The National Association of Radio Announcers was a professional organization that had been founded by thirteen prominent black DJs in the mid-1950s (as the National Jazz, Rhythm & Blues Disc Jockey Association) and by 1962 had gained a membership of over three hundred, including a few whites, like all-night r&b DJ “Hoss” Allen, who was deemed an honorary “ace boon coon” by his fellow jocks. The organization’s original impetus had been to combat some of the fundamental inequities of the job: what black-radio historian William Barlow described as everything from “low salaries to lack of employment opportunities in mainstream radio to the uneven distribution of payola along racial lines.” The record industry’s response to these complaints had been, essentially, to bankroll the conventions, which, as Barlow wrote, were transformed by this cash infusion “into a weekend of around-the-clock revelry and highjinks.” In the words of one of its founding members, “Jockey” Jack Gibson: “We partied until it was time to go to church.”
With the growth of the civil rights movement, however, NARA was beginning to see itself as occupying if not higher at least more socially significant ground. It was still a trade association, according to prominent New Orleans jock Larry McKinley, in which the idea of self-help predominated. “It was just an idea of camaraderie. All of us had some interest maybe in a song, maybe in publishing, or in the act itself, the artist, and as we got older, we started to learn how to network. I mean, I could call Houston, get Boogaloo, get Hot Rod [Hulbert] in Baltimore, Al [Jefferson] up in Detroit, and Rodney [Jones], of course, in Chicago—Jockey at that time was in Cincinnati, and, of course, Hoss Allen and [fellow white r&b jock] John R. were crisscrossing all over [on Nashville’s “clear-channel” WLAC]. There was never any money exchanged, we just did favors for each other that no outsider could do.”
And as the Movement gained a foothold, those favors extended almost necessarily to the entire community. “You have to understand,” said Jockey Jack, “that we were the voice that the people listened to, and if you gave us a message to say, ‘There will be a meeting tonight of SCLC [Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference] at the First Baptist Church,’ we would go ahead and elaborate all around it, [saying], ‘Now, Dr. King says to be there at seven sharp, no CP [colored people’s] time, and you know what I mean . . . ’cause this is important for you and me and our children.’ . . . And it worked. People came out on time.” It was, said Philadelphia DJ Georgie Woods, like having a “freedom mike” over which a secret message was being sent out directly to the people, with little or no interference from white ownership or the white world, which was for the most part either ignorant or indifferent.
Harold Battiste, who had gone to work for Specialty in 1957, written the vocal arrangement for “You Send Me,” and returned to his native New Orleans to run Specialty’s office there for the next three years, attended the St. Louis convention with trumpeter Melvin Lastie. Together with three other fellow New Orleanians, they had formed a musicians’ cooperative, a production company called AFO, or All For One, whose avowed aim, in Harold Battiste’s 1959 Manifesto, was for the “laborers,” or musicians, to take back the means of production and distribute the profits equally among themselves. This the AFO label had done with its second release, Barbara George’s “I Know,” which had gone to the top of the r&b and pop charts earlier in the year, and Melvin and Harold attended the St. Louis convention in the belief that its stated theme, “A Time to Speak,” meant just what it said. “We thought they had the same kind of motives that we had about utilizing [their] strength as a group to make inroads into ownership.” In the event, they may have been disappointed, but, like Sam, they were not about to give up. There was room, Harold Battiste felt strongly, for practical black idealism in the world of business, and he felt that AFO, along with established pioneers like Sam and Alex and Berry Gordy in Detroit, could show the way.
Sam entertained at the RCA reception on Saturday night, and Crain had his money and briefcase stolen. He had had a party with another couple and a woman named Peaches in his room at the Sheraton-Jefferson, the convention site, and “early the next morning,” the St. Louis Argus reported, “he discovered that more than $250 in cash and an expensive camera were missing.” Sam was barely able to contain himself as he gave the older man a stern lecture about responsibility and Crain complained bitterly about how this chick had ripped him off. “That chick just wore you out,” the others all ragged at him. “She knew right where the money was at. What did you do when you were finished? Just close your eyes and go to sleep?”
