SAM COOKE
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1951–1964 |
Classic soul-pop |
Cupid (1961) |
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Album
released: March 1958 |
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Tracks: 1) You
Send Me; 2) The Lonesome Road; 3) Tammy; 4) Ol’ Man River; 5)
Moonlight In Vermont; 6) Canadian Sunset; 7) Summertime; 8) Around The World;
9) Ain’t Misbehavin’; 10) The Bells Of St. Mary’s; 11) So Long; 12) Danny
Boy; 13) That Lucky Old Sun. |
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REVIEW
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So let us start
appropriately with his first single — ironically, also his biggest one, since
he would never get to have another #1 on the US pop charts. According to most
memoirs, the original recording of ‘You Send Me’ turned into a battleground
between Art Rupe, the head of Specialty Records where Sam had previously done
most of his gospel work with the Soul Stirrers, and Bumps Blackwell, the man
responsible for steering Cooke away from God and producing his early secular
recordings for the small Keen label. Back in those days, making a crossover
from gospel to pop for a black singer was somewhat akin to making a crossover
from classic opera to Andrew Lloyd Webber for a white one — and, in all
honesty, nobody could prove that the young and ambitious singer was seriously
tempted with the perspective of fame and fortune when he ultimately made his
stand with Blackwell rather than Rupe. Yet when fame and fortune come
hand-in-hand with innovative artistic vision and startling musical results,
who could blame this kind of sellout? Because ‘You
Send Me’ (along with its lesser known predecessor ‘Lovable’, which was still
released on Specialty and credited, out of caution, to Sam’s alias «Dale
Cook») really did create a new type of sound: the gospel-influenced romantic pop
ballad, Nat King Cole meets Thomas Dorsey. The backing track is a doo-woppy
waltz; the back vocals are gospel crooning; and Sam’s lead vocal combines the
suave and seductive overtones of a ladykiller idol with the epic vocal power
of a musical preacher (particularly on the bridge section). Of course, this
is pop-oriented «light soul» as compared to Ray Charles’ R&B-oriented
«deep soul»; but it is also the perfect romantic counterpoint to Uncle Ray’s
much more rough and physical approach to the subject matter of his songs.
With ‘Lovable’ and ‘You Send Me’, Cooke creates the image of a gallant,
courteous ladies’ gentleman who somehow manages to come across as both classy
and genuine — a relatively rare
exception in the world of pop, particularly black one (with people like
Marvin Gaye, it felt like they were only waiting for the right moment to get
rid of those cuffs and ties; Sam, on the other hand, sort of seemed like he
was naturally born into that particular image). The B-side of
‘You Send Me’ was, however, closer in spirit to the general composure of
Sam’s first LP — a cover of ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and Bess, far from the first and much further from the last
one. It gets an imaginative musical reinvention, almost proto-Bondian with
its echoey bass pattern and ghostly-haunting background wailing; but Sam’s
reading of the text itself is fairly literal and not particularly exciting
per se, unless you simply adore the sound of his singing voice (and there is
every reason why you should). This
is the general formula that was expanded for the self-titled debut album:
mostly classic or slightly more modern show tunes, mixed in with some folk
oldies and delivered by Sam in a sincere, but somewhat perfunctory manner. If you are a
big fan of ‘Moonlight In Vermont’ and ‘Danny Boy’ all by themselves, Sam’s
versions of these classics will soothe your soul for sure. But if, like me,
you only like them in outstanding interpretations (for instance, as vehicles
for Billy Holiday or some other singer with a unique personality), the suave
and delicate vibe which Cooke provides them makes it all way too dangerously
close to harmless and cuddly lounge entertainment. A nice touch of class is
provided by the backing band, ambitiously called «The Bumps Blackwell
Orchestra» but in reality more of a small jazz combo, with prominent bass,
jazzy electric guitar, and only occasional piano and horns here and there.
