Clyde McPhatter evidently had no such misgivings. While playing the Royal Peacock, the crown jewel of Atlanta’s black nightlife, which Henry Wynn had taken over in October (Wynn conferred upon it what the Atlanta Daily World described as “eye-popping splendor,” with a decor “as captivating as a lover’s kiss”), Clyde had taken his place on a downtown picket line with Martin Luther King Jr.’s father and brother. The picket line was made up primarily of Atlanta college students, to whom McPhatter declared, “Until we attain freedom for everybody, [none of us can] be free to breathe the fresh air of liberty.” When he was unable to attend an NAACP fund-raising dinner in New York, he bought half a dozen $100 tickets to the event and urged everyone to follow his example by giving NAACP memberships instead of expensive gifts for Christmas.
Meanwhile Jet magazine reported that many big-name stars were bypassing the Deep South altogether due to the endemic prejudice of its racial practices, while lucrative rock ’n’ roll packages such as the Biggest Show of Stars were in danger of extinction because of the “prejudiced parents of white southern teenagers. . . . The territories of Alabama, Louisiana and South Carolina, where mixed units of performers were [recently] accepted, are now shunned by booking agents lining up cities to display their supermarket-type revues, which feature 15 or more singers and quartets of both races.” With the latest edition of the Biggest Show of Stars (featuring such white performers as Fabian, Brenda Lee, and Duane Eddy), Chubby Checker had received a not-so-subtle lesson in prejudice when “after the show played in Houston and set out for towns in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, Checker and another sepia act on the bill, Jimmy Charles, were given a week’s ‘vacation’ and told to rejoin the revue when it got ‘up North’—which happened to be the ‘liberal’ . . . State of North Carolina.”
Sam had issues of his own with respect to both race and restraint of trade. He was furious once again with William Morris, this time, he told his brothers, because they had taken an idea he had brought them, a singalong television show, and given it to Mitch Miller. Larry Auerbach, in fact, was the agent for the show, Sing Along With Mitch, which had been introduced on Ford Startime the previous May and was scheduled to begin as a regular NBC series in January. Sam demanded a meeting with William Morris, and Jess dutifully set one up with Harry Kalcheim, head of the New York office. “You think I’m your little fair-haired nigger,” Sam railed at Kalcheim, in his brothers’ account. “You think I’m stupid. I come to you with an idea, and you told me it wouldn’t work. And then you take my fucking idea and give it to Mitch Miller. I made eighty fucking thousand dollars for y’all last year, but you won’t make it this year off Sam Cooke. I’m through.”
Jess’ recollection of the meeting did not include the singalong idea, which, as William Morris might have pointed out to Sam, had already reaped Mitch Miller enormous rewards in the recording field, with eight Top 10-selling Sing Along With Mitch albums since 1958 (and a total of 997 weeks on the charts). To Jess, the issue continued to be about the more down-to-earth matter of booking, but it was no less deeply felt. “Sam said, ‘What the fuck do you know about one-nighters? You have no black agents. You don’t know what it’s like on the road. And you get twice as much for your white artists as you do for me.’ When he was finished, Kalcheim said, ‘Mr. Cooke, are you asking for your release?’ Sam said yes. And Kalcheim said, very gentlemanly-like, ‘Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place. And by the way, the answer is no.’ Sam said, ‘You know, I think you mean that.’ And we walked out.”
Mostly, though, his problems were the problems related to his profession and craft. It was the music, as June Gardner, the new drummer, soon realized, that was his principal concern. Unlike June’s other experiences, with Roy Brown and His Mighty Men or the Lionel Hampton band, with Sam it could be a different backup band every night if they were playing a schedule of one-nighters. “Sometimes the bands could be so bad. Big bands, small bands. Sometimes Sam would say, ‘Let the fuckers stay out,’ and it would just be the three of us. ’Cause Clif could fill in so many things on the guitar, and the song would [still] go over. Clif was the glue that held it together—musically, and saying what was on his mind. He’d [always] get the band’s attention. His opening statement was, ‘If you don’t play my music, I’m going to snatch your arm off and beat you with the bloody end.’ He was a big guy, you know, big actor, had a great sense of humor. I learned a lot from him.”
