Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Read online

  It was a spirit of friendly competition, in which Sam, Clyde, and LaVern Baker, the irrepressible twenty-eight-year-old life force who had preceded Sam at Wendell Phillips High School by a year and started out her show-business career at seventeen as Little Miss Sharecropper, frequently sang spirituals in the locker-room dressing rooms of the arenas in which they played. LaVern, an uninhibited, cheerfully bawdy ball of fire both on and offstage, closed the first half of the show with her biggest hit, “Jim Dandy,” and was known, according to Ebony, for her “sexy gestures and daring body movements,” which included sticking her finger provocatively in her mouth and rolling her eyes. She was as likely to cuss out a fellow performer with a string of epithets few of her male co-stars could match as she was to sew a button on the shirt of one of the kids on the show. But she was as dedicated to her gospel roots as either of her co-stars, and, the Norfolk Journal and Guide reported in a syndicated story, “If they can get permission from their respective record firms, they want to turn out an album of their favorite gospel songs as a trio.” One night, the Everly Brothers, whose specialty was close country harmony and who currently had the number-one pop hit in the country with “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” walked into the dressing room while Sam and Clyde were singing. “It was the most spectacular thing,” said nineteen-year-old Phil Everly, “the two of them changing off, [they] were about the best I ever heard.”

  What set Sam and Clyde apart from so many of the others, a quality remarked upon by both reporters and peers, was a sense of restraint, an impression of natural elegance and introspection that manifested itself in both their person and their art. What Sam found so compelling about Clyde, though, were his private views on a whole range of subjects, views that, while not altogether foreign to Sam, he had never heard so forcefully expressed.

  Sam, LaVern Baker, Jackie Wilson, 1958.

  Courtesy of Reginald Abrams

  Religion, for example. To Clyde, the kind of religion on which he had been raised was a swindle, “based on fear [and] hocus-pocus. You know, ‘God don’t like this, God don’t like that,’ so one day I said, ‘Goddamn it,’ and my father beat the hell out of me.” His father, too, the “Bishop,” he saw as something of a hypocrite and an oppressor, a man lacking in both sympathy and understanding, where his mother, a woman of little education but much “mother wit . . . never tried to hold me back.” He could always communicate with her, he said, because she supported his dreams. “She was a country girl [who] would say, ‘You can bring your biddies up, but once they learn to fly, you must let them use their wings.’”

  He was a man with an acute sense of injustice, fully committed to the civil rights struggle, with a lifetime membership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a willingness to make public gestures of support, as he had the previous Christmas when he was pictured in an ANP dispatch, mailing a box of records from his music shop in New Rochelle, New York, to the embattled black students of Little Rock. He was equally indignant at the inequities of the music business, racial and otherwise, and he railed quietly against the mistreatment that he had received at the hands of Atlantic Records.

  All of this was so much against his perceived image that only an attentive listener would have picked it up, and many of his contemporaries missed it altogether. Clyde was shy, soft-spoken, polite almost to the point of diffidence, and because he liked his liquor, many of his fellow entertainers tended to dismiss his views or simply not to hear them. But he could have found no more attentive listener than Sam, who soaked it all up in much the same way that he took in all the information and opinions that he gathered from his wide-ranging reading, absorbing it all, trying out new perspectives, reserving judgment for another day.

  There were other outstanding acts and personalities on the show. Sam could appreciate the pure pop sensibilities of some of the young white acts, like sixteen-year-old Paul Anka and eighteen-year-old Bobby Rydell, and he and Clyde would sometimes fool around with country tunes, which made perfect sense to the Everly Brothers, who recognized in their ornate vocal embellishments a striking resemblance to the way in which Lefty Frizzell, one of their idols in country music, would wrap his voice around a song. But the talent to which Sam was drawn most of all was twenty-four-year-old Jackie Wilson, who had emerged from a gospel background in Detroit to take Clyde’s place as lead singer with the Dominoes, then gone solo the previous fall at almost exactly the same time that Sam had emerged in the pop field. Wilson, a strongly extroverted personality who was crazy about both the Soul Stirrers and comic books, brought the house down every night with his opening set, which consisted entirely of his first two hit releases, “Reet Petite” and “To Be Loved,” complete with splits, knee drops, spectacular falsetto flights, and a sense of showmanship that never failed to electrify the audience. Offstage he was equally bold, brazen, and streetwise, with very much of a “player”’s personality, but for all of their differences, and for all of the smooth urbanity that he himself sought to cultivate, Sam was drawn to that, too.

