Dream boogie: the triumph of Sam Cooke

by Peter Guralnick

  At the Apollo, business gradually returned to normal. As Frank Schiffman noted in his booking diary, had it not been for Kennedy’s assassination, “this could have been the strongest show yet for Sam. He and the show were superb.” Over the course of the week, Sam renewed his acquaintance with Cassius Clay, who had just signed for a title fight with Sonny Liston and was in town to promote I Am the Greatest, his Columbia LP, with an appearance on The Jack Paar Show. Clay was staying at the Theresa, where he spent much of his time with Malcolm X, whom he had come to know well over the last couple of years in his pursuit of Muslim teachings. He looked up to Malcolm almost like a big brother, and Malcolm for his part saw in Clay a “likeable, friendly, clean-cut, down-to-earth youngster . . . alert . . . even in little details.”

  Sam had known Malcolm for years, ever since the first time he had come to the Apollo as a headliner, and he had always appreciated him as an accomplished street-corner speaker—he had known people like Malcolm all his life, caught up in the grip of a hustle they needed for their own personal salvation. He had never much cared for his Muslim beliefs, but now, with Cassius Clay serving as a kind of catalyst, Sam finally began to recognize the greater truth of Malcolm’s message. Black pride and self-determination, the principle of ownership, the need, above all, to control your own destiny—these were lessons he had learned at his father’s knee. Never be satisfied with scraps from the white man’s table; it was better to die on your feet than live on your knees—this was the essence of Sam’s personal philosophy. And Malcolm wasn’t one of these one-dimensional cats whose sum and substance were his lessons, either. Behind his steely gaze, Sam could discern a bright glint of humor, from talking to him he could tell that this was a man who could think on his feet. And, like Sam, he clearly saw some indefinable potential, independent of religious instruction, in young Cassius Clay. “He saw greatness,” said Malcolm’s daughter Attallah Shabazz, “and wanted to offer a focus for motivation.”

  Sam saw Lithofayne Pridgon, too, who was in the middle of a “set,” or orgy, with a famous gospel singer, his girlfriend, and one of her “young tenders” when the news of President Kennedy’s assassination came on the radio. The famous gospel singer immediately grabbed all of their hands and intoned, “Let us fall down on our knees and pray.” It was ironic, laughed Lithofayne, how he could switch horses in the middle of the stream.

  As she recalled, it was on this trip, too, that she introduced Sam to another of her friends, who, as it happened, she had met in the midst of an earlier “set.” This was a young guitarist named Jimmy Hendrix, who, as Lithofayne understood it, had been brought to New York from Nashville by a gay promoter who Jimmy had only recently begun to suspect might be more interested in his person than in his talent. Jimmy was desperately looking for work, and Lithofayne got him backstage and introduced him to Jerry Cuffee, a little man with a raggedy process and bad skin, who took care of Sam whenever he was in New York. Jerry got him into Sam’s dressing room, but Jimmy didn’t last long, “and he didn’t want to talk about it afterwards—he obviously didn’t get the gig.” That sent him home to Nashville, but he quickly turned around and was back in New York not long after Christmas, and he and Faye soon became the best of friends and starting hanging out together at Small’s Paradise and the Palm Café.

  With Sam, Faye noticed even more of a change than the last time he had come to town. He seemed sadder, more distant, but coarser, too. “I started to hear little things that started to raise my eyebrows, like, oh my goodness. I knew plenty of whores and pimps, because they were all over the place, they’re human beings, like anybody else. I just didn’t want to believe he had to go there.”

  At the end of the week, Allen told him, “Listen, I want you to go home. You got the money. You don’t have to worry about money. Go home. Spend time with your wife and kids. You don’t have to do this shit anymore.”

  BUT THERE WAS NO REAL HOME to return to. Barbara no longer even bothered to hide a lifestyle that was as far removed from Sam’s as his had always been from hers. She defied his carefully constructed image of domesticity, the pains he had taken to separate their home life from life outside the home, by plunging into her own chaotic maelstrom, by disappearing without explanation and jettisoning any pretense of personal control. When she returned, she brought the street unmistakably back with her, as her mood became darker and darker and more and more openly hostile toward a husband she both blamed and desperately missed.

