Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 9781501355547, 9781501355578, 9781501355561

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LIVE AT THE HARLEM SQUARE CLUB, 1963 Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch. . . . The series . . . is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration —The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough —Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet—Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds—Vice A brilliant series . . . each one a work of real love—NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart—Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful—Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series—Uncut (UK) We . . . aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way . . . watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound​.c​om and our website at http:​/​/www​​.bloo​​msbur​​y​.com​​/musican​ ds​​ound​s​​tudie​s Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www​.facebook​.com​/33​.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Timeless by Martyn Deykers Lyric and Coloratura Arias by Ginger Dellenbaugh Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik John Prine by Erin Osmon Computer World by Steve Tupai Francis Blackout by Natasha Lasky Faith by Matthew Horton Moon Pix by Donna Kozloskie To Pimp a Butterfly by Sequoia L. Maner Boxer by Ryan Pinkard I Want You by Derrais Carter That’s the Way of the World by Dwight E. Brooks Fontanelle by Selena Chambers Come to My Garden by Brittnay L. Proctor Nightbirds by Craig Seymour Come Away with ESG by Cheri Percy Time’s Up by Kimberly Mack and many more . . .

Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963

Colin Fleming

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Colin Fleming, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fleming, Colin, 1975- author.  Title: Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 / Colin Fleming. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: 33 1/3 | Summary: “Shelved for over twenty years, Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, stands alongside Otis Redding’s Live in Europe and James Brownvs Live at the Apollo, as one of the finest live soul albums ever made. It also reveals a musical, spiritual, emotional, and social journey played out over one night on the stage of a sweaty Miami club, as Cooke made music that encapsulated everything he had ever cut, channeling forces that would soon birth “A Change is Gonna Come,” the most important soul song ever written. This book covers Cooke’s days with the Soul Stirrers, the gospel unit that was inventing a strand of soul in the 1950s, and continues on to his string of hit singles as a solo artist that reveal far more about this

complex man and the complex music he was always fashioning. We’ll stop and consider how he absorbed the teachings of Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan, as a writer and an agent of social change, looking at the differences between Cooke’s true identity and what various factions of his audience wanted from him, and how this towering soul artist came to reconcile so many disparate elements on a stage in Florida on a winter night in 1963-a stage that extended well into the future, beyond Cooke’s own life, beyond the 1960s, and into a perpetual here-and-now, so long as we all have need to look into ourselves and square our differences and become more human, and more connected with others in our humanity”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021013820 (print) | LCCN 2021013821 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501355547 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501355554 (epub) | ISBN 9781501355561 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501355578 Subjects: LCSH: Cooke, Sam. Live at the Harlem Square Club. | Cooke, Sam–Criticism and interpretation. | Soul music–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML420.C665 F54 2021 (print) | LCC ML420.C665 (ebook) | DDC 782.421644092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2021013820 LC ebook record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2021013821 ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-5554-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5556-1 eBook: 978-1-5013-5555-4

Series: 33 1/3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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With deepest gratitude for Leah Babb-Rosenfeld, who made a hard time in an author’s life a little easier, and allowed him to write the book that meant so much to him.

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Contents

Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Man Who Went Soul Rest, Soul Launch A Little Night Music Under the Trees and Over in Overtown Circle Sounds Promissory Party

x 1 15 25 55 79 107

Acknowledgments

I think anyone who listens to Sam Cooke feels like they’ve listened to him for their entire lifetime, even if they just started. I’ve listened to Sam Cooke for the bulk of my actual life, and Sam has a knack of making you aware of people who’ve helped you, meant something to you, kept you going, played a part. I want to thank my man, Howard Merritt, who hooks me up with awesome music and can find just about any recording a person might need. Kara Weber, my sister, lent me support when I needed it and helped me find ways to push myself onward when it seemed like there was always so much to do. James Marcus—a fine writer who knows his music—stepped forward right away when he learned I was doing this book, offering his assistance. Dan Wickett is always in my corner, doing what he can to spread the word. Sean Maloney helped me get the beginning right and shepherded the book along on its journey. Derek Capurso—a man I look up to, who plays Sam Cooke now for his children—used to sing along with me to Sam Cooke in college as we pulled the latest studysession all-nighter, rocking out to Live at the Harlem Square Club to find that extra bit of energy. Those nights brought

Acknowledgments

me closer to two people I treasure. Aaron Cohen—author of the excellent Amazing Grace entry in this vaunted and valued series—was always a buddy, always an ally, always quick to tell everyone how much he wanted to read this book. And finally, there’s Sam Cooke himself. As I get older, there are artists that mean more to me than they once did, even if they always meant a lot. I think those are the artists that change the world, because they’re with us the longest, and they help us grow the most over our own lives. That’s Sam Cooke to me. And so to Sam Cooke, I say thank you. And yes, it will.

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1 The Man Who Went

From the very first time I heard him sing—a mere two bars of the voice of voices—I have known and experienced Sam Cooke’s genius as an art of sending us where we need to go, oftentimes before we even know it. I think that’s what our greatest artists do and can’t help but do. Over the course of decades, I’ve made regular journeys with Sam Cooke, and he has led me into places in my life, and periods, that I likely would not have come to on my own, which play a role in who I am, who I become, as I’m certain Sam Cooke has done for many others, each in our own way. Some of these stages had obvious plot points and readily translate to story form, what you share with a buddy. Others have been of an internal nature, the schema of precious innards, the heart that is behind the physical heart, where pain and hope register the most. Oftentimes now we simply see “Sam Cooke, inventor of soul,” the soundbite-style appellation we’re increasingly presented with in an age of fake news and lazy labels that can stand in the way of the vital journeys a Sam Cooke impels us

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to make. And maybe it’s akin to throwing mud on a mirror, but I’ve never thought it matters if Sam Cooke invented soul, because even if he did, that accomplishment would feature around the lower rungs of his achievements, given the towering nature of much of everything else he did. Sam Cooke was a master of transcending labels. Transcendence: that’s a pretty good place to start with Sam Cooke. One song—the song Sam Cooke was most about and remains most about—cannot be placed in a single box, is not a “type,” or a “kind,” no more than Cooke himself was at his considerable best, as on a night in Miami, in the winter of 1963, when he cut a live album redefining our collective sense—as we listen from our various backgrounds, demographics, ages—of what a concert and field recording could be, both in the moment of its making and with a future it would help to shape. I think what I like best about music—and it took me years to pinpoint this—is energy. You cite “energy” to someone, and they’ll often think you mean pep, being able to get out of the bed all ready to go in the morning, power through the deadline at night. But that’s not what artistic energy really is, what Sam Cooke’s energy was about. There’s no greater quotient of energy in any slab of sound than there is with Live at the Harlem Square Club, the record cut that night in Florida. Or if there is, I don’t know about it. If sound could put its hands on your shoulders and shake you into trying to do more than you’ve been doing, it’s this record. I used to be hesitant to approach people as a kid, but when I heard Harlem Square Club playing at a record store,

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knowing what it was, I remember walking over to the man behind the counter, asking if he might turn it up. “Happy to,” he said, like we both needed that jolt, the “carry on better in your day” jolt, which can take all kinds of forms. At times in my life, this record has given me courage to do what I didn’t think I could do. What maybe I couldn’t have done without it. It’s taught me about myself, about writing, about people I might have nothing in common with but whom I’d like to be closer to. Great teachers have great energy, and the best records number among our best teachers. You return to them again and again, and even when the lesson looks to be what the lesson was before, you don’t experience that way. It’s always new, there’s more to be had, a different level to be glimpsed. And, with Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, we certainly never hear the lesson the same way. If Sam Cooke was but the inventor of soul, if that was his box, this album, this lesson, this energy, this piece of expansive human life, could not be what it is. And it’s a doozy. It’ll change your life, as I believe it has helped changed the world around all of us. * * * In order to arrive in that Miami club on that winter night, such that we may be fully present for what Cooke wishes us to hear, we must first consider the man’s sense of responsibility, traffic in his code of guiding conduct. Dig down into an ethos that fashioned the marching orders of how a goodly amount of an artistic life would be approached.

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For a lot of people, “You Send Me”—Cooke’s opening attempt to land a pop hit in 1957—is the primary Cooke number they knew. Waxed in LA in June, released in September on the Keen label—before Cooke makes his jump to RCA—the song was a mega-hit—though no one, save maybe Sam, expected it to do too much—that has never gone away, despite being the intended B-side of the George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which seems like a de rigueur number for people to cut at the time. Not only was “You Send Me” #1 on Billboard’s Rhythm and Blues Record Chart, it attained the same mantle in the Hot 100. It was a hit with white people, which Cooke’s buddies hadn’t anticipated. There were crossover artists, but this was a time of boxes, and especially racial boxes, with the likes of Pat Boone covering Little Richard numbers. Obviously no one was told what the official reason was, but the material is hard to hear without concluding that a point of de-Blacking Black music was being made. Richard would say that white people always liked his work—which is true, going by the charts—but flamboyance had the ironic effect of situating him within his own particular category. Whereas, if Cooke didn’t invent soul—and he has his case—then he made soul and rhythm and blues music, by way of a gospel background. People knew those groupings, and they were Black as could be. But from the start, Sam Cooke held a belief that he was for everyone. So long as there are oldies stations and a vogue for the tuneful past, there will be “You Send Me.” The song is laden with pronouns, and as the Beatles discovered—in large 4

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part thanks to Cooke—when you use pronouns you tend to foreground immediacy. The song as whisper-in-the-ear to that one person. Who, of course, may well be three million people. We see from this earliest, pre-Miami 1963 moment— the start of the journey to Miami—that Cooke was a master of connection and cross-pollination. “You Send Me” was not my first personal connection to Cooke. I had a musical go-between, after a fashion. At fifteen I was heavily into the Animals, the band with the toughest sound of all the British Invasion acts. The Beatles were in thrall to Black music, and the Rolling Stones did a Modernistically bastardized version of it—a sort of blues Cubism—but the Animals played legit rhythm and blues with heavier doses of felicity than other devotees like the Pretty Things. They weren’t amazing writers themselves—covers were their bag, and if that’s how you’re going to roll, you not only need redoubtable skills in at least partially making something your own, you need good taste. Put another way, a badass record collection. Eric Burdon and his mates must have had that, because they did a cover of Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me” that made me think—or maybe inwardly demand/scream—that I had to hear the original. Cooke’s rendition possessed a higher swing quotient. He might as well have employed the Count Basie band to back him, this juggernaut of rhythm, but the thing was, most of that rhythm, remarkably, came from the polyphonies generated by one voice. There was also Lou Rawls on backing vocals providing considerable assistance—I mean, look, it’s Lou Rawls—but 5

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the one-man-chorus-of-voices thing was new to me. How could it not be? Cooke seemed to sing both his own melody and his own harmony. Plain nuts, as if you were witnessing someone defying musical physics. I’d read about jazz musicians à la John Coltrane being able to split notes. Now I honestly wondered if one dude out there had split his entire voice. Later I’d listen to Robert Johnson and wonder how there were only two hands on that particular guitar. Cooke was the singing version of this suspension of belief, a near-orgastic bafflement—that is, the confusion was pleasurable because it produced awe and a craving to learn and hear more—and when such a force enters your life, it will remain by your side—on all your sides, given Cooke’s refulgent, prismatic vocal style. But the Cooke ethos, and what will become the journey to the Harlem Square Club and, in following, the composition of the most significant of all American pop songs, is encapsulated in “You Send Me.” The verb is notable, telling—it is everything. When we are sent somewhere, there is an element of duty. For instance, we are not sent to the store, when we are young, for a pack of baseball cards. That’s our treat, procured on our time, at the cost of some allowance money, etc. We’re sent for a carton of milk. For the family. To make mom’s day easier. We’re sent away again to work on our math homework. The duty of selfimprovement and what those who love us and know better esteem as necessary. Fetch our sister at the neighbor’s. Your partner sends you into the baby’s room to tend to her crying because it’s your turn this time. There is a built-in idea of 6

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duty to being sent. The commander sends the troops out of the boats and up a beach in Normandy. Horatio Hornblower, the hero of C.S. Forester’s nautical novels, has this mad crush on duty. No matter how difficult a situation, if duty calls, well, duty is the end all, be all. What the execution of duty requires is a measure of character and also some iteration of self-awareness. Forester rendered the character in this manner because he was writing for adolescent boys he was trying to help become men, to do what instilling he could for them, and with them, in those intervening years. Likewise, Franz Schubert’s 1827 song-cycle Winterreise commences with its nameless young protagonist standing outside of the home of his beloved in the middle of the winter night. There is little lambency. Not, really, unlike being in that Miami club that Sam Cooke commandeers in 1963, only with garmentpenetrating frigidity in the air rather than sweat running down the walls. We have the sense of a mission, a sending, the tacit realization of a matter of gravest consequence, but no additional details. The sending is everything. I think the best artists understand this better than anyone. Sam Cooke is one of them. * * * In spring 1964, Cooke appeared on American Bandstand, sitting down with Dick Clark—so close, in fact, that their thighs touched, which was as shocking in its way as Elvis dry-humping the air on TV in 1956, given that this was a Black man and a white man—for a quick interview in which 7

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Clark asks Cooke when and how it all began for him. Cooke goes right back to 1957 and “You Send Me.” You can tell Clark is an honorable person. He also knows his Sam Cooke history. Prior to “You Send Me,” Cooke sang with the Soul Stirrers, a gospel band and a guaranteed paycheck. There was security in that gig, if not riches. Gospel often differed primarily from rhythm and blues in large part because of its subject matter, not its actual timbre. But if you didn’t understand the English language and only understood, as we all can, a kickass beat, you wouldn’t have known this wasn’t Chuck Berry riffing away with pianist Johnny Johnson, or the glorious—and streetwise—Five Royales cutting loose on “The Slummer the Slum.” A band like the Stirrers couldn’t be massive, but they could be a national presence. The top gospel units toured the same Chitlin Circuit south of the Mason-Dixon line as the proto-soul, swamp blues, and jazz guys, only their quorums centered on the Lord, and less about what John Lennon later said were mostly songs about fucking. Cooke is a half-dozen years deep into a successful career, but Clark, who clearly looks up to the guy, asks him why he struck out on his own in the first place, and Cooke baldly states, “My economic situation.” He wanted more iron, as they say. We have to realize what a risk the solo venture was for Cooke. You leave gospel, you cannot go back. You’ve been out in the world, tainted, rendered less pure in the eyes of the gospel audience, never mind how sexual in nature a gospel concert by the Soul Stirrers could be. We have this same tacit understanding with whatever decision the protagonist of 8

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Winterreise has made. Sing secular songs, at this time, and in the gospel world, a door closed behind you, the bolt shot. But for Cooke to have his desired commercial success, he’ll need more than what was thought of at the time as the record buying market primarily for African Americans. He’ll have to infiltrate white suburbia, infiltrate the homes of kids—often girls—whose parents thought Elvis Presley’s routine was tantamount to porn that Ed Sullivan let air on his show for some befuddling reason. It’s like Josh Gibson. Josh Gibson may have been the finest catcher of all-time, the most prodigious slugger as well—more so than Babe Ruth. But you wouldn’t have known it—and we still don’t know it now—because Josh Gibson never had his fair chance to play in the Majors, on account of the demonic scourge of segregation. Black musical artists who didn’t crossover during the 1950s were in this Gibson-ish boat. Those that did make the jump can be artists that we now think of as shaded to the white cultural palette—Nat King Cole, as one example. If you know Cole’s work leading a piano trio, you know that he was a driving, funky player. But that’s not most people, and it wasn’t then—they knew the warblings, the pretty ballads, that safe a reminder that you were still on the right side of the tracks—that is, away from the juke joints, a venue like Miami’s Harlem Square Club. “The Christmas Song” sounds Black but in a pop Paul Robeson vein. It starts a drive. It doesn’t make the full trip. Clark respected Cooke—who had just performed “Ain’t That Good News,” the title track of his just-released thirteenth and final studio album—and understood his gifts as a writer, 9

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which will be central to our story. Billie Holiday and Elvis Presley might have received the occasional songwriting credit or a suggested line or a flash of a lick, but Cooke didn’t garner his songwriting credits in this fashion. He sat down with a guitar and he wrote the songs. You can speak of him like a Bob Dylan that way. We don’t, but we need to start. Clarke asks Cooke how many songs he has composed to date in the half-dozen years since his leap of faith in himself— or what we might call a leg of his journey—and Cooke ponders, as if there’s no quantifiable answer. The two men, though, come back to “You Send Me,” with its duty-bound verb. Clark goes so far as to get metaphysical and ask Cooke what the “answer” is, which sounds a bit like he’s hoping for a major helping of revelation. “Well,” Cooke says, “if you observe what’s going on, try to figure out how people are thinking, and determine the times of your day, I think you can always write something that people will understand.” The aphoristic answer is profound. Cooke saw the world— including its minutiae—with a profundity of understanding, and he also understood that connection is imperative. It’s the understanding of which he speaks. Most musicians—even songwriters—wouldn’t describe what they were doing in these terms. Franz Kafka would. Also the F. Scott Fitzgerald who penned “The Crack-Up” essays, which read like a confession of faith from someone who’d give anything short of his seed—his essence—to pool with his fellow humans, find the succor of true belonging. Consider the “Cokes are in the icebox” line from “Having a Party,” the 1962 B-side to “Bring It On Home to Me,” a 10

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key Cooke song—part painting, part short story—that will acquire new life and deeper resonance when we get to Miami. That’s the level of observation and relatability he’s talking about, signposts of our humanness representing more than frosty drinks when you have some friends over, though this corner detail of a larger still life lodges in the brain like the image of a flask of absinthe on a corner table in a Van Gogh café-scape. Those details distill expectation, the interplay of bondmaking between people. Cooke understood this, as did Anton Chekhov. It’s why we can call Cooke the Chekhov of Soul, or Chekhov the Russian writer of soul, if you prefer. Cooke’s friends and acolytes have laughed over the idea of “You Send Me” constituting soul music, but Cooke’s soul music wasn’t, say, Little Willie John’s soul music, on account of his ever-extending, outwardly radiating, purlieu. Cooke’s soul music was soul music. Again, we are in that internal vale, where heart is not physical and comprised of chambers but rather a concept oriented around a will for growth, and pain and hope each have a massive say. As well as other factors we can experience throughout Cooke’s catalog, but especially at the gig in Miami that will tilt him in the direction of realizing the person—a complex amalgamation of previous iterations, just as Cooke was himself a melting pot of musical styles—behind our most important song. Soul-lovers can be tempted to scoff at “You Send Me.” Do not make this mistake. Cooke knew it was a major piece of work, which is also why he knew he could blow it up, deconstruct it, render it almost as a form of atomic soul—or soul—later on at the Harlem Square Club. 11

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Yes, blonde-haired teenybopper girls loved the tune, and I bet a lot of 45s were worn out at a lot of slumber parties. The band that Cooke had left, the Soul Stirrers, might have been bemused. But Cooke didn’t really do selling out. He did trying, and risking, and sometimes failing—his spirit for experimentation was a lot like that of Orson Welles, which is maybe one reason why it was so natural for the latter to become a vocal ally in the Civil Rights Movement that will have its greatest sonic flowering with Cooke’s own “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a tune whose birth is helped along by what transpires on that stage in Miami in the early winter of 1963, the aforementioned most important song we have. The lyrics of “You Send Me” are not complex but neither are they twee. They’re elemental, and the text-painting is enough to make a George Frederic Handel, composer of the Messiah oratorio (a text-painter’s wet dream), swoon when Cooke interpolates cresting descants that both solidify and fly above his own vocal through-line. The singer of the song can pay his beloved no higher compliment than to say, “Darling, you send me.” She empowers him with that duty. That purpose. It’s nice to get one’s rocks off, but if actual rocks were laden on this fellow’s back, he will walk to where he needs to get all the same. Schubert and Cooke could have shared some martinis—which Cooke loved—and nodded knowingly to each other on this point of a journey’s vitality and vital-ness. Okay—so we know “You Send Me.” We’re going to be talking about the version from Miami which is such a sonic detonation of that which we thought we knew, that the song will not even be mentioned on the cover of the original 12

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release of the album in 1985, after RCA finally granted the tapes their freedom, or any subsequent reissues. An omission I’ve always found super cool and super telling. But let’s spend a moment with a version that few people have any idea exists. That’s the demo, cut in 1955, which is soul and soul music by any definition of either concept. I like to imagine that I’m in the studio, someone who tagged along that day. It’s easy to think you can all but see Cooke, scan the entirety of the scene. The immediacy of Cooke’s music always lends us that “You are here with me” feel, and that’s especially acute with the “You Send Me” demo. At the beginning, there’s this pause—like a diver about to take his mighty plunge—and Cooke’s soft-speaking voice— sometimes so at odds with his protean wellspring of a singing voice—pipes in and we hear, “This is ‘You Send Me.’” Cobalt-shaded guitar chords—much like what we’ll hear in plangent stretches of trumpet on Miles Davis’s Flamenco Sketches—kick off the number. This is exciting—we don’t get to hear Cooke play guitar that often, but this is him, and he even plays with this slight slide effect. Elvis Presley liked to boast that he was actually pretty good on guitar, and if you listen to 1957’s “One Night,” in which he’s playing lead, you’ll hear that he was on to something. Cooke can pick it, and he scumbles the guitar notes in a manner that he usually doesn’t with the notes he sings. We are definitely in the realm of the blues. Blind Willie Johnson would get this, find himself at home here. Cooke sings as though he were playing Virgil to his own Dante— he’ll be both wanderer and guide simultaneously, for him and for us. His voice blurs and “blues” the notes, as a jazzman like 13

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John Coltrane would have said. If honey could be scuffed, this is Cooke scuffing it. The singer is being sent away so that he might return better suited for that which he will deserve, and this beloved of his, too. He’ll go to any planet and back, whatever it takes, you pick the solar system. But what we hardly ever consider, in the concept of sending and be sent, no matter how many times in our lives are embroiled in such pursuits, answering to the relevant directives and requests, is that we can also be self-sent. Just as soul music and who invented it isn’t particularly germane when what you mine and distribute is soul music. Sending yourself is what we might call living with purpose. Or creating art so that others can find, or re-find, a non-aortic component of the heart and the self, that is far more than heart as flesh-based organ, and entirely who that person is. And, in turn, what a society should, if not be, then aspire to. Of course, just because you’re sent, and even self-sent, doesn’t mean you have to go. But Sam Cooke was someone who went.

