Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 32

  In the studio, 1958. Bumps Blackwell, Sam, and Herb Alpert.

  Bumps and Sam.

  S.R. Crain, Sam, Bumps, Clif White.

  Photographs by Jess Rand, © Michael Ochs Archives.com

  Light, lilting, with a kind of modified calypso beat that fell somewhere in between recent recordings by the Orioles’ Sonny Til and Little Willie John, it was also the first new composition by Sam to appear on record since “You Send Me”—and, of course, it was credited to L.C. It opened with bongos on top of drums, with Clif’s guitar (played in the most laconic, tuned-down fashion) adding one more percussive element to a tastefully churning rhythm track. Sam’s voice at the outset is accompanied by his own overdubbed high harmony, then the chorus falls in behind him with the quiet quartet sound that has been otherwise missing from his pop numbers. The lyrics themselves are sung in a modified patois, and there are plenty of “whoa-oh-ohs” along with other instantly identifiable vocal byplay, but the strength of the song lies in its very simplicity, in the apparent effortlessness that recalls his most graceful (though certainly not his most intense) gospel performances. It is as if he were, finally, freed from all constraints, the kind of singer so at home with the sound of his own voice that he is, in the words of his one-time Atlantic Records suitor Jerry Wexler, “a perfect case,” the very definition of the indefinability that lies at the heart of classic art. You get the feeling that at this moment he could sing the telephone book—and might very well do so if he were convinced that in so doing he could reach a larger audience.

  Sam was thoroughly enjoying his time at home. The apartment house on St. Andrew’s was rapidly turning into a kind of extended-family complex. Marlene Blackwell was over all the time visiting her girlfriend, a dancer from Boston, who lived upstairs, and Huggy Boy, the white DJ, and Oopie (George McCurn), the exuberantly eccentric bass singer for the Travelers whom Sam called Oopie Doopie Doo, were living there as well. Lou Adler started going out with Marlene’s girlfriend, and soon he, too, was close to a full-fledged resident, staying upstairs or camping out at Sam’s apartment most of the time. “There was always a lot of people around,” he remembered. “I was half living there and half staying there, I was living the life. We’d get up at two or three in the afternoon and have breakfast, you know, everything was a party. It was gatherings at one apartment or another, all the doors were open to the apartments, and we’d go out to the clubs at night, the 5/4 Ballroom and the California Club, and then to the after-hours places after the clubs closed and back at six in the morning.”

  One of those nights, they all ended up at the California Club, and Ed Townsend, whose “For Your Love” was a huge pop hit that summer, was onstage. To Adler’s surprise “he taunted Sam enough to bring him up, and then he tried to outdo him. And I remember it just going and going, Ed was just doing some of his riffs, and then Sam went into some gospel stuff, and it just tore the place apart. I mean, this was a guy who could literally lift women out of their seats, depending on what he did vocally, and he moved Townsend right off the stage, the women were going [so] crazy.”

  The July 4 Larry Finley Show, a local television program, offered a tribute to Keen Records’ success, as Sam got an award from the host for being the “Brightest Young Singing Talent to Grace the Airwaves of KTLA for 1958,” and Bumps got his own award “for discovering Cooke, Marti Barris, and other new recording stars.” Sam and Bumps wore their elegant Sy Devore suits, while John Siamas beamed proudly at Sam’s debut performance of “Win Your Love For Me,” backed by the “Bumps Blackwell Rockin’ Combo.” Jess Rand, the PR agent on whom Sam was increasingly leaning for advice, was there, too, taking pictures to distribute to the trades.

  Then he was back on the road, playing the Bolero, a classy fifteen-hundred-seater in Wildwood, New Jersey, a boardwalk resort on the Jersey shore, then going on to Atlanta, where he appeared on the first night of promoter B.B. Beamon’s two-day birthday celebration at the Magnolia, with Jackie Wilson and the Drifters booked for the second. Beamon, who, according to the Atlanta Daily World, bought over $2 million worth of talent annually, took a dim view of much of the current crop, because, he said, they “hardly know how to get on and off a stage.” But that was clearly not the case with Sam or Jackie, or Clyde McPhatter or LaVern Baker, for that matter, whom he booked again and again—and who consistently kept drawing.