  Sam restlessly made the round of the clubs. He saw old friends, stopped by Gertrude Gipson’s Nite Life for an evening of poetry and entertainment with Cassius Clay, checked out Dinah Washington’s closing at Basin Street West. But, said Lou Adler, “for the first time, you could detect that he was carrying something other than the person that he was. There was a [sorrowfulness], a leveling out.” He was drinking more, and his smile seemed forced at times; without his ever explicitly acknowledging it, the change was evident to every one of his friends.

  For Jess’ birthday on December 2 he gave his former manager a fourteen-karat solid gold Dunhill lighter with the masks of Comedy and Tragedy overlaid on the front and the inscription “You’re TOPS. Sam.” He did The Jerry Lewis Show (“Starring The Nut Himself,” the printed program announced) with Cassius Clay on December 7, introducing Linda to Cassius at the afternoon rehearsal and inviting him out to the house. Jerry Brandt had gotten Sam the booking on the strength of Clay’s current celebrity. With the title fight coming up and his album on the charts, Cassius, said the William Morris agent, “had the fucking world in his palm,” and Brandt simply insisted to the show’s booker, “You want this guy, you take this guy.” Sam talked to Cassius about maybe doing a record together someday, and the kid’s eyes lit up. Jerry Brandt was not surprised. Sam was the kind of guy who never took his eye off the main chance—and, while it was perfectly evident that Sam got a tremendous kick out of him, Cassius Clay was the main chance right then. “I mean, we never discussed it. He just thought this is something to attach yourself to.”

  Sam came out at the front of the show after a perfunctory introduction by Jerry Lewis, looking a little puffy in an abbreviated dark continental suit jacket and pants. He opened with an elegantly exuberant version of “Twistin’ the Night Away,” undeterred by audience apathy or the orchestra’s Dixieland groove. Then he performed a starkly theatrical reading of “The Riddle Song,” an Appalachian ballad recently revived in folk circles, while sitting on a stool and caught in dramatic profile by an overhead spot. Someone who knew Sam’s recent history might very well have supplied a deeper emotional subtext as his voice wrapped itself around the lyric’s paradoxical simplicity (“I gave my love a chicken that has no bone / I gave my love a ring that has no end / I gave my love a baby with no cryin’”), then supplied the answer to the riddle’s ultimate contradiction: “A baby when it’s sleeping has no cryin’.” For the casual viewer, though, there was only supreme confidence and supreme control, an actor’s sublimation of personal experience to express universal feeling. It was, like the refined version of the Twist that he and J.W. had worked out for presentation to this national television audience, a Twist that emerged from the subtlest of gestures and the most carefully choreographed little steps, a declaration on the one hand that he could command any stage, and, on the other, an act of secret complicity with himself.

  That same day, a picture of him appeared on the cover of Cash Box, seated behind an expansive executive desk and leaning over impishly toward RCA president George Marek beneath a portrait of Giuseppe Verdi. “The two are discussing the continuance of Cooke’s highly successful relationship with RCA,” reads the caption, “which the artist has just sealed with the pen he is holding.” Currently “fire-hot . . . Cooke [is] one of the record industry’s most consistent hit-makers, riding an unbroken chain of eight smash singles.” A bright future for record company and artist was clearly in the works.

  Barbara took the kids to Chicago for a visit not long afterward. Crume and th
e Stirrers were out on the Coast for a series of programs, and Sam and Crume got together with a pair of cousins they had met at a club earlier in the year. Sam had had to borrow Stirrers baritone singer Richard Gibbs’ room at the Dunbar for the earlier date, but this time they went back to the house to fool around. Sam was in a funny mood, he seemed as eager to talk with Crume as to spend time with his girl, and he called Crume on the intercom early the next morning and said, “Let’s take the girls home.” When they got back to the house, he played Crume three or four numbers that he had been working on for his upcoming session: a song called “Good Times” that was based on an old Louis Jordan hit; a variation on a gospel number, “Ain’t That Good News,” that they had all grown up singing; plus one or two others that didn’t make as much of an impression.