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2 Soul Rest, Soul Launch

Sam Cooke is ten days shy of his thirty-second birthday on the evening of January 12, 1963, when his record label, RCA, installs eight microphones at various strategic points in Miami’s Harlem Square Club to record what is intended as the singer’s first live album. Born in Clarksdale, Mississippi—an area of blues lore, where legends persist of men meeting the devil at crossroads, forking over their guitar to be tuned, selling their souls in the process—Cooke has returned to a Dixie that has died and a Dixie that also may never completely die. He’s a northerner though, albeit in the circumvented sense that a displaced Southern African American every really leaves the South, in terms of his or her make-up—that is, a knowledge of the price and preciousness of freedom is all but baked into Sam Cooke’s bones. Cooke grew up in Chicago, where generational talents like Louis Armstrong and Muddy Waters had also once emigrated—for Chicago might as well have been a different country—making a sort of musical Valhalla on the shores of

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a Middle Western lake. It is in Chicago that Cooke’s father preached, and now the famous son lives in Los Angeles, in a home with a pool—he’s made good, walks around with a couple grand on his person—which will play a pivotal role in his story when his one-and-a-half-year-old son, Vincent, drowns in the coming summer. Cooke himself has less than two years of life remaining. He will die in mysterious, ugly fashion—one of those deaths that prompt endless theories and talk of conspiracies regarding the mob and the FBI—early in the Christmas season of 1964, when bands like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles are telling their audiences just how jazzed they are by this singular artist. The original cover of the Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, LP features Cooke in a white dress shirt, bathed in a nimbus-y light. The light is centered on the chestal cavity— where Cooke builds his sound—rather than the head—and it all but ripples with magenta cross-hatching. The Cooke of this cover has a stained-glass quality, all the more so given his gestural pose—cupped right hand beseeching, mouth agape in the manner of someone creating a quavering, held O-sound, be it with an “oooh,” “whoahhhh,” or “God”—as the left hand grips a Neumann electro-static microphone, fingers tightened into a triumphal fist—the kind that punches the air in hard-won exultation. But it is a peaceable fist, one for striving and getting on—not mere conquistador-ing—similar to what we see in Eugène Delacroix’s mid-nineteenth-century canvas, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, in which a man of earth wages battle with the supernal. We are not exactly sure why Jacob 16

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wrestles the winged-figure in the arbor—perhaps it is a test, one which he must not fail, at least in his own mind. That is how Sam Cooke holds the tool that will render him audible to every last club-goer, the mic as pulpit. He will test this audience. He will test himself. He’ll test us now, still. Colored lights blink throughout the space, which must have lent a leftover Christmas vibe to what is a barn-like hall. If we are away in a manger, it’s a fittingly low-rent midtwentieth-century version, a hall meant to pack ‘em in, not bum rush the cover of Architectural Digest. Tinsel decorations remain. The simple, lo-tech soundboard—all that was available in these early days of remote recording in clubs—is upstairs, in the manager’s office, capable of three track recording. A lot of sound is going to be jammed into a tight recording window, a soul Louvre on the back of a stamp. This will prove a boon and give the document its Pangaeic-heft, a feral solidity that additionally possesses a cometary blaze. We have a tide whose time has come to make further explorations up the beach. Had some deity put you in charge of the elements for a spell, you’d have thought, “Hmmm, I can do something with this sound. Knock the weather for a loop. Change the shadows across the face of the moon.” This was the exact opposite response that the higherups had at RCA when they heard what Cooke and his all-Black band had wrought. They didn’t just shelve this sucker for its through-the-roof-quotient of denuded, raw, real humanness—they left it in the vaults until 1985, when presumably a marketing person said, “Might be safe enough now, people like Sam Cooke on the oldies stations, we don’t 17

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really have anything else in the can, let’s slap out Harlem Square Club.” And so this wondrous vessel slipped free of her moorings and was finally slapped out at that. * * * Ever heard a band tuning up—merely prepping for their set, tossing in the occasional lick or two as milling audience members grab another beer—and thought, “Shit, these guys sound tight already?” Let’s focus on some dates. We’ll hopscotch in time. The best art is a concatenation of temporal planes of existence. Its impact can be diluted because we are so familiar with the narrative, but when Charles Dickens has his Ebenezer Scrooge exclaim at the close of A Christmas Carol that he will do his best—no, his more-than-best; he will give of his very essence—to live in the past, present, and future, he’s on to something. William Makepeace Thackeray, who sneered at almost everything—he was a one-man Statler and Waldorf of the Victorian era—wrote that Dickens wasn’t just creating art, he was bestowing a kindness on his audience, which even those captious old-man Muppets up in their theater balcony box would have appreciated. Winsomeness pervades even the tune-up portion of the Harlem Square Club outing. There is warmth in this exordium, and it comes through on the record. If you’ve been to a Catholic Mass, where the priest invites people to make a gesture of peace to each other, post-Communion, it’s tough to mask a smile. In a world where so much often

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goes wrong—as the Mississippi Sheiks once sang—nice still remains nice. A group of men are primed to reach out to us and abet our personal causes, whatever they might be, wherever we might be in life. We usually have a sense of what a show will be, to a degree. Attend an MC5 concert in 1968, you’re in for a fiery, in-your-face affair. Truck out to a Grateful Dead show and you get the auditory trip, the communal high. You knew what you were getting and had hopes that you’d acquire veritable bucketfuls of that experience. But even before Cooke takes the stage in Miami, there is a different expectation—that of becoming enveloped, all but physically surrounded, enmeshed, housed, in restorative layers. Embraced. This is a crack band. They’re not a “regular” unit—Cooke had certain acolytes who were present more often than not, but things could also get grab-baggish. Depending upon venue, he’ll sing with a lot of white musicians, or an all-Black collective, as in Miami. Evaluated as a roster, this particular line-up reminds me of the one jazz pianist Andrew Hill assembled for his 1964 date that produced Point of Departure, with a short-lived combo of All-Stars with people like Tony Williams and Eric Dolphy in what may well be a matchless small band. The Miami Cooke-unit dovetails with this idea. They are a group of bad motherfuckers, by which we mean, these guys are legit good, big-time tight. If we were to do a battle of the bands/cutting contest type of deal, they’d be slicing out the entrails of their competitors. Tate Houston and soul stalwart King Curtis—who has played with Buddy Holly and provided the signature sound 19

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of the Coasters’ “Yakety-Yak”—hold down the tenor sax section. In baseball terms, they are the three and four hitters in the line-up, the power guys. Houston’s CV boasts a stay with Lionel Hampton’s band—true rhythm-making kings— and engagements with Curtis Fuller, Nat Adderley, and Art Blakey, musicians who ruled the roost of hard bop, but also had avant-garde swagger when they wanted it. George Stubbs—who plays with a Sonny Clark-type flavor—sits at the piano, with Jimmy Lewis on bass guitar. Lewis bears a lot of responsibility at the gig—in order for Cooke to float and flutter around various melodic lines, he needs that underpinning bass. Bach understood the same concept when he wrote Art of Fugue—he couldn’t veer and reassemble on higher levels, without a lower one serving as foundation. The foundation of our evening will be provided by Lewis, whose dexterity on his instrument resembles that of famed Motown mage James Jamerson. Chops, son. Albert “June” Gardner mans the drum kit. He’s pure powerhouse. Ginger Baker of Cream had some June Gardner in him, and Gardner himself possessed a redoubtable ladling of the jazz thunder of Big “Sid” Catlett, who tore it up barnstorming with Louis Armstrong. Cornell Dupree is one guitarist. He doesn’t play with Cooke a ton—later he’ll team with King Curtis, and both will record with Aretha Franklin. He’s tantamount to the octet’s ringer, the secret weapon, jacking up the sound like Mick Taylor did when he joined the Rolling Stones in 1969. When we hear vibrato guitar on the record, it’s usually care of Dupree. He plays with some flash, the showman’s panache, but also grease and grit—you could say that he keeps it real with style. 20

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And finally we have one of Cooke’s main musical men, guitarist Clifton White. That’s him before Cooke comes out of the wings, trying out a few tasty licks. Sam Cooke doesn’t do a lot of what Sam Cooke did without White. They are not equals in this musical union, as we see with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Billie Holiday and Lester Young, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Rather, White is the invaluable complement, responsible not for the urban planning, if you will, but for the erecting of the actual architecture. Sonic architecture, built from Cooke’s songwriting designs. Thus he is a Scotty Moore to Cooke’s Elvis Presley, Jimmy Blanton to Duke Ellington, Hubert Sumlin to Howlin’ Wolf, Johnny Dodds to Louis Armstrong. He’s also a conductor, the band leader who channels fervor and drive, directs and rejiggers the ensemble into attacking formations that Cooke reads and reacts to, and knows just how to explode therefrom. White is the figure of legendary stature who you don’t hear about, the glue guy who also doubled as sounding board, and a rhythm guitarist who could break down your inhibitions with his fretboard galvanism. The band is wearing uniforms. They look sharp. The only illumination in the joint is from those leftover, coruscating Christmas lights. The seven-member band vamps. Gardner’s toms have real kick—they sound sonorous, bottomless, as if pulling forth immaculately controlled echoes from a ravine doubling as concert venue. You’ll hear something similar with Keith Moon’s kit at the outset of the Who’s full Live at Leeds show. Percussive portent. 21

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The warm-up coalesces into the official start of the gig. Curtis has his brand of barrel-chested riffing up and at us already, and White’s rhythmic chording serves to lash the horses that are pulling this particular chaise. The number is King Curtis’s own tune, “Soul Twist,” his debut single which scored a two-week run at #1 on the rhythm and blues charts the year before. The people at the Harlem Square Club undoubtedly know this tune. It makes them feel good. Compared to what Cooke has been up to of late in his own work, there’s also that tang of the passé, but the tang is pleasant, induces a pressing of the nostalgia button. The MC bounds to the mic to bid us welcome, as the warm-up groove sounds its last array of funky, sidewinding notes. “Right now we’d like to get ready to introduce the star of our show,” this male voice informs us. I like the idea at play—Cooke can’t “only” be introduced; this is an act of heraldry requiring some prep time. Bate your breath, people. Steel yourselves. Because once this starts, you can’t stop it. We have to get ready to introduce Cooke. “The young man you’ve all been waiting,” the house MC continues: “Mr. Soul!” Nice touch—as if this concept of soul is bound up with Cooke’s identity, which is certainly true in the extramusical, way-past-mere-genre regard. “So what do you say we all get together and welcome him to the stand”—“stand” being a term of respect, where an elegant jazz musician like Duke Ellington was to be found, a higher aerie than your ordinary stage—“with a great big hand, how about it for Sam Cooke!” Gardner launches two notes from his bass drum, White hits a wicked downbeat on his guitar. 22

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How about it? Yeah. Let’s get it done. This is our primary date, January 12, 1963, the pivot point, the fulcrum of our chronology. The root chord. And now we have seen the very start of it—with its frisson of the prefatory. Beethoven began his Fifth Symphony with a rest, before its own famous, crashing initial downbeat. Conductors are often tripped up by this rest and struggle to start the symphony proper. The specter of that which is to come—when one is aware of the goods about to be delivered—can put a little hitch in the stride. Same goes with soul symphonies. You know how a rocket ship is said to clear the launch tower? Well, we’ve cleared the tower, no hitches detected. There is already so much freighted tension in the air, like rain clouds that must disgorge themselves of their contents. Behold the Chitlin Circuit varietal. And welcome to the stitching together of that Dickensian—and Cooke-ian— notion of past, present, future. Of shared and separate lives meeting within the space of this pinprick of light that might as well be as wide as the world. The phases of life change, the methodology of meaning-making, how we hear a musical constant such as Harlem Square Club—itself created in a river of flux, tracing a course of nine years—as we evolve, devolve, fail to grasp, reach, bleed, hurt, hug, kiss, fuck, heal, hope. So it went for Sam Cooke—which we shall plumb as thoroughly as Keats once did the deep-delved earth—and so it goes for me, so it goes for you. We will share the lens of a night in Miami in the winter of 1963, which in some ways was initially fired on a stage in Los Angeles in 1955. But first I will tell you of some cold mornings in Boston. 23

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3 A Little Night Music

Sam Cooke made albums of meticulous design. They were often more thematically driven than the discs a Bob Dylan would helm, one of those surprising observational nuggets in retrospect. There’s a racial element to the initial incredulity, the manner in which memory fogs over, if we were there at the time, or how scales might festoon the eyes if we’re coming to Cooke well after his career reached its end. It’s hard to avoid the racial component of what need to be disassembled expectations. Black singers, in our mind’s and memory’s eye, sang. Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmy Rushing, Big Joe Turner, Ella James. Those who played an instrument— insofar as we knew—like Memphis Minnie, may have been writers. They were granted the courtesy of the possibility. But if you just held or stood at a microphone and were Black, the regrettable tendency was to assume that someone else did the composing. This is one of the foremost lies of the Cooke story that requires disabusing. During that first era of rock and soul—

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the decade covering 1957 to 1967—he’s a compositional giant. Lennon, McCartney, Dylan, Brian Wilson, Ray Davies, Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix, Sam Cooke. But there are different gradations of composition. A writer at an apogee-level is not unlike a Russian nesting doll incarnate. They’re working on multiple levels, pogo-ing from layer to layer, simultaneously. We have the structure of the song, the modulations, the arresting combos of chords, the lyrics, but there is also how that song fits within a larger design of a record, conceivably an era of a career. Songs and styles may be developed within real time, facing an audience. The Beatles, for example, returned to the BBC studio again and again in 1963 to play live versions of their own material and scads of covers—rangy clumps of material—that went out over the airwaves. They were a musical Cuisinart, bringing past to bear on present, the work of others on their own developing oeuvre, and in this act of performing they were honing gifts that essentially rendered them live composers figuring out techniques that will have their official flowering a year or two in the future. “Strawberry Fields Forever” is not created without that 1963 introspective reading and understanding of Ann-Margaret’s “I Just Don’t Understand,” when the mask of toughness is dispensed, and the vulnerable human says, “Hey, here I am, this is what I got.” Jazz musicians are more readily known for these practices. They woodshop, as they call it, in private, grinding away in a new direction. They workshop in front of an audience. John Coltrane built his “sheets of sound” in front of people, writing as he went. There’s overlap with the relationship between writing and editing. People think they’re separate. 26

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The best writers know that not only are they the same, they always occur concurrently. To write is to make decisions in the head—no, not that word; the rhythm is off here; she wouldn’t say that; you’ve not developed her in that direction; use this other line. The foremost composers make the most instantaneous edits, executing them in the mind as fingers move across as a keyboard. You have to think fast. You have to think on multiple planes at once. You have to, again, be in the past, present, and future at once. That’s a gift you’ll feature in your quiver, that your peers cannot lay claim to. With that gift, you’ll have a different pace, because you are both entirely in a moment and in moments not temporally of that moment in terms of the clock on the wall. I’ve noticed a penchant for Sam Cooke fans to declare that he is the greatest singer ever. Period. Full-stop. I don’t have hardline stats—this is my anecdotal impression—but Cooke invokes this response at a pretty high rate. He’s a top-tier singer. Clearly. Sublime. What he lacks for in the technical arena—his range is not massive—he more than makes up for with what I call a radical vim to embellish, push all envelopes until they fly off the table and then, rather than drop to the floor, hover in the air, ultimately returning to where they’d originally been stacked. He doesn’t add a cheeky “See what I did there?” nudge and a wink, as a Cab Calloway might. Cooke is a native of his moment, each and every last one of them on record, though we have the sensation that an openness to travel—which is maybe better termed exploration—bulwarks his perpetual immediacy, so that we have both a laying down of roots and the quality of movement. He’s a vocal prestidigitator. A 27

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guy who makes you go: “Wait, you seriously just did that?” He’s impossible to conflate with anyone else. If you were Mozart and you lived in the 1960s, and you wished to tailor a pop opera to one singer in particular—as Mozart would often write for specific instrumentalists and singers in the eighteenth century—you’d be eyeing Cooke long and hard. You’d want to write for him. Better yet, Cooke wrote for himself. But certainly an Ella Fitzgerald tops him in technique— it’s not that close—and can emote and tone-paint as well as Cooke, while Cooke cannot scat like Ella or Louis Armstrong. He’s a Hall of Famer. First ballot. But he’s not the best singer, and if you do the vetting, he’s not much of a candidate. So why do so many people make this winner-takes-all pronouncement on Cooke’s behalf? I think it’s because he’s a singer-writer. When Sam Cooke sings, you’re cognizant of a narrative unfolding, with the singer of the narrative reading the room—even if he’s in a recording studio, envisioning with whom he’s aiming to connect—and tailoring syntax, emphasis, the modalities of enunciation for maximum conveyance and connectivity. To bind together, singer and audience, within the parameters of shared experience. When you’re at the train station, killing time until you’re called to board, and someone next to you begins telling their buddy a story about something that happened to them last week, you’re drawn in and perhaps despite yourself, you lean in to listen. That you are drawn is, I believe, the most fundamental part of our humanity. A given narrative has parameters, the rules of the world in which that invitation to partake and understand occurs, but in the total haul of 28

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these matters, from story to story—or song to song, album to album, verse to verse, syllable to syllable—there are no walls, limitations, theoretically. The quantity of existing walls corresponds to the artist’s talent to imbue, reach, sit us down by the same proverbial campfire. As a singer-writer, a connector of people with this idea of what we’ll call the transcendent lean-in, there haven’t been a lot of singers to touch Sam Cooke. And that’s why people have this tendency to say, “Yeah, best singer ever.” They don’t merely feel like they’re listening to an astounding vocalist. I’d contend that that’s almost secondary. They feel like they’re connecting with another person. Not Sam Cooke, the man with the child who died, who always had clear economical aspirations that may have been stacked higher than his artistic ones, who was shot after another night of womanizing in a hotel. Because that person at the train station, who induces you to lean in, isn’t someone you know, and it doesn’t matter who they are. Cooke is not a character in his songs. The “I” as well as the “me” isn’t this fellow from Chicago. He isn’t some freshman with a guitar out on the quad trying to woo the ladies first semester with airs of autobiographical sensitivity. That’s too limiting—because it stops that same “I” and “me” from being us. We want that possibility that we are in there. Which is how Cooke sings. And how Cooke writes. And how Cooke writes as he sings. And sings as he writes. Is he the best at that? Well, put it this way—if you want to advance the theory, you won’t find me insisting on rebutting you. “I hear you, brother,” is what I’d say. Because of how I hear what Cooke does. 29