Sam spent five days at home after the convention, and Luigi flew in for a session the night before he was scheduled to go back out on the road. They couldn’t get into the RCA studio until midnight, but Sam was determined to record “Nothing Can Change This Love,” a recent composition that he had first attempted in February with Oopie singing bass behind a bouncy doo-wop beat. This time he took an entirely different approach, sketching out a lushly orchestrated string-laden arrangement for René that transformed the song. It opened with a piano introduction by Eddie Beal, then unfolded with a sorrowful deliberation so at odds with the cheeriness of the earlier version that it almost seemed as if some life-changing event must have intervened.
“If I go / A million miles away / I’d write a letter / Each and every day / ’Cause nothing can ever change the love I have for you,” Sam sings as a swirl of violins, cellos, and violas washes over his voice. It sounds for all the world like the most clichéd version of romantic love, but then as the song develops, you realize that what you are hearing is not the embrace but the denial of illusion, set forth in a tone of deeply ambiguous regret. “You’re the apple of my eye / You’re cherry pie / And, oh, you’re cake and ice cream,” is the explicit message of the bridge, even as the singer’s world-weary mood, the unspoken layers of irony, yearning, and knowledge that accompany his heartfelt declarations, work to undercut any suggestion of belief. It ends with as straightforward an admission of the lover’s plight as you’re ever likely to get from Sam (“Mmmm, make me weep / And you can make me cry / See me coming / And you can pass on by / But nothing can ever change this love I have for you”), followed by the whisper of strings, a muted clash of cymbals, and trailing notes from the piano that recapitulate the opening passage of the song. Eight takes merely refined the message, and RCA put the record out on the street two and one-half weeks later, where its sales swiftly rivaled “Bring It On Home to Me.”
With the Valentinos’ “Lookin’ For a Love” really beginning to take off, Alex got the group booked on a James Brown theater-circuit tour starting at the Apollo in October, and he was already planning an all-out promotion campaign for the Sims Twins’ next single in the weeks following that. Sam pointed a reporter for the Raleigh-Durham area black weekly, The Carolinian, toward the Valentinos’ hit while playing a September 17 Supersonic date with Clyde McPhatter in Raleigh. “I was also informed by Sam that [his] brother L.C. Cooke . . . will have a release very soon called ‘You’re Workin’ Out Your Bag on Me,’” wrote Carolinian reporter Oscar Alexander in his “Diggin’ Daddy-Oh!” column. But what Sam really appeared to be excited about was his upcoming European tour. He would be going, he said, for “both business and pleasure” and spoke of visiting the French Riviera, though, in fact, his month abroad would be confined to a week of one-nighters at American military bases in Germany, followed by a three-week tour of England October 8-28. What, asked the Carolinian columnist with a verbal wink, would he do about the exotic fare he was likely to encounter over there? “Man,” said Sam, replying in kind, “I’ll stow away as much as I possibly can, and when I get [back] to the States, I’ll find the first real home cooking restaurant and order some real ‘soul food.’” But there was no disguising his genuine excitement about the trip, Riviera or no Riviera.
BRITISH PROMOTER DON ARDEN had been courting Sam for some time. Arden, born Harry Levy, was a thirty-six-year-old show-business veteran who had originally made his mark a
s Europe’s best-known folk singer in the newly revived Hebrew language. He had started producing shows in 1954 and had come over to Los Angeles at the beginning of the summer specifically to sign Little Richard for a tour. Richard had not sung rock ’n’ roll in almost five years, and Arden, the only promoter in England seriously committed to importing authentic American rock ’n’ roll, felt he could make a killing if he could just persuade the star to return to his former field of glory.
“I made a couple of journeys to L.A. to get hold of him, and eventually he said, ‘Very well, I’ll sing rock ’n’ roll again for you. But,’ he said, ‘the Lord will punish you, because I’ve always believed it’s somebody evil that’s going to bring me back.’ And I loved that. I thought it was great.” Arden’s view of promotion was, quite simply, to create a stir. Controversy was nothing new to him, and he knew the British press would become aroused at the first sign of conflict. But he didn’t trust his star—“I didn’t dislike him, I distrusted him”—and right up until opening night he was uncertain what exactly he would do.