  THEY HIT CHICAGO on May 3. Like the Alan Freed package the previous week, the Biggest Show of Stars was booked into the old Civic Opera House, where Sam had played the previous December. Once again the old neighborhood was out in force, and Jake Richard induced Sam to stop by Creadell Copeland’s house for an informal QCs reunion. None of the QCs had seen him perform—they all remained strict in their avoidance of secular music. Which bothered Sam in a way, even though he didn’t say anything. It kind of hurt the way the quartets would do him, he told Alabama Five Blind Boys guitarist Johnny Fields, who had come to see him three weeks earlier when the tour played Raleigh. “Sam had been in the gospel field, and he knew there weren’t no saints over there, either. He said, ‘I’m the same Sam Cook that was singing “Jesus Give Me Water.”’ He said, ‘I haven’t changed. I’m still Sam.’”

  To the public at large he permitted no such glimpse of vulnerability. “The transition from gospel to pop tunes was easy,” he told an ANP wire service reporter backstage at the Civic Opera. “When I first started singing pop tunes, I wondered how my former associates and fans would react. But they accepted me, as I see them all sitting on the front row . . . just like they did when I was with the Soul Stirrers.”

  That same night the violence that had been predicted by rock ’n’ roll critics since the start of both tours exploded at Alan Freed’s Big Beat show in Boston, when dancing broke out in the middle of Jerry Lee Lewis’ set and, after being stopped by police, broke out again during Chuck Berry’s performance. The show would not continue, the police announced, until everyone returned to their seats, and even then, the houselights would be left on as a security measure. “It looks like the Boston police don’t want you to have a good time,” Freed announced from the stage. Which was more than enough for the crowd, as the seventy-two-hundred-seat Boston Arena, primarily a hockey arena, erupted. Within a week Freed had been indicted by the Suffolk County D.A. for “inciting to riot” and fired from his job at WINS, as the tour itself came to an abrupt end. Universal Attractions’ R&B Cavalcade had already gone on permanent hiatus by this time, and the Dick Clark tour, which had been scheduled to begin at the end of the month, was almost immediately canceled.

  Only the Biggest Show of Stars soldiered on, completing a western segment that included Saskatchewan and British Columbia, then swinging back through Texas and Oklahoma until it reached the Southeast once again, where, fifty-six days after its start, the tour returned to Norfolk for what the Norfolk Journal and Guide anticipated would be another keen “battle of songs” between Sam, a “newcomer to the million-sales record field, and Clyde McPhatter, an old pro, [who] have clashed in wars of words and music . . . everywhere the show has appeared to date.”

  In addition to the stories in Tan and Sepia, there were features on Sam in the teen magazines Song Hits, Hit Parader, and Rhythm and Blues. There was some concern on Sam’s and Bumps’ part that they had yet to come up with a suitable fol
low-up to “You Send Me,” which had now sold nearly two million copies and, in something of an historic first, actually managed to launch a label with a number-one hit. But the album was selling well enough to bear out Bumps’ strategy of musical diversification, and Sam’s signature hit had entered the national consciousness to such an extent that its very paucity of lyrics had become a frequent object of good-natured satire. Prophet John the Conqueror, a Chicago freelance preacher/promoter Sam had known since his QC days, confidently predicted that Sam’s next three recordings, “regardless of the type or title, [would] sell a million or more copies.” None of it seemed to touch Sam anyway. Irrespective of record sales or the Copa debacle, said Lou Adler, who saw the Biggest Show of ’58 on the Coast, “Sam just seemed to be comfortable within himself. I mean, the excitement backstage with all those performers was unbelievable, but it all changed when he walked in. This was a guy that was different from everyone [else] who was in the room.”