Loyalty meant everything to Sam. But he still wasn’t where he wanted to be. To get there, to present his music properly, he knew he needed a band of his own. And to make good records, he knew he had to persuade Hugo and Luigi to record him in California, where he would once again be working with René and musicians who understood his music. Sam sometimes wondered if for Jess playing the Copa, a table at Ciro’s, headlining in Vegas like Sammy were not the sum total of show-business success. That was not the limit of his own ambition. One of the faceless RCA vice presidents tried to compliment him by declaring that Sam Cooke didn’t belong at the Apollo, Sam Cooke should be playing the Waldorf-Astoria. Sam just stared him down, refusing even to address him in the “proper” English he had spent so much time acquiring. “I ain’t never gonna sing at the Waldorf,” he declared angrily. “They’re not my people.” The truth was, he wanted to sing for everyone. But to do so, he had first to be true to himself.
Another Country
You know how it feels—you understand
What it is to be a stranger
In this unfriendly land
— Bobby “Blue” Bland, “Lead Me On,” 1960
NOBODY WAS SURPRISED when Jackie Wilson got shot. He had a reputation for smacking women around, and everyone knew he maintained two households—one in Detroit, one in New York. The shooting took place at his $500-a-month luxury apartment on West Fifty-seventh Street in the early morning hours of February 15, 1961. The way the papers reported it, a “love-crazed fan” showed up at his door, threatening to kill herself if he rejected her. “When the handsome singer tried to disarm her,” according to the Philadelphia Tribune, “she shot him twice, once in the [upper] thigh and once in his lower abdomen.”
What the papers failed to report was that, far from being a “love-crazed fan,” the shooter had been involved in an off-and-on affair with Jackie for years, and rather than herself, it was the girl entering the apartment with him, Harlean Harris, whom she was trying to kill. Harris was the teenage model “with the amazing hair style” who had dated Sam when he first came to New York in 1958 and then taken up with Jackie. Now twenty-one, she had been living with Jackie for the past year or so, but she disappeared from the picture altogether when Wilson’s wife, Freda, the mother of his four children, left their home in Highland Park, Michigan, to be at his side as he lay in the hospital clinging to life.
Sam had seen him just three weeks earlier at the BMI awards dinner in New York. Sam had gotten a pop songwriting award for “Chain Gang”; Jackie had received one, too, for “You Were Made For All My Love”; and, ironically, Barbara had been recognized as well—For her writer’s credit on “Wonderful World.” Jackie brought Harlean to the dinner, and everyone was having a good time until Jackie started mouthing off at Sam’s manager, Jess Rand. He had been drinking and was obviously feeling no pain, and Sam let it go at first, but after giving Jackie’s manager, a slick young mobbed-up white guy named Nat Tarnopol, a chance to settle his client down, he stepped in and defused the crisis. Afterward, Jackie asked Sam out for a drink with Harlean and him, but Sam went back to the Warwick instead. He had nothing against Jackie, they had long since patched up their differences over the 1959 Supersonic tour, and he always got a kick out of Jackie’s street swagger, but sometimes hanging out with Jackie just wasn’t that cool.
Sam and Jess had their own differences to iron out. Jess had just issued a press release announcing the formation of Cooke-Rand Productions, whose avowed aim was to present “touring musicals and gospel shows.” Their first show, according to
the press release, would be “a gospel caravan [with] a score by Cooke,” Jess as producer, and L.C. as musical director. But Sam knew it wasn’t going to happen. They were talking about two different things: what Jess wanted was to put gospel on the college circuit, while Sam’s only interest was to help more people of his own race appreciate the music. Sam wasn’t sure why he objected so vehemently to the idea, except that it seemed like Jess felt like he was doing gospel a favor. And the music didn’t need any favors from white people—and neither did Sam.