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Sam Cooke wrote a broad range of songs. Certain artists claim their particular vein, and it is that vein they will work for their career’s duration. To return to the Dick Clark interview, part of Cooke’s motivation was strictly financial. Having crossed over with “You Send Me,” there were two approaches he might have taken. One was the work-yourgarden business plan, producing the same manner of crop in slightly variegated forms. Cooke had too much of the Modernist about him, though. It will sound fatuous, but he makes me think of Laurence Sterne, author of the bonkers mid-eighteenth-century novel Tristram Shandy, which is meta before anyone ever used words like meta. Some readers call it impenetrable, which has more to do with its weirdness than actual opacity. When asked why he had written this volume, Sterne replied that he wanted to make a shit ton of money. He was perfectly sincere, crazy as his answer would have been. In the context of the late 1950s, Cooke jumping ship from gospel—the one-man exodus from the ark—was damn Shandean. In modern writer terms, he could have been Mitch Albom. You know exactly what you will get with an Albom book, time and again, that predictable, nougatstuffed confectionary. Cooke didn’t aspire to fit that particular bill in his financial approach or with his artistic impetus. He’d be akin to a chimera, the Shakespearean soulster who could morph and thus channel his assorted drives and hit myriad demos. He could hit them at once; some would overlap. But Cooke understood that not everything had to be for everyone—sometimes you dished up what Group A wanted and in other instances Group B made out like bandits. 30

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This will sound more fatuous still, but it’s certainly true: Sam Cooke, diverse writer, from song-to-song, was such a diverse writer, from album-to-album, that he produced more concept LPs than the likes of the Who, the Beatles, and Pink Floyd combined. Sam Cooke was an album-oriented artist who crafted a swath of rock and soul’s integral singles. With each record—and most purely with Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963—Cooke had a game plan of the most precise intention. He had his themes at the ready, and those themes would be made to up and dance like that broomstick Mickey Mouse enjoins in Fantasia. Cooke launched SAR records in 1961, his own label, with his cherry-picked roster of talent. The man with the plan had Motown-type designs before Motown. Cooke was a multifactorial thinker, and that’s how we’ll always find him, in business and in art. His love of money didn’t undercut his purity of artistic purpose—he was a range guy, a diversification guy, and there was no on or off switch. Picasso spoke about how having mastered one mode of creation, he’d be on to the next. Same with Mozart—in fact, there is an eerie echo from one of these chimera artists to another on the subject. This is Cooke’s camp. His boys with whom he fits in perfectly. In Miami, Cooke takes some of his previous conceptual statements—the reimagining of Billie Holiday that we find on his 1959 LP Tribute to the Lady; the shimmying, rhythmic focus on 1962’s Twistin’ the Night Away—and he interpolates. He makes them new, as his distinct brand of fusion—a metafiction, to be Shandean about it, with universal relatability— moves him forward. It’s like a business model—prudent 31

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companies always play and plan for the future. But when that same tight, multifactorial, and highly architectonic form of thinking—given how well everything is reinforced, buttressed—has an artistic cousin—soul mate—then you can offer things to your audience that other performers can’t. You will infiltrate mood, mind, and body, to different degrees, at different points in time, but always offering experiential access to that audience such that they’re bound to feel joined to the art itself. And not just joined—a part of it. * * * In that same winter of 1963 in which Sam Cooke and his crack band lovingly flayed an audience in Miami, the singer took to the studio with a new group of musicians to cut one of his concept albums. The lone holdover from Florida is the redoubtable Clifton White. Where Cooke goes, White is generally found. This is quite the groove unit as well. A young Billy Preston, who will later dazzle the unraveling Beatles in 1969, is the organ player. Cooke’s prior dates aren’t particularly organ-rich—his sound, before this winter, will not have that gargantuan, basso continuo approach that was first in evidence in Miami the month before these sessions which will formulate the Night Beat LP. Bassist Jimmy Lewis’s virtuoso approach to the foundational portion of the soundscape liberated Cooke in real time at the club engagement, and now Preston is tasked with a transliteration of that foundation at his organ chair. Closer to the tail end of the 1960s and on into the start of the next decade, Miles Davis, having fully committed to fusion,

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will recruit multiple keyboard players—Chick Corea, Larry Young, Joe Zawinul, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett—to in essence recreate Preston’s smoky, organ-istic, density—a swirling smoke that nonetheless feels that it would be as heavy as a planet, if you were to weigh it. Improbably, Preston is all of sixteen years old at the time of the Night Beat sessions, of which there are three that occur predominantly in the middle of the night, in RCA’s LA studio: one on February 22, the next the following day, and then back again, after a respite, on February 25. You will note, of course, that all of this is happening after the RCA engineers have had their field trip to Miami. We’re out of chronological sequence, but chronological sequence, especially with Sam Cooke—and I’d also say for people who experience Cooke’s music at its fullest—you’re not going to want to adhere too strictly to the regimented march of time. Cooke moves forwards and backwards often simultaneously, which is one reason his best music strikes us as ageless. Sun Ra—who shared Cooke’s spirit—had a similar theme going on with his 1956 album, Jazz in Silhouette. That is, if someone told you it was from 1945, you would have been like oh, cool, that’s neat; ditto if a winged messenger of the future turned up one day to announce that Ra cut his LP in 2037 and somehow you’d stumbled upon a copy. A writer writes in real time, but that writing can be intended for a future time. Not just with the assembly and release of the actual product but with the arrival of the right time. So: there is Sam Cooke on stage in Miami on January 12, and he’s hearing that basso continuo, that bottom he has featured nowhere else in his catalog to that point. It’s 33

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a smoky joint, it’s late, he’s letting that rhythm come to him, and he might not have thought, “Shit, I can do this Night Beat session,” but in a very real way, he’s designing that which is to follow. He’s composing partially from the past, with what he is pulling into a prevailing “nowness”; he’s reacting and adapting in real time, ad-libbing, crafting modulations, putting old vocal lines in new keys and registers. A choral refrain is rendered as fugato chant leavened by conversational aspect. There’s an uptick in ghost notes—no one “sang” with more ghost notes than Cooke, those words as much spoken as sung. We can’t really say that they’re sung at all. We don’t even know. Those are ghost notes. They are all over Night Beat. But we first start experiencing them in bulk in Miami. What we will hear Cooke do time and again at the Harlem Square Club, atop the basso continuo—which we can think of as a popping, mega, too-die-for-groove, dexterously executed—is this same half-sung, half-spoken style of expression, of communication. People were absolutely gobsmacked with how Mozart handled recitative in his operas, and not only does Cooke figure out a soul-based version of that recitative that we hear on the live recording, he takes it forward with him to the RCA studios in LA the next month. Sam Cooke both talked and sang and you weren’t sure which one he was technically doing at times. All you knew— and felt—was that he was communicating specifically to you, that you were the addressee. Even as you knew better on a rational plane. After all, you weren’t the only one in that Miami audience, and you’re not the only person on this 34

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mortal coil with a copy of the record or a working Spotify account. But when Cooke appears on that stage and the hotshit band behind him surges back into action with the first proper number of Live at the Harlem Square Club, which no one else gets to hear for another three decades, and Cooke extols one and all, “Don’t fight it, feel it,” a form of communion is at hand. A bonding. Each of us has been provided with instructions that will serve us well with what is to come. But good God, this man is immediately singing his ass off—or is it talking his ass off?—and the very moment itself feels definitively monadic. Already, with this opening potboiler in “Feel It (Don’t Fight It),” we also know, in a less primarily conscious part of our brains, that it’s not. We have the entrance, not the entire atelier. This is how Cooke writes, because as dialed in and specific as he could be with the details we see in his lyrics— like Chekhov, he has a way of seeing the world that makes you say, “I never consciously noted that, but damn is that so true”—he was a conceptual writer via this down-andgritty—that is, tangible and transcribable—music that he wrote on his guitar and less regularly at the piano. He’s an architect and engineer. A civic planner of song. With his second Great Quintet, Miles Davis did a lot of writing in a manner beyond “this is my tune, this is a blues I composed,” and so on. He wrote as a conductor writes, helping shape the contributions of his individual band members, organizing structure. This was a less classifiable form of writing. Done with the mastery of a Davis, it’s epochshaping. Or impacting, anyway. 35

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You don’t get the official writing credit for that—it’s similar to how Orson Welles would gut a Shakespeare play, graft in scenes from another Bardic work, and then voila, we have a new text, a form of multidimensional collaboration—a dyadic creation of dueling temporalities. It’s still officially Shakespeare, but there’s that “well, you know,” nudge-wink component added in. In this analogy, Cooke is both Shakespeare and Welles, and I suppose he’s also a large part Miles Davis, circa the Great Quintet of 1965 to 1968. He’s a soul singer who melds compositional planning—that is, “These are the chords of this song, this is the key, the chorus is in a different time signature,” and so forth—with extemporaneous bravura and a level of anticipation and forward thinking that results in the setting up of moments yet to come, in which he’ll play a key role. Wayne Gretzky’s father, Walter, used to say to the boy who would grow up to become the greatest hockey player of all time, “Learn where the puck is going, focus on that— not where it has been.” Gretzky was slight of frame, no man of brawn, and looked more like a pipsqueak kid than an athletic titan, but his genius was for being entirely present in his moment while simultaneously orchestrating—even composing—those moments of his artistry to follow. Wayne Gretzky was not a Time Lord—but he did have a bit of a Doctor Who vibe to him. The best auteurs do. This is a very different idea of being an auteur than what we’re used to. Francois Truffaut, the French film critic of the New Wave, esteemed John Ford, maker of American Westerns, because of how Ford commanded, with peak 36

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efficiency, every last vestige of a given picture. But what we’re talking here is tantamount to appreciating Ford all the more on account of how, say, he crafted a shot in 1948’s Fort Apache that creates a shot in 1949’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon as if they are different parts of the same visual sentence, but each wholly autonomous given their definitive efficacy in their respective moments. Writing takes many forms. Cinema can be writing, hockey can be writing, dance can be writing, singing and band-leading can be writing, editing can be writing, speaking can be writing, engineering can be writing, mathematics can be writing, and architecture can be writing. And, naturally, writing is writing (though maybe not as often as we assume). But the best writing also has a time-delayed quality. We think we get it all when we first get it—but we get more later. Sam Cooke the writer was thus an envisioner, a Gretzky writer-performer with a sagacity for knowing where things—even things he is writing—are going, not where they have been, save in how the past can be brought to bear on that future which will be here soon enough, and also the future that forever awaits, that loophole of human existence allowing the artist to live forever. Or until Apocalypse-time, anyway. But even then, as a betting man, I’d still bankroll the true human artist. During “Bring It On Home to Me” on Live at the Harlem Square Club, Cooke becomes so animatedly full of life—so alive in his soul-chanson moment—that he shouts out that he doesn’t have Leukemia, after rhetorically asking—and then electing to answer—his query of “What is wrong with me?” 37

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The answer is nothing. All caps. Italicized. Underlined. Put it in strobing colors. You get the idea. This is soul’s ultimate, superhuman, I-can-live-forever exultation/ejaculation, one that feels less like outright boast—or humble brag—than merited assertion of the self, albeit with desultory reference to a horrific disease, which may have been the worst ailment Cooke could think of just then. The art portion of Sam Cooke could not be felled—and Miami represents the in medias res presentation of evidence. The live album variant. Cooke’s no Tiresias—let’s not cede him supernatural ability—and thus one who would predict the future, but he understood in his precise moments of writing, in real time, that writing was a lot more like a river than a lake, to use aqueous terms. You get up the bend when you get up the bend. What you are composing, though, in that instance, when you write with the clearest of eyes, is what will get you there. And your audience as well. Your cross-generational, multi-era audience. A friend of mine once remarked to me that genius is “merely” skill and vision, at rarified levels. I never held her view as the correct one—there’s something transcendent about genius that is post-human—but still entirely human— that is beyond the bounds of mere skill, as impressive and layered as skill can be. Genius could well be the richest, ripest paradox of human existence. The possessor of genius travels beyond where we all are, to show us where we all are—and what we are. They have a dual citizenship, to my thinking. But she had something with the vision. That’s a key word here. How far can you see as you create and as your creation is extrapolated as you make it? 38

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In Miami, Sam Cooke will go a long way to writing the most important song in the history of a Republic that officially began in a boxy Philadelphia assembly hall on a humid mid-summer day in 1776, and rolls on some near 250 years later in a fog bank of fragmentation with such a need for unifying forces, voices, clarity of vision, resolve of purpose, works of art, that if we could put out an SOS to the gods, the fates, the aleatoric imps of chance, I vote we up and do it, because as they say on farms, “It’s nut cutting time.” But he will do so by doing what he has long, quite simply, done. In one way, he’s “merely”—there’s that word again— being himself. Understood and heard properly, Sam Cooke— or the likes of a Sam Cooke—is the response we need to the needed distress call. * * * There came a time in my own life—my own SOS-time— when Night Beat doubled as the record that primed me for Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, just as Sam Cooke was primed to create—to write, as we have spoken of Cooke’s compositional methodology—Night Beat, thanks to Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963. With Cooke, we’re always in this temporal tide. We’re moving forward, we’re moving back to move forward again, the present is part of a larger whole. Don’t get me wrong—I have loved the latter for what is now the majority of my years on this earth. In college, a close buddy and myself would sit in our room, and he would study for hours, I’d write for hours, with Harlem Square

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Club on a loop, as if Cooke was playing twenty sets in a row and showing no signs of wear. (In fact, the show used for the live album was the second set of that day—Cooke and his band had already lathered up with an earlier show.) We took energy from his energy. We learned about the pace of energy. Personally, I learned of its importance. People like to say that time is the most crucial commodity, but it’s not. Hope and energy are more important than time—they are what allow you to max out on what can be done with time. And energy—as Cooke knew—is integral to art. That doesn’t mean shouting and rah-rah-rah. But the art must be endued and crackle with an aliveness. Enervation is the undoing of art. I realized that from a bunch of different sources, and from my life and development, but Live at the Harlem Square Club was a ur-text in the matter. There’s an expansive dimensionality to soul music, though. We know of the demo of “You Send Me,” we have received a commandment of a sort with Harlem Square Club’s “Feel It (Don’t Fight It),” and now we will sojourn upon an isle somewhere between the two, an additional dimension. Soul music lends itself to these witching hour sessions of which Night Beat is one example, and I’d argue the ultimate example. The genre has an inherently fiery quality. It was with good reason and axiomatic accordance that James Brown called his backing band the Blue Flames. Soul music is heat, but fire-heat—not sweat heat, though creating it will make you sweat. To cool down soul music late at night is to fashion and experience something bluesier, which can be welcome. We commonly equate soul music with an intense carnality—let’s call it the driving thrust. Cooled-down soul 40

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music resembles a succession of long, thorough strokes instead; it’s a different brand of intimacy, one born of a longstanding connection, rather than a hook-up, which can be the nature of soul music in assignation form, those juke box offerings to which you pound your beer glass and forget the troubles of the past week. The paradigm is roomy. Picasso’s Blue Period paintings are soul paintings, fashioned at one in the AM. Sinkerball pitchers in baseball get more “sink” on their pitches when their arms are slightly fatigued, and soul musicians get more blues on their music after hours. Otis Redding—a passionate Sam Cooke fan—will record his Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Souls—as if the somber-shading of the music left any doubt to his stylistic intentions—in large part in the early morning hours on July 10, 1965. It’s no coincidence that Redding’s date features three Cooke numbers in “Wonderful World,” “Shake,” and “Change Gonna Come,” the latter a truncation of the original title as if Redding was too emotionally spent to write out each official formal word, sheering away several. Or else he wanted to make sure that we know he’s not doing what Cooke had done, couldn’t, and would never pretend otherwise; R-E-SP-E-C-T. Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik has a funky, spritelike streak that we denote in the whimsicality of the melody. Mozart was a playful guy, but he’s even more Mr. Sly Boots in this nocturnal instance. If his hair isn’t necessarily down, well, the wig is surely off. The art made in these hours often has the quality of an unburdening. When we are young, many of our “deep” 41

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conversations—when we first allow ourselves to be vulnerable to another person—occur after we have sailed forth into the first few hours of the next day. That doesn’t mean we’re talking strictly mischief and playfulness—but we are less self-conscious. We have a greater likelihood of “going there”—perhaps it is physical fatigue, but defenses are down, we’re candid. Drink and drug may have a role. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his “Crack-Up” essays, wrote of the “dark night of the soul.” In the pieces of ourselves that mean the most to us, the clock on our internal walls does not read high noon but rather 3 AM or near about. Night Beat is a concept album of these blue hours. The opening up, the unburdening, a confessional of despair, of that which plagues, and a kind of secular prayer for hope. It’s a nocturnal confab, and it’s greased with some of that “I’ll get by with a little help from my friends” fealty of the Beatles when Ringo Starr takes his turn as Billy Shears and shares some of his own under-the-covers epiphanies. The opening “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” is a jingle-jangle affair over a calypso rhythm, with syncopated bongo. Cooke goes to the top of his register—he uses falsetto sparingly, a secret weapon, almost like how Marvin Gaye saved his higher register for “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” but he gets close a few times, his voice sounding downright friable, as though you could tap it with a hammer and break it into a thousand pieces. I listened to this album a lot when my life fell apart. I was alone. I had lost a wife, a house. I was left without an explanation. A clue. I’d sit up at night here in Boston, in 42

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winter, heat off, huddle, and drink. I didn’t just drink— I’d imbibe thirty units of alcohol and was drinking so much that I’d be sober, still sitting there, crying maybe, wondering what to do, wondering about answers, knowing that answers only matter in this world, often, when they provide closure. What closure is about, though it has to do with the past, is never really the past. It’s about the future. Closure is an odd human paradox, in that manner, just like genius, only different. And I listened to a lot of Night Beat, imagining myself as having entered the very music itself. It was an air current, and I was a feather. Or one of those clouds you can see at night into which planes sometimes go as you sit watching on the roof of your building. I mention this because my experience is not your experience. But with an artist like Cooke, it could seem as if he codified his art specifically for me. Which wasn’t an actual view I have ever had, as that would be irrational, but the point is that we can each readily feel our version of that same direct, linear union with the way that Cooke writes and reaches. He writes to reach. The Glaswegian band Travis had a song many years later called “Writing to Reach You,” and though they were pale, skinny white kids, there was an aspect of Sam Cooke-type soul in the song and performance. I always felt that they believed that if you were not reached by what they were doing, you’d be lost; or, if they didn’t try to reach you, they would be. This was a secular and holy compact between artist and audience, and it worked, and flowed, both ways, just as Sam Cooke will instigate and use his art to marshal 43

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that flow between artist and audience at the Harlem Square Club. The second song on Night Beat is “Lost and Lookin’.” It’s not an A cappella performance, but it feels like one and might as well be. You know how people do that thing on YouTube where they isolate Keith Moon’s drum track on “Won’t Get Fooled Again”? On “Lost and Lookin’,” it’s like someone has already done that for you with Cooke’s vocal, even though it’s just the track proper, as it was set down, with no post-production knob-twisting. We have Cooke’s voice, bass guitar, cymbal. You sense that the cymbal and the bass are there merely to keep him on the beat. Or companionship. They’re not extraneous, but they’re also not necessary. The voice is essentially the entire soundscape. It has a verdancy, but the verdancy of fields of night-blooming jasmine. “I’m lost and a’looking for my baby,” Cooke sings. “Wonder why my baby can’t be found.” The pace is not hurried, but if you actually count beats, Cooke isn’t moving as slowly as it might appear. We’re in the alla breve milieu, blended with the style of the tempus perfectum, with voice, plucked bass string, lone cymbal, acting as a fused secular representation of the trinity. This is a hallowed night, we all can feel a hieratic underpinning, but we’re certainly outside of the province of a house of formal worship. We are babes in woods—adult babes in emotionally thorny woods. Cooke is very overt with that “a’looking”—he doesn’t drop the “g,” as he does in the title, like he wants you to know 44

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he’s in full possession of his faculties, no words are being slurred, no sounds shaved off. He’s fully feeling. It’s a man speaking—singing—sans painkillers. Non-self-medicated. This is vascular soul-blues—exposed nerves are auditorily palpable. The “a” clipped to the front of “looking” introduces a fairytale, Brothers Grimm element—the singer might be searching some snow-frosted forest under cover of what seems impregnable darkness. Maybe he will pass by the man who departs from his beloved’s house in Schubert’s Winterreise. I don’t know of a vocal that registers with this level of desolation. Maybe Nick Drake in “Black Eyed Dog” or Hank Williams with “Alone and Forsaken.” But still it maintains a bonhomie, limns a path with the illuminating quality of fellowship. It is strangely, ironically, a comfort. Here we have human pain at the very pump, fount, whatever you wish to term it; and in the sloshing hell of that realness, there is hope, because even now the singer of the song exhibits growth when the moment calls for it. You want to pay attention to what Cooke does with the letter “a.” The letter is crucial to his playbook as a singer, writer, artist. An “a” often has an “h” embedded within it; a singer can stretch an “h.” A lot of melismas, for instance, have an “h” foundation. When John Lennon went the falsetto route and stretched a note—particularly in the Beatles’ early career—you can almost always find an “h” there and typically one sourced from an “a.” George Frideric Handel, when he wanted to text-paint with maximum perspicacity and coloratura, deployed the “h” inside of an “a.” 45

