Sam had finally persuaded the Womack Brothers to switch over to pop. He and Alex had put out a second gospel single on the group at the start of the year. It was probably the best song from their June session, “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” with the seventeen-year-old middle brother Bobby’s rasping, buzz-saw lead, but neither Sam nor Alex had any hopes for the record’s prospects. Mostly they wanted to prove to the Womacks that there was no commercial future for them in gospel music.
The Womack Brothers had certainly enjoyed their brief moment in the gospel spotlight. Their first release had put them out on tour with the Staple Singers and the Dixie Hummingbirds, but, as Sam kept telling them, it wasn’t going to do a thing for their pocketbooks or prestige. Even the girls in their high school, Bobby said, still liked “the basketball players, the football players, the baseball players, they said, ‘That’s the Womack Brothers, but they be singing something about “Thank you, Jesus,”’ It was embarrassing!” And once they saw Sam perform at a rock ’n’ roll show at the Pla-Mor Ballroom in Cleveland in August, the first rock ’n’ roll show they had ever attended, it was all over. “My father told me, ‘You might as well kill me if you go to that show,’” Bobby said, “but, you know, I had to go, and it was all different. The people screamed, the women were going crazy—we didn’t get a chance to talk to him, they just ushered him out, but I was saying, ‘Shit, man, you know, we want to do that.’ You know, this is what I wanted to do.”
It led to a family crisis. J.W. worked on his fellow Mason, Friendly Sr., while Sam continued to stand as the primary role model for the boys. In the end, despite the continued vehemence of his opposition, Mr. Womack relented enough to let their mother drive them to the session but told them in a family meeting that if they went, they were on their own, they were not going to pursue a rock ’n’ roll career while living in his house. “We all cried,” said the oldest, Friendly Jr., who had his own misgivings on the subject, “[but] we said, ‘We’re gonna do it anyway.’”
Zelda and J.W. had prepared a song for them based on their second single, Bobby’s showpiece “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray.” The new number was called “Lookin’ For a Love,” and Sam was sold on it from the first, he loved the energy of the song—“but we felt strange,” said Bobby, “almost like we were making a mockery of God. Sam was saying, ‘Man, [now] just don’t be tense. I know you feel tense.’ He was laughing. He said, ‘Ain’t no [Holy Ghost] coming in here after you,’ ’cause he had been through all that and he knew we were tripping hard, ’cause this was God’s song.”
Sam told Bobby, “You gotta stop chewing your words if you want to reach over. If they don’t understand what you’re saying, they can’t relate.” But, he said, on the other hand, he didn’t want Bobby sounding too proper. “’Cause then you’ll start to sound like me!” He spent a good deal of time positioning them so their hand claps would sound just right. “He’d run from the board back out to where we were,” said Bobby, “he was on me about my phrasing and getting the message across, but he’d be like, ‘Damn, I wish I could be in this, too!’”
The only other song they attempted that day was “Somewhere There’s a Girl,” the lyric that Sam had improvised over “Somewhere There’s a God” at their first session. They didn’t quite achieve the ethereal quality that Sam had imparted to the song, but with Curtis singing lead they came close. “Wail it for me, huh, Curt?” Sam implored good-naturedly, and when, after seven takes, he felt that they were nearly there, he declared, “This is for the Womacks,” as if to make the distinction that now they were singing the song for themselves.
Everyone was happy at the conclusion of the evening. Sam pronounced that they had cut themselves a hit, and he told them that he and Alex had come up with a new name for the group, too. It was a name they had first hit upon when things started to go bad at Keen and J.W. thought he and Sam might record as a duo for another label. They had never actually used it, but now they had the perfect recipients for the title: five young boys with a different sound who, as J.W. said, were all “slim, long-haired, all but Friendly played left-handed, we were going to take them to Sy Devore and dress them up like lovers.” And that was how they signed their new contract—as the Valentinos.
