a sleepy country town. “The Vernon Avenue-Central Avenue area,” local historian Michael Betz remarked in terms that could equally well have applied to Bronzeville when Sam was growing up, “was a self-sufficient community with two black-owned newspapers, banks, insurance companies, churches and
civil rights organizations.” But nowhere was this sense of self-sufficiency more exemplified than in its music community, nowhere was there a sense of greater excitement and possibilities than in this independent black enclave of musicians and entrepreneurs that Sam was now determined to make his home.

  SAM TOOK ACTING LESSONS that summer at the Phil Carey Jones Drama School, both with an eye toward the movies and, as he later told a reporter for the Chicago Defender, to improve his “speech, enunciation and poise.” And he added a letter to his last name. Bumps thought it would be “classier” to spell Cook with an e on the end, and Bob Keane, whose original name was Kuhn, agreed. So Sam got in touch with his friend Duck back in Chicago, who through his court stenographer’s training knew the system cold and told Sam how to go about making the change legal.

  He observed closely, too, the changes on the current music scene. Harry Belafonte, the lithely handsome young West Indian folk singer, on whose success he had told Soul Stirrer Paul Foster he wanted to model his own, was still near the top of the album charts with his Calypso album more than a year after its initial release; in addition, at thirty he was about to star in his second major motion picture, was an outspoken voice in the civil rights movement, had produced his own box-office record-breaking national tour, “An Evening with Belafonte” (the live recording of the show had recently joined Calypso at the top of the charts), and was reported to be looking at a $1 million gross in 1957. All with a sexy and sophisticated style and deliberately soft-spoken presentation that went directly against every stereotype that white men like Art Rupe seemed bound and determined to perpetuate. And Johnny Mathis, the living embodiment of the romantic brown-eyed crooner whose arrival Bumps and Alex had insisted was inevitable, was challenging the very premise of rock ’n’ roll with one dreamy, color-defying ballad after another. With the Montgomery bus boycott settled and integration generally acknowledged by men and women of good will as the law of the land, there were no limits to be placed on a forward-thinking young man of determination and ambition.

  Bumps, meanwhile, was hard at work building up Keen Records for its September launch, doing all he could to help make that ambition a reality. He scheduled sessions and scouted new talent, contacted artists he had worked with in the past, and confidently predicted the demise of his former label. To Sister Wynona Carr, whom he and Art had been encouraging to “cross over” for several years now, he let it drop that not only would Specialty be losing “a lot of [its] spiritual artists” but Little Richard, too, would soon be leaving. He rehearsed the Valiants sometimes at his sister’s house at Forty-second and San Pedro, more often at Rip’s cousin Brice’s house on Twenty-third. He had acetates cut on “Summertime” and “You Send Me” at Radio Recorders at the end of July, and when Sam grew impatient and complained that nothing was happening, he hadn’t been in the studio since that fateful day in June, Bumps jollied him along with paternal good humor, addressing him as “Goodfellow” and telling him with that characteristic air of breezy assurance not to worry, there would be plenty happening soon.

  But Sam couldn’t help but worry as he watched Roy Hamilton come back from his long illness under the continued guidance of Bill Cook. The phone lines of Hamilton’s booking agency, the Los Angeles Sentinel reported, were swamped with requests for dates, and as a kind of test run for a summer-long tour, he had done $12,000 worth of business for B.B. Beamon in Atlanta alone. It would have been difficult for Sam not to wonder at this point whether he had made the right decision. When he went to J.W. to ask his advice, Alex had urged him to go with Bumps because, he said, Bumps would focus on him, and Bill hadn’t really done all that well for Roy. But now Roy and Bill were being talked about all the time in the news, and he had passed up Bill’s powerful connections at Atlantic and Roy’s own label, Epic, for a record company that did not yet even exist. Clyde McPhatter, with his third Top 10 r&b hit of the year currently climbing the charts, was about to begin an eighty-day tour of one-nighters with Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, LaVern Baker, and half a dozen other acts under the banner of the Biggest Show of 1957, while eighteen-year-old Little Willie John had been out with Arnett Cobb all summer, playing everywhere from Seattle to the tip of Florida. Sam knew everything was being set up for him—but what if it didn’t work? He watched the Soul Stirrers struggling with their own problems and, as difficult as he had always known it would be to go back, he was now forced to wonder if there would even be anything to go back to.