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Cooke will use the “a” to signpost an extreme emotion— the fear that comes with not knowing what is next for a person (or a people, or a race), as he does here in “Lost and Lookin’.” It’s his “you better pay attention” syllable/note (for a single syllable is also a musical note). He can move it around, too, use it as a landing spot, rendering it more guttural, final, definitive, delivering a blow of sublime plangency to the ears, a crucial cadence. In this song we do get a rare Cooke falsetto, and I don’t believe he began singing the number with the plan of using the falsetto technique. I think he couldn’t help himself, in a sense, and then “wrote” a falsetto in on the spot when he got there. The character—the singer—was going in a certain natural direction, and Cooke the artist ensured he’d continue on in that journey. A work of art itself needs to be kept in character; keeping it in character is central to what both a singer and a writer do, and as we have noted, writing takes many forms, singing being one of them. “Crying for my baby/Crying all alone/Calling for you to come home, come home.” The singer goes from crying to calling; there’s transformation. You read a story, and you wish to see character development. Songs are the same way. And this character is progressing. Cooke reacts accordingly, and on the line “Baby won’t you please come home,” he takes that “please” into a register you did not know he had—you could say that he mines the “a” and pulls out the melismatic h-sounds. He may not have known, until that moment, that he could sing in that register. Van Gogh would conclude his letters with the phrase “a handshake in my thoughts,” before adding his name. This is 46

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Cooke’s late night soul version—and soul version—directed to me—or so it feels—and directed to you. The writing to reach you bit. Reach us. For me, at that point in my life, he was connecting with a white male lost and looking for parts of himself in Boston. In 1963—and here, too, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century—he’s also present to connect with disenfranchised Blacks who may feel that parts of themselves have been crumbled, eroded away, as they are lost and looking. Sometimes we are made lost by others. Sometimes we become lost to ourselves when that happens. When he gets to that crucial word of “home”—and you are cognizant that he doesn’t just mean a house, he means a place within himself, where safety and warmth ought to be present, and should be sacrosanct, and are now voided, displaced—he inserts an “a” and then exploits the full power of the encoded “h.” “Home” is sounded as “hoamhhh.” We are not far afield of Walt Whitman’s “barbaric Yawp,” but there is no outright barbarism in this Cooke vocal—the pain is shot-through and evidentiary, but so is self-mastery. Cooke’s voice control is meticulous—it’s one of the few times in his singing career where he truly displays the technique of a prime Ella Fitzgerald. Enrico Caruso or Frank Sinatra—who once sniffed that Elvis could have been a proper singer if he worked at it—could have heard this passage and thought, “You have that down, brother man, I’m not going to compete with you.” Sinatra, in fact, would have keenly understood a concept album of the night, of the unburdening on display in Night Beat, having recorded his 47

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own In the Wee Small Hours in April 1955, in, you guessed it, the middle of the night. But there is nothing on that record like this shaft of light— care of the falsetto and the balletic dance of Cooke’s vocal timbre with the “hoamhhhhh.” Cooke wrote this song, but we must note how he wrote it twice. First was the time with the guitar, second is the way in which he sings it, making choices—writerly choices—as he goes. The protagonist of the song is looking. The artist responsible for the song is looking. We are looking, with whatever we are going through, the patch we have come to in life. The “lost” of the title, of course, riffs on the concept of lost in “Amazing Grace”—the life quality of having once been lost and now being found. Cooke was a self-sender. Or, if you want to countervail that and say that he was sent, answering to a person or a cause (the “apple of my eye,” to use another Cooke phrase, in “You Send Me,” or his bank account, or the Civil Rights Movement, or the compact of connection between artist and audience, or a meaty olio of all of the above) outside of himself, that’s fine—he was still the one who elected to go. Sam Cooke went, and he went looking. But he was also a self-finder. When we hear him in live performance—especially when we hear him in live performance—and we hear how he writes as he sings—we realize that ultimately a Sam Cooke gig is about locating people at the core of who they are and what they are experiencing, and determining direction. Even within the space of a single word and what can be found there. Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, takes us out into the field. Our sleeves are rolled up and 48

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we’re on the street where Cooke’s soul GPS can do its thing: re-finding what needs to be found. Be it for a single human, be it for a swath of humans. Be it for a race. Be it for a country. Not an answer, so much as a better purpose. You often don’t get the former—but you can make the most of the latter. * * * Something we all love music for is for how it connects with our lives. We envision, at various stops along our individual ways, that music soundtracking our lives. The music that we in turn love to the largest degrees is the music that comes closest to being perpetually present for us—that we fall for at sixteen, that we have played at our wedding, that we share with our kids. We hear it differently at different times, because this kind of music—and Sam Cooke represents this category for me—is phasic. But mutably phasic. “There was that summer on Cape Cod when I was working on a boat and all I did the rest of the time was listen to Metallica.” Everyone has their version of such a statement. We all have that connection with these impeccably controlled soundwaves to which we also seem to cede over a portion of ourselves, in a desire—and it’s not always a conscious choice— to have something precious returned to us. Conceivably the best artists repay us the most on our given investment. To listen fully is to listen as an act bordering on faith. Faith makes sense with Sam Cooke. He came out of the church, and an instilling of belief was central to his vocal

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style. The crux of his approach. Cooke wished for you to pick up what he was putting down. God, Jesus, wasn’t his focus, even with the Soul Stirrers. Sam Cooke trafficked in secular immanence. He’s our most Socratic soul artist in this manner. I can give you any of a number of personal examples. Mowing the lawn as a kid and listening to the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” changed my own life on summer Saturdays. I walked along a cliff thirty miles north of Boston with the Who’s “A Quick One (While He’s Away)” playing in my ears as I mulled the logistics of how a broken person carries on. Night Beat was a companion, which is how I think Cooke intended it. “This is a mean old world to live in/All by yourself,” Cooke sings on “Mean Old World,” as Billy Preston provides his own version of Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” with a veritable continental shelf of organ notes. Cooke ad libs a “whoa oooh oooh” that helps him make an octave-leap between the verse and chorus. He barely makes it. “I Lost Everything,” “Get Yourself Another Fool,” and “Laughin’ and Clowin’”—which is about anything but laughing and clowning—detail what Cooke terms his “worried mind.” On the latter, he grafts an “a” once more onto the word “clownin’,” and “a’clownin’” means that there’s no point in trying to jury-rig a smile and cheerful countenance. “Just let things be what they are, man,” Cooke seems to say. We rarely do that, give up the ghost of control. I was sitting there, drinking, “a’clowin’” as Cooke intends the word, and even as I made myself sick, literally swelled the size of my heart as a doctor was to tell me, I knew I’d start moving again. I was prepping, with Night Beat, for 50

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the record that is all about forward movement, in Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963. Cooke goes up-tempo with “You Gotta Move,” the same Mississippi Fred McDowell song that the Rolling Stones will cover on Let It Bleed, though Cooke writes enough verses of his own that he merits a songwriting credit, and you don’t begrudge him. McDowell probably heard it in a plantation field, took it for his own, and Cooke has done some rewriting and verse-addition, as if adding another chapter to what is tantamount to a primordial horn book centered on the need not to stagnate. Preston is downright giddy in his playing, like a kid (which is what he is), his organ fills voiced with the cheeky, wheezy frills of the circus calliope. These songs have been about lowdown feelings, but they’ve also often been in a major key, which is a strange schism that maintains an unblemished wholeness because of Cooke’s vocals. He is the sound of resolution, his voice all pep and vim, but with a “let’s-get-on-with-it” phlegmatic quality of someone who is truly strong and can be strong for you. Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” concludes the affair. His 1955 recording of the song is one of the stalwart contenders for the title of first rock and roll number, and we should remember that Cooke could straight up rock and roll in the verb sense of the phrase. When Cooke leans up-tempo, he moves away from rhythm and blues and in the direction of his proprietary blend of what we might think of as rock and soul. Cooke drives the beat like a rock and roller, a taskmaster of 4/4 tempo, whereas a James Brown was more apt to jump from 51

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time signature to time signature. Brown could be like a soul version of Captain Beefheart, actually. Cooke prefers to get from station to station in as linear a fashion as possible, just as he likes to travel between past, present, and future and back again so as to move forwards once more. Night Beat is a somber and yet somehow triumphant, even heroic, record. It’s also a live album that is not a live album— these guys weren’t doing overdubs nor running through shitloads of takes. They played as if they were doing a couple sets, only without an audience present. We can think of it as an extension of what had gone down in Miami the month before, and music that can send us back to Miami, with a better understanding of Cooke’s ability to inhabit multiple temporal spaces at once in the ways in which he builds his music. He’s taken the hothouse energy of one kind of live performance art, cooled it down, and strip-mined a relatable form of melancholia that is readily applicable to our individual lives. I’ve simply provided you with one example in my own life at a given time. If you were a Black person in America in 1963, and you heard Night Beat, you may well have connected with it for different reasons. Same goes in 2021. We’ve spoken of Schubert’s Winterreise and the idea of being sent. Schubert’s friends—who were enamored with Schubert—didn’t like the piece. They said it was depressing. They didn’t understand why Schubert had written something so forlorn. Sam Cooke was very hit conscious. He was proud of his ability to be a hit-maker. He had no expectations that the 52

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Night Beat sessions would result in a popular album. No PR Sherpa would help take this document to the top of any charts. RCA, around this same time, made a decision to shelve Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, thinking it more than many Americans—that is to say, white Americans—could handle. It was not only a lousy business proposition but a record that would be too dark. Which also meant “too Black.” Night Beat itself is a Black album, just as Prince’s The Black Album was. Cooke could sound white, and he usually sounded like he didn’t give a toss about Black and white. He understood how kids had mistaken Elvis Presley, before they saw him, for an African American, Chuck Berry for a white man. John Lennon made that very error. But Cooke is taking the Blackness of Live at the Harlem Square Club, he’s bringing it into the studio for a recording session-cum-unofficial live album, and so far as desolation and the need for hope goes, he’s concatenating, leading us to a song in “A Change Is Gonna Come” where Cooke does things with the “a” sound/device we have discussed that will crack open a world. His buddies, like Schubert’s dear friends, won’t be sure what he’s up too, if he’s gone too far, gotten too dark. “Shake, Rattle and Roll” swings, it sashays. “You won’t do right to save your natural soul,” Cooke admonishes, tweaking the line in Elvis’s version—which used “doggone” instead of “natural”—and it’s damn clear that Cooke plays for large stakes. Personal authenticity. That natural soul will be forfeited without the Cooke-esque derring-do to re-gather and rage against that which needs raging against. Albeit, with love. Also, courage. 53

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When I hear Cooke in the winter of 1963, I hear the sound of bravery itself. And I wish to rejoin Cooke and his band in Miami, so let us do that now. Rhythms of the night give way to other rhythms of the night. We move forwards, we move back, and we listen to the man who knows where he is going.

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4 Under the Trees and Over in Overtown

Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, is comprised of ten numbers, counting the King Curtis opener, and if we pretend that one of its key songs—perhaps the key song—does not exist on the record, which is what the back cover does via omission. The affair concludes in less than forty minutes. Think about that for a second—we’re talking somewhat longer than a sitcom. As we listen, we quickly lose a sense of time, which is the nature of immersion. Art is long and life is short goes the old line. The forty life minutes of Harlem Square Club have no clock-on-the-wall analogue. At the end of this soul event, which is then preserved as soul art, Cooke will sing, “Let me tell you, mister, Mr. DJ/Keep those records playing/’Cause I’m a-havin’ such a good time/Dancing with my baby.” That’s right—he inserts the “a,” again lending that urban folkloric feel dislocating us from the space-time continuum of January

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12, 1963. Life is short; art is long. Harlem Square Club feels endless, and I mean that as the highest compliment. In a way, Cooke’s protagonist and his baby will never stop dancing. The floor is eternally theirs. Cooke’s band is locked in from the jump with their opening vamp on King Curtis’s hit rhythm and blues instrumental, “Soul Twist.” Curtis would have had to okay the number with Cooke, certainly. You could get pretty tired of the twist—a limited song-form and a limited dance form, too—in the early 1960s. Cooke was the rare artist who said, “Huh, I can do something expansive and artful with this ostensible musical novelty,” and fashioned some of his better songs out of this twist vein, one of which will serve as means to shift this gig into a different gear here in Miami—a gear that, in my view, no other live album has. Post-“Soul Twist,” all of the songs on Harlem Square Club are written by Cooke. It’s a tour-de-force of one man’s compositional corpus. He doesn’t just have ace material; he has pliable ace material. Bob Dylan—an artist Cooke listened to hard—would go on to spend decades reworking his pliable songs, but Cooke was doing it first. Before the Grateful Dead, before anyone outside of the jazz and blues arenas with the balls—and the catalog—to reinvent as they went. We began by discussing the idea of Cooke inventing soul—but what Cooke does better—and it’s more important, too—is remake himself and his art to maximize assorted situations, both immediate and epochal. Cooke was an athletic man with an athletic build. He bounds to the stage, as if he’s just picked his way out of 56

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the backfield, and there’s nothing but green grass between himself and the end zone. The stage is his turf. “Before we do anything, we’d like to say, ‘How are you doing out there?’” Cooke greets the audience. You know the phrase “he could sing the phone book?” Cooke sings this pleasantry and renders it as music. His voice isn’t that quiet, soft-spoken, soothing—and nearly purring— instrument of pensiveness that we hear when he sits down to talk with Dick Clark on American Bandstand. This is the preacher’s son, the man late of the Soul Stirrers, who is here to preside over a gig that is no mere gig, but also part jubilee and shivaree—a toasting of nuptials for a union of musicians and audience, and the solidarity and shared experience of Black people in 1963 America. This is our time, our show, Cooke seems to say. That one line of inquiry, tantamount to “what is up, my brothers and sisters?” makes me think of Dylan Thomas’s 1952 NYC recording of his poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” He’s directing and challenging his audience—his dying father in one regard, but we must be sure not to box-in the poet’s scope—to press forward, and Cooke will do the same. Do not give in, fucker, the poet says, in essence, with affection, empathy, concern. Be steel. You are steel. Sam Cooke is also a poet. He gets his jubilant response from the crowd, then asks the question a second time, a third time. He’s stoking them up, already dealing in the antiphonal, in call-and-response, a feature that defines Cooke’s music in both ideological and literal ways. Again, the idea of flow. Sometimes it’s between past, present, future, other times between singer/writer and 57

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those with whom he is endeavoring to connect. And there is overlap, Cooke’s art so readily nesting doll-like in character and intent. With their third response to Cooke’s highly rhythmic query, the crowd has become rather frothy. It’s go-time. If you all got rhythm, as God’s children do, according to the spiritual-standard, now is the time to use it. Think of it like the team about to come charging out of the locker room for the homecoming game. Cooke’s no Floridian, but we already know that these are his people. He casts a wide net with his art in locating those brethren, but given the nature of this LP, some of them now are making their auditory mark on a special Sam Cooke tape. They are the choric component. Aristophanes would dig and get this. Or an Abraham Lincoln in search of humanist allies. Drummer June Gardner gets Cooke going. He takes a manic, adrenalized, whirlwind tour around his kit as if he’s Ginger Baker about to rock out with Cream circa 1967. There is sweet, ambered resonance to his tom-toms. They sound like barrel casks lined on their insides by pillows stuffed with clouds. He plays a fill and Cooke hops aboard that rhythmic rumble, using it for a spring-boarding, the cyclonic force that launches him into “Feel It (Don’t Fight It).” Just as Dylan Thomas commanded—with compassion—so too does Cooke. It’s some sage advice as well. If you went to a Pink Floyd show in 1968, maybe it wasn’t the worst idea to stick a tab of acid under your tongue first to get in the right head space. In order to make the most of the experience. The trick of making the most of this Sam Cooke trip is to let your walls 58

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come down. To range and flow yourself. Do not resist your own feelings. Be vulnerable. And give yourself unto this music, which is giving itself unto you. I like that Cooke is aggressive, without being a dick, in laying out frankly—if self-referentially—what he wants and what is best. And songs whose communicative thrust references what is occurring in that moment aren’t just meta, they’re pretty cool, especially when they are driving and euphonious. Oliver Hardy, in the pictures he made with Stan Laurel, would turn and face the camera, commiserating with the audience via a reactionary gesture—a shrug, a sigh, a head shake. Cooke does some fourth-wall busting of his own with us, all of these decades later. “You shouldn’t fight this either, future listeners, just like my Miami crew didn’t.” Again, apt advice. I don’t know that we can say that the studio version of what at the time was simply titled “Feel It” is similarly arresting. It is certainly novel. Released as a single in 1961, it was backed with “It’s All Right,” which also has a part to play in Miami. The single has a Bossa Nova feel and is nowhere near as driving or rhythmically insistent. This is a mid-tempo piece, and a kind of Coasters knock-off that isn’t realized with any of the humor that band could put over, not unlike when we hear the Beatles tackle “Three Cool Cats” on their New Year’s Day Decca audition of 1962. A bass voice continuously bellows “yeah” in response to Cooke’s “don’t fight it, feel it” line of instruction. Cooke was a perfectionist, and he must have known the studio recording didn’t work. That he also understood that the song could prove to be a dazzling, come-to-Sam-baby! intro number at a 59

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concert says a lot about the level of mutability Cooke intuited in his songs. Built into his songs as well. There’s a selection of piano triplets throughout this studio cut that do what they can to liven up the proceedings, but put squarely, the piece just wasn’t going anywhere. On the charts, it will only reach #56. In Miami, the song is a reclamation project made good. I knew this version first, and when I heard its studio counterpart after, I was baffled. I didn’t grasp how you went from there to here. Gardner’s role can’t be overstated. He’s drumming his ass off, a master of the polyrhythm. If you know the work of Elvin Jones, who drummed so long in Coltrane’s Quartet, and imagined he had a Chitlin Circuit cousin, you’d have a musician approximating Gardner. Some guys are just exciting players, they electrify you. Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, Art Tatum, Clarence White when he joined the Byrds and provided a sort of electro-shock therapy to their sound. In Miami, the shock activist is Gardner. He’s dropping bombs and launching fills, but he’s also teaming with bassist Jimmy Lewis to create one mother of a rhythm section. James Brown’s first live album at the Apollo is the one that gets the props, but his second LP cut at the Harlem club has the deeper grooves, if not the same appealing concision of song structure. From this first Cooke-led cut on Live at the Harlem Square Club, this group has synthesized what Brown will later do across those two celebrated sessions. They have the concision—this particular song will last less than three minutes—and they have the rhythmic range. The beat feels as big as all outdoors, a force to range over a continent and then make the leap to the next and continue on. 60

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In painting terms, Gardner and Lewis are the lower foreground. They anchor the piece, through, paradoxically, buoyancy. The beat is not static, the pulse alters, even if the time signature does not. This is a rhythm section that is rubato incarnate. That’s their modus operandi. The approach is far more common in jazz. Actually, it’s along the lines of the vanguard Modernism of the recordings Ornette Coleman made with his trio for Atlantic in 1959 and 1960, but Coleman didn’t have Cooke’s gift for populism. The blending of the avant-garde—and conceptually, this is “experimental,” albeit in tailored and controlled way—and the popular isn’t realized a lot. The Beatles could do it, Charles Dickens. The James Joyce of “The Dead.” Sam Cooke, temporarily of Miami. Clifton White’s rhythm playing occupies the middle ground. Some players work their guitar so hard that they hurt their hand. Pete Townshend was this way—playing in his style could be physically comprising, almost an act of athleticism. He nailed those strings, hand getting beat up like that of an offensive lineman. White isn’t dissimilar. He’s a somatic chord-maker. You feel his level of physicality in his playing in your body. He flogs the band, he flogs this tune, he flogs the audience, flogs strings and fretboard, he flogs us when we listen now. We don’t just like it, we wish for more. Cooke knew what he had with this band. I have no doubt that he loved being able to tap into the skills of these musicians, abet his brilliance with theirs. It’s akin to giving a great point guard a dominant center, a high-flying big man on the wing, and a nifty shooting guard to run out in game after game being on a team that lacked for weaponry. When “Feel It” was released in single form, the listening public 61