The downside of this, however, is a fairly lo-fi level of production: you can
distinctly hear the difference between the crystal clear and sharp sound of
‘You Send Me’ (an earlier recording from June ’57) and the comparably muddy
and flat sound of the early ’58 Keen recordings for the LP. Therefore, if
you want to get a clearer picture of Cooke’s musical evolution in the early
days of his solo career, it will make much more sense to follow the trail of
his singles (which honestly should all be attached as bonus tracks to this
album). The first one of these was ‘I’ll Come Running Back To You’,
deceitfully beginning with a classic Ink Spots guitar line but quickly
turning out to be more in an R&B vein — it actually has more «soul» to it
than ‘You Send Me’, which fully explains why it also went to #1 on the
R&B charts but only stalled at #17 on the pop register. (If you listen
really closely, you can spot the melodic similarities with ‘A Change Is Gonna
Come’ — it is mostly the faster tempo that is confusing). Ironically, the
single was released not on Keen, but on Specialty Records: apparently, Art
Rupe was trying to cash in on the newly found popularity of his former
protegé, gospel purity be damned and all. Meanwhile, on
Keen Bumps Blackwell was still trying to cultivate Sam’s honey-drippin’
image: December ’57 sees the release of ‘(I Love You) For Sentimental
Reasons’, the first Cooke single not actually written by Cooke and, honestly,
just not a very good song: it has no distinctive hook and mainly gets by on
its doo-woppy / crooning atmosphere. Much better is ‘You Were Made For Me’,
again written by Sam and released three months later: here, the hook power is
unmistakable — following each set of Sam’s favored lists of comparisons
("a fish was made to swim in the ocean, a boat was made to sail on the
sea..."), delivered with the usual gallant suaveness, he finishes each
verse with an almost doom-laden epic delivery of "you were made for
me", subtly lowering his pitch with each new verse to hammer that nail
deeper and deeper in. On the whole,
this little string of singles illustrates Cooke’s early stylistic
fluctuations much better than the LP. Not every song he wrote or performed in
those days was great (his best years would not really begin until his
transfer from Keen to RCA), but the important journey in search of himself
had truly begun. You can discern all the influences — sometimes it feels like
he is trying to be a one-man Ink Spots, sometimes a black Sinatra, sometimes
a Nat King Cole in the R&B era — but in the end, slowly but surely, he
was working toward his own singular style, smudging and ignoring genre
borders and being almost equally well palatable for old-fashioned audiences
and long-haired musical rebels. |
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Album
released: April 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) God Bless The Child; 2) She’s
Funny That Way; 3) I’ve Got A Right To Sing The Blues; 4) Good Morning
Heartache; 5) T’Aint Nobody’s Bizness (If I Do); 6) Comes Love; 7) Lover Girl
(Man); 8) Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off; 9) Lover Come Back To Me; 10)
Solitude; 11) They Can’t Take That Away From Me; 12) Crazy In Love With You. |
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Every once in a while in the
professional life of any linguist (myself not excluded), somebody from the
big bad outside world is bound to contact the expert and ask: «what’s your
opinion on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?», the purpose of the question usually
being to (a) show that the person in question knows what the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis is, (b) let you know that, no matter what your answer may be, it
shall never shatter the ironclad opinion that the person already holds on the
subject. In all honesty, I have never given that much thought to the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a.k.a. the «hypothesis of linguistic relativity», since
it is more a matter of linguistic philosophy than linguistic science. But on
the other hand, when it comes to linguistic philosophy, almost every theory
ever put out by reasonable professionals usually finds itself in limbo between
truth and falsehood — and every once in a while each of us may come across
specific situations in which the way that things are put into words by
somebody else genuinely impacts your perception of said things. (Admittedly,
the hypothesis has more to do with structural / grammatical properties of
language than pure lexics, but for the sake of this review, let’s get a
little bit expansive). |
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What exactly
does this have to do with Sam Cooke’s third and last album for the Keen
label, released in the spring of 1959? (The second one was Encore, a bunch of orchestrated
