Crain for the most part kept his own counsel, not anxious to test either his power or his prestige with other members of the group. Charles, on the other hand, showed no such restraint. He didn’t like Alexander’s attempts to rein in his spending, he didn’t like Alexander himself, and he didn’t care who knew it. “Alexander come out,” said L.C., who clearly shared his brother’s views, “and he say, ‘Charles, you spending too much of Sam’s money.’ Charles said, ‘Wait a minute, Alexander. That’s my brother.’ Said, ‘You work for him, and I work for him.’ He took him right to Sam, and Sam set him straight. He said, ‘Charles, if I tell you it’s too much, that’s when you worry about it. You don’t work for Alexander, you work for me.’ He said, ‘As a matter of fact, Alexander work for me.’” After that, Charles refused to drive Alex unless Sam was in the car. He said, “I drive for Sam, Alexander. I don’t drive for you.” But Alex dealt with this, too, with the same easygoing manner that infuriated Charles even more. He saw Charles not as a freeloader but as someone who took advantage of Sam’s good nature by encouraging freeloaders. But if Sam wanted to tolerate that kind of attitude, that was all right with him—so long as Charles and L.C. had nothing to do with the business. Which they did not—and which was probably the original source of their resentment.
Charles didn’t have much use for Bobby, either, as Bobby was well aware. “Charlie was always saying, ‘He a slick little fucker, telling you all these little stories. Why he have to ride with you in the limousine all the time?’ But Sam just said, ‘Bobby? He’s green as a cucumber. If there’s anything he do, it’s not that he’s trying to be slick, he just don’t know no better.’”
There was hardly anyone on the tour, as Bobby saw it, who didn’t get mad at him at one time or another for his favored position. “Everybody would say, ‘Man, he gets under Sam.’ But Sam knowed I would be straight up with him about anything. Even if it meant somebody else getting busted, I would just tell him, you know, ‘That’s what happened.’ Plus, I always had my guitar, and we’d be kicking it. Now, you ride down the highway, just watching, hearing the sound, you got to get bored. But with me, it was always playing, plus he was always talking, we would always talk.”
They talked about anything and everything, just the two of them riding along in the limo. Bobby would have Sam in stitches with stories about growing up in the Womack household in Cleveland, where “you weren’t allowed to do nothing but sing gospel. My father, man, you ask him about the facts of life—when you wake up from being knocked out, he say, ‘That’s the facts of life.’ We had a TV, but my father called it ‘the one-eyed monster,’ he say, ‘Why you watching that TV, the white man invented that, he stealing everything around you while you’re watching.’” Bobby would come up with the most naive questions, like: why did they always stay in “motels,” not “hotels”? And Sam would patiently explain, carrying him through the etymology of the word, pointing out that “mo-tel” was coded language for “mo’ tail,” until Bobby started nodding sagely and Sam just cracked up. He had fun with Bobby, maybe, because in Bobby he saw his younger self—that’s what Bobby thought some of the time. But above all Sam seemed to want to give him advice, to offer the kind of advice that he himself might have liked to have had when he was starting out.
Bobby still wore his hair in an upswept process, and Sam told him he was showing his ignorance. “You know, we’ll never be those people. We black, and we’ll stay black,” he said. “I’ll never straighten my hair again.” Bobby said he wanted a big Cadillac, just like Johnnie Morisette, and Sam and Alex both laughed at him—they told him to keep that pencil in his hand, his writing could get him whatever he wanted. “Sam always have a flask, he always sip on it. He start [to] reading black history, and you couldn’t get him out of it.
He never got above people. He be driving down the street, and some cats gambling in an alley. He get out and say, “Hey, man, what the fuck is that shit? Let me shoot out.” I’m saying, Sam is going to get killed in that motherfucking alley. That’s no class. What’s he doing in there with the winos. But he say, “Man, I had uncles, I had people that ended up like that, ’cause they couldn’t ever get their niche, they didn’t go to school, or whatever. They ain’t gonna do nothing to you, ’cause they know they can ask you for it. It ain’t like you gonna lock all the windows and roll by them. This is where I come from, and if I get scared to come down here, then I’m in trouble.”