  Sam stayed out until August 2, when he returned to give a deposition in Art Rupe’s continuing legal action against him and to play the fourteenth annual all-star Cavalcade of Jazz, for which Lil Cumber had booked him as headliner the following night. The lawsuit was just one of his ongoing concerns. He had finally settled his divorce action with Dolores. She had sued him in May, alleging that she had not been aware of the import of papers she had signed the previous fall agreeing to an uncontested divorce and seeking that the judgment entered against her in default be set aside. Then in June her motion was granted and the judgment set aside, and, perhaps based on what she had read in the papers about his new house and swimming pool, she sued him for $5,000 in attorneys fees and $5,000 a month alimony. Sam’s lawyer got her lawyer and her down to $10,000 in a single lump sum—no alimony, no attorneys fees—and Sam instructed him to get it over with once and for all.

  He was concerned enough with his reputation, though, to put together a first-person article for Sepia, which, while undoubtedly ghostwritten, bore all the earmarks of Sam’s present thinking and preoccupations with the perils of success. “As a Soul Stirrer,” he declared in a story entitled “The Trouble I’ve Seen,” “I wasn’t too familiar with what goes on in show business.” The gospel world, of course, had not been without its own snares and delusions, “old ladies crowding around me after we had finished a concert, many of [whom] made passes at me which I naturally ignored.” Or introduced him to their daughters with the idea of trapping him in marriage. All of that he had learned to deal with.

  As a pop singer, however, he found himself “smack dab in the middle of a sinful world,” amidst beautiful women who were not so easily distracted, beautiful women who “have money, know how to dress and talk about things they never mention or think about among the teenage crowd.” The only way of avoiding this kind of temptation, given that he was a normal red-blooded young man, was “to really put on the brakes . . . to take each step in stride to avoid making those mistakes that have wrecked the careers of other promising singers.” He valued, as he always had, he wrote, his parents’ “steadying advice” and spent a great deal of time “in silent prayer.”

  At the end, he addressed his own domestic situation. “Because so many things have been written and said [about it], I feel I am entitled to speak for myself.” He and Dolores, “a swell and lovable person,” had simply gotten married too young, during a time when he should have been concentrating exclusively on his career. As for Connie Bolling, “the Philadelphia secretary who brought [the] unfortunate paternity suit against me . . . I am still convinced it was just one of those things that happen to a guy when he is on his way up.” He was now, he acknowledged, paying for his mistakes, and it was “most upsetting. I can say seriously that it sure doesn’t ‘send me’ as the song says.” But he was not going to make the same mistake again. “For I’ve learned a lot since I went into show business. I know now that things can come back to haunt you. Like past mistakes of judgment and passion.” And, he pledged to his fans, and perhaps more significantly to himself, he would keep those passions tightly reined in, from now on cool reason would remain in control.

  He did not, of course, speak of Barbara, though things had finally come to a head with her. She had brought the baby to see him at the Evans Hotel the last time he was in town, and Linda piped up, just as cute as a button, “My mama won’t tell me who you are, but I know you are something to me.” It had just about killed him. He wanted to claim his daughter right then and there, but Barbara was playing that two-faced game, doing all she could to make him jealous of Diddy, when she knew he knew all about the kind o
f life she was leading. Finally, against his better judgment, he said that he really hated the idea of her being with Diddy, and she just looked at him as if to say, Well, what the fuck is that to me? And he said, cautiously, “But I could never accept you with a kid of his.” Because it was obvious that she was pregnant—her clothes were loose-fitting enough to be maternity clothes. She stared at him like was he really serious, and said, “Well, you don’t want me no kind of way, so what difference does it make?” And he didn’t say anything else, but he told her girlfriend Mook, Mildred Richard, that he wanted his little girl, that he would take Barbara and the baby both, but not with some other man’s child.

