Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963

Biography

It’s Saturday night, and Miami’s Harlem Square Club is packed. Only hours earlier the club had appeared to be mired in a permanent state of disarray with tables overturned and the debris of last weekend’s festivities in abundant evidence, but now the ashtrays have been cleaned out, the low-wattage colored lights wink brightly, a banner has been hung announcing someone’s birthday, and tinsel decorations bravely proclaim the festive mood, transforming the cavernous warehouse-like structure, howeve...

It’s Saturday night, and Miami’s Harlem Square Club is packed. Only hours earlier the club had appeared to be mired in a permanent state of disarray with tables overturned and the debris of last weekend’s festivities in abundant evidence, but now the ashtrays have been cleaned out, the low-wattage colored lights wink brightly, a banner has been hung announcing someone’s birthday, and tinsel decorations bravely proclaim the festive mood, transforming the cavernous warehouse-like structure, however briefly, into a fairy tale domain. This week’s headliner, Sam Cooke, has not yet arrived, but the band (a mix of Sam Cooke’s regular accompanists guitar Clif White and drummer Albert “June” Gardner along with King Curtis and his band) have changed into their uniforms in the men’s room upstairs, and the RCA engineers are set up with eight mikes plugged into a three-track, twelve-position mixer in the little office that overlooks the dance floor. A Couple of times assistant engineer Tony Salvatore struggles through the crowd to check a lead or change a mike placement, barely able to find his way in the absence of any illumination except that provided by the cheap colored lights. At last the headliner arrives in a swirl of activity, changes swiftly into an open-necked shirt, greets the RCA crew with a “Hiya, fellas” and a casual wave, and starts down the stairs – where he encounters a six-inch scorpion. Not even breaking stride, he stomps on it and makes his way to the stage just as the MC finishes his introduction. “Right now, ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to get ready to introduce the star of our show, the young man you’ve all been waiting for, Mister Soul, so what d’you say let’s all get together and welcome him to the stand with a great big hand, how ‘bout it for Sam Cooke.” It’s Another Night On The Chitlin Circuit It’s rare that an album can cause us to radically reassess a major artist, particularly one who has been dead for 20 years. This is such an album. Everyone has his or her own image of Sam Cooke. Hailed with Ray Charles as the father of gospel-based soul music, Cooke has always been perceived as the mellifluous side of the equation: smooth, urbane, possessed of one of the most liltingly graceful and swinging voices in the history of American pop music, the progenitor of “sweet” soul. He was, says Jerry Wrexler, who sought in vain to sign him to the Atlantic label, “the best singer who ever lived, no contest. When I listen to him, I still can’t believe the things that he did. It’s always fresh and amazing to me; he has control, he could play with his voice like an instrument, his melisma, which was his personal brand – I mean, nobody else could do it – everything about him was perfection. A perfect case.” His influence on a whole generation of singers – from Solomon Burke to Wilson Pickett to Bobby Womack, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Teddy Pendergress, Al Green and Aretha Franklin, to Rod Stewart and Steve Perry – has been universally acknowledged. His one previously released live recording, Sam Cooke at the Copa (done about a year and a half after the Harlem Square Club date), has stood as a classic of sophisticated soul for over two decades now, and he was certainly among the most popular artists in the world at the time of his death in 1964. What can this album add to our appreciation of Sam Cooke, then? It’s a different Sam Cooke. The Sam Cooke who appears on this record, presenting his R&B hits of the last years to a crowd that knows and loves his music, it not the same Sam Cooke who appeared on the Tonight Show, who presented himself as a kind of urbane “swinger”. The Sam Cooke who sang to this club audience made up of working men and women is a harder, grittier version of the Sam Cooke that we have known from his records, a singer closer to the ecstatic gospel music with which he started out, the very entertainer that black audiences could see every night of the week in Charlotte, Roanoke, Raleigh, Baton Rouge, crisscrossing the South with one of Henry Wynn’s SuperSonic Attractions package tours, battling it out with Jackie Wilson at clubs like the Harlem Square in nightly Battles of the Blues. “That’s Sam,” says veteran black music promotion woman Rowena Harris, who first heard Sam with the Soul Stirrers in her native Birmingham, Alabama. “That’s the real Sam Cooke. That’s what he was like.” “When he was really in his bag,” says J.W. Alexander, Cooke’s longtime friend and business partner, “you know, when he was really having fun, he could work, he could drive the women into a frenzy. It was almost like a sex act, like he was beating up on them to get an orgasm.” That is what you get on this album, too, an audience that is frenzied a part of the show itself, a sense on the part of the entertainment that he can do what he wants with them, that he is home free. The first, a “teen-age matinee,” serves as a sound check, giving the band a chance to acclimate a itself and the engineers one last opportunity to get their mike placement right. By the time the second set starts they wouldn’t be able to change anything if they wanted to, because the club is jammed well beyond its 750 capacity, the floor so crowded around the bandstand you can no longer squeeze your way through. The program is identical each set. All the