Sam was home for another month after returning from Chicago. J.W. concluded the deal with RCA for the Keen masters, thus paving the way for a Sam Cooke Greatest Hits LP. Liberty brought out the single that Sam had produced with Herb Alpert and Lou Adler on their mutual friend, George McCurn, the former Pilgrim Travelers bass singer better known as Oopie Doopie Doo (“Baby, put your hand on top of my head,” Oopie told Herb as an explanation for some of his lapses from orthodox phrasing. “You feel all that motion there?”). The song they had recorded was an update of “The Time Has Come,” one of Sam’s earliest compositions, given an eccentric romantic twist by the resonant agility of Oopie’s voice. Sam swam in the pool almost every day, and J.W. had just about persuaded him to take up the game of tennis. Every night, Johnnie Morisette or Johnny “Guitar” Watson or Johnnie Taylor was playing somewhere around town. There was no question that Sam had enjoyed this unaccustomed interlude, but with the Henry Wynn tour scheduled to start on April 6, he was ready to go back on the road.
HE HAD BEEN OUT for just under a week when the idea for a radical reworking of Charles Brown’s song first came to him. He was in the limo on his way to Atlanta, the car’s headlights sweeping the highway as he sat in the backseat with the little pinprick of light from his reading lamp illuminating the lyrics he was writing down. The song would retain its gospel flavor and the call-and-response format that made it in essence a vocal duet, and some of the words would even continue to suggest its spiritual origins—but its refrain (“Bring it to me, bring your sweet lovin’, bring it on home to me”) would leave little doubt as to its secular intent.
He pitched the song excitedly to Dee Clark in the dressing room after the show. Dee hadn’t had a hit since “Raindrops,” number two on the pop charts the previous summer, and Sam felt like the new tune was perfectly suited to him. But Dee, who had covered a couple of Sam’s songs already, couldn’t hear it no matter how many times Sam played it for him—he said it just wasn’t for him. So Sam called Luigi and sang the song for him over the phone along with “Having a Party,” another new number he had just written. Luigi was instantly sold and set up an L.A. recording session in two weeks, once Sam told Henry Wynn that he was going to have to take a brief break from the tour.
The atmosphere at the April 26 session matched the title of Sam’s second song. The Sims Twins were there at Sam’s invitation to sing backup. So was Lou Rawls. Sam and Alex’s lawyer/advisor Walter Hurst, was present, along with Sugar Hall and Fred Smith, the former Keen assistant a&r man who with his songwriting partner, Cliff Goldsmith, had had one hit after another from “Western Movies” on. Zelda wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and Alex remained constantly by Sam’s side, but it was a surprise to RCA engineer Al Schmitt to see Barbara, too, an occasional visitor at best and one who did not always contribute an upbeat note. Tonight, though, she was just one more part of an uninhibitedly festive mood. “It was a very happy session,” said Schmitt, a twenty-seven-year-old New Yorker who had grown up in his uncle’s recording studio. “Everybody was just having a ball. We were getting people out there [on the floor], and some of the outtakes were hilarious, there was so much ad lib that went on.”
They started with “Having a Party,” the “lighter” of the two songs, written in the reportorial manner of “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha” and “Twistin’ the Night Away,” except that this one injected a more personal note. René had assembled an eighteen-piece backing group composed of six violins, two violas, two cellos, and a sax, plus a seven-piece rhythm section that included two percussionists, two bassists, two guitars, and a piano.
It opens with Cliff’s countryish guitar brightly echoed by the violins, then, as Sam’s voice comes in, the cellos and violas supply a mournful counterpoint to the
vocal. “We’re having a party,” Sam declares in a deliberate, almost wistful way:
Dancing to the music
Played by the DJ
On the radio
The Cokes are in the icebox
Popcorn’s on the table
Me and my baby
We’re out here on the floor.
The tempo picks up a little as they run through a dozen takes, with Lou’s voice joining in on the chorus, just out of synch enough to suggest spontaneity but totally attuned to Sam’s lead. “So, Mister, Mister DJ,” the two of them sing together, as though recalling times that would be no more, “Keep those records playing / ’Cause I’m having such a good time / Dancing with my baby.” The sax takes its second solo on the outro, while the strings, almost unnoticed, keep up their stately threnody and Sam and Lou go out over the instrumental with a recapitulation of the song’s original message.