He would always tell me the position he would be in. He would say, “You be in this position one day, and you’ll understand. You know. Mom fix you that favorite bread pudding you like. You know how much you like that bread pudding?” He said, “That bread pudding will cost me ten thousand dollars.” He say, “I want to go [visit them] so bad, but, see, they don’t see me as Sammy no more, I’m the one that save the world.” I was saying, “Yeah, but that’s your family.” He said, “Man, you’ll understand once you get there.”
I said, “Sam, I never see you mad, I never see you bothered.” He said, “Bobby, I don’t come out of my room when I’m in a mood. I don’t share it with nobody else. ’Cause when I’m uptight and down, why would I depress everybody else? When people believe in you and you give them such a lift, why show your attitude? You know, it can almost stop a person’s world.”
He always had this way of making you feel like you were the one; I don’t care how you were feeling, before you know it, you was laughing and feeling up. That was the thing that was so special about him. He had the charisma, but he knew [how] to use it. He would say, “Bobby, always have your bad guy. You be telling [people], ‘Oh, I want to do it,’ and [your] guy say, ‘No, he can’t do that. I’m not going to let him do that.’” Sam was always a good guy—see, the good guys, they’ll wear you out. But then Alex or Crain would be talking about, “Naw, you ain’t gonna do nothing. Just shut up.” And Sam would say, “Come on, man”—he would fuck around like that, and they’d get back in the car and laugh about it.
You couldn’t get him out of his books. We’d go to a motel, and Charles and them would be wanting to get chicks, and they’d be saying, “We have to get all these goddamn books for Sam.” When he wasn’t chasing, he was reading. And the more history he read, the more [he would talk about it]. “Do you know about this? Do you know about that?” He said, “Bobby, if you read—the way you write now, you writing songs you ain’t even lived. You ain’t even been with a woman, so how you gonna write about a woman?” I said, “I know people that have, and I see what they go through.” But he said, “Bobby, if you read, your vocabulary, the way you view things in a song—it’ll be like an abstract painting, every time you look back, you’ll see something you didn’t see before.”
He say, “You have to be universal. You have to be all the way around. You just work every day at your craft.” It wasn’t like he was trying to sell nothing, he was out having a good time. He kept saying, “Bobby, a star, that’s the one you can touch.” He would just sit up and listen to people, listen to people talk. He said, “That’s where you get your hooks.” He said, “It’s easy to write the truth, it’s hard to tell a story. You’ve only got three minutes. You gotta hit ’em, it’s gotta be strong, and you’ve got to stick to the script. It’s got to be about feeling, but if you’re telling a story, you’ve got to make a believer out of the person that’s listening.”
Bobby was always playing for Sam in the car, just fooling around on guitar, coming up with little riffs and melodies that sprang into his head. He never thought of them as songs—they went right out of his head almost as fast as he played them. But often the next day Sam would ask, “What was that you were playing?” And if Bobby didn’t exactly recall, Sam made him keep playing until he did. “He could remember it so well [for] not being a guitar player. And he’d say, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll tape the fucker next time.’”
Gradually it dawned on Bobby that he was supplying Sam with song ideas, and he got into it one time with Sam directly, how he had let Zelda and Alex
steal songwriters’ credits from the Womacks on “Lookin’ For a Love.” At first Sam denied it. “He said, ‘You took that song [from someone else]. You took a few [others], too.’” But Sam could never take a hard line with Bobby for long, and after a while, he owned up with an impish grin. “He said, ‘Okay, I’m taking your shit, but I’m doing you better than James Brown [would].’ He said, ‘At least I’ll fuck you with grease. James’ll fuck you with sand.’” Bobby had been on the verge of telling him off once and for all. “I was like, I’m gonna tell this motherfucker, ‘If it’s good for you, [how come] it ain’t good for me?’” But when Sam put it to him like that, he found himself totally disarmed and came to see it as part of his education, part of the same growing-up process that Sam, and all the others, had had to go through. And now that it had at last been openly acknowledged, he assumed that Sam wouldn’t be fucking him any more, grease or no grease.