songs are familiar, none dating back much more than a couple of years with the exception of “You Send Me,” a No. 1 pop hit in 1957, and the familiar pop standard, “(I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons,” which Cooke also recorded for Keen before signing with RCA. At the same time none of the songs bear more than a passing resemblance to the antiseptic treatment in the hit version. “You Send Me,” for example, perhaps Cooke’s most evanescent celebration of romantic love on record, is transformed here into a white-hot interlude of almost savage intensity that serves as an intro to “Bring It On Home To Me,” one of his most explicitly gospel-derived numbers. The segment from “You Send Me” on is in fact the conclusion to the 15-minute set that Sam presents on the package shows, a sharp flickering of feeling in which perfect musicality is sacrificed to a less-controlled sensibility, in which the voice is frayed but the emotion true. By the third set all pretense of subtlety is lost, the mask of the genial host is abandoned for the chuckle of complicity, and there is something irremediably nasty in it all, something evil, something soul-stirring, something beautiful. It is as Ray Charles says: “When I do a song, I must be able to make it stink in my own way.” Except for the lyrics, this is a performance that could have been lifted from a Soul Stirrers show, when Sam Cooke was the No. 1 attraction in gospel music. Sam Cook was born without the “e” in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931 and grew up in Chicago, singing gospel with the Highway QC’s, a kind of junior division of the Soul Stirrers, the most celebrated gospel quartet of the day. That was how J.W. Alexander, 30-year-old tenor singer and manager of the Pilgrim Travelers, a group almost equally renowned, first laid eyes on Cooke at the age of 16 or 17. “He didn’t really have the delivery,” says Alexander, a dignified, well-spoken man with a shock of white hair and a warm infectious charm of his own. “People just liked the guy. I thought to myself, ‘This guy’s a jewel.’” Art Rupe, President of Specialty Records (to which the Soul Stirrers were signed), remembered first meeting the 20-year-old singer in February 1951 after Stirrers lead vocalist (and Cooke’s previous chief stylistic influence) R.H. Harris quit the group in the fall. “Sam was just a boy when he came here with manager Roy Crain; they were afraid I wouldn’t accept him because we were accustomed to Rebert Harris. We took a chance and he made a hit right away.” Despite a certain stiffness at the beginning, Cooke soon demonstrated his special charisma and rapidly took on a kind of matinee-idol status within the world of gospel. Disarmingly handsome, almost breathtakingly at ease with himself and his charm, he possessed the rare ability to suggest swinging without effort, passion without strain, a sense of clarity and simplicity that gave him a direct line to his audience while preserving his star insouciance. By 1955-56 his records with the Soul Stirrers had achieved a unique limpidity and grace, and indeed along with this album and a handful of the pop sides they continue to stand as the essential Sam Cooke, the definition of feeling that soul is supposed to be all about. When, after the success of Ray Charles, all kinds of singers began crossing over from gospel to pop, translating the old gospel standards, as Charles had done, into unashamedly secular settings, Cooke was torn, put out one record under the pseudonym of Dale Cook, and eventually declared himself a pop singer. His first release under his own name, on the fledgling Keen label, was “You Send Me.” He had hits over the years both with standards and, more often, with original compositions that conformed to his own definition that “a song should have a lilting melody and be easily remembered. I use phrases say every day. A repetitious phrase helps put the story across.” In late 1958, J.W. persuaded Sam to join him in a publishing company (Kags) and, the following year, in a brand-new record label (SAR), which, as writer Joe McEwen has pointed out, subsequently served as an outlet for Sam that did not find expression on the RCA material. The Sims Twins, for example, forerunners of Sam and Dave, recorded “That’s Where It’s At” almost two years before Sam did. Johnnie “Two Voice” Morisette did the same thing with “Meet Me At The Twistin’ Place,” and Johnnie Taylor cut a beautiful early version of “Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day.” Overall the sides that were cut for SAR were harsher, more down-to-earth, less “pale” than the more pop-oriented RCA arrangements, despite the presence of much the same personnel and the contributions of long-time arranger René Hall on both sets of sessions. It was only during the last year and a half of his life – perhabs emboldened by the growing success of both his label and career, and in the wend with a new manager, Allen Klein, and a renegotiated contract that guaranteed him artistic control – that Cooke began recording some of this material himself. In fact his greatest composition, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a self-proclaimed “civil rights song” that was inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” was released on an album (Ain’t That Good News) in early 1964 but came out only posthumously as a single – and then with one overtly explicit verse excised. His death in December 1964 (he was shot by the night manager of a $33-a-night Los Angeles motel_ came to symbolize the impossible contradictions between black aspirations and reality. As sordid and senseless as his own demise may have looked, it took on a mythology of its own, a mythology in which Sam Cooke was cut down for his independence, for his overweening ambition, for his “uppity” nature. It was said that over 100,000 people viewed his body as it lay in state in ceremonies in