It was, as engineer Al Schmitt said, a happy, feel-good kind of session, and as they listened to the playback of the twelfth take, Barbara and Sugar Hall started to do a slow twist, and J.W. and some of the musicians joined in. Then they overdubbed the additional voices and hand claps of just about everyone in the room, and the music swelled and took on an almost anthemic quality—it had all the uncalculated fervor that defines a group of people who have lived through good times and bad times together and cherish the good times despite the near-certain knowledge that they are not going to last. Except that this was calculated, and calibrated, down to the last rough harmony. “These were easy, natural things,” Luigi said, but it’s doubtful that Sam would have agreed.
The bittersweet mood of “Having a Party” seemed to merely set the stage for the second song, the Charles Brown-inspired “Bring It On Home to Me.” The song opened with piano and drums taking the lead and Lou dueting with Sam in the foreground as Sam declares in full gospel mode:
If you ever
Change your mind
About leaving, leaving me behind
Ohh, bring it to me
Bring your sweet lovin’
Bring it on home to me.
Then the strings come in with their by now familiar undercurrent of melancholy, and Sam goes into the call-and-response that is the heart of the song (this was something notably absent from the much smoother Charles Brown original) as he emphasizes his message with a forceful “Yeah,” and a chorus that now includes J.W., Fred Smith, and probably the Sims Twins in addition to Lou, delivers an equally forceful response. “We were after the Soul Stirrers-type thing,” said René Hall, “trying to create that flavor in a rhythm and blues recording.” It was, said J.W., an entirely conscious decision. “We felt that light shit wouldn’t sustain him. We felt he needed more weight.”
They nearly got it all in one take. This was the closest Sam had come to the classic gospel give-and-take he had once created with Paul Foster, and the only adjustment that he chose to make on the second, and final, take was the decision to use Lou alone as the echoing voice and dispense altogether with the background chorus. What comes through is a rare moment of undisguised emotion, an unambiguous embrace not just of a cultural heritage but of an adult experience far removed from white teenage fantasy. There was nothing to add or subtract. There was no thought on Luigi’s part of trying to fit in another song or extend the session. He was convinced by now that Sam knew his own talent best. And he was equally convinced that they had a pair of hits on their hands.
Sam rejoined the Supersonic tour two days later in Birmingham, where, for the first time, the Birmingham World reported, Rickwood Field employed “Negro citizens [as] ticket-takers, handlers, and sellers” after it had been suggested that, without such measures, the show “could possibly prove a financial flop.” There was a new kind of pride in the air and a new kind of proclamation. Sam’s “natural” hairstyle was finally beginning to catch on (“People used to say to him, ‘Why don’t you get a haircut?’” said June Gardner, who had wondered the same thing himself when he first joined in 1960. “All this was virgin territory at the time”), and a few months later, the Philadelphia Tribune defined “soul,” a term confined for the most part at this point to the downhome instrumental sounds of jazz musicians Bobby Timmons, Horace Silver, and Cannonball Adderly, as “the word of the hour . . . a spiritual return to the sources, [an] emotional intensity and rhythmic drive [that] comes from childhood saturation in Negro gospel music.” “Oh, we all heard it,” said onetime “Wonder Boy Preacher” Solomon Burke, a lifelong Soul Stirrers devotee who had positioned himself somewhere between Sam and Brother Joe May in his own persuasive style, of Sam’s new soul sound. “Pop audiences heard that yodel . . . like it was a shiny new thing. But if you knew Sam from gospel, it was him saying, ‘Hey, it’s me.’”
And when he left for the West Indies with Barbara and Linda just five days later for the start of a two-week tour, he finally had a band of his own.
