Whenever he opened his mouth onstage, Sam told an informal press conference of local newspaper reporters midway through the two-week run, he was trying “to grab hold of someone’s heart.” He was, wrote Paul Learn in the Atlantic City Press, “more alive than most people. To him, jokes are funnier, the music more enchanting, the leaves on the trees more in bloom.”
Like his friend Cassius Clay, the reporter wrote, “Cooke is a healthy young man who still squirms in his chair [and] will perch cross-legged on a divan, and when he moves, his body flows with tiger grace. He’s happy as a boy pushing skyward on a swing.”
On the subject of Cassius:
“He beat [Liston] once, and he’ll beat him again. And do you know why? Because he makes Liston afraid of him.”
Cooke bounced out of his chair to illustrate how Cassius scared the big lumbering Liston into losing.
“Liston has just showed up for the fight, see?” said Cooke in recounting the day of Clay’s glory. “Cassius comes over to him, and he puts his head real close to Sonny’s, and he says, ‘I didn’t think you were going to show up. I’m sure glad to see you. You’re mine tonight, baby.’”
Cooke put his face close to a reporter’s head and grinned fiendishly.
“That’s how he scared Liston,” said the . . . singer.
He added that it accounts in part for his [own] ability to communicate with his audience.
“I have no doubts about myself,” he concluded. “I have no fear. Doubt will kill you. Fear will kill you. The worst enemies are doubt and fear.”
HE SHOWED LITTLE EVIDENCE of either doubt or fear in the full-scale screen test that immediately followed the Atlantic City engagement. There had been universal enthusiasm at Fox about the way he photographed in the preliminary shoot, so Earl McGrath set up a dramatic audition in which Sam traded lines from a Clifford Odets play with an experienced Broadway actor. He acquitted himself well in a five-minute scene that focused, like all of Odets’ best work, on issues of social justice. What impressed Earl most, though, was how comfortable Sam seemed with the camera. He was eating an apple in his scene and, McGrath noticed, got a piece stuck on his upper lip. Earl had seen veteran actors thrown by less, but Sam just reached up lazily with his tongue and flicked the apple away, as if it were just another small dramatic “bit” in his delineation of the character.
Sam took Earl and his wife up to Harlem while he was still in town, waving off any concerns they might have about the recent rioting and introducing them to the DJ Fat Jack Walker, who made them a big soul-food dinner. They went to a few bars, and everywhere they went, Sam was greeted like a long-lost friend. It was, Earl later came to think, a kind of lesson. “Sam was a very optimistic person, and when those riots happened, he was just saying, ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’” At the same time, Earl realized, he wasn’t simply going to come right out and say it. “By taking us up to Harlem, he was showing us without proselytizing. He was pointing [us] in that direction, so the thoughts would be [our] own.”
With Al Schmitt still in New York mixing the Copa tapes, Sam scheduled a double session at RCA’s Twenty-fourth Street studios on the night of August 7. For the first session, from eight to eleven, he got a hot new arranger, Torrie Zito, who specialized in complicated string arrangements, to write a delicate, deliberately bossa nova-ized orchestral treatment of “I’m in the Mood For Love,” the universal standard with which Louis Armstrong had had one of his biggest popular hits in the thirties. None of Sam’s musicians played with the twenty-seven-piece ensemble, not even Clif, and if in the end the song came off as more mannered than successful, it was striking for its delicate instrumental voicings and bold vocal coloration.
The eleven o’clock to two A.M. session, with only his own rhythm section to accompany him, focused on almost as unlikely a choice. “He’s a Cousin of Mine” had originated with a 1906 Broadway musical, Marrying Mary, written by two black songwriters, Chris Smith and Cecil Mack, and popularized by Bert Williams, the greatest of all the Negro blackface comedians and vaudevillians. Sam had first heard the song among the piano rolls, cylinder recordings, and old 78s in the collection of his and L.C.’s longtime friend the DJ Magnificent Montague. “He would go through my piano rolls,” Montague said. “I have the original sheet music of ‘Carry Me Back to Old Virginny’ and ‘In the Evening By the Moonlight,’ so he knew that they were written by James Bland—a black man. He found out that most of your Tin Pan Alley hits were written by blacks. And he wanted to do an album.”
He appeared, in fact, to be finally making a start at the program he had announced the previous year of “hit[ting] the trail on behalf of Negro writers . . . who are and have been idling on the shelf,” but he didn’t bother to clue in the band, who, with the possible exception of Clif, knew nothing of the origin of the song. Bobby had no idea what to make of it musically (“Play the guitar like a banjo,” Sam said to him), but Sam had him convinced that the story—with its episodic narrative about talking your way out of a compromising situation by suggesting that the man or woman you happened to be with was actually your cousin—was a true one. “He was saying that this girl really was a cousin, and he wanted to fuck her,” declared Bobby, who never noticed that Sam had reversed the storyline but played his guitar part persuasively nonetheless. The whole rhythm section acquitted itself admirably—it was the first time in all the years they had been together that June had played with Sam in the studio, and the addition of Sticks Evans on bongos only added to the eccentric flavor—as Sam put the song across with a sly wit and genuine relish that almost allowed it to be perceived as a contemporary number, despite its hoary origins.