both Chicago and Los Angeles, and Ray Charles sang “Angels Keep Watching Over Me” at the Los Angeles funeral. Removed by 20 years, what do we hear on this record? We hear a voice that’s at once both familiar and fresh, but one that’s never before been captured in this setting. We see a disguise lifted off, a reality acknowledged. This is the real world of Sam Cooke and every other black R&B singer, this is the secret of race, this is the unbuttoned reality. When you hear Sam Cooke sing of going to the but station with a cardboard suitcase in his hand and then ask, “Can you imagine me carrying one of them suitcases?,” for the first time we can. We can, and we can’t. There’s both venomousness and warmth, identification and incredulity in the formulation of the question. “Let me tell you what I’m doing, baby,” the singer teases his audience with warmhearted good humor as he plays with one of the oldest lines from the blues, then declares, “I’m standing here wondering, will a cotton-picking matchbox hold my clothes?” Try not singing along with “Bring It On Home To Me.” Try not to be swept up by “Nothing Can Change This Love,” as in the midst of a Reaganesque picture of romantic love (“You’re the apple of my eye/You’re cherry pie/You’re cake and ice cream”), he declares with an urgency that belies the lyrics, “Let me hear the middle part one more time; give me that middle part one more time.” And in the end put yourself in the same position as the audience at the Harlem Square Club, imagine yourself going out into the Miami night with Sam’s final admonition still ringing in your ears: “Keep on having that party.” As soul DJ, the Magnificent Montague, recited to his audience at the conclusion of a bantering interview with Cooke on the subjects of soul, survival, philosophy and poetics: “And when the humming’s over / And time finds its soul / All I can say to you, darlings / Sam Cooke’s yours / He’ll never grow old.” - Peter Guralnick, December, 1984 P O S T S C R I P T When I wrote these notes over twenty years ago, there were a number of things I didn’t know – and probably couldn’t have understood anyway without a lot of additional context. One was how recently Sm had adopted the act he showcased at the Harlem Square. He had toured England in October of 1962 with Little Richard, the self-styled wildman of rock ‘n’ roll, who was returning to the secular stage for the first time in five years. Night after night Richard took the show with what Sam’s friend and business partner, J.W. Alexander, called that he needed to develop a new act to reflect the gospel fervor in his own music. He debuted the act at the Apollo the week of November 2, and this was the set that he presented at the Harlem Square just two months later. There were a number of ancillary issues it was difficult to grasp at the time. What prompted the recording of the show in the first place (probably a combination of James Brown paying to record his own live show at the Apollo two weeks prior to Sam’s opening there and Sam’s justifiable pride in his new act). Why the album was not released contemporaneously (a growing backlog of studio recordings by Sam, including his brilliant Night Beat album, together with the usual music business split between music and business). I had no idea that the Harlem Square date was part of a month-long tour with King Curtis, which in turn led to another month out in March and then a seven-week all-star tour under the Supersonic Attractions banner with Solomon Burke, Jerry Butler, the Drifters, Dionne Warwick, Gorgeous George, and Lotsa Poppa among others. I was unaware of the full extent of the ferment of creative activity in which Sam was caught up at the time. One thing I did know: I wanted to write a biography of Sam Cooke. I had known that ever since meeting J.W. Alexander in 1982, when the picture he painted of Sam, the portrait he had painstakingly drawn of Sam’s boundless charm, adventurousness, and ambition, was every bit as enticing as the music itself. It took me a while to get around to the biography, and over the years that I researched and wrote the book, I was able to answer some questions about the Harlem Square, while others inevitable remained a mystery. The one unchangeable element was the impact of the music itself, the way it held sway not just over it’s audience but over its creator, the almost hypnotic effect it continues to exert over new listeners to this day. For anyone who saw these shows while they were still crisscrossing the country in Supersonic packages and Summer Showers of Stars, the power of the performance will come as little surprise, but like James Brown Live At The Apollo, Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square stands as one of the few recorded monuments to an era in which the good feeling of the audience was as important as the showmanship of the performer. Out on the chitlin circuit charm, wit, and challenge mixed with grace and transcendence to create a real sense of community, the sense that things were getting better, if only, as Sam suggested in “That’s Where It’s At,” one of his most poignant compositions (“Your heart beating fast/You’re knowing that time will pass/But hoping that it’ll last/That’s where it’s at”), for the fleeting moment that was being shared. - Peter Guralnick, July 2005 [On the back of the new release] “Live At Harlem Square” is one of my favorite live recordings of all time. It captures the true energy of this staggering, passionate talent. It’s such an intimate recording – you can hear cracks in his voice, the madness of the crowd who are so with him, encouraging him, shouting for him in each song. A particular favorite is “Twistin’ The Night Away.” Sam Cooke will always be a tremendous influence on me, and who knows, if there weren’t a Sam, there might not have been a Rod.” - Rod Stewart, June 23, 2005. 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