With Sam he harbored no such doubts. He had posed the terms of the engagement straightforwardly to Jerry Brandt, explaining that there would be two shows a night at venues seating between two thousand and twenty-five hundred and that Sam would be the co-star, closing out the first half of the bill, but Richard would unquestionably be the star. Then he met with Sam. “A perfect gentleman, exceptionally good-looking and [well-spoken], I’m sure he was highly educated, and he had confidence in the people he was working with.” J.W. accompanied Sam to Arden’s hotel, and Don found him to be a perfect gentleman as well. “I felt he knew all about Sam’s talent and was capable of telling people what his artist needed without being a heavy.” To Arden, Sam “probably had the best voice I’d heard in over twenty years, artistically I was jealous of him,” but the delightful surprise was his sophistication and curiosity. “He said, ‘I want you to tell me about England. I think we must have spent three or four hours together.”
Arden’s fears about Little Richard turned out to be well founded. None of the legitimate theaters would book a rock ’n’ roll show, so Arden was forced to slot the revue into movie theaters for the most part, with the Granada chain (which had more than half the dates) more or less “sponsoring” the tour. He had assembled a program that included “Gag Slinger” Bob Bain as comedy act and compere; twenty-three-year-old Jet Harris, who had recently left Cliff Richard’s band, the Shadows, as co-star of the second half; a saxophone-heavy instrumental group called Sounds Incorporated to back the various acts; and American expatriate rocker Gene Vincent serving as impromptu audience “plant,” since, with the expiration of his British working papers, he could only sing his seminal 1956 hit, “Be Bop a Lu La,” from the same seat in the orchestra from which he would then introduce the two stars.
Opening night, October 8, was scheduled for the Gaumont in Doncaster, a small, out-of-the-way northern venue that Arden had picked for its very obscurity (“It was a shocking place—I don’t think anybody’d ever heard of it”), because, he calculated, any kinks in the show or in his star’s attitude could safely be ironed out there. He had left little to chance, but he could scarcely have anticipated Sam’s plane from Germany being so late that he would miss the first show of the evening altogether. Nor could he have been fully prepared for the strange turn that Little Richard’s stubbornly recalcitrant piety would now take.
He was not surprised when Richard showed up with a huge Family Bible, nor when he started quoting Scripture at him. He would not have been taken off-guard if Richard had demanded more money, and he had already planned his own response, which would have been to threaten to send his reluctant star home with no money for his return fare—which Arden was perfectly prepared to do. There was little at this stage that could have shocked him. But he was genuinely taken aback, and helpless, at the performance that Richard put on at the early-evening 6:15 show.
“As soon as he walked out, I knew we were in for trouble,” said Arden. Richard was wearing what looked to the promoter like religious robes, and he started off singing gospel songs exclusively—“Joy Joy Joy”; his own brilliant original “He Got What He Wanted (But He Lost What He Had)”; and the inspirational number “I Believe”—as his accompanist, sixteen-year-old Billy Preston (making his first appearance on the secular stage more than ten years after his debut on piano as a gospel child prodigy) took a featured turn on organ. It was only at the end of a very abbreviated set that Little Richard allowed the band to play what they had been rehearsing for most of the day, presenting a rapid-fire medley of his hits that ended with “Jenny, Jenny” and got a somewhat sparse house on its feet. “But even at this point,” wrote Chris Hutchins in the New Musical Express, “it seemed we were something short of the great artist who once rocked the world with his records.”
Don Arden was fit to be tied. He pleaded, he cajoled, he threatened Little Richard to no effect (“I said, ‘Now look, don’t double-cross me. That’s a naughty thing to do.’ He said, ‘You’re the devil’”)—and then he rushed outside to reassure the queue for the second show that, despite what they may have heard from the departing crowd, they were not going to be shortchanged. But he held out little hope until Sam and J.W. finally arrived. He asked if there wasn’t something they could say to Richard. He begged Sam to intercede, even after J.W. pointed out that Little Richard would most likely just respond to the competition that Sam had to offer. So in the end Sam agreed, as a favor to the promoter, to speak with Richard in his dressing room.