  KEEN RECORDS by all appearances was thriving. Bumps had by now built up a full-fledged roster, with the Valiants, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, and J.W. Alexander’s Pilgrim Travelers, who, as the Travelers, had just put out their first two pop releases, including “Teenage Machine Age.” Bumps had developed a gospel line, too, with strong new releases by the Gospel Harmonettes and the Five Blind Boys of Alabama as well as the Pilgrim Travelers, all former Specialty artists. There were in addition a host of newcomers, with artists like Marti Barris, Milton Grayson, and a young group from the Greek community, the Salmas Brothers, all showing varying degrees of commercial promise.

  John Siamas spent more time at the record company now than at his aircraft parts business, mostly because, as his teenage son oberved, “he enjoyed it more. There were other executives at Randall to run operational matters, but this was his avocation.” As a longtime sound buff, he had planned from the start “to develop a high-quality recording studio,” and to that end he had recruited a Greek-American engineer, Dino Lappas, who had designed it and was building it for him at the label’s new West Third Street location.

  Lou Adler and Herb Alpert had long since graduated from their assistants’ roles; they were now not only writing and producing for pretty, blond Marti Barris, they had written and produced Sam’s latest single, “All of My Life,” which unfortunately turned out to be his first not even to chart. They had at this point learned all there was to learn from Bumps, but they were still in the process of seeking an answer to the question that bedeviled everyone who went to work at Keen: “Where’s Bumps?!”

  “Bumps was a teacher,” Lou said, expressing a sentiment on which both he and Herb were in full agreement. “His strength was [as] an educator—and he wanted you to learn. [When we first started], he’d give us a stack of tapes and acetates, and he’d have us break ’em down by verse and by chorus. And then he would grade us, just like school. ‘That was good. You picked the right verse. You picked the right song.’ He pretty much taught us song structure.”

  His downfall, unfortunately, was organization. “After he hired us, we spent the next three months trying to find him. He’d say, ‘Meet me here.’ We’d go there, and they’d say, ‘He just left.’ We knew Bumps was scattered, everyone knew that Bumps would make an appointment and not show up, not follow up on something he should have taken care of—that was just Bumps. He never felt professional, even to us. He felt great, he felt like he’d do anything for you, stay up twenty-four hours a day, he was always thrilled about [any] event that elevated things and took them to another level, levels he had probably dreamed about. But they were beyond him—the monetary thing for Bumps was secondary, but he always sort of outhustled himself, [he always] reached his level of incompetence.”

  Follow a&r apprentice Freddy Smith felt much the same way, only more so. Freddy was trying to pitch a song that he and his new songwriting partner, Cliff Goldsmith, had written. It was called “Western Movies,” a kind of cowboy comic opera along the lines of a Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller-produced Coasters record, and every time he sang and played it for Sam on the piano, Fred said, “Sam would roll on the floor, laughing like nobody’s business. He says, ‘Bumps, you gotta do it, man. You gotta do it.’ But Bumps kept procrastinating, and Cliff, my partner, is dying, ’cause I can’t get nothing done.”

  The way Freddy saw it, it was symptomatic of the way Bumps took care of business—or didn’t. “Bumps had no organization. None. And all these people scattered out everywhere with promises that he’s going to do things and stuff. My thoughts of Bumps was, I learned the business by watching his mistakes. As far as I’m concerned, Bumps should have paid [more] attention.”

  But Bumps was paying attention to something else. He had been cultivating a Latin dance sound ever since discovering a group called Raul Trana and the Nicaraguans in a Hollywood nightclub the previous year. He had even gone so far as to record them for a single release. Now Sam had brought in a song with a Latin feel that Bumps was convinced could be Sam’s next big hit, and when they went into the studio again toward the end of June, several weeks after Sam’s triumphant homecoming, that was the number that Bumps was determined to concentrate on.