THE TOUR WAS BILLED as Sam Cooke’s Twistin’ the Night Away Revue, Featuring the Upsetters, who had been teamed with Little Willie John until just a few months earlier. Sam had had his eye on them ever since first touring with Willie in October of 1960, but he hadn’t made a move until Willie, never a model of professional or personal responsibility, proved no longer capable of maintaining a band and the Upsetters had gone out on their own. The band was built around a core of two or three saxophones, a trumpet, keyboards, and a rhythm section whose bass player, Olsie Robinson (known as “Bassy”), Sam would put to work with Clif and June. They were a show band who could do a strong set of their own with unison steps, costume changes, and instrument twirls, and, more important, once Clif schooled them, they should be able to deliver the rhythmic kick and tonal variety he was looking for to put the music across. Crain objected strongly to their addition, it would only add an unnecessary expense, he said, for something that would not translate into either greater ticket sales or higher ticket prices, but Sam was not about to be deterred by anything as immaterial as money. He was prepared to pay anything it took, he told his brother Charles, to get that sound behind him.
Sam, Barbara, and Linda arrive in the West Indies, May 1962.
Courtesy of ABKCO
The show was as big a hit as ever at The Cat ’n’ the Fiddle in Montego Bay. Sam was hailed as “Sweet Man” everywhere he went, and drummer June Gardner was once again led to wonder at Sam’s uncanny ability to mix with beggars and kings, as he proved himself equally at home with stagehands, bellboys, and the aristocracy of island life. But, as Barbara was well aware by now, Sam set his own limits. She was having a good time on her second Bahamian trip. The worst problem she had encountered so far was that Linda got so covered with mosquito bites that they wanted to quarantine the child until they could be sure it wasn’t anything contagious. Then one night after the show, a nice-looking man offered to take Sam and her to the club where he was singing, and he made the mistake of trying to pay her a compliment. “You have a lovely wife,” was all the man said to her husband, but that was it. Sam grabbed her by the arm, took her back to the hotel, and beat the living hell out of her because, he said, she had been flirting with the guy. She couldn’t understand it coming from a whorehopper like him. All that poor man was trying to do was to compliment you, she told Sam. But the fool wouldn’t listen, the only thing that stopped him was that Linda woke up and started crying. He stormed out then, and she was left to console her daughter until Crain arrived and looked at her and just shook his head. She knew Sam had sent him, she knew Sam felt bad. He alternately tried to comfort her and dissuade her from leaving. Sammy had had too much to drink, he hadn’t meant to do this, Crain said, he was sure Sam was sorry. Barbara had stopped crying by now. She knew she wasn’t perfect, she didn’t doubt that she had given her husband reason to be disappointed in her, and she recognized, finally, that she could never be all that he wanted her to be—but that freed her, too. Because there was nothing more he could do to her. He was only educating her to hurt him as much as he had hurt her.
; For Sam it was an encounter with an identity that he would never willingly have chosen to reveal, even to himself. He was deeply embarrassed, and deeply ashamed, but there was nothing to do about it other than to pretend that it had never happened. Crain was loyal, the people around him were loyal, and he believed deep down that Barbara was loyal, too. But he no longer knew if he could make this marriage work. He had believed so strongly that he could. He had believed that, with the right approach, he could turn Barbara into just what he wanted her to be, the girl who knew everything about him and understood—the one. He didn’t know anything to do but to go on. It was a situation he no longer knew how to control.
SAM TOOK JOHNNIE MORISETTE out on tour with him in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana when he got back. Johnnie’s single, released in late January, had just crested at number eighteen on the r&b charts and number sixty-three pop, and Alex had finally put out Johnnie Taylor’s “Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day.” The Sims Twins joined Sam, Johnnie Morisette, and the Upsetters on a few dates. They were always a hit in person, “Soothe Me” invariably got the crowd, but it was proving difficult to get them a follow-up, and Sam was beginning to suspect that they might be too hardheaded, and insufficiently disciplined, to adapt to the rigors of studio recording. The Valentinos’ record was the one he and Alex were counting on, anyway. Sam was convinced that with their youthful good looks, high-energy stage act, and eager educability, they could be stars of a magnitude that none of his other artists could even imagine.
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 52
