Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon (17 page)

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Authors: Pamela Des Barres

BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon
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Sam appeared on “American Bandstand” and “The Steve Allen Show,” and with one smash after another, both on the pop and R&B charts, he was selling out shows across the country. In the world of gospel Sam hadn’t come up against the race issue, but in his new, wider role, he had to deal with prejudice and the painful problems of segregation every day. Bumps Blackwell tells of an incident at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant when he and Sam waited an awfully long time to be served. As they waited for service somebody played “You Send Me” on the jukebox and all the waitresses started swooning over Sam Cooke. “Everybody in the place swooning!” Bumps recalls, but he and Sam never got to eat dinner. Even after receiving warnings from the KKK, Sam chose to go through with an appearance on one of Dick Clark’s specials, which happened to be the first integrated audience in Atlanta. A half hour before the show there was a bomb threat, but Sam was the epitome of silky-suave cool and there was no incident. He began to let his hair go natural and take pride in his race. His fans paid attention.
Sam never forgot his first love, Barbara Campbell, and the two became engaged in the fall of 1958. They had known each other since they were kids, and understood each other. Sam said he wanted a home and a family, but he still couldn’t seem to settle down.
Almost no singer/songwriter owned his own publishing in 1959, but Sam started heading in that direction. He wanted complete control over his career, which was in full bloom. An avid people-watcher, Sam often said that his astute songwriting gift came from observation. He churned out more hit singles, from “Everybody Likes to Cha Cha” to “Only Sixteen,” spending his days in the studio and nights out on the town.
Sam had stayed in close touch with his first wife, Dolores, so her death in March 1959 was a severe blow. Still despondent over her breakup with Sam, Dolores had been drinking and crashed Sam’s gift—her new Oldsmobile convertible—into a cedar tree, fracturing her skull. When he attended the funeral in Fresno, Sam was mobbed. Her death hit him hard. He sang “Somewhere There’s a Girl” to Dolores.
The white South was torn up with racial tension. Sam was touring with the explosive Jackie Wilson, and when they reached Little Rock, Arkansas, the polite but resolute Sam told the management of the venue that unless the seating was completely integrated, he wasn’t going on. Sam went on—in fact, he was the one who walked out onstage to inform the audience that the show would not be segregated that night. In an interview with columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, Sam said, “I have always detested people of any color, religion, or nationality who have lacked courage to stand up and be counted.”
Sam finally married Barbara Campbell in Chicago in October 1959, with his father presiding over the ceremony. The press called it “a whirlwind courtship” even though the couple had an eight-year-old daughter. Said his friend Aretha Franklin, “He wore a lot of women down when he got married.
He wore me down. Ooooh, I loved him, I just loved him. That man could mess up a whole roomful of women.” He continued to mess up women. Wedding vows didn’t seem to slow Sam down.
In January 1960 Sam signed with RCA and recorded “Chain Gang,” the first of a long string of hits with the company, but he had bigger ideas. Having already formed his own publishing company, Kags Music, Sam started his own record company, SAR (taken from the initials for his name, Sam, and those of his partners, J. W. Alexander and Roy Crain), becoming the first African American artist to own his own label.
SAR was producing hits, but Sam’s first concern was still his own career, and he was bringing houses down all over America. Crain recalled a night at the Town Hill club in Brooklyn. “They throwed them panties,” he said. “Sam would catch them and just keep right on singing.”
Sam was making it big. Soon after an hour-long national television special, “Sam Cooke Phenomenon,” he and Barbara moved to the West Coast and bought a house in the Hollywood Hills with a pool and a marble bar inlaid with silver dollars. They had another daughter, Tracey Samie, and finally Vincent—the son they had been hoping for—was born.
The next few hit singles Sam recorded were about twisting the night away and swinging at parties, but one of the B sides, the passionate ballad “Bring It on Home to Me,” in which Sam trades “yeahs” with his friend Lou Rawls, defined what was about to be called “soul music.” People rightly started calling Sam “Mr. Soul.”
Sam enjoyed spreading his money around, buying jewelry and furs for his wife, new cars for his friends. He was on a major roll, planning his first tour of Europe, when the false rumors started that he was about to die of an incurable disease. Sam made sure to show up at clubs and parties in Los Angeles, proving he was hale and hearty, but the rumors that he was dying—and leaving his eyes to Ray Charles—gave him an eerie feeling. Sam’s easygoing manner seemed to undergo a change. He started to drink a lot more and became even more restless than before. Perhaps the thoughts of death prompted Sam to go back to the safe arms of gospel. He performed at a gospel show on New Year’s Eve 1962, working his throaty sex appeal into the spirit. Sam’s agent, Jerry Brandt, recalls the night with glee. “Sam is taking off … . Right next to me, almost, this woman stands up, gives a big shake, and goes out! Lands on the floor, stretcher comes, puts her on it, take her out. I say to my wife, ‘I think she just came.’ She thinks it’s God in her soul, but this chick just had an orgasm that popped!” A few days later Sam recorded a live album at the Harlem Square Club in Miami, and Mr. Soul’s sexy, steamy nonchalance had the audience dancing and singing in the aisles. It’s without a doubt one of my top ten favorite records. Oooh, I wish I could have been there.
Since Sam had a seemingly insatiable appetite for women, Barbara and he had “an understanding” about his many flings. The
Los Angeles Times
recently reported
that Sam often slept with prostitutes to avoid paternity suits. “I didn’t accept what he did, but I supported him,” Barbara told the
Times.