It all got spelled out over the incident with Jerry Butler. “I was in Jerry’s room just playing stuff, all these cats going, ‘Whoo, this motherfucker’s bad,’ and Sam said, ‘Bobby come on out of there.’ He said, ‘You never go around playing with these people and just give it to them.’” When Bobby acted innocent—all he was doing was playing for Jerry, just like he did for Sam—Sam really ripped into him. “He said, ‘Bobby, you’re a writer. That fucker ain’t got no melody, he can’t sing nothing. That’s the reason they want you in the room.’ He says, ‘They’re ripping you off, they’re taking your shit. You know what I mean.’ I said, ‘I could do this all day long.’ He said, ‘But I don’t want you to do it all day long—okay, I’m taking your shit [too], but I’ll tell you what, anything we do together [from now on], we’re partners on it fifty-fifty.’” Which may not have been exactly the way it worked out, but Bobby took it in the spirit in which it was offered, as evidence of Sam’s implicit faith in him. He would tell Bobby, “As you grow, you’ll write. It’ll come out. You’ve got things to write about.” And Bobby had no doubt that this was true.
Jerry Butler’s presence on the tour led to Sam reconnecting with Leo Morris for the first time in years. Leo, the New Orleans drummer who had worked with Sam in the summer of 1960 just before June joined, had been playing with Jerry for the last couple of years but had successfully avoided Sam for the first week or two of the tour. His feelings were still hurt about the callous way he believed he had been let go, “but then one night as I came offstage, Sam was standing there in his robe, and he said, ‘Come here, I want to talk to you.’ He said, ‘Why did you leave me?’ I said, ‘I didn’t leave you, you fired me.’ He said, ‘I didn’t fire you, you quit.’”
As they talked, Leo for the first time was able to pour his heart out about an incident that had wounded not just his pride but his sense of self-worth, and Sam was able to persuade him that he had known nothing about it, that it must have been Clif who had let Leo go—for whatever reason—and then told Sam that his drummer had quit. “So we became good friends—I was kind of [devastated] to find out that he didn’t fire me, but [what] was already done couldn’t be reversed.”
Leo had more pressing problems at this point, anyway. He had brought his wife out on tour at the invitation of his employer, and now he had concerns about both his wife and his employer. He sent his wife home but fell into bad habits and started entertaining fantasies of revenge. It was not-yet-sixteen-year-old La La Brooks, the youngest Crystal, who saved him. “My crazy mind was saying, ‘Shoot him, shoot him tonight.’ So I drown myself in drugs, trying to get away from it. And La La would sit by me and talk to me about this shit. She’d say, ‘Why are you doing this? You going to kill yourself over a woman. It doesn’t make any sense.’” The rest of the girls in the group were all fooling with someone on the tour, but La La didn’t have a boyfriend, and all the guys were after her. “She said, ‘Just pretend that me and you are tight’—you know, to kick these guys off of her—and we got to talking [all the time]. She was fifteen years old, but she was telling me stuff I had never even thought about.” And so Leo fell in love, and while it took him a while to straighten out his life, he made a pledge to himself that he would never compromise La La and that he would marry her one day. And, two years later, that is just what he did.
MEANWHILE THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION was erupting all around them. Even as the troupe was facing what Bobby called “K-9 dogs” patrolling the aisles to prevent race mixing or overdemonstrativeness on the part of the colored population, in Birmingham, Alabama, the vicious police dogs and fire hoses of Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor were thown up against whatever forces Martin Luther King was able to rally in opposition to the most intransigent resistance to integration in any form in the South. King’s campaign had begun in early April, just before the start of the tour, with Harry Belafonte raising well over $100,000 for bail-bond funds and forty-seven-year-old blind jazz and blues singer Al Hibbler standing side by side with Dr. King and going to jail with him early in the demonstrations. Comedian Dick Gregory had just gotten back from Greenwood, Mississippi, where he was a leading participant in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee [SNCC]’s increasingly confrontational voter registration campaign (“Well, now, Mr. Mayor,” he challenged Greenwood’s race-baiting Mayor Sampson at a public press conference, “you really took your nigger pills last night, didn’t you?”).