He was still pissed off at Jess over the whole BMI debacle. Now that it was over, and he was officially registered as a BMI writer, it seemed almost funny, but Jess’ condescending attitude toward his publishing company—and the growing rift between Jess and Alex—continued to rankle. The cause of the original problem was Sam’s own failure to sign up as a writer with BMI, one of the two major performing rights societies charged with collecting songwriter’s royalties (ASCAP was the other). The reason for the oversight was Sam’s inability to put his own name on any of his songs until the resolution of his legal difficulties with Art Rupe. As long as those difficulties were ongoing, L.C., and then Barbara, had been assigned songwriting credits, and while Kags was a BMI company, and both L.C. and Barbara had duly signed up as BMI writers, it was only after “Chain Gang” became a hit in the fall of 1960 that any real BMI money for Sam came due. That was when he and J.W. discovered, much to their consternation, that Sam was not an affiliated writer and, due to that lack of affiliation, had already lost almost $10,000 in performance royalties (money collected by BMI from radio, television, and any other public performance of his songs, which went into a common pool from which it could not be recovered if the songwriter was not already registered).
Sam and Jess Rand, ca. 1961.
Courtesy of Jess Rand
J.W.’s reaction was to simply go in and pick up the pieces. He had no interest in scapegoating or trying to assess blame. Jess, on the other hand, kept telling Sam, “We’ll go in there and sue. Can you imagine all the writers that haven’t gotten their money? We’ll start a [class-action] suit.” But J.W. had become friends with Dick Kirk, who ran BMI’s West Coast office, “and he said to me, ‘Look, Alexander, there’s more ways than one to skin a cat.’ He told me, ‘Bob Sour (who was president of BMI at the time) is coming out in a few weeks, and I’m going to have a few friends over to my house for drinks, and I’d like you to come.’ So I went, and I was telling Bob the story; I said, ‘I’m Sam Cooke’s partner, not his manager. It’s been his intention to join all along. All of his songs are in BMI.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you come to New York? I’d like to see him [join].’ So I drew money out of the company and bought myself a couple of suits and went to New York, and Bob Sour had George Marlo and Theodora Zavin [two veteran BMI executives] come into his office to meet me, and they worked out a fantastic deal.”
What they offered, in a three-year agreement dated November 21, 1960, and taking effect on January 1, 1961, was what was termed a three-for-one deal. BMI offered to guarantee as an advance against royalties for 1961 150 percent of what Sam would have earned in 1960 if he had been a BMI-affiliated writer, including in their calculation of the theoretical base all sums earned by Barbara and L.C. as well. The minimum guarantees for 1962 and 1963 would similarly be figured on 150 percent of Sam’s actual earnings in the preceding year.
J.W. brought the deal back to the Coast with understandable elation. “I was really thrilled, and I went over to Sam’s house and was telling him about it, and he called Jess and said, ‘Man, Alex has really got a good contract.’ And Jess’ answer was, ‘I don’t know, let me talk with Sam Reisman about it.’ That was his lawyer, you know. I said, ‘Sam, don’t you make no fool out of me.’ I said, ‘I went and got you a good deal. I’m not your manager, but I’m your partner.’ So he said, ‘Give me those fucking papers.’ Just like that. And he signed them. And that was the start of Jess Rand being out.”
To Jess it wasn’t that simple. He was used to Sam’s secretive ways, and this was certainly not the first time Sam had gone behind his back. He had seen the way Sam had dealt with Art Rupe and outmaneuvered the Siamases, and he hadn’t really been surprised when Bill Cook turned up in the fall of 1960 with a management contract that he said rendered Jess’ invalid. Jess told him to take it up with Sam, and evidently he must have, because Jet magazine reported in its February 18, 1961, issue that the claim had been settled out of court for $1,500. But this whole publishing business, as Jess saw it, represented fundamental differences in philosophy and direction.
