Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  Sam was focused on the future. He spent time at Keen’s new offices on Hollywood Boulevard, made a guest appearance on the brand-new ABC-network Guy Mitchell television show on November 11 (for which he received $750, minus his William Morris commission), and two days later went into the studio to begin work on his first album. At Bumps’ direction, accompanied by the Bumps Blackwell “Orchestra,” which consisted for the most part of Clif, René, drums, and bass, augmented by the same vocal chorus that had played such a prominent part on “You Send Me,” he focused on standards like “Ol’ Man River,” “Danny Boy,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and “That Lucky Old Sun,” songs to which he had always been drawn but which had the added advantage, Bumps pointed out, of demonstrating his versatility, expanding his appeal, and helping to further the scenario that the William Morris agent had painted for them so persuasively.

  On the strength of Sam’s success, Keen Records, too, was rapidly expanding. They had hired a combination promotion man / art director in Don Clark, formerly with Aladdin Records. They had set up foreign distribution through London American, a division of the English conglomerate Decca Records. They announced the upcoming release of the first two albums on their new Andex subsidiary, Bob Keane’s jazz outing and the Pilgrim Travelers’ Look Up!, for which Bumps drafted Sam to sing tenor on one track behind a rare (and haunting) J.W. lead. In mid-November they signed Johnny “Guitar” Watson, a star on the L.A. r&b scene whose talent was exceeded only by his panache and by his ambivalence about whether he wanted to be a singer or a pimp. And not long before that, Keen put out its first release by the Valiants, “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” once again landing the label, and Bumps, in hot water with Art Rupe.

  Bumps was scarcely a passive agent in this new brouhaha. He had worked with Little Richard on the song (for which he had cowriting credit) at Richard’s last New Orleans session, at the end of July 1956, when Richard was already beginning to balk about going into the studio under the terms of his Specialty contract. Art rerecorded the number at Richard’s last regular session for the label in October, but in the year that had passed since then, he had never released it, and now that Richard had dramatically announced that he was quitting show business (he had thrown all of his rings into the water at the end of a two-week Australian tour, during which he saw the Soviet satellite Sputnik pass over the Sydney stadium like a “fireball” and took it as a sign that the Day of Judgment was near), Bumps doubted that he ever would. In any case, doing the song with the Valiants was one more chance to stick it to Art, the former boss in whom he had once so fervently believed. And he never mentioned any of the possible complications to John Siamas—why should he? He just put the session together, got Don and Dewey, signed to Specialty as an incendiary teenage vocal duo but equally talented multi-instrumentalists, to back them up, along with an expanded rhythm section of Nicaraguan percussionists on congas and bongos whom Bumps had discovered in a Hollywood nightclub.

  The Keen crew, fall 1957: Paul Karras, John Siamas, Rex Oberbeck, John Gray, Sam Cooke.

  Courtesy of John S. Siamas

  The entire emphasis was on speed. With their talented lead vocalist, Billy Storm, setting the pace, they started fast and, at Bumps’ urging, just kept gathering velocity. “Pick it up, pick it up,” he kept yelling at the four Valiants, determined that no white boys would be able to take this song from them. In the end, they carried it off better than any of them would have believed possible, and for the other side, Billy laid down “This Is the Night,” a beautiful ballad penned by all four, which just went to show their versatility on top of Billy’s Hollywood good looks.

  “ANOTHER KEEN HIT, taking off like a rocket” was the way that Keen Records was promoting its new release, and though “This Is the Night” appeared to be the A-side, Art was not the least bit sanguine about what he took to be another stupid provocation coming from an all-too-familiar direction. He suspected, he wrote to “The President” of Rex Productions Incorporated on November 7, the same day he wrote to Sam, that “you do not have all the accurate and honest facts about this whole mess. I’m certain that most of your information [has come] from ‘Bumps’ Blackwell, our former employee whom I was forced to discharge.” The release of “Good Golly, Miss Molly” by Keen, Art informed them, “reflects an out-and-out violation of our property rights” because of the fact that it had not been released to date by its owner, Specialty. “I cite this as an example,” Art continued, “to show you that you are making decisions without all the facts.” And he then went on to suggest that “if you had all the honest facts, I’m sure that you or any other ethical business man would do the right thing, which in the long run is the most practical and profitable for all concerned.”

