New SAR business was at a standstill, as all efforts were focused on Mel Carter’s “When a Boy Falls in Love,” which continued to sell in the pop market. Mel was playing the top nightspots around town and was prominently featured in a big rock ’n’ roll show at the Sports Arena on August 31 with the Beach Boys, the Righteous Brothers, and Marvin Gaye. Zelda Sands, who was taking an increasingly active role in Mel’s career, teased Sam that this was the direction in which Sam’s career could be going, if he would only adopt more of her advice. “I said, ‘I’ll show you [by] putting him where you should be.’ ’Cause I always felt that Sam should be with the pop crowd.”
The Sims Twins and Johnnie Morisette weren’t selling any records. L.C.’s latest single, “The Wobble,” had sunk without a trace. And Johnnie Taylor, the Sentinel reported, was cruising around town in the new Buick Riviera he had gotten as a gift from one of his female “admirers,” still unable to choose between the life of a singer and the life of a pimp. The Soul Stirrers, meanwhile, were in a limbo of their own with the arrest of their lead singer, Jimmie Outler, for kidnapping, robbery, and rape, and their indispensable second lead, Paul Foster, forced to miss an increasing number of recent dates due to illness. J.W. announced to the press that Jimmie, whose troubles stemmed from a Stirrers party at the Dunbar Hotel, was not the lead singer on the group’s best-known coupling, “Stand By Me Father” and “He’s Been a Shelter,” though he didn’t bother pointing out that that particular record had been released in 1959. Still, he and Sam were not about to give up on the Stirrers. Nor were they about to give up on Jimmie, whose last name was transliterated not entirely inappropriately to “Outlaw” in print and popular pronunciation. Sam liked Jimmie, just as he liked Oopie, the former Pilgrim Travelers bass singer, and Johnnie Morisette. There was something about the rough life they led that he was clearly drawn to; denying them would have been like denying an ineluctable part of himself.
He had his first session under the aegis of Allen’s new company, Tracey, on September 11. The idea behind Tracey, Allen explained to him, was to provide a kind of holding company for his income, which would allow him to pay taxes only as he drew money from the Tracey account. Allen would own Tracey (otherwise it would be regarded as Sam’s personal holding company, which would be taxed no differently than an individual), but J.W. would be president and Sam’s daughter’s name would stamp it as his own. Allen was working out the details with Joe D’Imperio—if all went as planned, this would give Sam full control of his masters, in addition to a substantial improvement in his financial situation. But even if it didn’t work out, it gave them a model for independence; it established a kind of prototype for future negotiations. And by doing the session under the umbrella of Tracey, without any input from Hugo and Luigi or RCA, they let the record company know they really did mean business.
Sam went in with a new arranger, Jimmie Haskell, who had done most of Ricky Nelson’s hit sessions, along with a sixteen-piece string section and a big pop chorus. The result was not particularly scintillating, a florid remake of Harry Belafonte’s “I’m Just a Country Boy,” which Sam had cut three years before (and with which Oopie had recently had a hit under his real name of George McCurn, on Herb Alpert’s new A&M label), and a cheerful retrieval of his own “Sugar Dumpling,” which he had originally recorded for his Twistin’ the Night Away LP. Three days later, he was back on the road, with nothing officially resolved but two songs in the new Tracey catalogue.
Allen was by now fully settled on his plan. Despite the little misunderstanding over the process server, there was no longer any question in his mind that Joe D’Imperio was a Sam Cooke fan, so there was no further thought of going to Columbia, even if he was not yet prepared to admit that to RCA. The template for the deal was based on a simple manufacturing and distribution agreement but was dissimilar in most other respects from any of the normal ways in which a record company did business. The idea had evolved from bits and pieces of his own accounting experience, but it was based on something in between a misconception and a blinding flash of illumination. From the time that he had first moved into the former Hecht-Hill-Lancaster offices in the United Artists building on Seventh Avenue in 1960, he had been fascinated by the concept of independent production. To make a movie, you needed a director, an editor, a writer, and a star, and if you had all of those in one package, as Burt Lancaster and his partners in Hecht-Hill-Lancaster had proved, what did you need a studio for? Solely to distribute your product.