  The Soul Stirrers themselves were beginning to wonder the same thing. They were so unprepared for Sam’s departure that they had had to go out without a lead singer at the beginning of their June tour. They played a few dates with Paul Foster doing the best he could, but they soon found that the promoters didn’t want to pay the agreed-upon fee for a group that couldn’t adequately perform its own songs, and the people just kept calling out, “Where’s Sam?” Then in Augusta they picked up Little Johnny Jones, the lead singer with the Swanee Quintet, who was in many ways the perfect substitute: he knew all of Sam’s material, had sung with Sam occasionally, possessed a similar vocal style with a spectacular falsetto and a wider natural range, and, best of all, he had learned from Sam “how to carry myself, [he] gave me a lot of advice about singing [and] was the first to appreciate that I was not trying to sing like him but had my own style.” They brought him back to Chicago at the end of the tour, but Johnny got homesick for Augusta, and for his girl, and he left as quickly as he came, on the eve of their upcoming July tour.

  Gospel promoter Herman Nash was still advertising the “inimitable Sam Cook” when they played Atlanta on July 14, and the angry reaction that they got from their audience, despite the presence of an exciting new lead singer, led Crain to give an interview to the Atlanta Daily World the next day. The Soul Stirrers, “[he] told disappointed Atlanta gospel music lovers . . . would be more ‘beloved and respected than ever’ . . . despite the loss of star vocalist Sam Cook to the popular music field.

  An audience of some 5000 at the City Auditorium earlier had learned that Cook had quit the group Thursday and was in Los Angeles, Calif., where he will receive coaching and study bookings for a national tour.

  The Soul Stirrers rejected an offer to join the rock ’n’ roll ranks along with Cook because “We’ve always sung gospel music. Our lives are dedicated [to] spreading His word in the highways and byways. It will be impossible to change our style now.”

  Their new vocalist, the paper pointed out, was “almost a carbon copy of Cook in looks, voice and style [and] performed flawlessly all of the Soul Stirrers recorded hits.” He possessed all the talent that Sam did, Crain insisted, “and I think will be even more popular than Sam once the public gets used to him and respects his ability.” Sam, Crain said, “has our best wishes. We know the public would not expect us to try to hold on to a man who wanted to do something else. If the people love us then they will not let one man stand in our way.” Crain requested all “well-wishers of the organization,” the article concluded, “to write the group at 4526 South Woodlawn [his home address] to affirm their confidence in the group.”

  The newest Soul Stirrer was the same singer who had taken Sam’s place in the reconstituted Highway QCs just two years earlier. Johnnie Taylor continued to possess the same uncanny vocal similarity to Sam that he always had, and the other Stirrers for that reason had always viewed the QCs as serious potential competition, but now, they realized, Johnnie’s mimetic skills could be turned into a real asset.

  Crume had gone to see him at two in the morning, right after Johnny Jones had decamped for Augusta. “I drove over to his house, and we sat out on the steps, and I explained everything. Johnny was temperamental—he was a hard guy to deal with—and I said, ‘You got to be one of the guys,’ and he agreed that he would cut his little temper. So he says, ‘How much time have I got?’ I said, ‘Till you can put a few things in a bag. I’ll be waiting downstairs for you.’ He got his clothes, and we went to Atlanta.” Johnnie had the whole act down, a
ll of Sam’s gestures, yodels, and seemingly spontaneous interpolations, he even said the word “fucker” in casual conversation just like Sam. He was a nice-enough-looking young man, but he didn’t have Sam’s warmth, he didn’t have Sam’s charm, and, even though he went over well with the audience, everyone in the group pretty much agreed that Johnnie was a cold-hearted motherfucker.

  Still, things really started picking up after he joined them, and they were all looking forward to the Big Gospel Cavalcade, the first all-star gospel revue set up along the lines of the enormously successful rock ’n’ roll package tours, which was scheduled to start in Baltimore on August 15 and play nothing but ballparks, auditoriums, and stadiums with seating of at least five thousand over the course of an eight-week national tour. Clara Ward was the headliner, but the Soul Stirrers were at the top of a quartet lineup that included the Caravans, Dorothy Love’s Original Gospel Harmonettes, the Swanee Quintet, Julius Cheeks and the Sensational Nightingales, the Harmonizing Four, and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama. Like the rock ’n’ roll touring shows, they had their own specially equipped, streamlined tour bus, which was augmented by whatever vehicles individual stars chose to drive (including Clara Ward’s $12,000 twelve-passenger, cream-colored, eight-door Chrysler purchased specifically for the occasion). For the first time the popularity of spiritual music was being tested in head-to-head competition with touring packages like Roy Hamilton’s all-star revue. Which may have been one of the reasons Sam approached Crume at around this time and asked what he thought the other fellows’ reaction might be to Sam coming back to the Soul Stirrers.