Above all, they tried to avoid any suggestion of failure, not really all that difficult given the upbeat nature of their personalities and partnership. They had gotten the feel down, they told Sam. There was no point in wearing it out. They could just pick it up again in three days’ time.
And so they did. They ran through two new numbers, an English-language adaptation of a Jacques Brel ballad and an old Perry Como chestnut, before returning to “Teenage Sonata,” which Sam now polished off with a couple of vocal overdubs. Tellingly, the principal difference between the master take and the previous day’s efforts lies almost entirely in the outro (Sam’s instantly recognizable yodel occupies most of the soaring fade of the final version, which in earlier takes was filled primarily with clumsy verbal protestations). They finished with yet another undistinguished ballad, but at this point it didn’t matter. Hugo and Luigi had their single. There was still lots of work to do, with the record release date just weeks away, and the producers’ next immediate priority was to cut an album on Sam for the adult record-buying audience. There was no great hurry about getting back to that peculiar original of his.
SAM WAS IN THE STUDIO AGAIN just three weeks later, back in Los Angeles, but this time as producer, not artist. “The Patsy,” the General Electric Theater drama he had filmed with Sammy Davis Jr., had aired the night before and gotten him plenty of attention in the black press but no critical raves. It was a small part, and Sam could not have failed to be aware of the awkwardness of a performance whose chief virtue, and chief defect, was his own winsome charm (Sammy, by way of contrast, played a kind of holy fool with impassioned belief)—but Jess was confident it was bound to lead to bigger things, and so far everything Jess had told him had come true. With Sammy having just completed a movie in Las Vegas called Ocean’s 11 with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and Jess’ new production company with Jeff Chandler about to get under way, who knew what the future might hold in store?
The February 22 session was Alex’s idea. They had had no additional SAR sessions since cutting the Soul Stirrers in September, and Alex had long contended that Kylo Turner, his old lead singer for the Pilgrim Travelers, was a prime candidate for crossover success. So they wrote some new songs for a pop session, contacted René to do the arrangements, and put together a rhythm section consisting of Clif, premier studio bassist Red Callender, and drummer Earl Palmer, along with a chorus made up of Alex and Gaynel Hodge and fellow Turks alumnus Tommy “Buster” Williams, and a full string section. But then Kylo showed up in a state of such insobriety that even J.W. had to admit defeat. And all they were left with were some instrumental tracks with a vocal chorus, a couple of barely usable vocals by Kylo, and scratch vocals on two songs that would have to be replaced.
Then Sam ran into Johnnie Morisette.
Johnnie Morisette, known professionally as Johnnie “Two Voice” for his propensity for establishing a dialogue between his natural voice and a throaty falsetto register, had started out with the Bells of Heaven in Mobile, Alabama. He had first met Sam at the Twilight Café on Davis Avenue, a regular hangout for every entertainer who passed through Mobile and every jitterbug in town. Sam had just joined the Soul Stirrers. He was twenty, and Johnnie some four years younger but already an impressive street personality with a powerful imagination of his own (one of his more fruitful imaginative exercises was the composition of his own biography, which placed his birth sometimes on “Montu Island” in the South Pacific, sometimes in American Samoa). Sam was immediately taken with him, and continued to be upon Johnnie’s arrival in L.A., where he combined a singing career (for the Specialty label, among others) with a street life, leading to the logical sobriquet “The Singing Pimp.” He had, as J.W. observed, a genuine aptitude for pimping. He was handsome, free-wheeling, and bold. But he was a talented singer, too, and it was only natural that Sam would think of him in that regard when he ran into Johnnie coming out of a breakfast club called Master’s.
They hadn’t seen each other in a while, and they had some catching up to do. Johnnie brought Sam up to date about his string of girls, while Sam told Johnnie about his new record label. As a matter of fact, Sam said, he had a couple of songs he thought might be just right for Johnnie. So they went over to René’s office on Selma, and Sam played him the two instrumental dubs from Kylo’s session, with voices and full string section—which definitely impressed Johnnie that Sam and J.W. meant business.