  He proposed a private meeting at which they might iron out their differences, but when he and John Siamas met eleven days later, he found that Siamas, while a perfectly pleasant man, was willing to discuss only the matter of licensing “Good Golly, Miss Molly.” When he brought up Sam and the eight sides he owed to Specialty, Siamas was “evasive,” said that Sam was “back east” (which Art didn’t believe), and told him, somewhat insultingly, that Sam would be happy to take a lie detector test if Art would.

  Art was suddenly tired of it all: he was tired of Sam and Bumps, he was tired of Richard, he was tired of the endless wrangling, he was, in fact, tired of the business. The impression that he got of Siamas was that here was a businessman perfectly willing to fight over business issues, a self-made man with the attitude that he had come into this world with nothing, that he would go out with nothing, and that “what happens in between doesn’t count.” Art wasn’t about to give up, but neither was he going to hold a grudge against a man who had been purposely misled, a man in some respects very much like himself. So he agreed to the license, continued to make plans for his upcoming European vacation, and prepared a rush release on Little Richard’s “Good Golly, Miss Molly” that would blow the Valiants’ version out of the water.

  If Sam was affected by any of this, he didn’t show it. To thirteen-year-old John Siamas Jr., Sam remained the most thoughtful and down-to-earth person in the world—“and interested, in situations where there was nobody around to impress. Sam would shoot baskets in our backyard. He tried to teach me how to play the guitar, which was his one miserable failure. One of the things I vividly remember was when he came and performed at the junior high school I attended, Audubon Junior High, south of Crenshaw, which was racially diverse at the time—he just sat there with his guitar and sang songs and invited me to come up onstage with him and introduced me as his friend.”

  The single most dominant impression that John Siamas Jr., a bright, serious young man destined to become a lawyer, took away from his contact with Sam was of his warmth, his kindness, his “love of life.” And why not? He was at last in the place he had so long wanted to be. He had gained not just the financial wherewithal but the “legitimacy,” the respect, the identity that his father said you must always seek (and never settle for anything less) in the white man’s world. Following Bumps’ lead, he began to cultivate a collegiate look: V-neck sweaters and pleated beltless pants for casual situations, a growing number of modestly elegant business suits for more formal ones. He was wearing his hair more and more close-cropped with less and less straightener, in direct contrast to all the elaborately processed fashions of the day.

  For all of the fact that his fame and status were growing so rapidly (“In just three sensational weeks,” reported the black wire service, ANP [Associated Negro Press], with some hyperbole at the end of November, “he has become the ‘top man’ in all popularity departments . . . and has zoomed from a $150 a week performer to one who can ask and get a cool $1500 every seven days”), what stood out most was the easy grace with which he accepted it all, almost as if it were something about which he had had no doubt all along. “He was very conscious of [who] he was, what he looked like, how he was groomed,” said Herb Alpert, who had just gone to w
ork at Keen with his friend, twenty-four-year-old Lou Adler, as one of Bumps’ three “junior assistant a&r men” (Fred Smith, who had come over with Bumps from Specialty, was the first, and the only, one with any real experience in the business). “He made everyone feel at home, he had lots of charm, was full of smiles, and seemed to be enjoying himself. And yet he was intimidating at the same time. He seemed to suck up all the oxygen in the room—I mean, the focus would go right to him.” It wasn’t that he sought it out, Herb was convinced. It was just that he had “this larger-than-life quality about him, he had stardust on him.”

  Fred Smith, who had met Sam at Johnny Otis’ talent show at the Nite Life that summer and whose mother was a well-known blues singer, saw it a little differently. An accomplished songwriter himself, he was unreserved in his admiration for Sam, but at the same time, he recognized in Sam an element that neither of Bumps’ two young white assistants was likely to pick up. “Sam was a genius. He’s one of those people who when he walks in the room, you almost get cold chills, but he had an attitude: Hey, man, I deserve this. And he did deserve it, because of who he was and how he got there. But in some cases he wouldn’t back down.”