  So she had an abortion and went to see him again at the Evans Hotel, like she expected him to come through on his promise right there on the spot, and he didn’t know what to do. He knew what he had said, but he didn’t know what to do. Because the girl he had left was the woman that he wanted, but the girl he had left, the one he had loved when they were both little more than children, was almost unrecognizable within her new hard and polished shell. Then Barbara was completely outdone. She pleaded with Crain, but his heart was adamantine. He said there was nothing he could do for her, there was nothing Sammy could do even if he wanted to, he didn’t have any money because, after all, they were just starting out in the business. She stared at him in disbelief. What was wrong with these people? Didn’t they have any morals? Then, as if to prove how low an opinion of her he actually had, Crain tried to get her to give him some. She just looked at him in utter dismay, like, What did he take her for, was this just something he was going to run back and tell Sam about, or did he really need it that bad? He said, “Well, you a girl that’s been around town, you with these drug pushers and all,” as if to excuse some little faux pas, and then he backed off in embarrassment. But he was insistent that there was nothing either he or Sammy could do to help.

  She might have resigned herself to it, tried to get Diddy to marry her or improve her situation some kind of way, but she had gone too far—she didn’t want Diddy anymore, she wanted Sam. And she wasn’t willing to leave it like it was, with her thoroughly humiliated and him acting like he was the king of the fucking castle.

  So, after they had gone back to California, she went to Sam’s sister Mary—she never knew why, because Mary never liked her any better than any of the other Cooks, but she liked Barbara’s fur coat, and Barbara offered it to her if she would only get a message to Sam. She had an uncle in Los Angeles, Obie Lee, she told Mary, and Obie Lee had offered to take care of her and the baby and get her started out there, so Sam didn’t have to worry about nothing like that, she just needed the money to get out to California. Mary nodded and said she would see what she could do—she surely did like that fur coat, which, even if it wouldn’t fit her, she could have a rug made out of it. She was as good as her word. She told Sam what Barbara had told her: that Barbara and Diddy had gotten picked up by the police, and the welfare people were coming around threatening to take Barbara’s baby away from her, and the next thing Barbara knew, she had two tickets and a $125 money order for her and the baby to fly out. So she crept away from Diddy, and when he caught her and told her not to take anything but the clothes on her back as she packed the cardboard suitcases that her stepbrother, Don Cornelius, a Chicago policeman, had brought to the house, she turned the full fire of her fury against Sam on him. “I screwed for these clothes,” she said. “I’m taking my damn clothes with me.” But they lost her suitcases on the American Airlines flight.

  SAM REMAINED EMBROILED in Art Rupe’s ongoing attempts to prove him a liar. Art had initially begun his lawsuit against Rex, Sam, Bumps, and various other interconnected parties in February, seeking, essentially, restitution for his loss. By his figuring, Keen had earned close to three quarters of a million dollars from Sam’s hit, and while that was something to which they were entitled fair and square, he was entitled to something like $45,000 in the way of publishing income on “You Send Me” alone, not to mention his share in Sam’s future songwriting royalties.

  With Art’s own increasingly lucrative investments in oil and real estate, it didn’t really amount to all that much in the greater scheme of things, but as he saw it, it was a simple question of justice. He had been trying to find someone—anyone—who would testify in a manner that would rectify that injustice. At first he thought he had discovered that person in Leo Price, Lloyd’s brother, who declared that he was the author of the song, or one very much like it called “Why You Send Me.” But when he tried to pin Leo down and get something out of him that seemed more than just another interested party’s attempt to cash in on a confused situation, the whole thing pretty much went away, and, for the time being, he was back where he started, clutching at straws.

  He tried to see if anyone had slipped up when the record was first released and it had ever been advertised or announced as an original by Sam. He contacted Bob Keane, who couldn’t offer legal proof of Sam’s authorship but was convinced that he had written it—and equally convinced, he told Art, that Bumps was ruining Sam as an artist “by removing the Negro quality and making him sing things he doesn’t feel.” Rupe had given up on his half-assed idea of holding Sam to his 1956 Soul Stirrers contract, and he started cutting the group in March with its new lead, Johnnie Taylor, who sounded almost identical to Sam but evidently not identical enough to sell any records.