Then he recalled what he had heard about Frank Sinatra’s Essex Productions, which Sinatra announced boldly to the trades in 1957 would be his own “full-fledged independent record company,” with Capitol merely serving as its distributor. In reality, Capitol owned Sinatra’s records outright and rejected any modification of that arrangement, because, as Capitol vice president Alan Livingston observed, it would have been “totally contrary to everything going on in the record business then,” but Sinatra continued to trumpet Essex not just as a holding company but as a record manufacturer. Allen also knew of a partnership between Harry Belafonte and Nat “King” Cole, which was actually intended for extra-musical ventures and which turned out in any case to be extremely short-lived, but which Allen for some reason took to be an arrangement by which each manufactured the other’s records, thereby escaping IRS classification as a personal tax dodge.
That was the genesis of his idea for Sam, cobbled together, as Allen himself would have been the first to admit, from nothing more conclusive than imprecise scholarship, his own instincts on the subject, and a willingness, actually a desire, to try something that had never been tried before.
Here was how it would work, he explained to Joe D’Imperio, something of a maverick thinker himself within the music world. Tracey would be neither a production company nor a personal holding company, since Sam would not own, hold stock in, or serve as a controlling officer of the corporation. It would, in fact, function as a full-fledged record company, assuming the burdens and responsibilities of Sam’s artist contract with RCA, taking on the status of record manufacturer, and, of course, owning the masters of the records that it manufactured. But it would assign to RCA exclusive distribution of those records for some indeterminate period of time—Allen suggested five years, D’Imperio came back with a nonnegotiable thirty—and RCA would in turn provide Tracey with free studio time and, in addition to purchasing the records from Tracey at a price that allowed Allen’s company a reasonable rate of profit, reimburse Tracey for its recording costs at a fixed rate of $2,000 for a single, $6,000 for an album.
There was one additional catch. Allen recognized that RCA could not raise its 5 percent artist’s royalty because of favored-nations agreements with other artists, but it would not have a contract with Sam, it would have a contract with Tracey Ltd., for which, since there was no record-business parallel, there could be no favored-nations concerns. Allen wanted a 6 percent royalty for Tracey, and he wanted it paid on 100 percent of all sales. Sam’s royalties, like every recording artist’s, were calculated on the basis of list price minus excise tax (on a single listing for ninety-eight cents, the excise tax came to approximately four cents) and were paid on 90 percent of all sales, the assumption being that 10 percent represented “promotional” distribution and breakage. Sam’s royalty of 5 percent was thus, in reality, no more than 4.23 percent, and it was to be set against a substantial, still-to-be-agreed-upon advance (in other words, Sam would see no royalties until the advance was earned out), but under Allen’s proposal, Tracey’s 1.77 percent share (the difference between Sam’s actual royalty and Tracey’s 6 percent) would come off the top. So, if, for the sake of argument, Sam sold a million singles and three hundred thousand albums, Tracey’s royalty would amount to approximately $35,000. And Allen wanted to be paid not quarterly or biannually, as was customary in the business, but monthly, on the basis of verifiable sales reports.
To Allen’s surprise, not only did D’Imperio not blink, he seemed intrigued by
the idea. What about Sam? Did Sam understand the full implications of the deal—they would need to have a piece of paper from him in which he assigned his RCA contract to Tracey and indicated his full knowledge that henceforth all monies that would have been paid to him by RCA would instead be paid to Tracey and that all past sums owed to Sam or to his publishing companies, Kags and Malloy, would go to Tracey as well. That, Allen said, would represent no problem. Sam’s partner, J.W. Alexander, would be president of Tracey (though he, too, would have no financial stake in the corporation), and both Mr. Cooke and his partner, Mr. Alexander, were sophisticated businessmen who, as Joe was well aware, owned their own publishing and record labels.