  Sam went on a five-day West Coast tour with Little Richard’s band, the Upsetters, second on the bill, and an acquaintance from the Chicago gospel and r&b world, Dee Clark, singing all of Little Richard’s hits. Upon his return to L.A., he went back into the studio on November 26, then flew to New York for his second Ed Sullivan appearance with his fee doubled to $2,000, perhaps to make up for past “insult and injury.”

  “Sam,” Ed Sullivan said, introducing him with that discomfiting awkwardness that was his most distinctive characteristic, “here’s the time.” Sam, looking almost equally awkward, stood with his hands clasped and elbows drawn in. The smile was removed from his face, and his hair stood up in spiky strands, as if it couldn’t quite decide between being “natural” and woolly like his father’s and J.W.’s, or slick and smoothed back as it had been for his last appearance. The musical accompaniment was different, too. He opened with “You Send Me,” but there was none of the cloyingly sweet sax vamp that had accompanied his ill-fated debut, the song was taken slower, with a barebones rhythm section, a vocal chorus, and Clif, who had just agreed to go out on the road with him as “bandleader” and arranger, leading the ensemble on guitar. And Sam just sang his song, weaving endless romantic curlicues around words so simple and repetitive (“You send me” must have been repeated two dozen times) that the mere variation of “You thrill me” carried a disproportionate weight of its own, and when he got to the release that led into the bridge (“Honest, you do”), it was like an ice floe letting go. But it wasn’t about the words, as Clif had learned at their first meeting just six months earlier. Sam had a way of turning hypnotic repetition into a kind of musical suspense that, for all of his experience in the business, Clif would never have imagined any singer could sustain. But Sam did—and he had utter confidence in his ability to do so and in his instinct for when to do so. Siamas at one of the early sessions had tried to interject his own well-intentioned sense of how to improve the song they were working on by giving it the “Sam Cooke feel,” and Sam had blown up at the label owner in his own quiet way, telling him, “You can’t just put in a ‘whoa-oh’ in every song, you got to feel it, man,” saying it perfectly politely but not bullshitting around, because for Sam it was a musical trademark, not a gimmick.

  He came back out to sing his new Keen single, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons” (there was no way he was going to plug his Specialty single, Bill Cook’s “I’ll Come Running Back to You,” which was by now closing in on nearly half a million sales), and Ed took the opportunity at this point to make further amends. “I did wrong one night here on our stage,” he told audience and home viewers alike, then apologized directly to Sam, adding that in the aftermath of the incident, “I never received so much mail in my life!” Sam wore a tux for this number, once again kept his gestures to a minimum, and improvised off the vocal chorus, lagging behind and singing all around the beat. And then at the end, he clasped his hands together and bowed his head as if to receive a benediction.

  “You Send Me” officially hit number one in Billboard the next day, and Sam and Bumps celebrated in New York. As John Siamas Jr. remembered it, his father had flown in to be with them for The Ed Sullivan Show, but they protected him from certain elements of their lives. “Sam and Bumps said they were going to spend the night in Harlem, and my father said, ‘Okay, that sounds right.’ And Bumps said, ‘No, no, I don’t think you understand. You can’t spend the night in Harlem. We have to go spend the night in Harlem.’ So that was the one night they did not stay in the same place.”

  Sam knew all kinds of girls in New York by now. He had always known a certain type of girl in New York as a Soul Stirrer, and since Crain had started booking them into the Apollo the previous year, he had had time to get to know more of them. But the girls he was meeting now were a faster crowd, more knowing, more glamorous, more sophisticated, more to his current taste. “Sam had quite a way with the ladies. I always stood back and waited my turn,” said Lithofayne Pridgon, who came out of “Dirty Spoon,” the black section of Moultrie, Georgia, and had met Sam the previous year when she arrived in New York at the age of sixteen. She had taken immediately to the life, started going with Little Willie John, and first kissed Sam in Willie’s bedroom at the Cecil, looking out the window on 118th Street. “He wasn’t the world’s greatest lover—but he was, you know, [because] he was on another page. It wasn’t so much a physical thing [as] a whole social thing. He wasn’t the most dynamic bed partner, but he was so cool it took up the slack. He was a gentleman, [which was] all the way the other way from what I was accustomed to.”