Then Sam picked up a guitar and started singing the words to one of the dubs, an “answer song” that he and J.W. had written to his own Specialty hit “I’ll Come Running Back to You.” Johnnie said, “Yeah, I like that,” and they decided right then and there that Johnnie Morisette was going to be SAR’s newest star. Within days they were at Radio Recorders to put Johnnie’s voice on the two tracks. Sam had to explain to Johnnie about overdubbing, because “I had never heard of that. I’m looking at this big studio, and he said he didn’t want nobody there but us. Damn, I’m used to singing in front of a crowd!” But he nailed the “answer song,” “I’ll Never Come Running Back to You,” fitting his energetically bluesy voice into its peculiar combination of a childlike New Orleans melody, a cha-cha beat, marching band-style drums, vocal chorus, and percussive strings. It was the kind of big pop sound that Hugo and Luigi had spoken about putting behind Sam—but with none of the awkward concessions to bland emulsification that you hear on Sam’s session. On the second number, J.W.’s secular adaptation of the old spiritual “Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” it is just gospel with strings, as Johnnie sings in his theatrical second voice, and Sam lets him adlib an outro that feels so good it ends in a laugh. All in all, it was the kind of record that Sam and Alex hoped they could keep on putting out, one on which they could proudly emblazon the assurance that it had been made “Under the Personal Supervision of Sam Cooke and J.W. Alexander.” “We felt like we could do things ourselves that were taboo to a company like RCA. It was all about people, really,” said J.W. “We just recorded people that we more or less liked.”
SAM WAS BACK ON THE ROAD in March but still able to fit in recording sessions for the two “theme”-oriented albums that Hugo and Luigi had conceived for him. Cooke’s Tour, with songs like “London By Night,” “Under Paris Skies,” and “Arrivederci, Roma,” was a standard variation on Frank Sinatra’s 1958 Come Fly With Me, while Hits of the ’50s could just as easily have been called Hits From Your Father’s ’50s. It was the time-honored strategy for broadening an r&b singer’s appeal by reaching out to a mainstream white audience (“Albums weren’t really a factor in the black market,” said Shelby Singleton, soon to become Clyde McPhatter’s producer at Mercury), though with the exception of Ray Charles, who was just beginning to sell albums on a consistent basis to his white fans, the crossover-album approach had never really worked for any major r&b star.
“Where is the good new music?” was the question on the lips of every “sensitive citizen,” according to Hugo and Luigi’s liner notes for the second record. “Where are the good young singers? Well, this album gives the answer.” And, indeed, in the liner notes to each LP, they tried to point sensitive ears toward a genuine appreciation of “a new style of singing [which] might be described as playing with a melody or a series of notes (but always coming back to the original melodic strain) in order to heighten an effect.” But whatever their good intentions, artistic or commercial, nothing could mask the sessions’ uninspired point of origin, and Sam’s “simplicity and directness” were almost drowned in the sludge of Glenn Osser’s arrangements. It might be argued that Sam’s voice occasionally rose above the tawdriness of its surroundings, but the tawdriness was the single inescapable factor.
“Teenage Sonata” came out in early February, supported by a full-page ad in Billboard saluting Sam Cooke’s “Glorious Golden 60’s Debut on RCA Victor.” A month later it had barely cracked the charts and never got any higher than number fifty pop while lingering only two weeks on the r&b charts. “You Understand Me,” the throwaway fi
nal ballad from the second session, was released as the follow-up single in the first week of April and never made the charts at all. Meanwhile the “demo” version of “Wonderful World,” the collaboration with Lou Adler and Herb Alpert that Sam had recorded at Keen more than a year earlier, had just been discovered by label owner John Siamas among the tracks that Sam had left behind. It came out on Keen the same week as the second RCA single and quickly rose to number twelve pop and number two r&b, his best overall showing since “You Send Me” and one that easily outsold both RCA singles combined.