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heard one sound; in his head, Cooke heard a future sound and that was going to be a whole new ballgame for Mr. Point Guard, who wouldn’t require the services of Mr. DJ on the concert stage. Cooke often inhabits the high ground of this sonic canvas, but he’s also a free agent and will join up with Clifton’s guitar, riffing a vocal line that matches it in texture, then dip down to see what Lewis and Gardner are up to, using their beat to concoct a play of enjambed syllables in his vocal that send him bounding skyward once again. Coleman pioneered his concept of free jazz, documented on his infamous 1961 album of the same name, and Cooke is dishing out some free soul. He’s written this song by paring away words, turning it into a mantra, a koan. There is considerable rasp in his voice, as when a singer has tormented the larynx for too long and their instrument is starting to go. Cooke’s voice is not starting to go. He is creating that raggedness on purpose. It’s there in one moment, gone the next. But what it does induce is another element of the somatic, that you’re not just hearing this music, you’re feeling it. We’re at a concert as act of transference. Cooke isn’t just giving his sound, his body as well. You conclude— it’s all but unavoidable—that he’d give anything to put over what he wishes to put over. Curtis plays stabbing notes on his horn, pricking the beat, making more blood flow. “Ha!” Cooke laughs, leading into a final charge of the song. He’s a master laugher—no one does the laugh/sing thing like Sam Cooke. I don’t know of any other singer who laughs in the middle of their songs and uses it as a singing technique. You’d experience this with a rhapsode in ancient Greece, those 62

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early pioneers of Audible who’d sing and enact poems in the center of the city, letting the words infuse their being and then emerge in a hybrid of narrative and musical form. But a popular, modern-day singer? Nope. “Baby when you’re swingin’ music,” Cooke sings, describing exactly what he’s presently doing and using a verb we rarely encounter in popular music in this context. A singer might convey something about swinging a physical item, but swinging a song? That’s a different brand of wordsmithing. “Make you want to flip,” he continues. The line is “That makes you want to flip,” but he’s writing as he goes, realizing that a downturn in formality has greater efficacy, is more directly communicative; he’s doing buddy-speak with the audience and Messrs. White, Lewis, and Gardner have sufficiently syncopated the beat by now that taking out a couple notes from the vocal adds to that syncopation stew in a highly pleasing way. How Cooke reads the band influences how he edits—which is to say, writes—the song, a piece of work that is now a long way away from the 1961 single and its codCoasters-isms. The piece is gnomic, and if it is not limitless, it creates the sensation of having no bounds or restrictions. Or we could just say that this art is very long. “Oh don’t be in pain/Trying to strain/Don’t move your hips,” Cooke continues. In other words, lock in. Listen. Think. There is also the idea that you could dance too hard to such music and, I don’t know, yank something, pull a hammy. Cooke uses humor as he spotlights the physicality of this music, but there’s also more here. As an opener to the gig, “Feel It (Don’t Fight It)” is a statement. Also, an in-concert philosophy and some practical instruction. 63

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One facet of Cooke’s genius is getting people ready for that which is to come. He writes what he writes in one moment to have payoff in future moments. Cooke is an exceedingly Dickensian artist that way. Past, present, future. It’s similar to how he ranges up and down the soundspace. “If you feel it say oh yeah,” Cooke challenges the Harlem Square Club crowd when he reaches the end of the number, having repeated the koan a couple dozen times in a row, with no other lyrics. The crowd is hard-wired into what he’s doing by this juncture, and the audience members don’t elide a single beat when they sing that “oh yeah,” syncopating it a touch, too. The union has been consummated. The show is about five minutes old. But as I said, you can’t measure it that way. * * * When “Feel It (Don’t Fight It)” sticks its landing—coming full-stop to a close on a downbeat—the audience members go nuts. They are in thrall. The club itself is situated in a Miami neighborhood called Overtown. It’s the Black side of the city, once dubbed as Colored Town. Likened sometimes to New Orleans’ Bourbon Street, this is the Entertainment District, where leading Black musicians play and also sleep when they are deemed worthy of playing for white people at the racially segregated Miami Beach clubs near the hotels that won’t board them. Which is sickening— that you’d be used for your gifts and then ported across the tracks to what’s really the ghetto but with a thriving music scene of its own. A music scene to kick the snot out of the one centered on the ritzier locale.

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There are shotgun shacks lacking plumbing, even electricity. One alley is termed the Bucket of Blood and not because there was a vogue for Grand Guignol theater. Blacks were not allowed to leave Overtown after nightfall. The Klan could walk right into the neighborhood if it so desired, but you were penned in. Overtown was literally on the other side of the tracks, like you read about and think that’s just a midcentury phrase with no deeper, insidious, evil meaning. Next to these tracks are the whorehouses, which did a brisk trade with white men from Miami. Which Black past masters played in Overtown? Which didn’t might be the better question. Residents would have seen Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Josephine Baker, Sam and Dave, Sammy Davis, Jr. Flip Wilson developed his early comedy routines in Overtown. Zora Neale Thurston and Jackie Robinson hung out there. So did Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, W.E.B Dubois. It was also known as Little Harlem, but Overtown could certainly have gone toe to toe with its sister neighborhood to the North. On my own personal wish list of places I’d most like to have access to for gig-going should I ever have a time machine, Overtown is up there with the Fillmore West, Minton’s in NYC, and the Globe Theatre back in Queen Elizabeth’s day. The neighborhood was cut off physically and psychologically from the rest of Miami. In addition to the African Americans here during this period of Black musical and intellectual fecundity—we are talking some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the twentieth century— were also families from the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti. Leaving downtown Miami, you took a Gray Line bus “over” to this 65

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other town, which was proximate in one way, another realm with different values in another. There was movement itself built into the name of Overtown. It was a safe haven, a port that just happened to be on land, providing shelter and succor. Community. The community that grows up around a shared set of experiences. Cassius Clay—later to become Muhammad Ali and Sam Cooke’s future singing buddy— loved Overtown. You could see him walking down the main drag, shadow boxing, just as you might see him later that night listening to his boy Sam light them up over at the Harlem Square Club, shaking his hips—despite Cooke’s irony-infused prodding in “Feel It (Don’t Fight It)” to stand down—to the next number on that evening of January 12, a Sam Cooke song that had been released as a single in late July 1960. That song is “Chain Gang,” and it is one of the most shocking songs of the 1960s. There are several works of music in my life that I have listened and thought, “Wait, you’re allowed to do that?” The Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” is one such example. I’m talking about art that has no precedent, that is sudden, definitive, sui generis. When it arrives, it sounds like an autonomous work of borderless totality. Your initial reaction will remain consistent and be reprised with each subsequent experiencing of that work, as though there’s no diminishing the sui generis force behind it. Probably because it can’t be diminished. To hear a recording like “Chain Gang” for the 567th time is also to hear it for the first time. It’s like magic—but far too real to be sorcery. Cooke’s singles in 1960 prior to “Chain Gang” had a symphonic tinge. “Summertime,” “Teenage Sonata,” “T’aint 66

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Nobody’s Bizness,” the final song lifted from Cooke’s 1959 album in commemoration of Billie Holiday, Tribute to the Lady. Lady Day had died that year, aged only forty-four. Holiday and Cooke will be responsible for the two songs numbering as the most important that this country has produced. She didn’t write hers, in “Strange Fruit,” originally recorded in 1939, but she inhabited it to a degree that it was entirely her own. Or I’ve always been inclined to think of it that way. I think Sam Cooke was as well, and that was both what he loved with her and what he learned. Normally throughout her career, Holiday would introduce “Strange Fruit” in concert by saying that it had been specifically written for her. She waits six years, though, to give it a first in-person airing, which occurs in 1945, at Los Angeles’ Philharmonic Hall in 1945. This recording is released in 1954, and Cooke knew it, because he made certain to know all of Holiday’s releases. They are closely knit, Billie and Sam. Neither sings as anyone else does, then or now, and both encapsulate and transcend Black experience. “Strange Fruit” looks to the past, probes a warped pastoral of Black bodies hanging in poplar trees—the strange crop of the title, the fetid spoils of lynching. It goes back to go forward. Holiday had a hard life. She’s used, abused, beaten, and, of course, she is discriminated against. Many Blacks were. She knew oppression, which is a blight that that could and can be open to all. Holiday wants to lift up her Black brothers and sisters, but she’d never leave out the white teenage girl who also took solace in this music—that same kid who maybe also listened to “You Send Me” in 1957. 67

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She wishes to acknowledge—insists upon acknowledging, calling out, rendering plain—what a people had been through, help a race move forward, overcome, but she was also an inclusionary artist. You need not share the Black experience to align with Holiday’s music, to feel close to this art, as if it couldn’t champion you as well—maybe even champion you to you. There is an indefatigable resolution of self-belief in Holiday’s artistry. The fact that you didn’t have to be Black to connect with her songs makes it all the more likely that you would connect deeply with them if you were, because you understood the most crucial requirement of human decency: that others be allowed to grow as fully and richly as you wish to be allowed to grow. Holiday empowers in different ways. Like Cooke will learn to do, she moves from the personal to the universal. The white girl would have focused on the former. The Black people who lived a version of what Holiday had lived instead focused equally on both. Their own experiences and the experiences of their people as a whole. But no one called out racial injustice as Holiday did on “Strange Fruit.” This is new. “Strange Fruit” is one reason why the casket was left open at the funeral of the murdered Emmett Till in Sam Cooke’s Chicago in summer 1955, with 50,000 people—many of whom loved Holiday and would embrace Cooke—turning up to view the body, which was also part of that devilish crop of fields that were rarely fallow. Recently I heard “Strange Fruit” playing at a Starbucks, with no one even stirring from their phones and lattes, completely failing to take note of this sound that can render 68

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you incapable of standing for a while. You won’t be shaking your hips, to put it in the Harlem Square Club terms of “Feel It (Don’t Fight It).” But you will sway as you listen, like those Black bodies dangling from the trees. Cooke does not cover “Strange Fruit” on Tribute to the Lady. I think the reason is simple—he understood the scope of the song and preferred to leave it be, leave it just as Billie’s, until he could create a song of his own with comparable scope. He wasn’t there yet. In the meanwhile, he could cut versions of “Tenderly” and “God Bless the Child” and lay plane his spiritual symbiosis with this star-crossed jazz-soul paragon. The 1945 version of “Strange Fruit”—what will be a seminal song for Sam Cooke, which will help take him to “Chain Gang,” and then on to Overtown in January 1963, and finally to his own most lasting composition, the result of all of this, a number at the level of, and even beyond, Holiday’s timeless creation—is almost too powerful to listen to. You can hear Holiday cough several times as she prepares to join in body and soul with this hellish diorama, where she will serve as narrator—the narrator who must not flinch, even as we do, because how can we not, if we are human? Arrangements of the song tend to get a bit busy later on in Holiday’s career. They’re not spartan. But this is. It’s Holiday and only a piano. And the crowd. They’re part of this performance just as the Overtown crowd turns Cooke’s octet into a nonet (we’ll count the ticket-buyers in Miami as one group member). The pacing is in line with Cooke’s own “Lost and Lookin’.” You feel like you could lay the two tracks on top of each other and there’d be a rough synchronicity. 69

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She approaches the end of the song and begins to sing the final word, which is “crop,” and her voice just breaks. It gives out. It gives out, and then she catches herself, and it rises higher than it otherwise would have without that giving out. As we have seen, Sam Cooke using laughter as a form of singing. Laughter is not that far from crying. We might cry until we laugh. We might laugh until we cry. He’s simply modulating the emotional context. Laughing to keep from crying, to paraphrase Smokey Robinson. Holiday, Cooke, linked. The crowd is spent, and the crowd turns rapturous, in LA in 1945, as Billie Holiday finishes the first ever live performance of “Strange Fruit.” As their applause dwindles, the applause in Overtown rises once more, in this shifting sea of soul—and soul—time. Sam Cooke is blasting this bad boy of a gig, of a live album, into another gear, just as Billie Holiday had geared herself up to give her audience a performance of a song that will stand apart from all others in rock and roll, soul, jazz, blues, until Cooke is ready to reach his highest level. We are getting there. * * * The studio single version of “Chain Gang” was released July 26, 1960. It becomes Cooke’s biggest hit of a year that saw him push a lot of lushly orchestrated fodder at the 45-buying public. Cooke is always conscious of demos. He wants the white suburban girls to buy his records, the older crowd, the Black people in the cities. He doesn’t necessarily care if every demo 70

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stocks up on every record. Sam Cooke has doubtless had many Cooke completists, but you really don’t need to be one, in that sense that there are people who only listen to Dylan from 1965 to 1966, or early folkie Dylan, or fin de siècle Dylan. The more places an artist gives you to find yourself and what means the most to you, the greater the likelihood of chickens locating roosting spots. His other big hit that year was “Wonderful World,” which has always amused and beguiled me in that it sounds like an oldie, despite rock and soul not having existed that long, and I bet it sounded like an oldie when it came out on the first day of Easter Triduum that spring. It may be the quintessential oldie, and I don’t mean that in a way to suggest that it’s dated; rather, the song packages nostalgia for bygone times much like Rod Serling’s script for the 1959 Twilight Zone episode of “Walking Distance.” The track is autumnal—time is getting on, and we are conscious of its march. It’s a taking-stock number, an itemization of memories. There is a large helping of “Wonderful World” in “Penny Lane,” but one is English and white, and the other is American and Black. I remember reading in Rolling Stone as a boy where Rod Stewart had said that it’s all well and good, Sam Cooke singing his “cha cha cha’s” in “Wonderful World,” but it’s not art, which is one of the more inaccurate comments I’ve encountered about a piece of music. Stewart was a huge Cooke fan, but I think he missed what was happening at the level of the writing. “What a wonderful world this would be,” Cooke sings in this song about the past, the failures and frustrations 71

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of a boy in school to figure out what to do with his slide ruler and master that damn French homework. But note how he conscripts the subjunctive—“What a wonderful world this could be.” He is talking of change, the future, but in the argot of imagination. A daydream. And what is a daydream for the future so often founded upon? The bedrock of those daydreams is hope. And it is hope that is the ligature that binds us to the possibility of all that we might ever become. Martin Luther King famously gave oratorical voice to exactly what Sam Cooke is singing about here in his “I have a dream speech” at the end of August 1963, in Washington, DC. King would have known the song. You pare back the schoolboy element—which Cooke also inserted so as to hit more of those demographics, to appeal to the moms and dads of the suburban white kids who enjoyed having their own conceptions of nostalgia stirred. Cooke merely wanted to get in—he wanted to gain ingress to your home, your head space, your conversations, your memories, your plans for what to play on the jukebox that Saturday night. But Blacks recognized something else in the song’s wistful, bittersweet, daring-to-dream refrain. They understood Sam Cooke’s cipher, just as they had known exactly what Chuck Berry was singing about with 1956’s “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” “A-a-arrested on charges of unemployment/He was sitting in the witness stand/The judge’s wife called up the district attorney/She said, ‘Free that brown-eyed man.’ ” Thus begins the Berry number. Songs meant to scale charts do not normally start with accounts of arrests, unemployment, and 72

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brown-eyed men, which anyone with ears and a brain would have understood to mean brown-skinned man. Berry takes us through times in history; it’s a phasic song, jumping around from point to point, scene to scene, as Cooke will jump around in a song about change not long after hearing King’s righteous, daring, oneiric speech. “2-3 the count, with nobody one,” Berry sings, describing a baseball game in which a Willie Mays or Hank Aaron-like figure will win the day. Despite being a big baseball guy, he reverses the numbers of the count, letting us know that something is up, a game of change is afoot. It’s not hard to imagine the singer of Cooke’s “Chain Gang” as Berry’s browneyed man, caught up in a maelstromic system, allowing that the phone call placed by the well-meaning wife of the judge hadn’t gotten him off. On tour, Cooke’s bus was pulled over, and he and his band came upon an actual chain gang, Cooke taking a few minutes to speak to the men who were shackled to each other, like the men at the oars in the slave ships, only now upright. People thought it was shocking when they heard Archie Bunker flush a toilet on All in the Family, but a song about Black men manacled to each other, working as the warden sweats the life out of them, was beyond the pale in 1960. Cooke gave you some of what the Stone Roses would later term candy floss to get into your house, to establish his brand as one you deemed reliable, but when you hit as many demographics as he did, you have more opportunities for Trojan horses and maybe sending people on to worthier ideas as you yourself have been self-sent. Yes, there could have been white men on this chain gang, but you didn’t hear it 73

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that way. The Defiant Ones had chained Sidney Poiter to Tony Curtis in 1958, though if you hadn’t been cycled through the penal system yourself, the concept of race and Blackness was indivisible from the concept of a chain gang. Which Cooke was fully cognizant of. “I hear somethin’ saying,” Cooke begins. It’s not very different from “I have a dream,” is it? I hear, I have. But it’s “something,” not “someone.” Cooke hears the times, just as Dylan heard them, and both men knew that they were changing or could be—the artist had a role to play as inducer. That “I” plants a foot firmly in the ground and drives into fresh narrative, like an edge rusher coming out of his stance to flank around the offensive line and launch himself bodily at the quarterback. Cooke embeds the song—which went all the way to #2 in the Billboard charts—on a record called Swing Low, another concept album. After his first two LPs for Keen back in the 1950s, every Cooke album is a concept album. All of his RCA records are concept heavy. Swing Low centered on bluesy, Black tunes tinged with a spirituals component. It was Cooke’s long-player of work songs of a man working for change. A change he might have said, in keeping with these declarative sentence constructions, “I will cause to occur, help make arrive.” With “Chain Gang” on Live at the Harlem Square Club we go to the upper regions of intensity. You almost have to acclimate to them. Were this sci-fi, a ship’s commander might intone, Set the controls for the center of soul. The studio version is a driving number, but this live performance is downright irradiating. In the 1950s, Count Basie self-described his 74

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sound as “atomic,” which meant that he’d somehow upped his rhythmic ordnances to the point that you wouldn’t have seemed like a cheeky piss-taker had you wondered aloud if he’d split some kind of sound-based atom in his own way and harvested the power. Cooke, in January 1963, is having himself not just a party but a harvest festival of that power. He lays into the grunts—the “ooh-aah’s”—of “Chain Gang” in Miami with calcined ardor. The singer isn’t just working this land with his pick—he might as well be driving his hips through the ground itself. “Got through the crust, and now I’m coming for you, upper mantle.” It’s sexual, but also post-sexual, something beyond flesh, like in ancient Greek legends when a god fornicates with a mortal. It’s human and not human. This is a multi-orgasmic Cooke, a progenitor, a life-bequeather, loving with a purpose, not some Earl of Rochester-type debaucher. He’s a life force, soul-style, always ready to go again. On the middle eight, Gardner instigates a tintinnabulous rhythm on his ride cymbal that’s like this citron, gossamer bridge for Cooke’s voice dance across. When Muhammad Ali said, “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” he may have had Cooke in mind on the Lepidoptera front. Here, amid the earthiness, the grunting, the insistence of being born and being reborn—not in the Christian, Bible-thumping sense but as a person worthy of decency and dignity—Cooke sings one of his prettiest passages in the entire discography. He sets up his own line with a quick hum, a stilling, half-a-bar intro to a lullaby. “I’m going home,” Cooke croons, caressing all the words, but the last the most, and home means so goddamn much. It’s more than abode; it’s 75

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more than away from this toil in this heat, and all of the concomitant metaphors of Blackness in America. “See my woman, whom I love so dear.” Lady Freedom. The America that this is supposed to be and often is not. Which is not “only” a Black thing, though it can be. Cooke didn’t leave you out. Again, he understood demos, because Cooke understood people and what they needed, the forms of help most relevant to all: empathy, equity, inclusivity. He is of primal, protean, raw voice on the Harlem Square Club version of “Chain Gang,” but we experience that idea again of someone writing to reach us. “Voices ought not be measured by how pretty they are,” Cooke once said. “Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth.” Ali liked to describe himself as pretty, by which he meant real. More code. And you don’t need a decoder to know that Sam Cooke is the prettiest of singers and the most truthful. It is Lady Freedom whom this man wishes to join with, to bed and be bedded by. We are talking of human conduct, from person to person, and principle as well, a soul-Kantian imperative of absolute right and absolute wrong. Human to human, and also human-to-idea, which is what those Grecian mortal-god pairings were really about. She goes by many names, this Lady Freedom. For King she is a dream. For Berry she’s that ballplayer who will bowl over the catcher, do whatever is necessary to score. “Everybody help me do it,” Cooke implores the Overtown habitués, dropping the formal lyric, improvising, writing here in this present tense, writing to the crowd, bringing in

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their voices to join with his own. The freedom of the moment, freedom in the midst of a portion of one’s people. “That’s what I’m talking about,” Cooke says, off-mic and so low in the mix you can barely hear him. I’d say turn up the record and you will hear him better, but I also know that by the end of “Chain Gang,” there’s no way you don’t have Harlem Square Club at max volume. Here in Miami in the last winter of Sam Cooke’s life, Lady Freedom is one comely, age-altering, miracle of a figure, with a strong back and a clean mouth perfect for kissing. For Lady Freedom is change.