He spent nearly the entire three-hour session on this one simple song, then gave Bobby an even odder assignment, with an insistent thick-toned lead on a new number called “The Piper,” for which he had provided the words and melody of a children’s song. “Up and down and through the town,” Sam sang with curious wistfulness, “The piper plays today / Doors and windows open wide / To greet him on his way.
He’s dressed all up
In little boots
And green and yellow clothes
And when he plays his little heart
Away your trouble goes
Hi, everybody, I didn’t come to stay
I just came to let you know
The piper’s on his way
Up and down and through the town
The piper plays today
Doors and windows open wide
To greet him on his way
Hi, everybody, I didn’t come to stay
I just came to let you know
The piper’s on his way
Did he imagine himself as the Pied Piper? If so, he had clearly not recognized the implications of the fairy tale. Was it a song for Tracey and Linda, or was it a hastily dashed-off sketch of the uncomplicated role he would have liked to imagine for himself in the world, something like J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, an incorruptible guardian and champion of innocence? Whatever his intentions, the song amounted to little more than a rough demo, the suggestion of another song it could only be imagined he might someday come to write. The whole double session, in fact, could scarcely be viewed as anything more than an experiment in diversity, but neither Sam nor his new a&r man was fazed in the least. “What was so great about Sam,” said Al Schmitt, “was that he was willing to try anything. He had total control, but he was open to everything. I knew we were going to come out with something [that would] knock everybody on their ears.”
In this case, they had to wait two weeks for all the elements to coalesce. Sam had returned to California by this time after headlining a big outdoor show, Blues Under the Stars, at Wrigley Field in Chicago on August 15. The show drew forty-five thousand people and included everyone from Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and Etta James to Motown stars Marvin Gaye and Little Stevie Wonder, but it was Sam who really incited the crowd, and, with Charles already en route to California in the Rolls, it was left to
Duck to save him from the mob that broke through security lines and surged around him happily onstage. The Muslims pursued him no less ardently, as Cassius Clay and his wife, Sonji, who had just been married in Gary, Indiana, the day before, showed up with a large retinue of Black Muslims led by his new manager, Herbert Muhammad, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s son. They were all over Sam, said his brother L.C., hustling his ass and telling him everything the Nation of Islam had done for the champ. “You didn’t do nothing for Ali,” Sam said indignantly. “Ali did for Ali, just like I’m doing for Sam. You wouldn’t even be talking to me if I wasn’t Sam Cooke.” And with that, he turned his attention back to Ali and his beautiful new bride, a sophisticated twenty-seven-year-old woman of the world whom Sam knew from the clubs but who, after her introduction to Ali by Herbert Muhammad and their whirlwind romance that summer, had announced her intention to convert to Islam. “There are two types of artists, artists and con artists,” Sam told Bobby and left little doubt as to which category he believed the official hierarchy of the Black Muslims belonged.
He called a session in Los Angeles five days later, once again with his own band, once again, surprisingly, to record a single song. The song was one he had given to the Sims Twins nearly two years earlier, a typical Sam Cooke composition built around a familiar phrase and then given a distinctive twist—but in the Sims’ version, the song, “That’s Where It’s At,” achieved none of the poignancy that Sam had imagined for it. Now, spurred on perhaps by the downhome flavor of the Chicago blues festival, and pricked no doubt by the rise of what was now widely referred to as “soul music,” the strong gospel-based sound that had started to dominate the charts, he set out to create what could be taken almost as a template for that sound. “You’ve got to go back to what you know,” he had told Don Covay, one of the most influential of the young soul songwriters, whose first big hit on his own, “Mercy, Mercy,” had just been released. He had offered similar advice to Otis Redding and Solomon Burke, whose music reflected the same explicit embrace of a tradition that had long been represented, in different ways, by Sam, Ray Charles, Jackie Wilson, Clyde McPhatter, and James Brown—but never so explicitly as part of a “movement,” never so unapologetically as an affirmation of identity. “Write about what you know, write about what you’ve experienced, write about what you observe,” he told them. “Write about natural things, you’ve got to come out of the future and get back to the past, to what you knew when you were a little kid.” Most important of all, he said over and over again with what each one took to be the fervor of true belief, “All you gotta do is be yourself.”