  Then Sam told him about his new RCA deal, and how much money he now had in the bank. “He said, ‘I don’t want you to tell nobody about this. Even Barbara don’t know what kind of money I got. If I hear it [from her], I’ll know where it came from.’” He was going to take some time off, he said, “because what he wanted to do he couldn’t do as long as he was doing one-nighters. He said, ‘I’m just another rock ’n’ roll singer if I keep doing that.’” But, he said, he was going to keep on paying Clif and June and Bobby, just as if they were working every night.

  And he wanted Crume to write him some new songs. What he wanted were r&b numbers that sounded like gospel. “He said, ‘Crumé, this is what I want you to do. Put everybody out of your room for two weeks and write me some fuckin’ songs.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be out of your mind, man. You mean to tell me you just want me to sit in a room by myself for two weeks and write songs?’ He said, ‘But this is important. This is your fucking career.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but Sam, it don’t take no fucker that long to write a song.’ He said, ‘Well, just write me some fuckin’ songs, man.’” Crume said he’d give the matter some serious thought. But by the time he got around to it, Sam had already put together all the songs he needed.

  Long Time Coming

  For people fighting for their freedom there is no such thing as a bad device.

  — Malcolm X

  THE FIRST TWO SONGS he recorded at his December 20-21 album session were the ones that had most impressed Crume earlier in the month. “Ain’t That Good News” had, in all of its earlier incarnations (including a 1949 version by J.W.’s group, the Pilgrim Travelers), hinged on a variation on the familiar line “Jesus said he’s coming again / Ain’t that news, ain’t that good news.” Sam substituted his own secular introduction (“Well, my baby’s coming home tomorrow”) as the occasion for rejoicing and added a jangling banjo lead, congas, and a horn chart that pushed hard against the banjo’s country twang to change both song and message, while his vocal subtly undercut the song’s cheerful flavor and upbeat lyrics. He polished off the tune in three takes, then spent the rest of the evening experimenting with “Good Times,” the Louis Jordan-inspired number that took up the chorus of Jordan’s enormously popular 1946 hit, “Let the Good Times Roll,” which had served as an inspiration to a whole generation of singers, from Sam and James Brown to B.B. King and Ray Charles, with its anthemic call. Sam’s version, once again, suggested an elegiac tone absent in the original, but his approach was less strictly defined than the one he and René Hall ordinarily took, experimenting with a variety of tempos and instrumentations, bringing banjo back in along with marimba only with take seven, and breaking off the three-hour session without achieving a master take.

  “Hey, Hey, the Gang’s All Here,” March 3, 1964.

  Courtesy of Sony Legacy

  To Luigi it was business as usual. He and his partner and cousin, Hugo Peretti, were nearing the end of their run at RCA—their contract was about to expire in March, and they were increasingly frustrated by what they considered the label’s refusal to move on their a&r recommendations (“We said to [RCA president] Marek once, ‘You ruin everybody you buy’”). But Sam seemed exactly the same, cheerful, focused, full of ideas. Luigi knew all about the drowning death of the son, but he didn’t say anything about it, and Sam didn’t say anything, either. That was just the way he was. It was Barbara who was the problem. She sat in the back of the control room, sullen and distracted, visibly out of it in a way that no one could miss. Sam seemed to ignore her for the most part. There were moments, Luigi noticed, when he appeared lost in thought, but then he’d come right out of it—he was, as always, in perfect control of himself and his surroundings.