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Eventually I fell asleep on those long evenings of Night Beat and “Lost and Lookin’,” arising feeling older than I was, aches in my sides and calves, in need of energy and a renewal of purpose—a reminder of what true purpose is. I think we look to works of art for these reminders, especially works of art that connote their own sense of purpose. They can double as a kind of playbook the subject, the primer that is not piecemeal, but rather infuses every last back alley of who we are with the reminder of why we need to push on. Sometimes you push on without knowing what you’re pushing on toward. A work of art like Live at the Harlem Square Club makes you move. And as Cooke had sung, you gotta. I’d pull myself out of bed, swallow some Advil, throw on a couple sweatshirts in the dead of winter, and I’d take to the Boston streets at three or four in the morning. I’d walk for upwards of twenty miles, and I walked most of those miles with Live at the Harlem Square Club playing in my headphones. Again and again I’d listen. I’d think about being

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sent, trying to self-actuate, to think less about my absence of a destination and more that I was moving. My feet were literally beating on pavement, but something else drummed in my heart and Sam Cooke helped with that beat, which was very faint for quite some time. It is the song of one’s self, the person one seeks to rediscover, and the shedding of older layers as the new person emerges. In that way, we are not so different than from how Sam Cooke wrote his songs in realtime moments and his superfluidity of past, present, future. When I was a kid I watched a lot of Boston Bruins hockey games. There was this player named Nevin Markwart. He was no star—a third-line checker—but he stood out because of his energy. He raced across the ice as if shot from a particle accelerator, and he didn’t just pop people—he left his feet to try to deck his opponents like he was hell bent on driving both them and him through the roof of the rink. I’d play hockey at seven, eight years old in the driveway, pretending I was Markwart, tossing my body into the garage doors as though imaginary foes were skating there, just about rattling the whole house, likely to the horror of my parents, who’d sometimes stick a head out from the breezeway to tell me to chill. Listening to Live at the Harlem Square Club on those winter mornings as an adult, when it felt like the rest of the world was asleep, encountering neither friend nor foe, nor living form save the rats of Boston, was Markwart-esque, a new understanding of energy. I don’t believe there is a record with more energy than this one. It makes you wish to leap forward into a person you’ve never been, whom you need to be. 80

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There are only a few musical documents in a comparable energy category. The electric half of Bob Dylan’s set at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966. Otis Redding’s Live in Europe. Jerry Lee Lewis’s Live at the Star Club, Hamburg. The Beatles’ long medley on Abbey Road. The beginning of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The Stone Roses’ attempt to prove they still had it as a live band at Glasgow Green in 1990. The orgastic “Sing Sing Sing” finale to Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall gig. These are rocket launchers. They are not just sonic and cerebral experiences—they are physical experiences, as much as playing in a football game, dancing a ballet, having sex, pushing yourself through a workout, or trying to walk your way out of the lowest circles of an existential crisis of the soul when you are not sure on one Sunday if you will live to see the next. In Miami, Cooke entreats the crowd to stay with him, to come with him, pledging that he will never leave them. He doesn’t mean that he won’t blow this town to play somewhere else in a week. Certain works of art walk beside you in this life, which is what they are built to do—the figurative side of walking side by side. They’re potentially always there. The American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan remarked, “Heroism is endurance for one moment more.” In Overtown, in an era of the dehumanization of the Black people attending this gig, Cooke is helping his brothers and sisters to endure. He provides a secular form of faith. We need not pray to God, but we do need to look within for forbearance, for that heroism. He’s by the side of these concert-goers and always will be in the consequential sense. 81

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More importantly, he can help you stand by your own side, so to speak. Art props us up until we can ourselves get better at the job. You self-prop, you self-send, and eventually you arrive where you should and deserve to. Had I been in that crowd on that night—just as you can be in that crowd now, after a fashion, every time you cue up the album—I would have felt richly propped. Not only propped—I would have felt loved. Which might be the miracle of art like this— because even theoretically I could barely imagine what love was. The tactility of Live at the Harlem Square Club is unlike that with any other record. To listen to it is to feel as if you’re physically being touched. That’s partially why Markwart came to my mind, that image of an extreme attempt at extreme touching—throwing yourself bodily into someone at twentyfive miles per hour isn’t exactly a limp-handed handshake or a palm in the small of the back. M.R. James was an English writer of ghost stories and a provost at King’s College. Each year, on Christmas Eve, he invites his colleagues and favorite students to his room, where he’d read a terror tale he had written, altering it as he went along, just as Sam Cooke alters his earlier songs, producing new compositional product in real time. James himself was a buttoned-down fellow, but his stories were somatic like Sam Cooke could be somatic. Yes, there were various monsters in James’s weird fiction, but it wasn’t just that there was this hairy revenant in a given tale, but that in reading the prose it was as if the hair of the revenant was being rubbed up and down your face. An intense, inescapable tactility. M.R. James represents the horror version. Cooke signifies not necessarily 82

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the post-horror version, so much as the “I feel you, we’ll carry on” version. The “I got you” version. On the Harlem Square Club medley of “It’s Alright”/“For Sentimental Reasons,” Cooke advises what to do after a bad fight with one’s lover. He’s caught up in this moment, unfiltered as he is throughout the gig—for all of the impeccable control, it’s also a raw, compositional brainstorming session—and cautions that you shouldn’t go hitting her, which shouldn’t need saying, but there it is. He’s in front of a crowd but also singing as if there is no one else within 100 miles. The band does this honeyed, aureated vamp behind him, but Cooke isn’t quite ready to start—he hums instead, as if to himself, taking the time to give himself that pleasure. It’s a sweetly onanistic series of hums, a private moment that’s okay for us to witness. The singer’s girl has been unfaithful. She may be in repose, post-coitus, from the earlier portion of her evening with someone else. And the singer, utilizing the same cadence as the one used with the hums, now begins to articulate words that have a hum-like aspect. They are words, sure, but they are as much caresses. They are ghost notes that touch us. “It’s alright,” Cooke sings, repeatedly, “It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright.” The selflessness might seem imponderable at first. I think of Christ washing feet, but there is also horror—not the Jamesian horror of ghosts and their tactility but the physicality of betrayal. The smell of the another on the person one loves. The presence of the seed of another, even. “It’s alright,” Cooke sings, “It’s alright.” He assuages. There is nothing like this on record. The Who featured an extended coda of expiation on “A Quick One (While He’s Away),” but for all of the earnest 83

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sentiment, tongues were in cheeks. Whereas, this is stark emotional nakedness, euphonically rendered, peaceably intended, even if guts are all but laid out on the floor. The singer is leaving in a few minutes—perhaps he could share a ride with Schubert’s young man from Winterreise— which we know because he tells the woman that if she ever needs him, he’s only a phone call away. “Just try me,” Cooke adds, and I am honestly not sure if he says it, sings it, or hums it. You barely know if it’s a voice or a horn. That hard evening concluded—but also one of patience and clemency—the second half of the medley finds us at a future point in time, when the singer is perhaps with someone else. And now it is working, the romance, the connection. Cornell Dupree plays augmenting, decorative lines on his guitar that frame the singer’s well-spoken Valentine with just the right amount of gilding—nothing tacky, just a bit of gold coloring surrounding the words. Again, we have the self-pleasure angle—Cooke sings, “Oh, I like this song,” editorializing on his own work and showing himself some love in the margins. “I’ve given you my mah-mah-mah-mah-mind,” he sings, taking the hard “i” and converting it into a soft “a” that offers a bumper crop of stretched “h’s”—one of his power moves. When Sam Cooke writes these possibilities into his vocals, you know it’s playing-for-keeps time. Immediately after, he wants to engage the crowd in call-and-response singing. “Everybody!” he exhorts, and the way that everyone does join in—exactly where they’re supposed to—on “I think of you every morning” makes one think Cooke had been rehearsing with these people for a couple weeks. 84

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When I heard this the first few times, I wondered if it had been overdubbed in later. They’re bang on. The crowd sounds like a whole damn city singing along. “You’re sounding good,” Cooke opines, coaching them up. Trust me—these people know they sound good. “I dream of you every cottonpickin’ night,” Cooke ad libs—writes—and yes, of course, he is playing off of an activity associated with slaves and that everyone at that club associated with slavery. The crowd roars in vocal unison. “Hold my hand, fellas,” Cooke says to his band, and Cooke and Gardner do this kind of vocal-drum duet on the outro, Cooke going high, Gardner going low. They’re like that cypress tree in Van Gogh’s Starry Night, bridging soil and heavens. We can think of the Harlem Square Club set as one big song, which is getting worked and reworked, revealing the assorted images of various levels of underdrawing, this kind of painting-in-reverse so as to move forward. The gig is the composition. The soul sonata. The writing is in every aspect of that performance. The helming, the overseeing, the look Cooke shoots to June Gardner to create another beat that allows him to syncopate a vocal, build in another melisma, turn his voice into a horn, situate a descant in a minor key above a passage in a major key. That estuarial blending of lows and highs, major and minor, vocal through-lines and harmonies (with Cooke harmonizing with himself), is what we’re going to have on “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a masterpiece’s version of a masterpiece, and a work of art that is not composed without this gig, where it is also in a very real way composed. Call it 85

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a track he didn’t get to within the whole of this performance in which we can adumbrate its emerging form. There is somberness to Live at the Harlem Square Club, despite the energy. Strictly speaking, we have blues numbers here, shouted cries of pain—but the whole thing sounds like the actual spirit of what it means to overcome. Carry on. Live your life like a thrown knife. Or like a shot arrow. The medley is set up by “Cupid.” “Here’s another song that . . .” Cooke begins by way of introducing the hit that everyone would have known, as the band races ahead of him. June Gardner pushes these guys like a motherfucker. Cooke forgoes a formal intro and does a little rap: “Tell me, tell me, tell me . . . ,” then sings a single elemental and ornamental word—“Tulipppppp”—before adding, “Maybe you remember this one, a very nice little song.” The studio version was a mid-tempo number released in May 1961, with a Latin touch, not uncommon in the early part of the decade—Ray Charles was another polystylist Black artist who went to that particular well. The kick in the Cooke studio version came courtesy of Earl Palmer on drums, a powerful player but one lacking Gardner’s fluidity. Palmer can drive a beat, but he doesn’t dislocate a track from its time signature the way that Gardner does on Harlem Square Club. Gardner frees the pulse, like Elvin Jones would with John Coltrane, but whereas Coltrane took his flights on tenor sax, Cooke uses a voice that is noticeably horn-like. Our earliest music teachers say that the voice is an instrument, and you think, well, no shit, but there’s a deeper layer to the statement; apart from the sense delivered by the words, a 86

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voice like Cooke’s, in terms of its timbre and function, is saxlike, but also pianistic, lute-ish, organ-esque, etc. It is vocal and instrumental at once. Pretend that you don’t know English when you listen to him sing. Hear the voice as pure sound. Notice how it still speaks to you, right? The carrier of that articulacy has changed but not the extent. When you free the pulse, as Gardner does, you widen the parameters of the song, and you alter what its identity can be, creating room for another instrument to range further in dominion over the soundscape, because ultimately it is the leader, but also a leader that can take and welcome cues. Turn a cue into a fresh idea. Cooke’s crack band is part of his writing process on evenings like this one. They abet in his unpacking of a temporal palimpsest, serve as allies in composition. With the studio recording of “Cupid,” guitarist Clifton White builds a framework of nice, clean chords, a kind of fence that might as well have been whitewashed by Tom Sawyer; he’s dirty here, though, greasy and funky, with scuffed and scuzzy chordal blocks that his fretboard partner Clifton Dupree riffs on as part of the dual-guitar attack, adding vibrato to White’s oil-coated rhythmic bedrock. White is the real timekeeper, not the drummer, which is what we expect a drummer to be, and what we get with Earl Palmer on the studio version. The altoist Jackie McLean cut an album in 1962 called Let Freedom Ring. Suffice it to say, Cooke and the boys are ringing it. On Harlem Square Club, studio tracks have a knack for sounding like they have stood in line and are now casting a vote, with the voice and representation that is their due. They 87

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self-assert. They weren’t shackled before—let’s not undersell Sam Cooke’s studio artistry in the years prior to Live at the Harlem Square Club. But if there is such a thing as extraliberation, in song form, these songs are extra-liberated here. Or maybe they are just growing into what they’ve collectively been journeying toward. Gardner cues Cooke’s entrance into each chorus with a tom-tom roll and a bass drum capper. During the sessions for “Don’t Let Me Down,” John Lennon requested that Ringo Starr provide a beat that gave him the courage to come screaming in, as he put it. Gardner does something similar, but it’s more like companionship, an extra fillip of impetus, a “come on now, buddy, time to send your missive” pep talk. Cooke doesn’t get all guttural even on the coda—which he does sometimes, when he wants to convey substance, and as he did with boosted panache a few numbers back on “Chain Gang.” But the gang is set free now, racing out over the countryside, traveling home—and hoping for a better one than that which had been left before. Cooke’s voice resembles a trumpet worked with a plunger mute as the song reaches its conclusion. That voice is a clarion call of hard-fought advancement and intended arrival— Gabriel coming to meet Cupid. But in our cognizance of how the drum rolls send Cooke into the choruses—which are themselves epistolary, like a letter written to an agent of sorts for some help—we are aware of the stakes. The singer, though, has an agency unto himself. He’s one more self-sender. So naturally he cuts loose in celebration of this epiphany and gives his vocal the wah-wah effect near the end, which has an uplifting plaintiveness, a de-pinioning of voice in both a 88

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sound sense and a metaphorical one. We all want an equal voice. Here the voice is second to none. Earthiness would prove anchoring, so instead this portion of the soul sonata is focused on soaring and invoking a life form—the cherub of the title—that already does soar. It’s about getting on the same level, a raising up. The Live at the Harlem Square Club version of “Cupid” is a passion piece, whereas the studio take is a praline kiss. The passion is for equity, of being eyeball to eyeball. Our singer writes to reach this figure—it’s more of a parley, less the calling in of a favor—because he believes in his cause. Thus there’s no need for Cooke to scream and shout, given that implications we’ve already been made to feel—without having to note them consciously—do the heavy-lifting. So what you’re hearing is a full, 100 percent effect but with something else, paradoxically, held back. This is exactly what Cooke will soon do on the piece of music that would have made him vital to his world even if he had written nothing else. These are the techniques of a song and studio recording created with Harlem Square Club energy and tools. Those tools are being honed—written—as the Overtown crowd beats feet to the beat, in both the literal and metaphoric ways. And as Cooke knew, what you hold back now is what you can use to really lay people out later. A sophistication of energy beyond the simpler bounds of Nevin Markwart energy. An energy that saves. An energy that helps one keep going. Which, if it’s not the same thing, is certainly all wrapped together. * * * 89

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As I lit out into the Boston pre-dawn, crossing through the Public Garden where mallards huddled together for warmth, making my way down Boylston Street, listening to Cooke, I felt as if I could leave my body and take to the air. Put a shoulder against the clouds. Music does not get more adrenalized than it does on this record. I’d count how many churches I passed, until they numbered so many that I gave up the numerical ghost, as Cooke himself had once given up the church. Live at the Harlem Square Club is an album of what I call timeless immediacy. It installs a listener in a situational totality; what it was like to be in a time and place—the room where this music was made, on that night, in front of these people. There’s an Anton Chekhov story called “The Student,” in which a young man studying for a career in the church is coming home late at night through a woods where he encounters a widowed mother and her widowed daughter at a fire. He sits with them, and they begin speaking of the Biblical story in which Christ says to Peter that the latter will deny him three times. We all know how that goes. The student—another self-sender—resumes his journey home, thinking how the cold, the wind, the smoke from the fire, the story of Peter going back 1900 years, unites him, and these women, with moments in places that have passed and also not passed, on account of their resonance. The idea of timeless immediacy. Chekhov’s student could walk a city street, put on headphones and crank up the Miami version of “Twistin’ the Night Away,” and he’d feel connected to this particular biosphere. 90

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Live albums, of course, do not technically have demos—as in demonstration discs, to use the full term—the way songs do. We’ve looked at Cooke’s demo for “You Send Me,” which put forward the song’s rhythm and blues identity before a string glissandos disguised it, but only to those unfamiliar with the morphability of Cooke’s process. Morphing, though, does not change essence. It alters appearance. Depending upon how we define a live album, Cooke has already had a masterwork in the genre that predates Live at the Harlem Square Club and which is also connected to it. On July 22, 1955, a Friday night, Cooke’s unit the Soul Stirrers appears for a multi-artist gig at Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium. The group’s name was a catch-all for a shifting roster of talent. Silas Roy Crain helped found the quartet in Texas in the late 1920s. They were recorded by the likes of Alan Lomax in 1936. Their raison d’être was jubilee singing over straight-up soul saving. Early in the career of the Strokes, front man Julian Casablancas was asked what the band’s guiding principle was, to which he replied along the lines of, “We just wanna do what we do, and rock your balls off.” Cooke wasn’t dissimilar at the outset of his professional career. He just sang about God, which is less obviously related to ball-rocking. He also wanted you think, as he himself was growing as a thinker. Cooke joins in 1950, departing six years later, knowing he can never return. His studio recordings with his fellow Soul Stirrers could be uneven. Cooke was never a simple singer. He has techniques he must utilize to come across to his listeners. We’ve listened as he interpolates those “a” sounds, for instance, and his ability to appear to self-harmonize is 91

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vital in Overtown. The Cooke of Live at the Harlem Square Club creates vocal riffs, which largely replace any other form of riff. Throughout his discography, you’ll find little in the way of the ostinato, unless it is derived from Cooke’s voice. He riffs across the whole of the Miami gig, but he first discovered—as if by accident—the approach on the Soul Stirrers’ 1951 hit 78, “Jesus Gave Me Water.” He warbles the first word, which is “oh,” turning it into a protracted meditation. It’s total vocal command before an “actual” word has been sung, the establishment of a presence. The ghost note. He who knows. He who can lead, in a song which will itself is about the singer being led. Christ is doing the leading within the song, but the Cooke installment of the Soul Stirrers was never about dogma. You can feel him exploring as he sings. He’s writing in this moment, right back at the beginning. We listen and we don’t know which way he’ll go, and I don’t think he did either. He’s vocally composing “live,” reacting to the setting, a developing narrative. He hits a high note, which encourages him to try another later, given how well it worked. One of the key moments in the Sam Cooke journey occurs as we get about three-quarters of the way through, with another occurring in the song’s last flourish on the outro. Throughout Cooke sings the titular refrain without the “me.” It’s this phantom “me”—you think it’s there, but you don’t actually hear it. Cooke folds it into something larger. For all of his presence as a singer, Cooke was also a vocal artist of refractions. He doesn’t have to enunciate a word to lodge that word and concomitant sentiment, idea, association in your mind. 92

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He says the word “water” an awful lot in this song, but now he stretches it, makes the internal vowel sounds rise as if they’ve been glacially thrust skyward, a mountain peak where one had not been previously. An immediate mountain. He knew, in this stretch of seconds, that he had something, just as he’ll continue to develop it in Miami as he formulates a song that pulls off a kind of miracle blend, being both a purely spiritual number and a purely secular one. An earthly holiness, open to the God-fearing and the God-abrogating. And all colors and creeds, too. On the coda of “Jesus Gave Me Water,” Cooke must have shocked the hell out of his fellow Soul Stirrers, when he starts hammering on the word “water,” a cascade of vocal notes. It’s as if we’re being baptized in someone else’s immanence of artistry, becoming transformed as they are themselves transforming. You may simply exclaim a happy, “What the . . .” The Stirrers’ portion of the Shrine gig has comparable energy to that of the Harlem Square Club session. Three songs, twenty minutes, and, frankly, you don’t know how much more you can take, and I mean that in a good way. Cooke was competitive, and no doubt he aimed to let everyone else on that bill know who was the realest of real deals. “I Have a Friend Above All Others” is the first number, with Cooke turning the line of the title into a song unto itself. I have never heard anyone do so much with the “I” pronoun. The way Sam Cooke sings that word, “I,” comes off as meaning “all of us.” His ability to foster community in a stretched syllable is matchless. Naturally he stuffs the “I” 93

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with his elongated succession of “a’s.” The rest of the group harmonizes behind him, but Cooke is as naked as he is in “Lost and Lookin’.” He is the song. He’s a mature artist at this late juncture of his Soul Stirrers career, but one also plainly in flux, being born again in view of an audience and not in the religious meaning of the phrase. Alan Lomax made field recordings of the likes of Son House and Blind Willie McTell, so it’s fitting that he also once made one of the Soul Stirrers, given that this particular field recording, from LA, brings us home to Miami eight years later. The second number, “Be with Me Jesus,” features call-and-response. Cooke’s is the answering voice, but in answering as he does, that rejoinder vocal becomes the lead vocal. Cooke inverts. Even in this ostensibly simple tune, he inverts songwriting expectations. You listen past the putative lead vocal to get to Cooke. You must locate his voice. It is the beacon, or the raft that takes us in the direction of the beacon. Maybe it’s both. His notes are striated, they have a quality of gravel, but also an encompassing flow, a surrounding river of energy. It’s a necklace of sun around your neck out in the middle of your hard day, or your hard year, the times you are endeavoring not just to get through but to get through well— more intact as who you are than when you started. When Cooke discussed his career with the Soul Stirrers, he was also careful to say that he sung spirituals, not gospel numbers, which is telling. Most people who listened to the Stirrers would have been thinking along the lines of the latter. I don’t know this for certain, but I bet the other members of the group did themselves. In that Dick Clark interview on American Bandstand, Cooke speaks of these spirituals 94