  Finally, as depositions continued and he found himself confronted with more and more of Sam’s and L.C.’s baldfaced lies, he reached a point where he was ready to dismiss Sam once and for all as one more in a long list of disappointments. The naked avaraciousness of the man, his total lack of business ethics only strengthened Rupe in the determination that had slowly been building to leave the record business and its corrupt practices behind. He may have treated his artists like children, but always, from his perspective, with a concern for their greater good. Their lack of gratitude—Little Richard’s, Lloyd Price’s, Bumps’ and Sam’s—saddened him but only confirmed him in his bleak view of human nature. Henceforth he would leave the running of the business for the most part to others—to Sonny Bono in Hollywood, Harold Battiste in New Orleans, and Professor Alex Bradford in the gospel division—but only under the strictest financial controls.

  As for Sam, he felt no compunction whatsoever about his role in the affair. As far as he was concerned, Art had long since made his money, what was he complaining about? He and L.C. and J.W. only chortled when L.C. was called upon to claim authorship and, under close examination by Art’s lawyer, Dave Pollock, L.C. not only affirmed the compositions to be his own but recited the lyrics verse by verse, note by note. Art’s lawyer at this point drew Art aside and, speaking in an urgent undertone according to L.C.’s recollection, declared, “The wise father knows his own children. I would stake my reputation that he wrote these songs.”

  “You know,” said J.W. Alexander to L.C. afterward, “I was almost believing that you actually wrote them!”

  DESPITE KEEN’s GROWTH, and Sam’s success, things had not been going particularly well for Bumps at the label. He still did not have a written contract spelling out either his partnership agreement or his profit participation, and his relationship with John Siamas grew increasingly testy that summer. At the beginning of July, he had asked for a clarification of his status and, a month later, demanded an accounting, since he had as yet received no royalties. In response, as he understood it, he was promised formal recognition of his ownership share in the company, but, he was given to understand, this would be in lieu of unpaid royalties, so there was still no hope of money actually changing hands.

  Sam, too, was upset with him, Bumps had little doubt it was at Alex’s instigation. Bumps had reassured Sam again and again that here at Keen, unlike Specialty, they were going to own their own publishing, that Siamas had promised them at least an equal share in their own songs with Higuera, Keen’s publishing arm. But so far not a word had come from the company itself, and Sam kept pressing
him for proof. Bumps knew that Alexander was always playing devil’s advocate, telling Sam Bumps didn’t know what he was talking about, that you needed more than pretty promises to be in business, and Bumps put down Sam’s growing impatience to Alexander’s interference. One time Sam said to him, “You taking care of all these other people’s business instead of taking care of mine—and I’m your bread and butter.” Which shocked Bumps in a way, but he thought it was just a little too much ego and would most likely pass.

  Then his “assistant,” Fred Smith, left over what Bumps might have termed a little “misunderstanding” but to Fred was more a matter of his life’s blood: his songs. It all came back to “Western Movies,” the novelty number that Fred and Cliff Goldsmith had written for Sam and that Bumps kept stringing them along about. Nothing happened and nothing happened, and finally Fred’s mother, Effie Smith, a blues singer who with her husband, John Criner, had various music business enterprises of her own, was taking this group called the Challengers into the studio for the first time, “and she let me hear the stuff [that they were gonna cut], and I said, ‘Man, me and Cliff got a song that would make them number one.’ So I told Cliff, I said, ‘Man, I’m just tired of Bumps. Let’s go do it.’” The group changed its name to the Olympics, the song was a hit right out of the chute, and when he got wind of what Fred and Cliff had done, Bumps fired Fred and recorded the song on his wife, Marlene, who no one had even known was a singer up till then.

  It was as if Bumps’ magic was deserting him. René Hall’s description of Bumps in the studio could just as easily have summed up the man: “He would just talk loud and boss everybody around and create the impression that he knew what he was doing. Then he would hire capable people that would straighten it out and do it their way, and he’d say, ‘Yes, that’s what I want.’” Only now it seemed some of those very problem solvers were instead creating problems of their own.