There remained, however, the continuing problem of back royalties. Allen was not in the least interested in putting the company through a lengthy auditing process, it would be a needless expenditure of time and effort (and, in the long run, money) for them both, why couldn’t RCA simply concede that there was a sizeable amount due and then work out a reasonable formula by which it could be calculated and paid out? Again to his surprise, D’Imperio agreed. It appeared as if RCA owed Sam and his publishing company back royalties of at least $125,000, D’Imperio conceded, and if Allen would be satisfied to allow RCA to make a good-faith final determination based upon the internal audit it was currently conducting, he thought that a good portion of that sum could soon be released. That was all very well, Allen said, but if they were going to make a deal, he needed a deal memo right away, because Tracey’s fiscal year had already begun, and if he didn’t have something by the end of the month that could be backdated to September 1, RCA could just forget about the whole thing.
This was pure bluff. There was no fiscal year, there was no need for anything but a quick close (“I wanted to get it done fast so that they couldn’t change their mind, I just wanted to make sure I had it”), but in this, as in everything else, D’Imperio proved the soul of gentlemanliness. Whether or not he believed in the literal truth of Allen’s fiscal year was no longer the point. They both wanted to make a deal. He overruled his sales force, which argued that blacks didn’t buy LPs, by insisting vehemently that it was up to the record company, then, to change that. Sam, he declared, was a major talent on the order of Harry Belafonte, who had undeniably sold a lot of albums for the RCA Victor label—and with the proper exposure, on television and in showcase bookings, Sam would, too. D’Imperio’s interests coincided even further with Allen’s in that by being prepared to make so substantial an investment—an investment that could never be recouped in singles sales—he was virtually guaranteeing a label commitment that no r&b artist other than Ray Charles had ever received. By endorsing this kind of deal, Allen recognized, there was no way D’Imperio could survive if Sam didn’t succeed. The whole idea was to make Sam Cooke into a major star.
Jerry Brandt, in the meantime, watched from the sidelines with a mixture of skepticism and resentment. He hadn’t liked Allen on first acquaintance. More to the point, like nearly everyone else in the record business in a position to offer Sam advice, he didn’t trust him. “I tried to talk Sam out of it. I thought Allen was not up to it, and Sam would get hurt. Prior to that, Sam wanted to open an agency with me for his acts. I said, ‘No, let’s open up a management company,’ [but] he didn’t want me to manage him. [At first] I didn’t see Allen moving in. I think he just overwhelmed Sam. His whole ploy was, ‘You’re broke.’ But then he smoothed me, too.”
Jerry’s plan for bringing Sam into the money, not surprisingly, had its own element of self-interest. He and his boss, Roz Ross, had gotten involved in the Sweet Chariot, a brand-new gospel nightclub on Broadway owned by Crystals manager Joe Scandore (who had previously owned the Club Elegante in Brooklyn), which was bolstered by an exclusive deal with Columbia for on-site recordings that Jerry had set up with Dave Kapralik. Gospel nightclubs, with waitresses dressed like Playboy bunnies with wings, were the latest rage, and Jerry’s idea was that this would be a safe way to introduce Sam into a mainstream Manhattan showroom without risking the kind of public humiliation that failure at the Copa or Basin Street East could entail. With Sam’s unimpeachable gospel roots and appeal, Jerry was confident of Sam’s success at the Sweet Chariot, and the attention he would surely attract there would pave the way for a return to the supper-club circuit from which in recent years he had been largely absent. Sam and Alex thought it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard. It was against everything they had been working for, no competition, certainly, for the money Allen was talking about but, more important, a scrimped vision compared to the grand schemes that Allen had advanced. Jerry finally just gave up the fight. Sam, he decided, was simply not manageable, and Allen was another overbearing hustler who thought he could roll over everybody. “He was bright, aggressive, he pulled the wool over my eyes and everybody else’s. He’s a charming asshole, you know. But he was just a homo to Sam. We all were. Straight guys who became homos. No question about it.”