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in his career of yore, and the distinction matters. Gospel music is what is sung inside of a church, but a spiritual is outdoors music. Or, if not the music of outside, the music that travels. Spirituals were sung in plantation fields. They’re work songs, but also songs of hope. Organic, lived in, caked with dirt, sweat, blood, the pus that runs from bust open blisters, the juice of the soul, if the soul has juice. A spiritual would be the field recording version of what someone else might call gospel. There’s a different level of secularism in that spiritual, a perpetual outdoors-ness. We inhabit the space of the spiritual, and the spiritual inhabits us within our own space—fields of inner consciousness. Live at the Harlem Square Club is a field recording that is also a disc of spirituals or one long, woven spiritual. These are urban spirituals, if you like, secular spirituals, post-gospel spirituals. Musically speaking, what we hear from Overtown is similar to that which transpired at the Shrine Auditorium, only it’s more sophisticated. We could say, “Better written.” Cooke has these moments of writerly brilliance even in the pre-“You Send Me” period, but they’re centered on specific points, rather than whole entities. The entire Overtown set is a work of writing, a large-form piece. It’s what Cooke was always working toward, building up, figuring out as he went, and as he sang and wrote, and wrote and sang; those concepts, for him, are more closely related than the genres of gospel and spiritual music. Spirituals were what you took for the road, the lighting out, the next audience, the song you’d write that encapsulated the past of a people and of a nation, which we can all carry around with us. 95

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The final song of the Shrine gig, “Nearer to Thee,” could double as Cooke’s mission statement as a developing vocal and writing artist. He roars but with tenderness. When he sounds angry, it comes off as mournfully so, a man— narrator—hurt and frustrated by our human shortcomings, trying to make up the difference in song, doubling down not on hate, fear, or rage but what I can only term as love. His voice has the horn-quality, but this is a raspier horn of the gut-bucket style we experience with the classic stomping big Texas tenors like Herschel Evans from the Count Basie band. Cooke doesn’t yet have filigree—his power is rawer than the finesse-power of Live at the Harlem Square Club. He can reach back and chuck it 100 mph, to use a baseball analogy, but he doesn’t yet know that he can touch 100 with ease, just by fine-tuning his mechanics. Or, put another way, reaching another level of sophistication in his real-time writing with its off-stage undercurrents and evolution. At the end of the performance, Cooke sings off-mic. Something has carried him away. I don’t know what. He’s obviously walking the stage, though. Maybe the need to beat feet, to light out, is getting the best of him. (The ladies are audibly reacting to his presence. I think we can assume there were quite a few wet seats to be found after, much as with the teenybopper Beatles shows.) He starts saying just how hard he’s praying to Jesus, but I never hear it as “Help me, Lord,” but rather that Cooke, or any one of us, can be the bringer of a personalized, and universal, brand of light, and the bringer of light for others. He’s liberated by his own sound, testing its physicality, shading his voice by echo and refraction, giving all of himself 96

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while suggesting a second self, as if he is at once protagonist and foil, the hero and the Greek chorus. He’s not complacent, nor stationary. He moves, approaches from all angles— which is literally what he’s doing with the microphone in this case—and as a questing, questioning person, Sam Cooke impels us to trust him. He’s a community-maker who both asks—always—and answers—when he is able to and it serves others well. When I listen to this seminal piece of sound—which is actually seminal in that it helps to birth something else— and Live at the Harlem Square Club back-to-back, I find it impossible to believe he didn’t have a thought or two regarding LA in 1955 pass through his mind in Miami in 1963. Understanding place as well as he did, drawing distinctions as capable as Sam Cooke could—like between “gospel” and “spirituals”—he understood places he could get to and these listeners as well. And those who were not his listeners yet. Listeners who still have not been born and who Cooke connects to as he did the crowd in Miami, most of whose members have departed this, but not before experiencing the change that can come with experiencing Cooke firsthand. But with Cooke, firsthand can be defined a number of different ways. I don’t think it’s possible to listen to Live at the Harlem Square Club and have the word “secondhand” enter your brain. It makes sense that he felt he needed to leave the Soul Stirrers, even beyond his desire for money, which was always important to him. Sam Cooke’s best spirituals would be of the secular nature. They could feel, as with “A Change Is Gonna Come,” that someone or something post-human had a co97

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credit in the writing, but they’re the stuff of the fields, the cities, the open spaces, the suburbs, the ghetto. Cooke made all of outdoors a church by elevating the human component. Or, if not elevating it on his own, saying, in effect, “why should we not uplift ourselves, and here is where I think we should begin.” The Shrine tape is one of the great fragments in all of rock and soul, or however we choose to classify it. A scrap of an evening, a field recording, even rhythm and blues. You could argue that it’s the first important live album this medium had produced, if we’re to lump it in with the work of the early rock and rollers, allowing that it’s not verboten to call what the Soul Stirrers were doing by 1955 a form of what it was that Chuck Berry, the Five Royales, and Bo Diddley were also doing. I’m buying that. It’s useful with Cooke, as we have seen, to dispense with labels. Personally, I’ve always been captivated by the concept of the live album. They’re the records I enjoy reading about the most. I get excited when a favorite band has one coming out or a historic gig has been plucked from the vaults and now the world gets to hear it. They make my imagination surge because we might think of a studio album as how a given thing was—there’s a past-tense quality—whereas a live album is how life is. Not what was, even though it depicts a night that is no more. Cooke only cut concept albums as he went further into his career. In the age of the single, Cooke dominated on that front, but he was the rare pop musician who delivered artistic statements in long-player form. Live at the Harlem Square Club is no less of a concept album, which live albums almost never are. Usually they are postcards from the road, 98

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or another way to package songs you already know, but in slightly different guises. As we’ve seen, Harlem Square Club is Cooke’s Black album, just as Prince would have—and shelve—his own, decades later. It’s the Blackest music he ever made, but it’s also the most universal, until we reach the end of Cooke’s journey with its apotheosis in “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Radio listeners were used to hearing Cooke with strings. They had a fringe of classical music, which we almost always think of as white. People wouldn’t have been namechecking William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (1934) when they heard the likes of “Wonderful World.” Harlem Square Club is earthen, but also urbane. These players are as sophisticated as the bebop Modernists—Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk—had been, and that was out and out art music. You sat down and listened to it. Sure, one could dance as well, but the implied directive was that of “hear me, drink me in.” Same goes for Cooke and his Miami band. Strings are not an alien prospect, given that even as you sweat and dance—or walk, in my case—you’re cognizant of a gravity, of a need to pay attention, maybe make notes, and revisit, revisit, revisit. Yes, this is Cooke’s Black album, but I’d say we’re better served thinking of it as his liberation album. His self-liberation album. Cooke’s art has societal concern and certainly a zealous concern for the African American people. He’s a spiritual freedom fighter. He’s also a veritable Muhammad Ali in regard to fighting for the person within, honing one’s being, and then lending a voice, a will, a purpose, to societal change. He moves from the personal to the universal better than even the Beatles. Cooke listened to a lot of Dylan, and in 99

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this same year of 1963, he hears “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which he in turn covers on what will become the only released live album of his career, in 1964’s Sam Cooke at the Copa—made mostly with white musicians, though Clifton White and June Gardner are on hand. “Blowin’” figures into the brainstorm—as does Miami and the resulting would-be concept album that is deemed too Black for the American public until the mid-1980s—that gets us to “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The Cooke song makes the Dylan anthem seem platitudinous, a work that plays loosey-goose-y with imagery, flirting with cliché, but not fully succumbing. It could be a Woody Guthrie number, a song for children that works for adults. We must remember—Dylan still had a jonesing to be Guthrie, and only in 1963 was he beginning to do what Sam Cooke had been doing for years. Bob pushed Sam, but Sam had already been pushing Bob, who understood that Cooke wasn’t just some soul singer. You could love Little Willie John, but not quite as how you could love Sam Cooke. Loving Sam Cooke could feel like loving yourself. His best material has that built-in, vested interest. You have skin in Sam Cooke’s game. Dylan wasn’t the universalist that Cooke was, though, and universality is the locus of Cooke’s songwriting genius, especially as he tailors that universality for specific groups and people, while simultaneously beckoning to those who might appear removed or estranged from the concerns of the Civil Rights era and inviting them to have a seat at the table. He subsumes us in the rich humanity of his art. That’s his fertile ground; it’s underfoot as his secular spirituals reach us, and journey off with us, the songs that all but 100

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go in our pockets. He’s a maker of concept albums, and he’s a concept singer, too. His voice is a concept album, depending upon what the concept is at the time. It’s also a writing instrument. And when Sam Cooke has a party, everyone is invited, though you feel as if he wrote your card first. I feel that, and it means something to me. If you were Black in 1963—or Black at simply anytime in America—it touches upon the impossible to overstate what Sam Cooke was doing. Cooke’s January 1962 single, “Twistin’ the Night Away,” served notice that a first-rate writer would be moving up the charts (reaching the top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 and no. 1 in Billboard’s R&B listings). The song—which follows next in the Miami setlist—is about a party: a very well-observed party. Cooke the writer was a master of eidetic recall. The song will also feature on his concept album of the same name. The Twist itself was in part popular because any boob could do it—you needn’t be Fred Astaire to cut a twist-based rug. For most popular musicians, Chubby Checker and his dance craze represented a curse. Everyone had to twist for a spell, just as in 1999 writers had to pen Doomsday Y2K stories. Cooke turned what ought to have been a musical limitation into a songwriting challenge and, ultimately, a skill. He excelled at stacking details in a way so that what might have been a little added up to a lot. Again, he’s a Chekhovian fellow. Think of how this plays out in Miami. The people dancing at this club are living the life of the song. A well-dressed man asks a comely woman to dance, and the narrator—the singer—watches, just as Cooke narrates and watches now. 101

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He’s dancin’ with the chick in slacks She’s a’movin’ up and back Oh man, they’re ain’t nothin’ like Twistin’ the night away Cooke was a virtuoso of the demotic (e.g., “chick in slacks,” which additionally sounds a lot like “chicken slats,” a bit of hip slang) while also imbuing it with the regality of what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the practiced eye of the commander.” He is whole as an artist because he is dyadic, much like Descartes spoke of the human unit as a blend of mind and body, but the components are symbiotic. They inform each other. He’s the self-sender because the mind understands that the body can capitalize on will. A parsonage of personage. The single human unit is also a team. We are each of us “one” and more than one. Nor is it hard to feel that one is on Team Cooke. Note how he slips in the crucial “a,” before “movin’,” the letter representing the first of everything, including the fresh start, that Cooke returns to again and again in his most commanding art. It’s his tabula rasa of possibility. He leads from an effaced slate, because his art—his writing—issues new dictums we naturally connect with given how we see ourselves in relation to them. The “up and back” is surely sexual but appropriately with a twist—this isn’t a missionary position set-up. It’s trading off, it’s equity, and the arched back belongs to the more altitudinous, let us say, female. Up and back, in and out. Everyone has a turn. We know what he means, but even as he sweats all over the Miami stage, he’s earnest rather than gratuitous. Sam Cooke loved the ladies, but he doesn’t need to titillate. He wants to

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free us, or help us free ourselves, whatever that might mean from person-to-person. Cut loose for an evening, maybe. Or make a march on societal mores in need of trampling. Being the keeper of one’s brother by according him what one desires most for himself. Sex is human, and it will be a part of this—but it’s more about reciprocity. With the advent of this number in Miami, the intensity ratchets up. Cooke is a multifaceted auteur, and he’s an auteur of energy. Don’t sleep on energy—it’s one of life’s most underrated qualities. You might say to yourself, “It’s just putting in the work, trying,” but it’s not—energy comes from a fount within. You have it or you don’t. Energy is not the same as task-handling, or “let’s get ‘er done.” Energy is a radiance of everything you are, internal essence outwardly actuated. No great art has ever lacked for energy. You can’t have art of a timeless character without it. Maybe no art has more energy than what Cooke and his band put forth from this point on. Each time we think we have topped out at a crescendo, he goes up once more. There’s old school showmanship in that idea, but transcendence is its own radiant beast, or chimera. Cooke’s energy extends and enters into his fellow musicians. He’s the marette, the connector, the artist as both path-lighter and common denominator. Cooke has a knack for going first while managing to bring up the rear as well. “A-one, a-two, put it anywhere” Cooke counts in the Miami performance of “Twistin’ the Night Away.” A suggestion of the sexual. Openness. The band roast the groove, and they roast it fast. Huge bass drum accents from Gardner. Jimmy Lewis’s walking bass drum figures bust into a sprint, like he’s crashed through into Jaco Pastorius territory. 103

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The group is playing so fast—they’re like the soul Ramones—that Cooke can’t fit in the word “gay” on the line “Everybody’s feeling gay” and get to the next line on time. He skips across the beat, as if the rhythm is tantamount to a winding column of stairs that he takes two-at-a-time, with no dip in energy or a need to catch his breath. Rather, he appears to be getting stronger, virility personified in vocal form. King Curtis blows a tenor solo straight from the Illinois Jacquet handbook, a sidewinding bolt of stage-sweeping electricity as Cooke screams, “Oh yeah, oh yeah!” off-mic. Your very fingertips perhaps feel like they are buzzing. Cooke hits upon an idea and wonders aloud if everyone has a handkerchief, which they should then take out of their pockets and start passing them around as if they’re flowers, symbols of mutual respect, community. The “water water water” moment of the Soul Stirrers’ “Jesus Gave Me Water” has become this latest Cooke-ian invocation. “Take the handkerchief ‘round,” he instructs, “take it ‘round, take it ‘round, take it ‘round.” That last word, in this setting, with these people moving these symbols between each other, symbols lifted out of from the pockets over their hearts, takes on geometrical resonance, a circle of oneness, a global slant in miniature. Clifton White’s fingers must be bleeding by now, because he is comping on his guitar as though slowing down would burn away his hands, and who wants that? As White shreds up and down his guitar, Cooke is emphasizing the opening pronoun-verb tandem of “They’re twistin’ the night away.”

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It’s like he’s saying, “And why shouldn’t we be twistin’ just as hard?” Why not us, indeed. There is a density to this performance that you won’t even get in heavy metal, but it still floats, remains ethereal, but cyclonically ethereal. The phrase “raise the roof ” was invented for an in-concert interlude such as this. Round and round it goes: those handkerchiefs, the rhythm, Gardner’s fills, Cooke’s words, and a form of hope that is indubitably alive because it is the best kind of hope— that which connects to possibility. Here in an enclave, in front of just a few hundred people, on a winter night in the weeks following Christmas, Sam Cooke’s effaced slate now feels like an advent calendar. There is no blankness. There is the opposite of blankness. No wonder everyone is feeling gay. No wonder he didn’t even need to say it.

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When Schubert completed Winterreise in 1827 and played it for his friends—supporters so ardent that they carried scraps of Schubert’s compositions and letters around with them—it was met with disapproval. Why would the composer wish to write something this sad and sobering? Was he not well? Eight months after the concert in Miami, Cooke and his band were once again in the South. Their bus is en route to Shreveport, Louisiana, where Cooke has called ahead to make reservations at a Holiday Inn. Upon their arrival, and noting that the guests are Black, the hotel manager says that there are no vacancies. Cooke does not fare well with hostelry management in the last fourteen months of his life. His death comes on December 11, 1964, when he takes a woman—a prostitute, unbeknownst to him—to an LA hotel room. While he’s in the bathroom, she relieves him of his money and his clothes. Or he threatens her and she flees. We don’t know. Cooke ends up at the front desk, naked save one shoe and a sports jacket. The woman working the desk will say that Cooke attacked her. She shoots him dead.

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The Louisiana incident will bear different fruit. It is related to the strange fruit that Billie Holiday knew so well, but this crop will in turn bear something else itself. Cooke loses his temper, as we can readily understand. He berates the manager. His wife Barbara tells him that if they don’t go, he’ll be killed. The unintentional prescience is harrowing. Cooke and his retinue blow, get back on the bus, lay on the horn as they drive through town to the “colored” motel. The cops are waiting for them when they get there. Just as a group of roadside prison workers informed the creation of “Chain Gang,” so too does this incident play its part in Sam Cooke’s defining work of art, one that does not exist had he not sketched out portions of its soul—and its musical make-up, its sonic scaffolding—in Miami. He hears Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in August 1963, thinks that if Dylan can do this—and Dylan seemed to be speaking for Black people—why on God’s earth shouldn’t Sam Cooke? What has taken him so long, in fact? As we’ve seen with Cooke, he creates across the temporal plain. He’s the artist as journeyer, he is the creator who leaves when it is time to go, to reach the next stop of the road. His map is internal, his impact meant for the external world. Schubert was unperturbed by the reaction of his friends, even if it was dissimilar to any response they had had to his prior work. As a new winter dawns at the end of 1963, Sam Cooke formally writes “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a song he has been writing for a long time. The gestation is not dilatory, so much as it took as long as it took, and Cooke had the faith in himself to let the song come as it came. When we listen to Live at the Harlem Square Club, enmesh ourselves 108

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in its dualistic spiritual and secular nature, the conjoining of worlds that would seem disparate, the blended qualities of soul and art music, soul and soul, Grecian pensiveness and somatic energy, the narrative-making in song form, those inserted, opened-up “a” sounds that might as well crack open a universe and let us espy a world both beyond our own and indicative of who we are, we understand how close Sam Cooke is getting to that which he was self-sent toward in the first place. Before “A Change Is Gonna Come” is worked up in the studio, with a string arrangement that further adds to its “I am on the Mount and I am telling you the truth” aspect, Cooke plays the song on acoustic guitar for his protégé Bobby Womack. The latter remarks that it sounds like death. He doesn’t mean death as in the end—he means a prefiguration of life, of rising up. The bird with wings out of the ashes. The strange fruit cleared from the poplar trees that dances once more with two feet on the ground. Sam Cooke wrote our greatest song of hope. It is thus because it is rooted in reality. Back in Overtown, the band swing a Count Basie-styled groove on “Somebody Have Mercy.” “Somebody have mercy/I don’t know what is wrong with me,” Cooke sings, riffing on a kind of internalized self-blame we all know at various life stages and which dogged Cooke’s race. The battle that plays out when one is told one is not good enough, not equal. We can know that we are, but the toll is still taken. That’s another reality, one of human nature. The song hails from the Twistin’ the Night Away LP, where it has a Calypso bounce, isn’t the earthen hunk of rhythm we experience in the live context. Cooke interpolates bits from 109

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the “Matchbox” number, a blues that we find repurposed throughout that particular idiom, leaking into soul and rock and roll as well. In his vocal stylizations, the words become Cooke’s own. “I’m going down to the bus station, baby,” he sings, “With a suitcase in my hand.” That first line is pure narrativemaking. Think of John Lennon starting “Strawberry Fields Forever” with “Let me take you down.” The earliest takes of that song, before it got its LSD-fueled work-up, touch upon Sam Cooke soul. The writing has a comparable precision of detail. The singing is soulful. Cooke then breaks the fourth wall of song by addressing the audience directly, stepping out of character: “Can you imagine me carrying one of them suitcases, honey?” he asks. We’re beckoned into a story, one of journeying, with a bus prominently placed. Sam Cooke’s soul-circumlocution. Take a second and note that his voice is stronger now than at the beginning of the evening. This won’t seem possible, but he’s paced himself. He’s the pitcher who always has another few miles-per-hour to add to the fastball if he needs it. Cooke needs it, because we need it, and he’s giving us what we need. He’s morphing into a human force of nature. A human force of nature primed to prevail against an unnatural order. And he’s confident. “I’m gonna grab me an armful of Greyhound”—meaning the bus—Cooke sings, a glorious boast that is not hubristic because we intuit veracity, “and ride just as far as I can,” which also sounds like “write justice just as much as I can,” and might as well be. After King Curtis’s most volcanic solo of the evening—he even splits some notes, like John Coltrane would do in the Giant Steps 110