  He could, of course, have been thinking of a lot of things. He might have been frustrated at his inability to get “Good Times” just the way he wanted it. Barbara’s presence could well have unsettled him, for all of his studiedly calm demeanor. But mostly he relished the idea of finally being in control—what would make this session different, Allen had told him over and over, was that now he was finally working for himself. He could do whatever he wanted, and contractually he could take any length of time to do it. Which perhaps explained his and René’s slight departure from their usual working methods. At the end of the evening, he was no more discouraged than if he had been working out a song at home: he was simply focused on the two sessions coming up the following evening.

  He kicked off the six o’clock session with a number he had begun in the car with Bobby Womack while they were out on tour the previous fall. He still hadn’t fully worked it out and did only one complete take, a kind of glorified demo, with flute, banjo, and marimba supplying a gentle, clippity-clop sound. “When I go to sleep at night,” he sang:

  I add up my day

  Trying to recall the things I’ve done

  And debts I have to pay

  For that is one thing

  That I know

  What you reap is what you sow

  And then in a chorus that seemed to reflect almost unintentionally the challenge of applying Old Testament lessons in an existential age, he offered the only hope he could summon up:

  Keep movin’ on, keep movin’ on

  Life is this way

  Keep movin’ on, keep movin’ on

  E-v-e-ry day.

  The same wistful mood, and same flute obbligato (“That’s another Italian!” Luigi volunteered in response to Sam’s use of the term), were carried over into the next number, “Memory Lane,” the song J.W. had sung to Allen in New Orleans. “One-take Cooke,” Sam called out cheerfully after a few takes, and then he returned to “Good Times,” continuing to experiment with different approaches until he finally got the sound he wanted on the twenty-fifth take.

  The ten o’clock session might just as well have been planned for another artist. Against Clif and Alex’s advice, Sam had hired Joe Hooven, the arranger they had used for Mel Carter’s lavishly orchestrated SAR sessions, to write the charts for the four songs he had left to do. From Clif’s point of view, Hooven’s arrangements “just kind of overpowered Sam,” but it was almost as if Sam was insistent on making the point “Look at me. I can do anything. Don’t corner me off.”

  He started with “Basin Street Blues,” a number virtually defined by Louis Armstrong, sailing through it with all the confidence of someone who, he once told a disbelieving Bobby Womack, had modeled his vocal style on the gravel-voiced trumpet player. (“Listen to us both,” he had said. “Don’t listen to his voice, listen to his phrasing. It’s like a conversation, it’s real.”) He showed equal confidence in his approach to both “Home,” an Irving Berlin composition made popular by Armstrong and Nat “King” Cole, and “No Second Time,” a melancholy new composition by Clif, then finished off the session with a beautifully articulated, carefully precise, and somewhat stilted recitation of “The Riddle Song,” in which, for all of the pathos of the lyrics, just as little was revealed as in his television performance of the same song two weeks earlier.

  But the evening was still not over. It was one o’clock in the morning, and Sam’s voice was getting frayed, but he returned once more to “Good Times,” overdubbing a couple of
deliberately unsynchronized harmony parts as a sketch for one final pass at the song. Allen had told him, “Take your time for once. Don’t do another shitty album,” and it had really pissed him off at the time. What the fuck did Allen know about making a record? But with these sessions he had done just what Allen said.

  HE AND BARBARA threw a small Christmas get-together for their friends. Alex’s girl, Carol, was back from Hawaii, where she had been working on the start-up of a new magazine called Elegant, and Sam and Barbara teased Alex that he had better make his move soon. You know, they said, he was nearly fifty, and as cool and hip as he might think he was, not every beautiful, young twenty-one-year-old chick with striking Asiatic features was going to be all that impressed with his gray-haired eminence. He had better just start thinking about the future—before she turned around and went back to the islands to marry some wealthy young businessman. Alex just smiled and kept his own counsel, but Sam could see his partner was smitten, and he took every opportunity to let Carol know that he and Barbara were on her side. It seemed like one of the few things the two of them could still agree upon.

  He called Alex right after Christmas and invited him out to the house. He told him that he had a song that he wanted Alex to hear. He didn’t know where it had come from. It was different, he said, from any other song he had ever written.