Sam reasoned with Richard. He said they had both come a long way to do this tour, that this was his first trip to England, and that maybe Richard thought Don Arden had used some kind of trickery to get them over here, but that as far as he knew, they had both signed contracts and he was certainly going to honor his. Arden simply watched in astonishment. “Sam said, ‘You’re a man. Why didn’t you say, “No, I can’t,” if you didn’t want to do it?’ And, you know, Little Richard melted. He said, ‘I’m only doing this because I respect you as an artist.’ And they both shook hands, and Richard decided to shake hands with me. But even after all [that], he still opened up the second show by saying, ‘I am here by courtesy of the devil, Don Arden!’”
J.W. was not convinced it wasn’t Little Richard’s competitive instinct as much as Sam’s persuasive powers that prompted him to put on what Chris Hutchins described as a “roof-raising act that began and ended with rock.” Sam, according to both Alex and Hutchins, killed the house, but then Richard came out at the end of the show, just as J.W. had said he would, “he came out with a damn chair in his mouth, and he pulled off that robe, and he literally slayed them.” He sang all of his hits, ran screaming up and down the aisle, and whatever peak Sam had been able to achieve, Richard was able to overcome with what J.W. called his “energizing approach.” It was a lesson in humility for Sam, but one that J.W. felt was not about to be lost on him.
The rest of the tour had its own internal dramas, though none quite so electrifying as the first. Little Richard continued to put on an arresting performance night after night, and Sam and J.W. continued to have the same lesson drilled into them. “No matter how Sam killed the house,” said Alex, “Richard could always come back with that energizing approach.” Most of the audiences were there for Richard, who was far better known in England than Sam and who continued to introduce new and exciting elements into his act. Perhaps the climax came when, in the midst of a piano-pounding “Lucille,” he keeled over at the piano and fell to the stage as though struck dead. Amid cries of “Is there a doctor in the house?” Richard lay prostrate on the stage, while the audience fell silent, and band members, stagehands, and a bewildered security crew anxiously gathered around the fallen star. Then suddenly a sound emanated from him. “A wop bop a lu bop, a lop bam boom,” screamed the resurrected Little Richard, and the audience greeted his revival with a fervor that generally brought the show to a close. It was, said Bill Millar, seventeen years o
ld when he attended the show at the Maidstone Granada, “the most exciting thing I’d ever seen, a never-forgotten moment.” Forty years later, a passionate and perceptive chronicler of rock history, he could scarcely even recall Sam.
Jet Harris, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Sam: England, October 1962.
Courtesy of Trevor Cajiao, Now Dig This!
For Jet Harris, on the other hand, who studied both headliners closely from the wings each night, Sam’s act was a lesson in polish and sophistication. Harris, a rocker with peroxide-blond hair, had come on the tour as a kind of protégé of Gene Vincent, with a nod to James Dean, and was absolutely fascinated with Little Richard. “Richard used to watch my show, and when I’d come off, he’d say, ‘Now, look, you’ve got to make love to the guitar, treat it like a woman.’ He gave me loads of advice. But some of the things he wanted me to do, in my mind, were outrageous. So I didn’t bother.”
Sam, by way of contrast, was quiet, polite, almost unapproachable because of the way in which he marked off the boundaries of his world both by his manner and by the coterie that surrounded him. Crain and Alex, his brother Charles, his musicians Clif White and June Gardner, all silently served his needs and responded to his direction without his ever having to raise his voice or make a single untoward suggestion. “I was quite in awe of what a sort of gentleman he was. But when he went [onstage], he was a man in his own complete and utter style—he couldn’t go wrong. Most of the audience were waiting for Little Richard, but Sam just captured them—you know, ‘Here I am, get hold of this, I’m on.’ He really just hypnotized—with his hands, his voice, I can’t stop using that word, he hypnotized the audience.”
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 54