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era—Cooke returns to tell us once more how he’ll travel, singing and laughing simultaneously. Cooke can sing a laugh like no one else can. I can’t think of anyone who does anything vaguely like this. It’s all part of his paint box. He has that “cotton-pickin’” matchbox-sized hole in his clothes, and once more we have that reference to incivility and inequity that everyone in Overtown would have understood, as we can still understand now. “I got such a long way to get there,” he adds, just about popping out of his stage uniform, “and such a short time to go.” The syntax is busted, but the syntax makes sense. We know exactly what he means. He’s coming far. Arrival is anon. Cooke cues up a second Curtis solo with an extended “Ooooooohhhhh” that sounds like it has been sourced from low in a valley, coaxed upwards by the pied-piping voice, the voice of the leader. As Curtis soloes, Cooke vocalizes, intercutting a refrain of “Lord have mercy on me,” a harkening to the days with the Soul Stirrers when gospel music, for Cooke, became the music of spirituals and in turn an experiential, relatable art for the devout and the atheist alike. The solo concludes, and Cooke’s primary vocal returns and it is as if he is indulging in prayer, but a prayer more like a plea to one’s fellow human. “Somebody somewhere,” he sings, repeating the words again and again, changing their order, fostering communion in sibilance, the fuzzed edges of the “s’s” like the penumbra of a candle. “I want to know what’s wrong with me,” he says again, but with defiance, an assertion that there is nothing the fuck wrong with me at all. He doesn’t want to be over-harsh, or prideful, so he makes a 111

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“joke” after a fashion: “I ain’t got Leukemia,” he says. “That ain’t it.” The song is a bonding exercise, and in the jape that is not a jape, it conjures death, just as “A Change Is Gonna Come” will as well, though it is about anything save sentiments or acceptance of requiescat in pace. Self-send, self-arrive, show others how they may come with you, and take them. “I’m going down to the bus station, baby,” Cooke sings in Miami, an invitation to hear a man’s story. “I was born by the river/In a little tent,” the singer commences “A Change Is Gonna Come.” We know that both singers, characters, protagonists, both Sam Cookes, if you like, have come from somewhere both far off and infinitely human, just as change will, when change arrives. Sam Cooke was as complex an artist as any that popular music has produced, but Live at the Harlem Square Club and “A Change Is Gonna Come”— different but overlapping, bivalvic parts of the same process— can be summarized in a two-word prompt and a three-note query that doubles as a statement depending upon how you answer it: Come with. Why wouldn’t you? * * * Nearing the end of our night in Overtown, we go to another level once more. I find it impossible not to think of extreme physicality when listening to the final three numbers of Live at the Harlem Square Club. The 1987 Canada Cup international

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hockey tournament pitted arguably the two finest teams in the history of the sport in a three-game finals. During the second contest between Team Canada and Team Soviet Union—as much a hockey game as an extension of Beethoven’s Appassionata piano sonata on ice—one of the veteran TV analysts finds himself doubting his own senses and asks his on-air colleague if he’s ever seen a sport played at this pace, to which the answer is, “No, no, I have not.” And so it went, too, in Miami. Cooke was probably incapable of not cutting loose. No matter the work or setting, he always goes for an emotional jugular. This is different than histrionics; it’s earnestness, sincerity. Sam Cooke could sing the phone book and he’ll make you need to know just how Adam Apple and Betty Booperific were faring in their lives. He talked often about how he failed the first time he played the Copa in New York, which was a much different undertaking than headlining the Harlem Square Club in Miami. The audience was white, and most of Cooke’s band was white. He said that he wasn’t ready that first time, and seemed to mean it, though you can’t imagine him not sounding as Sam Cooke was capable of sounding. The Beatles experienced something similar when they played Paris in 1964, and the Parisians all but sat on their hands as the bewildered mop tops played their sets. With the return the next summer, they showed a focus that you don’t get to this degree during the touring years, going so far as to play an encore, which the Beatles never otherwise did. Cooke makes his return to the Copa the summer after the Miami gig, to record what ends up being the only live album 113

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released during his lifetime. Usually it is slated by critics, but that’s mostly because it’s not Live at the Harlem Square Club, rather than that it’s so lacking in its own intrinsic value. Cooke does a lot of numbers belonging to other artists, a sea change from the Miami show. We have the cover of Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and a rendition of Lee Hays and Pete Seeger’s “If I Had a Hammer.” He understood how closely Black and white music—or forms of music associatively Black or white—often stood to each other. Cooke was a rhythm and blues artist who could cut “You Send Me” and infiltrate the milieu of white suburban domesticity, but the tune was still shot through with what Black jazz musicians long called “blue notes.” You listened to “You Send Me” with your gal pals on sleepover nights, just as you stuck an Everly Brothers record on the hi-fi straight after. They were white artists who had rhythm and blues hits. Cooke had a gift for comprehending overlap, denoting overlap—or common ground—where others only saw polarities. The Everlys built their songs up with the same R&B chording favored by Clifton White on Live at the Harlem Square Club. A song that was both overtly Black and white, as one thinks of the respective tropes and styles, would also be a song where skin color was canceled out, leaving only the internal human component. That’s where Cooke fought to get. On Copa’s “If I had a Hammer,” Cooke sings both the lead vocal and an accompanying vocal; that is, having sung a line, he repeats it without regathering breath, as though he were a second singer, like Lou Rawls on the studio version of 114

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“Bring It On Home to Me,” released as the B-side to “Having a Party” in May 1962. When you sing this way—not that many can—the oxygen you’ve already expended and which you can no longer draw on causes that second vocal line to have a harmonizing nature. It’s less pronounced, less forward-leaning, simply because that’s how lungs work. You pull this off because of energy, chops, and gusto—it’s a form of dare-devil singing. Elvis Presley did it now and again, if you listen to 1969’s “Wearin’ that Loved on Look” or 1971’s “I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water,” but with Elvis it was like he got hyped up and couldn’t stop himself—slow his roll, as it were—whereas the device with Cooke is stylized technique, another way to put forward the round-table vibe that makes us all feel—even we, the listeners—that Cooke’s music is one in which all are heard. It’s a discoursing, dialogical music—why, he’s even discoursing with himself. The dyad. The mind-body split and union. An open, back-and-forth exchange of ideas. There’s civility, yes, but this is also how productive, inclusive societies—and any strong relationship—function. Like Martin Luther King, Cooke is a dreamer, but he tempers that which might seem overly aspirational by leading via example. And when he does lead by example, you find yourself thinking, “Huh, that’s pretty doable.” On “If I Had a Hammer,” he feeds the audience lines, and they join in with the same vigor as the Miami patrons. They roar. This is soul music, these are white people, and no one can hold them back. Again, commonality. And commonality where it might not appear to be readily apparent or sourceable. Sam Cooke at the Copa also includes a performance of 115

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“You Send Me,” the last portion of a medley also featuring “Try a Little Tenderness” and old friend “I Love You (For Sentimental Reasons).” This is a “white” rendering of the song, a fluttering Valentine that could be inserted into a Peanuts cartoon. Cooke the crooner. Not Cooke the detonation artist, which is what he becomes in Miami when he brings “You Send Me” to bear on “Bring It On Home to Me,” and vice versa. The single version of the latter was the closest Cooke got to “A Change Is Gonna Come” in the studio before “A Change Is Gonna Come” itself. The string section is formidable. Hector Berlioz would have admired swings that ravaged and swept with this potency. The setting is in part that of the classical music realm, but a Mississippi delta variant, if there could be such a thing. Chitlin Circuit strings, which also would not have been out of place in the European concert hall. The Animals were able to memorably cover the song because it looks into a groove, which suited their talents. Cooke’s buddy Lou Rawls is his vocal foil. On the coda they trade “yeah’s,” which within the context of the lyric—for this is a song about enjoining one’s lost love to return to home and hearth—references a connection that has been lost and needs to be put in place again. Or, in a better place—a new start instead of a resumed status quo. Both singers want to have that last “yeah.” Cooke gets it, just as the record fades to black, but we’re certain that if he consequentially held the winning laurel in his hand, he’d present to the human with whom he’d just been singing. The Miami version of “Bring It On Home to Me” begins with “You Send Me,” which is now deemed sufficiently 116

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unrecognizable in this phase of the journey as to garner no mention in the tracklisting. You won’t find it on the back cover of the album. The song as secret weapon. Cooke pairs his journey song—now highly evolved—with his proto—“A Change Is Gonna Come” song, as he both writes into the other, writing another portion of the piece of art that should be our national anthem, and doubles as a personal anthem for those who also self-send. This version of “You Send Me” operates as a duet between June Gardner’s press rolls and Sam Cooke’s roiling vocal. He is the howling man, crying out as if from under shackles that he’s engaged in exploding in front of us. Duck, lest the shrapnel from these irons hit you. He rocks in place over two chords, another device out of modern jazz. The singer details strife between he and his baby. He doesn’t want to fight. He seeks accordance. The putative subject matter is man-woman, but we also know that the implications are national. The divide is in reference to our shared Republic, where some share less equally than others. He calls up the operator, desperate that she put him in touch with this estranged being he needs so much. Cooke never achieved a level of volume like he does on the word “baby” when he all but drowns out Gardner’s press rolls, which themselves sound like thunder on the heath. Then, shockingly, Cooke begins hitting his own chest with his fist, to get the full effect of his vibrato. The effect would be no more physical if he somehow jumped out of the speakers and tackled you. The Overtown crowd is bonkers now. Voices shout out encouragement. You can hear the bodies pressing against 117

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each other as a group of individuals has now become a collective that advances upon the stage where Sam Cooke is singing, rapping, talking—writing. “Now see I got a message for you, honey,” he announces, and we have that frisson of knowing that something major is about to happen, without knowing what that major thing is. He reaches deep. So deep. As deep as you would have heard Sam Cooke reach to date. “Darling I want to tell you . . .” He holds the pronoun, then continues, a banshee cry of precise, virtuosic, soul-sourced unity, a knitting up of past, present, future, of those who were there and those who are here now. “You send me,” he sings, making the words last multiple bars, singing the line again, and again, laughing by the fifth time he says it, singing as he laughs, blending and bonding. Having said the refrain enough times, he sounds a long “ohhhhh” that lasts the length of a full verse, putting in those stretched open “a” sounds that we know so well, which become a kind of sonic skeleton in “A Change Is Gonna Come,” where three “a’s”—the number of the trinity, of hope and rebirth—are coded into the title, heavenly grace notes deregulated from heaven and lent transcendent secular power because of the pastoral, earthiness of the song’s narrative. “Born by the river.” The start of a story that begins in nature that is about human nature. In “A Change Is Gonna Come,” the singer says, “I go downtown.” He might as well be in Overtown, taking solace in this evening that becomes this record, hearing “You Send Me,” long one thing, become something else. Because it really is that possible. Sam Cooke, as we know, leads by examples. He has given us possibility. I 118

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think that is what he has journeyed to all along—the ability to give us what might be the greatest gift of all. When I first heard this unmarked performance of “You Send Me,” I thought that it was the most galvanic, intense piece of music I had ever heard. I thought this for what turned out to be three seconds, as Cooke makes a request of us: “I want you to listen to this song right here for me”—as if he needs us to do him a favor, just as he’d been doing us a solid—and Clifton White picks out the descending, fournote riff of “Bring It On Home to Me.” For me, this is the live cut that goes past any others, by anyone. “If you ever change your mind,” Cooke begins, another story-starter, “about leaving me behind, bring it to me, bring your sweet loving, bring it on home to me.” He dandles the beat, rocking the groove. The performance is riff-heavy, and it’s the par excellence riff of the night by the band. And yet, Cooke’s voice alone is the subsuming riff. The ghost notes flow. We’re sung to, talked to, but never sung or talked down to. Which can be unusual for a song built around someone else telling us what they want someone else to do. That Clifton White transition is euphoria of a higher nature—it’s the guitar version of that moment when one is sprung from purgatory. Gardner hammers on his bass drum, which has been left out of his fills until this juncture. The singer is conciliatory because the singer also does not need this person they’re singing to in order to complete their wholeness. They’ve figured out so much on their own. For a song about two people no longer together—one of who, at least, was unfaithful—it’s a number or obvious jubilation. 119

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That jubilation is not predicated on the bird in hand, but rather the exacting delineation of what the bird is, and why the bird matters, rendered in a work of art that we know, and feel, matters as much as anything. In the dandling of the groove, the bird is also flung skyward. Again Cooke strikes his own breast as if it’s an extension of Gardner’s drum kit. “That sounds pretty good to me,” he sings after the audience joins him in voice where he intends to be joined, where the song calls out for unity. A unity in performance but the extra-musical performance of life. I cannot believe, for a second, that anyone left this gig after making their contribution to “Bring It On Home to Me,” thinking they’d experienced “mere” music. The singer makes his promises to us: his promise to fight, to send, to endure, to take care of us, to guide, interjecting another level of the personal as we move from the individual to the universal. “That ain’t all Sam is gonna do for you.” No, of course not. Because Sam is change. Sam is a’coming. Nay— Sam has arrived. And you do sound pretty good at that, sir. * * * The second-to-last number, “Nothing Can Change This Love,” serves as a regathering of energies. The band is granted a reprieve to cool it a touch, but not Cooke. He’s uncontainable now. We get to hear White’s rhythmic work at the fore—you can tell how Lennon lifted this style for the Beatles’ “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You.” Fittingly for us, with our exploration of soul and soul music, the song’s studio counterpart turned up on Cooke’s Mr. Soul album from

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October of the year before minus the normally ubiquitous White, which may be in part why he strafes as he does on the Live at the Harlem Square Club variant—now he finally had his chance for a bash. Cooke renders the chorus as a promissory note of fealty. Trust can be a hard-to-locate commodity in this world, but Cooke engenders it. I think if you engender trust, you make it easier for people not just to trust you and what you do but to trust elsewhere in their lives, even improve at trusting themselves. When we trust ourselves, we’re more willing to explore who we might be as individuals. This is how we grow. And, having grown, it’s how we help facilitate necessary changes. The Sam Cooke of this Miami, January 12, 1963, night, and “A Change Is Gonna Come,” is a society-builder because he aids us in locating the machinery—and guts, heart, and soul—of self-actualization. He knows that the way to the promised land of the macro begins with the micro. It begins with each of us, in each of us. “A Change Is Gonna Come” is formally recorded in January 1964, using strings just as “Bring It On Home to Me” uses them. They’re there, but the soul component is not encroached upon, not prettified. As much as these live versions of “Twistin’ the Night Away” and “Feel It (Don’t Fight It),” “A Change Is Gonna Come” is a groove number. But whereas in times past, Cooke may have cut a studio recording and only figured out how to rework—rewrite—its essence later, the in-person writing process that we see in Overtown helps Cooke fashion his studio masterwork in a real-time moment of its own. “A Change Is Gonna Come,” even if Cooke had lived, wouldn’t require a future Overtown 121

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stage to reach its most powerful form, because Overtown had already helped it get there. As Cooke peregrinates in his career, as he does in this one evening on the stage, moving between places, planes of consciousness, temporal modes, so too does “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It’s awash in the ghost notes, sung—or is it spoken?—whispers when the singer appears to be communicating to each of us, one by one. We are first at the river, those riparian forces upon which our earliest societies were built. Tigris, Euphrates. The comparatively modern society of Cooke’s Mississippi. The song is powered by gerunds that litter the Miami stage. “Running.” “Coming.” Telling.” “Knockin’,” with its dropped-G. Above all, “Living.” It’s been too hard living But I’m afraid to die ‘Cause I don’t know what’s up there Beyond the sky. The Cooke of the Soul Stirrers, on a stage in LA in 1955, would not have admitted of this doubt, because that Cooke hadn’t mastered the art of openness and vulnerability that January 12, 1963, Cooke clearly has. The verse from “A Change Is Gonna Come” doesn’t signal cowardice. We know this. Death is nebulous in ways that life is not. The singer’s point, his thrust, is that while life is also scary—he never suggests that it’s not scarier than death—he is going nowhere. The battle is to the end. Community will embolden. That is why he’s sharing his story in such stark, unfettered terms. Vulnerability inspires, compels others to do their version of 122

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story. To pass the handkerchief round and round. Which is how change comes. Later we’re at the movie theater, in what feels like a time period a couple hundred years after where we began on those freshwater banks, in the Black part of town, where the Miami patrons would not be welcome. Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” protagonist takes shelter there, a respite from his days where bigotry is the norm, plunged in a space of darkness, Blackness, after a fashion, just as these concert-goers have their repose at the Harlem Square Club. Cooke knows this. “Somebody keep telling me/Don’t hang around,” the singer relays, and Cooke opens up those “a” sounds to put in the same “h’s” that fuel the singer’s melismas as Gardner, Lewis, and White rock out. Miami is a moment that will stretch and continues to stretch, that can enfold us like the very fabric of time itself. I don’t believe that a record like Live at the Harlem Square Club goes away, or stops, all the less so as it feeds into Cooke’s paean for change. But as a concert, this gig needed to have its last number and that takes the form of “Having a Party.” It’s boisterous, sure, but like “Change,” it’s elegiac to a degree that it can make you cry for something you want so damn much. Chunks of the spring 1962 studio version— which was made in a party-like atmosphere—were adlibbed, so it makes sense that Cooke can extemporize as he sees fit with the live version. I always hear this performance as a sort of after-party for “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The bash, fete, shivaree, fish fry when we get there, with the awareness that the battle, now finally won, nonetheless came at unfathomable cost. It’s the bittersweet, grace-steeped 123

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gravity of life, perhaps, and definitely for the people for whom Cooke had most fundamentally written “A Change Is Gonna Come.” On “Having a Party,” he namechecks the instrumental that started our evening in “Soul Twist,” as the beginning becomes the end, temporal planes shifting as they so often do within Cooke’s art. The song is a post-coital embrace, this canticle of slumped bodies, and all of the possible implications of stacked human forms. When we think of Handel’s Messiah, our memories so often turn back to the Hallelujah chorus, but the oratorio concludes with a movement built around a single word, that being “Amen.” A city of sound and rhythm is erected off of that single word, the possibility that the songster— and Handel, like Cooke, was a songster—imbeds into an otherwise basic word, used a certain way in a certain context, with certain genius, that we all know. Cooke keeps shifting what that word is for him on the Miami version of “Having a Party.” The crowd—each and every voice in that crowd—doubles as his backing singer. Sometimes he builds his castles off of the word “party,” other times from “radio” as he lays into the line “playin’ on the radio,” which he could never use to describe the album he was in the process of making, this Black beauty of human connectivity. He rides the beat of his band, rides the beat of his own voice, the clarity of the beat of his own writing. I always picture Sam Cooke observing what he’s seeing, both in this room and in his head, as he caps off this gig. Sam Cooke the

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observer, Sam Cooke the spirit guide for those who know and need art, those equipped to take what he offers us. “I hate to quit this,” he sings. There are Cokes in the ice box, the lyrics note. Those Chekhovian details, at the end of the long, worthwhile journey of winter. Everybody is swinging. Dancing to the music. Have a party for me, he implores. Have it on his behalf. Have it on behalf of your kids you raise right, to see people as people. Have it on behalf of those who went before, denied their freedoms that may or may not be freedoms you take for granted. Take care of yourself. Take care of others who might not have taken care of you. There is no other way we get to where we need be going. Cooke’s party is the life lived like a thrown knife. Have it, fight for it. On behalf of the strange fruit in the poplar trees. On behalf of Billie. On behalf of who you aren’t yet but can be. On behalf of who you need to be. What we need to see inside of people. What we see and should not care about on surfaces that ought never register as what a person is. On behalf of self-sending. On behalf of change. And if you don’t believe it’s coming, if you doubt, if you despair, if you know of no hope— Just listen. Long ways to go. But it’ll sound something like this when we get there.

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Also available in the series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos

11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard 12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno

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22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing . . . by Eliot Wilder 25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth

39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard 42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay

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54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond . . . by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol

70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem

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87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Elizabeth Sandifer 89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley 106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia

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119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti's Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli 121. Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde's Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould's Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo's Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats' The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk's Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin 129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman 132. Siouxsie and the Banshees' Peepshow by Samantha Bennett

133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel 134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson 135. Tori Amos's Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry 136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson 137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans 138. The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin 139. Tom Petty’s Southern Accents by Michael Washburn 140. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines by Ian Bourland 141. Wendy Carlos’s SwitchedOn Bach by Roshanak Kheshti 142. The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner 143. David Bowie's Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler 144. D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick 145. Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt 146. Elton John’s Blue Moves by Matthew Restall 147. Various Artists’ I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett

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148. Janet Jackson's The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier 149. Suicide’s Suicide by Andi Coulter 150. Elvis Presley’s From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson 151. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley 152. 24 Carat Black’s Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth by Zach Schonfeld 153. Carole King’s Tapestry by Loren Glass

154. Pearl Jam’s Vs. by Clint Brownlee 155. Roxy Music’s Avalon by Simon Morrison 156. Duran Duran’s Rio by Annie Zaleski 157. Donna Summer’s Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery 158. Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming 159. Janelle Monáe’s The ArchAndroid by Alyssa Favreau

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