No matter how unconventional the marriage seemed to be, Sam and Barbara Cooke had been through a lot together. Sam loved his wife and said he would never leave her.
Sam was at his SAR offices, working with Mel Carter on his upcoming LP, when he got the news that his eighteen-month-old son had fallen into the swimming pool. Sam raced to the scene to find that the ambulance had already arrived. He desperately tried to revive Vincent with mouth-to-mouth, but his baby son was already gone. At the funeral Sam broke down at Vincent’s casket and had to be helped away. Friends say he was never the same again.
Sam drank through his grief, brooding, blaming himself, blaming Barbara. True to his word, he didn’t leave his wife, but their relationship crumbled. He forced himself to work. He got a new manager, the formidable businessman Allen Klein, signed a lucrative new deal with RCA in which he was guaranteed artistic control, and went on the road.
Defying the Southern racial turmoil, instead of staying at the Negro hotel in Shreveport, the Royal, Sam booked his party into the Holiday Inn, only to find upon arrival that his rooms weren’t ready. Exhausted and not ready to put up a fight, Sam told off the clerk and left, and had just gotten to the Royal when five cop cars pulled up and arrested the entire party.
The New York Times
ran the news under the headline NEGRO BAND LEADER HELD IN SHREVEPORT, and went on to report that Cooke had been arrested for disturbing the peace after trying to register at a white motel. Press about the incident helped secure Sam’s reputation in the civil rights movement. Sam was reading books on African history and spending time with Black Muslim leader Malcolm X and one of his followers, Cassius Clay—soon to become Muhammad Ali. Angered by the discrimination in the music industry, Sam bankrolled a recording studio for emerging black talent, calling it “Soul Station #1,” and planned on opening several more around the country.
Bob Dylan’s gentle protest song “Blowin’ in the Wind” made Sam realize that he could share his activist views with his music, and despite its sorrowful tone, his self-proclaimed “civil rights” song, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” was his announcement heralding that change. At its heart, “Change” is a gospel song, a fervent message of hope—even though Sam admits it’s been “a long time coming” and he doesn’t know what’s “beyond the sky.” When the song had to be trimmed for a single release, Sam’s most poignant lyrics about going downtown and being told not “to hang around” were cut out. He had to live with it.
Sam sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” at his June 1964 show at the Copacabana nightclub, blending the coming changes easily into his breezy, sophisticated style. The show, an unqualified success, was recorded for RCA, and
Sam Cooke at the Copa
would remain on the charts for over a year. Sam had done it again—opened the doors for soul music to reach a higher-paying, mainstream (black
and
white) audience.
After a lot of touring early in the year, Sam spent most of the rest of 1964 in Los Angeles, working on “Shake,” the last of four singles for RCA that year, and preparing
At the Copa
for release. He screen-tested for Twentieth Century-Fox (for
The Cincinnati Kid
) and the talk was good. But by year’s end, his relationship with Barbara was severely strained, and he was having problems with his manager, Allen Klein. Sam told S. R. Crain that he had “found out something” and was planning on getting out of his contract with Klein. He had already made an appointment to meet with Steven Hill, who would later manage Marvin Gaye.
On December 10 Sam had dinner with friends at Martoni’s, a showbiz restaurant in Hollywood. He was seemingly in a good mood, talking about a blues album he wanted to start work on, when an acquaintance arrived with an attractive Eurasian girl. Sam excused himself and paid for the drinks, and his friends noticed that, as usual, he had a huge sum of money in his wallet (“several thousand dollars”). Sam didn’t return for his main course, and when the couple left Martoni’s, they saw him sitting in a booth, talking intimately with the Eurasian woman. Said the friend, “The picture in my mind at the moment was, “‘Oh, this is somebody he knows.’” Sam told another friend that he would meet him at PJ’s, a nightclub a few miles away, at one o’clock. He never got there. Instead, he took the Eurasian girl, Lisa Boyer, to the Hacienda Motel on Figueroa Street, paid the three-dollar charge, signed his own name to the register, and went into the motel room with Boyer.
Twenty minutes later he was slouched in the motel office’s doorway, bleeding profusely, wearing only an overcoat and one shoe. His brand-new red Ferrari was idling in the parking lot, but Sam Cooke was dead.
When the police arrived at 2:35 A.M., the motel’s manager, Bertha Franklin, told them that the half-naked man had banged on her door, shouting, “You got my girl in there!” She said he then broke the door down, grabbed her by the wrists, and they tumbled to the floor. “He fell on top of me,” she said, “ … biting, scratching, and everything … . I run and grabbed the gun off the TV, and I shot … at close range … three times.” Bertha Franklin said that Sam’s last words were, “Lady, you shot me!” Even after the bullet tore into Sam’s heart, she said he kept coming at her, “so I got this stick and hit him with that. In the head …”
Lisa Boyer had called the police at about the time Sam was shot. They found her in a phone booth a half a block away and took the twenty-two-year-old in for questioning. She said she had met Sam that evening at a dinner party and he had offered her a ride home but instead had kidnapped her and taken her to the Hacienda Motel. “He dragged me into that room … . He pulled my sweater off, and he ripped my dress off … . I knew that he was going to rape me.” When Sam went to the bathroom, Boyer said that she grabbed her clothes and ran out of the room, and that it was just an accident that Sam’s
clothes had gotten entangled with hers. Later Sam’s family testified at the inquest that his wallet was missing, and it was never found.
The body was taken to the County Medical Examiner’s, where an autopsy showed that Sam’s judgment might have been affected by the 0.14 level of alcohol in his blood. Then he was taken to the morgue and placed in crypt nineteen.
 
The late Sam Cooke, wearing only an overcoat and one shoe—the ignominious demise of a legend. (UPI/BETTMANN)
The coroner’s report showing Sam Cooke’s fatal gunshot wounds. (ADAM W. WOLF)

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