“Are Show Biz Folk Sincere in Going Down South to Protest Racial Ills?” asked the Negro weekly the Norfolk Journal and Guide. “We certainly are,” said Clyde McPhatter, who had recently refused to play an exclusive nightclub in Atlanta unless it rescinded its whites-only policy. He had cast his lot with the student protesters, McPhatter said, because he believed in “the right to be treated like an American. If we’re ever going to be free, now is the time,” he declared once again, as similar views by such notable figures as Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, folksinger Leon Bibb, organist Jimmy Smith, and Sammy Davis Jr. were all cited, and, it was pointed out, popular entertainers like “Sam Cooke, Chubby Checker and others canceled engagements scheduled before racially segregated audiences. . . . ‘We travel all over the country, and sometimes the world, having opportunity to observe—first-hand—the plight of the minority peoples,’ [McPhatter] said. ‘There is hardly one major entertainer who hasn’t at some time felt the sting of prejudice or the stick of jimcrow, and there is not one who wouldn’t give his all to erase these things from the face of the globe.’”
Not everyone agreed. Nat “King” Cole, who had been physically attacked and beaten onstage by local White Citizens Council members in Birmingham in 1956, defended “stars who shun[ned] Dixie picket lines.” Obviously defensive, Cole, who under ordinary circumstances showed exemplary civility in public discourse, suggested that Dick Gregory and Al Hibbler needed the publicity and that Harry Belafonte was a “professional integrationist.” It was an “idiotic idea,” he said, that “Negro entertainers should lead the way,” even though he could scarcely comprehend that so many of his white fans could love him as a performer, like his songs, even like him personally, “but still dislike Negroes as Negroes. This is baffling to me.”
Fats Domino, who, like Cole, had always had a strong white fan base, announced his own break with NAACP thinking by declaring earlier in the year that “henceforth he [would] play in any nightclub or theater which pays him, regardless of whether Negro patrons are permitted.” He was doing so, he said, because his band had to feed their families, his own family had to eat, and “I’ve lost thousands and thousands of dollars in the past because I’ve gone along with the NAACP, and it has hurt my reputation as a performer. I won’t do it anymore.” Within days, after a firestorm of criticism from the black community, he rescinded his new policy, declaring in a prepared statement that he had been misquoted and that “I know from my heart that the NAACP is the greatest friend of the minorities”—although, as the syndicated ANP story pointed out, he “did not say whether he was booking for any segregated performances.”
Even the bla
ck newspapers were not by any means uniformly convinced of the need for further demonstrations, worriedly suggesting to their readers that the militant actions of a few could threaten the gains of all and that this might be the time for patience and consolidation. The Birmingham World, along with the Atlanta Daily World owned by the Scott family of Atlanta, refused to even cover the Birmingham demonstrations at first, wrote civil rights historian Taylor Branch, “treat[ing] King’s campaign as a disturbing rumor,” a ragtag movement undertaken solely for reasons of political opportunism that those of good taste and judgment might safely ignore. When King was jailed and placed in solitary confinement on Good Friday, April 12, he began what came to be known as his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he laid out, on scraps of paper at first and in the margins of a discarded newspaper, the moral imperative of civil disobedience, the heroism of those who simply refused to capitulate to oppression. “One day,” he wrote, “the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be . . . old, oppressed, battered Negro women. . . . They will be the young high school and college student . . . sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’s sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream.” It was a document written with the kind of moral clarity that is born of desperation, and it might well have sparked a renewed sense of dedication in both the black and white communities, but, as Taylor Branch tartly observed, “reporters saw no news in what appeared to be an especially long-winded King sermon. Not a single mention of the letter reached white or Negro news media for a month.” And the Birmingham World saw no reason to rescind its judgment that this type of approach was “both wasteful and worthless.”
Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke Page 62