  Sam had started writing more and more. He carried a blue spiral notebook with him everywhere he went, filling it up with his lyrics, sometimes even jotting down words while he was talking to you. One time he showed Herb Alpert a song he was working on, “and he asked me what I thought of the lyric, and it really seemed trite to me. [So] I asked him what does the song go like, and he pulled out his guitar and started playing. And all of a sudden this thing that looked so corny on paper just turned into this magical event. ’Cause he had a way of phrasing, a way of presenting his feelings that was uniquely his. I mean, he was talking right to you, he wasn’t trying to flower things up with words that didn’t connect. He had a very clear way of expressing himself.”

  “If you listen to his lyrics,” echoed Herb’s songwriting partner Lou Adler, “they’re very conversational. And it’s something that he always expressed. He said, ‘If you’re writing a song that you really want to get to people, you’ve got to put it into a language that they understand.’” Although he was an avid reader of poetry, his rhymes were more a matter of feel than formality. “It didn’t matter if it was a real rhyme or not,” said Adler, “[as long as] it felt right. I’ve seen him pick up a guitar and, you know, almost talk to you in the way that he was writing. And maybe it’s a song or a lyric that he’ll never use. But it sounded good when he was doing it.”

  He had his own decided ideas of production as well. With René Hall, who was writing most of Bumps’ arrangements by now, whether credited or not, Sam was always insistent on getting it exactly the way he imagined it in his mind’s eye. He was “stubborn,” said René, “[but] he knew what he wanted to do. He would come in [to my office] with his guitar—or Clif White would play the guitar, because Clif knew more chords—and he would [show] me what line he wanted, he’d hum what he wanted the bass to play, hum what he wanted the strings to play, he would tell you exactly what he wanted every instrument to play.” To Herb, a trumpet player with a somewhat formal approach to music, it was Sam’s uncanny ability to communicate—as much by gesture as by language—that allowed him “to set up an environment where the musicians felt comfortable enough to express themselves through Sam, and that was the key. He told me something once that’s riveted to me, it’s like a permanent memory. He said, ‘People are just listening to a cold piece of wax, and it either makes it or it don’t.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You know, you listen to it, you close your eyes, if you like it, great. If you don’t, nobody cares if you’re black or white, what kind of echo chamber you’re using. If it touches you, that’s the measure.’”

  One time Sam and Herb were listening to a young West Indian singer who was auditioning at the Keen studio. “He even brought his own box to put his foot on for the audition. And I was saying to myself, ‘Oh, wow, man, this guy has the whole tool kit. I mean, he’s
nice to look at, he plays nice guitar, his songs are good, and he’ll look great on television!’ And Sam looked at me and said, ‘What do you think?’ So I told him, and he said, ‘Well, turn your chair around for a little while and listen to him.’ And I did, and, of course, nothing happened. And I said, ‘Oh, well, it’s not as good when I turn my back.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I know.’ But, I mean, that was Sam. He wouldn’t be intimidated by how you looked, it didn’t matter if you were handsome or funny-looking, he was listening for the feel.”

  As to how Sam picked up the Latin sound (which had been pervasive since the mambo, rhumba, cha cha, and calypso crazes that had periodically swept through the music business over the past five years), it wasn’t any more a matter of conscious study, Herb felt, than the way Sam sang. “I don’t think he was listening to Tito Puente. Sam had his antennae up at all times, and I would guess that Sam just kind of took the concept [that Bumps had introduced to the Keen studio] and put his own stamp on it.”

  The song that he and Bumps were planning to focus on, “Win Your Love for Me,” was a real departure for Sam. He recorded it at the Capitol studios on the same day that he finally laid down a satisfactory vocal for “Almost in Your Arms,” the theme from Houseboat that he had originally cut while he was in New York in March. The movie theme had been written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, the veteran Hollywood team who had come up with everything from Nat “King” Cole’s classic “Mona Lisa” to Debbie Reynolds’ “Tammy,” and there was no question that it would be the A-side of the single, both because of its cinematic pedigree and because of Bumps’ strong belief in upward musical mobility. But, however smoothly Sam delivered it, it remained a conventional romantic ballad, whereas his own composition had the airiness, the space, above all that inimitable sense of “motion” that so strongly marked Sam’s feel for a song.