  Sam, Lithofayne said, “could rub elbows with anybody,” and that in a way was as much a part of his charm as his talent, intelligence, or physical beauty. Without it, he might have been insufferable, another one of those “hincty niggers” who acted like their shit didn’t stink like everyone else’s. But Sam was as likely to salute the bum in the alley as the highest high mucky-muck. He had no intention, he firmly told family and friends, of leaving anyone, or any part of his life, behind. To that end, he convinced Crain to join Clif and him on the road. Crain could be his “road manager,” he said, he really needed him—and for all of Crain’s dedication to the Soul Stirrers, it seemed as if he had just been waiting for Sam to ask. “I’m going with Sammy-o, the greatest lead singer in the world,” he told the group, scarcely giving them time to react and bequeathing his managerial responsibilities to J.J. Farley, the bass singer from his home town of Trinity, Texas, who had joined up in 1936. Sam, Crain, and Clif were perfectly matched, with the two older men well qualified to offer different kinds of advice but equally amenable to accepting Sam’s decisions as final.

  In New York Sam picked up a driver / valet, too, even though he wasn’t convinced that he necessarily needed one. Eddie Cunningham just started hanging around and running errands—he got Sam’s white leather coat cleaned for him when Sam didn’t think it needed cleaning, and after he brought it back sparkling white, Sam told his brothers, “This cat is something else.” Eddie, who was originally from L.A., was a sharp dresser who knew his way around, but more important, he knew everyone in the business. It turned out his sister was Mabel Weathers, Tony Harris’ manager, and Eddie had taken care of Tony when Tony played the Apollo earlier that fall with a little record of his own. The way Eddie saw it, Sam was going places, and he wanted to go there with him. “Sam never really hired me,” Eddie admitted to L.C. some months later. “I just started straightening up, getting him food and coffee, and then I told him, ‘You need for me to drive for you.’”

  Sam remained in the East for most of the next two weeks, with a three-day interlude in Chicago, where he played a show sponsored by popular DJ and television personality Howard Miller at the Civic Opera House on the Friday following his Ed Sullivan appearance. The entire Co
ok family turned out. “There were so many people there, you could hardly get in,” said his twenty-two-year-old sister Agnes, who was accompanied by her husband of five years, Eddie Jamison. “We all had seats right down in the front, and we sat through both shows.” It was a rock ’n’ roll show for an almost all-white audience. Brash new rockabilly sensation Jerry Lee Lewis was the co-headliner, with the Four Lads, the mixed group the Del Vikings, Howard Miller discovery Bonnie Guitar, and Pat Boone’s brother Nick Todd on the bill. As he had on Ed Sullivan, Sam performed in his tux, and the Cooks had a family picture taken outside the theater, with girlfriends, neighborhood acquaintances, and Sam and L.C.’s best friend, Duck, all in tow. Everyone looks proud and pleased, with the possible exception of Annie Mae Cook, whose pale, doughy face appears to be worriedly contemplating the future. “I can say this,” Annie Mae told a reporter doing a story for Sepia magazine. “None of my children have turned out badly. They don’t run around with gangs and stay out all night either. . . . God has blessed us with their voices.” As to a proposed family move to Sam’s new home base of California, Mrs. Cook said, “Maybe we’ll stay six months in one place and six months in the other—just so long as Sam is satisfied.”

  He played the Newark, New Jersey, Armory with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters the following night, opened a one-week engagement on December 12 at the upscale Lotus Club in Washington, D.C., and found time in between to give an extensive interview to one of the country’s most prestigious black newspapers, the Amsterdam News, which ran a rare in-depth feature on him just before Christmas. In the picture published with the article, you can see Sam leaning forward to engage Women’s Editor Margurite Belafonte with what one imagines to be all the charm at his disposal.