This couldn’t help but add to the pressure Hugo and Luigi were already feeling from the RCA executive committee downstairs (“They met once a week in a boardroom and played the records that were going to be released,” said Luigi, whose general opinion of the RCA higher-ups was that they were “unhelpful, unimaginative, and uncooperative, a lot of ‘uns’”). And it could only exacerbate the resentment that Sam and J.W. were feeling toward Keen, who, in the same way that Specialty Records had once ridden Sam’s Keen success, were now riding, not to mention threatening, Sam’s good fortune in signing with RCA—and still not paying him. Sam and Alex had already initiated another lawsuit against the Siamases a few weeks earlier, this time for $8,000 in publishing money that was owed to Kags and close to $5,000 in artist royalties that had accrued to Sam since the December settlement. But now the matter seemed to be taking on an even greater urgency of its own.
SAM HAD A TWO-WEEK Supersonic Attractions tour for Henry Wynn coming up in mid-April, then a month of theater and club bookings, and various other dates that would keep him busy through mid-August. Before setting off on his four months of touring, though, he went back into the studio for a singles session with Hugo and Luigi on April 13.
It was a different kind of session. To begin with, instead of an orchestra, the producers had assembled a rhythm section made up of New York session stalwarts, with Clif, as always, supplying the solid underpinning, and Hugo pitching in on organ. Perhaps because of the absence of strings and horns, they used a different arranger, and, more significantly, Sam brought all the songs to the session. One in particular, “Sad Mood,” sounded to Hugo and Luigi like it could be a smash, but after four takes, they recognized that the feel wasn’t right and set it aside. For all of its differences, the session would have been counted no more of a success than its predecessors had it not been for one central element: they completed “Chain Gang.”
They used the twelfth take from the January session as the instrumental master, and Sam ran through three vocal overdubs, each gaining in mastery and assurance (“Oh wow,” Sam declares as he breaks off the second with an easy peal of laughter) until he sails through the last as if there could never have been any doubt. Once again much of the difference appears in the fade, where Sam’s improvisational skills are fully engaged and the length of the song is increased by a full nine seconds, but the subtle alterations he has made to the lyrics (no longer are these prisoners at hard labor “thinking of their women at home / In their silken gowns”; instead, they are “working on the highways and byways / And wearing a frown”) further add to a recalibration of sound and meaning that can neither be precisely defined nor denied.
With this session, too, Hugo and Luigi seem to have come to a new appreciation of their artist. Part of that appreciation may have been a result of their seeing him work the Town Hill Club in Brooklyn the week before. It was, said Luigi, “an experience to live through, to see Sam singing to a black audience. He just stood there, he hardly moved, a little bit of sweat on his forehead, but it seemed like it was effortless, the audience just loved every nuance, they fed on every little thing, they were enwrapt.” That, said Luigi with a certain degree of self-amusement, was what finally convinced them they had the right guy. “We went backstage afterward and said, ‘You were singing real good.’ And he said, ‘Oh, man, I was just shuckin’.’ You know, he threw it off. But we were just floored by what he could do with an audience.”
Clyde McPhatter, Hank Ballard, Lloyd Price, Freddie Pride, Sam, Dee Clark, ca. 1960.
Courtesy of Billy Davis
The Henry Wynn Southern swing started the weekend after the session, playing Birmingham on Easter Sunday. The featured acts in addition to Sam were Dee Clark, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Drifters, blues singer Big Maybelle, Motown Records founder Berry Gordy’s latest success story, Barrett Strong (Gordy had also cowritten Strong’s current hit, “Money”), along with the Hank Moore Orchestra. There were lots of girls, lots of parties, and Sam enjoyed hanging out once again with Midnighters’ guitarist Billy Davis and various individual Drifters. But inevitably much of the talk was of Jesse Belvin’s death three months earlier in an automobile crash that had taken the lives of his guitarist, his driver, and his wife as well and directly raised the question: just how dangerous was this new racial climate getting to be?
Belvin had been killed when the tires on his 1959 Cadillac blew out following a show with Jackie Wilson and Arthur Prysock in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was the same old ugly peckerwood story. The show was booked to play a segregated dance, and when Jackie refused to do a second show for whites, after a “hot dispute with [the] dance managers,” the Los Angeles Sentinel reported, “Wilson and his group were allegedly ordered out of town at gunpoint.