That is what he now set out to do. Where the Sims Twins had given the song a bright, bouncy feel, Sam at first took it almost at a crawl, with a small four-piece horn section providing a steady choral-like backdrop, and Bobby’s tremolo-touched lead providing more than a suggestion of the gospel sound. It didn’t go smoothly at first. Sam’s voice was a little raw, the horns couldn’t get the off-kilter feel he was looking for, and he expressed uncharacteristic irritation at the rhythm section for rushing him (“They backwards to what I’m singing,” he declared. “That’s why I’m annoyed”). Most of all, though, he was frustrated at not being able to achieve the objective he had set for himself: the communication of unfiltered emotion. Finally, on the fourteenth take, it all began to come together as Bobby moved to a higher register and the band, at Sam’s direction, picked up the tempo a little. The song remained as raw as Sam intended it, with the horns capturing some of the sweet-and-sour dissonance of a New Orleans marching band, and the drag of the tempo against intentionally ambiguous lyrics (“Your world turned upside down / You making not a sound / No one else around / That’s where it’s at”) becoming a kind of implicit statement about mortality and the passage of time.
He continued for another twenty-four takes, proving once again his contention that the simplest effects were achieved only with the most arduous application of effort. Here arduousness yielded to almost painful deliberation, as he bore down for six more takes to create a ragged vocal overdub, seemingly spontaneous and out of synch, that suggested profound regret in the midst of romantic celebration. “Your heart beating fast,” he sang, “You’re knowing that time will pass / But hoping that it’ll last”—and then the song’s title, the last line of each verse and the single line of each chorus, providing a melancholy reminder, against the explicit manner in which the song would surely be taken, that this is all there is—this is how fragile and evanescent are our pleasures.
You say, “It’s time to go”
And she says, “Yes, I know
But just stay one minute more”
That’s where it’s at
The chorus took it out, triple-, quadruple-tracked with only Sam’s ironic laugh and a “pretty baby” thrown in to punctuate the fragmented reading of the single line, as the horns provided a soft pillow for vocals and guitar. It was as if in one moment Sam had summed up an entire chapter in his life and then, regretfully, made up his mind to move on. For at that moment, he knew it was time to go, even as he sought to linger for just one minute more.
2 | THE SHADOW WORLD
It changes. A lot of things change. Money is popping, and everything is happening, and it’s hard to separate the difference. Everybody want a piece of the pie: you can spread it everywhere and have nothing. And then you just like you were. You’re slaving.
— Sam to Bobby Womack, 1964
THE VALENTINOS KEPT AFTER SAM about their upcoming session all during their two-week tour together, which was billed as “Sam Cooke and His Revue, Featuring the Valentinos.” They wanted a full horn section in the studio, just like all the other SAR acts got, and nothing Sam said could dissuade them. The horns would just get in the way carrying the background parts, Sam said. If they stuck with what they had, they could compete with some of those new English groups like the Animals. The Animals? Bobby said. He hated the fucking Animals, whose “House of the Rising Sun,” a gloomy minor-key version of the American folk song, was currently number one on the pop charts. They were just another one of those English groups that couldn’t sing. But Sam told him he was going to have to lower his musical standards. He said, “Listen to what the song is saying. It sounds like a haunted house.” He said what people were looking for was no more, and no less, than communication; it wasn’t a question of outsinging the other fellow anymore, like in the gospel days, it was all about getting your message across. More and more writers from behind the scenes were becoming artists, he told Bobby, because “they don’t sound as good, but the people believe them more.” And that was what was going to lead to the revolution that he saw coming: a day when the marketplace wouldn’t distinguish between black and white.
Sometimes, Bobby thought, Sam might have been better off if he could have listened to his own advice. Three days before the Valentinos’ session, on September 16, he appeared on the premiere episode of Shindig!, the first prime-time weekly show devoted to rock ’n’ roll. He was co-headliner with the Everly Brothers, and his appearance was widely touted in the trades (“The Negro beat & blues singer . . . has rarely been seen on network TV,” Variety reported in an access of well-intentioned enthusiasm), but rather than take advantage of the opportunity, he chose to represent himself with a weird mélange of styles. While folk singers Jackie and Gayle featured Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Up Above My Head” in their opening medley, and the rapidly rising white West Coast duo who called themselves the Righteous Brothers showcased their own black gospel sound, Sam sang two selections from his new supper-club fare, “Tennessee Waltz” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” as the Shindig! Dancers, an outlandish collection of neatly scrubbed go-go girls clearly designed to appeal to a mainstream audience, pranced and ponied and, for the Dylan number, sedately mimicked ecstatic abandon. Sam’s practiced gestures only enhanced the incongruity, particularly on “Blowin’ in the Wind,“ as his right hand trailed off to show the way a cannonball might slide, his left fluttered to illust
rate the song’s central metaphor in a manner that appeared almost self-satirizing and certainly contradicted his heartfelt advice to Bobby to focus on words and message alone.
It was only with the show’s closing number, an Everly Brothers’ version of Little Richard’s “Lucille” with the entire cast assembled onstage and the credits rolling, that Sam got untracked. The Everlys are standing alone at the mike, wailing away in harmony, when Sam comes trotting out with his guitar, finds a place in between the two brothers, and interjects some of the gospel fervor that was so conspicuously missing from his own performance. It is a curious moment, as Sam, ever watchful, seems willing to reveal this side of himself only as a kind of afterthought, but none of the reviewers seemed to notice, and Sam was already on to other things.
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 75