SAM HAD BEGUN HIS NEW TOUR, with Bobby “Blue” Bland, Little Willie John, Baby Washington, Freddie Scott, and the white rock ’n’ roll star Dion, on September 14. They played Nashville the following day, just after getting word of the Birmingham church bombing in which four little girls had been killed. It was like a constant assault, an almost stupefying catalogue of mindless racial insult and injury. “What murdered these four girls?” declared Martin Luther King in an uncharacteristically angry public outburst. “The apathy and complacency of many Negroes who will sit down on their stools and do nothing and not engage in creative protest to get rid of this evil.” It hung like a shroud over the whole tour—the cops in Louisville who stopped the show because two white girls in front got up and started dancing, the teenage white boy in Charlotte, North Carolina, they chased up the aisle simply because he was having a good time. “It was not only against Sam or the black acts,” said J.W., “it was against the music. Period.” And, of course, it was against the mixing of the races that the music inevitably provoked.
Onstage.
Courtesy of the Estate of Clif White
But the music always offered some reprieve. Bobby “Blue” Bland, a stand-up singer, stolid in appearance but much like Sam in the way he could turn an audience out just by the sound of his voice, was riding the crest of a remarkable wave of gospel-inflected hits (“He knows consciously what he’s going to do in advance,” Sam said to a white interviewer, suggesting that Bobby’s music was perhaps a little too “premeditated . . . but it comes across effectively”). One night Bobby and his opening act, singer Al “TNT” Braggs, teamed up with Little Willie John to—as J.W. put it—“gang up” on Sam onstage. “They really planned to cut Sam up on the finale,” J.W. said, which was, as usual, “Having a Party.” They all got out and did everything they could to take the song away from Sam, and Sam acted like he was simply going to quit and leave the stage to them, when, by prearrangement, J.W. came in from the side, and, “you know, I could always dance, and a lot of the girls thought, ‘This must be Sam’s dad,’ and I just brought the house down.” It was so successful, in fact, that it became part of Sam’s nightly act, and it broke the crowd up every time.
Little Willie John, who hadn’t had a big hit in three years, was as irrepressible as ever, and Baby Washington invited Linda onstage for the finale, when she and her mother joined the tour briefly one weekend. A teenage white girl who saw the show with a friend in Columbus, Ohio, remembered Little Willie John’s childlike charm and the thrill she felt when Sam spotted her girlfriend and her doing the twist in their fourth-row seats. “Sam pointed at us and said, ‘Those girls are doing some twisting,’ and we just went out of our minds.” But when Bobby “Blue” Bland did “Stormy Monday,” and his guitarist, Wayne Bennett, played the liquid notes of the solo, “I just slid down into my seat and felt like I was dying.”
THE RACIAL CLIMATE IN NEW ORLEANS was tense when they came into town on Thursday, September 26. There had been a series of marches protesting discriminatory voter
registration procedures, which had culminated in the arrest of ninety members of the Youth Crusaders’ Corps the previous week. In Shreveport a scheduled Sunday march in memory of the four little girls killed in Birmingham was blocked by the police, and more than five hundred black churchgoers were attacked by armed riot squads, deputies, and a mounted posse as they left a memorial service, with the Reverend Harry Blake, president of the local NAACP “dragged out of [his] church, clubbed to the ground” and taken to Dallas for treatment, the Louisiana Weekly reported, due to “fear of foul play at Shreveport hospitals.”
On the other hand, Weekly writer Elgin Hychew noted in his “dig me!” column: “We congratulate the mixed crowd which turned out at the Auditorium the other night for the James Brown Show. . . . Our hearts really throbbed at seeing the people of this community enjoying themselves without incident. [The police contingent of fifty] did not harass the rock and roll fans who just could not sit in their seats during the four-hour show. We saw white girls and Negro girls, white boys and Negro boys seated side by side and together whooping it up. . . . We were proud because this was the New Orleans we love . . . the city which for so long enjoyed the reputation of being so cosmopolitan until the hate factories started working overtime. [The upcoming Sam Cooke/Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland double bill] promises to be the biggest rock and rollarama presented in the Municipal Auditorium in many years. Both sides of the auditorium are expected to be filled to overflowing [for this] ‘battle of hits.’”
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 66