“Investigators believed,” the story went on, “that . . . disgruntled [white] dance fans were responsible” for slashing Belvin’s tires, a conclusion bolstered by the rumor that both Jackie and Prysock also suffered tire problems as they drove to the next date in Dallas. Although nothing was ever conclusively proved, there was little doubt about culpability among Belvin’s fellow performers (“Did Racism Kill Jesse?” was the headline in the Norfolk Journal and Guide), and it could only have served as a sobering reminder of the dangers that each of them faced almost daily. Like it or not, they were being drawn into a conflict they could scarcely avoid. As they headed through the Carolinas, they saw the spreading sit-in movement and the implacable white resistance to it. Increasingly there was no hiding place, and even entertainers who in less perilous times might simply have clung to their conventional role as good-will ambassadors for the music were induced to speak out. “They try to knock us down,” said the normally phlegmatic Count Basie of the sit-ins, “but we get right up again.” It was, he said, a “beautiful” movement.
By the time they got to New Orleans on April 27, Sam and Clif were thoroughly dissatisfied with the drummer for the Hank Moore Orchestra. Sam was eating at Dookey Chase’s Restaurant on Orleans Street and freely expressing his unhappiness when local bandleader Joe Jones overheard the conversation and suggested to nineteen-year-old drummer Leo Morris that he introduce himself to Sam. Morris, who came from a family of drummers and had grown up playing percussion for his “play-cousins,” the Neville brothers, did just as Jones suggested. “So I introduce myself, and he’s talking and eating, and he said, ‘Man, do you know any of my songs?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he started singing, and I started playing on his dinner table, and he hired me! I knew all his songs, and that night, I just walked on, asked the drummer to get up, put my snare drum down, and played the show. The next day I left town with him.”
They went straight from there into the Apollo. Leo Morris had never been to New York before, and, according to Charles, he spent most of his time looking up. “Charlie was my mentor. He was showing me the ropes, man. I didn’t drink, and I didn’t gamble, but he showed me all the ropes. He used to call me Little Brother, said, ‘Little Brother, now look, when you get there, this is what you do.’ And he would tell me different things. He said, ‘We’re going to New York, New York. The town is so hip they named it twice!’ He would take care of Sam, and then him and I would go hang out. It just was Clif [I had problems with]. I think Clif was kind of disappointed that Sam had hired this guy and I could walk right up and play Sam’s show without any rehearsal. He would try to tell me about, ‘The arrangement go like this,’ and this and that. And Sam would say, �
��Oh, fuck it, man, whatever he doing is good, man.’ I think that was kind of a shock for Clif, that I was that good and Sam liked me that much.”
For Leo it was a lesson in music and in life. “Sam was so soulful, you could follow him [musically] wherever he went. He had a way of singing, it was like Mahalia Jackson, she could sing a Christmas carol, and people would cry. And Sam had that same communication line. He could sing to an audience, and he would have their complete [attention]—I would look down the rows from the stage, and everybody would be looking at him, man, they couldn’t take their eyes off him.”
They played weeklong runs at the Howard in Washington, the Royal in Baltimore, the Tivoli in Chicago, “and everywhere we went, they had to pull him offstage, because the people [wouldn’t let him go] until he’d come out and just sing a few more notes. In those theaters they show a movie and a newsreel and a cartoon, but they usually had to cut some of the newsreel or the cartoon because the show was always running over. He was a wonderful guy to be on the road with, because everything went so smooth. I had a daughter—I got married at eighteen when my girlfriend got pregnant and I didn’t really know too much about how to maintain a family, but Sam would always tell me, ‘Man, you’re lucky you’re married. You got a daughter, and you got a family.’” Leo’s impression was that Sam would like to have a family, too. Sam talked to him all the time about how much he would like to have a son. But Leo was unaware that Sam was even married (“Because, you know, the ladies was there every night, you had to beat them off of him”), let alone that his wife was pregnant with their second child.
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 42