For Jess, who had started off in the business at fifteen out of a deep love for the popular songwriting tradition, ASCAP, which represented all the classic composers from Gershwin and Cole Porter to Harold Arlen and his first employer, Irving Berlin, was the one legitimate performing rights society. BMI, which had been in operation only since 1940 and had been founded as much as anything else to take up the spillover of “race” and “hillbilly” music, which ASCAP declined to license, was a kind of unregulated marketplace—and Sam’s choice of what Jess deemed BMI’s “fast money” over ASCAP’s “more astute” long-term approach was a direct slap in the face to Jess’ business judgment. There was a brief, bristling confrontation that appeared to be over almost as soon as it started, except that, knowing what he knew about Sam’s brooding nature and Alexander’s antagonism toward him, Jess was not altogether optimistic about the outcome. Still, there was nothing he could do about it, and if there was one thing he had learned from his long association with Sammy Davis Jr. and its bitter dénouement the previous summer, it was that “a contract with a client is only as good as your relationship with a client.” So he gritted his teeth and simply accepted the fact that there were certain areas of Sam’s life in which by definition—Sam’s definition—he did not belong.
Sam and Alex for their part saw Jess as increasingly out of touch and out of step, like someone who was all too proud of his mastery of the fine points of a subject whose fundamental premise he did not understand. But J.W. counseled patience. “Sam realized he was selling, he wasn’t buying,” J.W. said. They both recognized the duality with which they had long since learned to live. “Sam’s attitude,” said J.W., “was give them what they’re buying.” But always keep something for yourself.
SAR was for Sam and Alex. By April they had put out four new singles and conducted a pop session with Johnnie Taylor, who had grown tired of the ministerial life. They put out their first album, too, Jesus Be a Fence Around Me by the Soul Stirrers, with a beautiful four-color cover shot by celebrated jazz photographer William Claxton. Shortly after the LP came out, J.W. got a call from Leonard Chess, whose Checker label had an extensive gospel line. He told Alex SAR was going to ruin the market for everyone else if they insisted on giving gospel music that kind of high-class treatment. “He bawled me out! But I told him, ‘Look, Leonard, I was a gospel singer and Sam was a gospel singer, and everything we do is going to be treated with the same respect.’” It was an album of which they were both very proud. As J.W. quoted his partner in the album’s liner notes: “Although I wrote ‘Chain Gang’ (one of the country’s top hits), I thank GOD for the inspiration to write . . . ‘JESUS BE A FENCE AROUND ME.’” Or, as Sam put it in another context, assigning at least as much credit to purposeful intent, “I am aware that owning a record company is a losing deal much too often for comfort. But this company of mine is concentrating on recording Negro artists I feel have the ingredients to become as successful as I have. [And if I] lose a few dollars along the way, in the end it’ll be worth it to me. Morally, it’s a worthwhile project.”
“It was fun. It was family,” said Zelda Sands (née Samuels), SAR’s newest—and so far only—employee, who had come to work at $85 a week just after the start of the new year. She had arrived in Los Angeles not long before Christmas, looking for a music-industry job. A strikingly attractive, combative woman with the kind of figure that provoked both comments and stares
(“I used to like to go over to her house and watch her tan,” reflected one musician wistfully), she was a veteran of the music business in New York, where she had first met Sam when he was playing the Copa and she was trying to pitch him a song. Ed Townsend steered her to SAR’s tiny office when she arrived on the West Coast, and she started making job calls from there, since the motel where she was staying didn’t have a phone. J.W. was in and out, but she only saw Sam once, when he came in off the road and, recognizing her, asked if she had gotten married yet. “I said no, and he said, ‘Good.’ He said, ‘You shouldn’t be married.’ ‘Ever?’ He said, ‘No, you’ve got too pretty a smile!’ I mean, he was always that way—with everybody.
“Then Christmas came, and I saw Sam again at the California Club. He asked how things were going, and I said I still hadn’t found anything, and I was all alone ’cause I didn’t know anyone in town, and I started to cry—I didn’t expect to, but I did. And he said, ‘Let me ask you something. How much would it take for you to pay your bills?’ He said, ‘Figure it out to the dollar.’ And I did. I told him it would be $85 a week. And he said, ‘Okay, you’ve got a job.’”
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 46