standards produced by Bumps Blackwell which I have agreed to skip in this
chronological survey of Cooke’s career — there’s only so much schlock I can
agree to take from the guy, considering that his main strengths lay so
drastically elsewhere). From a purely musical perspective, this is a
collection of old jazz, blues, and vaudeville standards, on which Cooke is
backed by the René Hall Orchestra — another exercise in retro
stylistics, but not fully unreasonable per se; why shouldn’t Sam Cooke be
deprived of the pleasure to perform pre-war material in his own style,
particularly if the songs have actual class? (as opposed to most of the stuff
on Encore). Unfortunately,
the album is called Tribute To The
Lady, and there is absolutely no getting away from the fact that it was recorded as a musical homage to
Billie Holiday — not just because of the title, but also because all the
songs on the album come from Billie’s setlist, and some have, indeed, very
specifically been associated with Lady Day (‘God Bless The Child’, ‘Lover
Man’, ‘Solitude’, etc.). Initially, I quite naturally thought that this was a
posthumous tribute; however, Billie died on July 17, 1959, whereas sessions
for Tribute were held in January /
February of the same year, and the album was released in April (meaning that
Billie herself might have had a chance to hear it before her demise). One can
only speculate on how the track list, the arrangements, and the general mood
might have been drastically different, had the Keen label given the green
light for this just a few months later than it did — but even if we agree to
judge it strictly in the context of early
1959, when nobody could yet see the future with 100% clarity and foreknowledge,
Tribute To The Lady is still
rotten to the core, and remains the most pointless and embarrassing entry in
Sam’s entire catalog (though at least a somewhat intriguing and perversely
fascinating entry, as opposed to Encore,
which is just a big fat nothing). Now, it is no
secret that I deeply and dearly love Billie Holiday, whose status in the
world of vocal jazz is akin to that of Jimi Hendrix in the world of electric
rock music simply because there has never been anybody else in the world
quite like her. I also admire Sam Cooke when he is at his best, charging the
listener with the spiritual optimism and sexual energy of his pop, R&B,
and even gospel performances. Unfortunately, the idea that Sam Cooke could
ever «pay tribute» to Billie Holiday is one of those catastrophic types of
mismatches like when Woody Allen tries to make an Ingmar Bergman movie (Interiors) or, closer to home, when
Paul Stanley begins to sing opera arias. I certainly realize that when
"comes love, nothing can be done", but love also makes us stupid,
which is fine if you don’t run around and make it public, but will definitely
bite you in the ass if you decide to run naked across a football field
yelling "SHE LOVES ME!" —
which, in a way, is the everyday life equivalent of Tribute To The Lady. The
overproduced, schmaltzy, Vegasy arrangements of all the songs are only one,
and far from the biggest, problem with this «tribute» — after all, Billie had
also had quite a few big band and orchestral arrangements in her life, though
even her most overproduced efforts late in life (e.g. on the Lady In Satin album) never really
sounded like they were supposed to be accompanied by scantily clad parading
models in boas and feathers, a glittery vision that cannot escape my eyes
over the entire course of this musical disaster. The biggest problem is that not a single one of these tracks betrays any signs of actual understanding
between the covered artist and the one offering the tribute. Billie’s unique
delivery of these songs, be it the deeply personal ‘God Bless The Child’ or
even the generically playful ‘Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off’, involved
humanizing the material, making it sound realistic — a bit bumbling, a bit
vulnerable, almost completely devoid of scenic mannerisms and
artificialities. Cooke, in
comparison, sings everything here like a perfectly oiled, well-trained robot,
stripping the songs of whatever pain and emotion Billie might have endowed
them with and turning them back into their empty sheet music shells. It is
hard to blame him because he largely does the exact same thing he does on all
of his pop hits — it’s just that this exact same thing does not work on this
pre-war material, where pretty much everything,
due to its initially non-descript or, worse, initially schlocky nature, depends
on personality and interpretation rather than pre-written hooks. I do not
believe it was ever in his power to do this thing differently, which means
that he should never have tackled the job in the first place. Songs like
‘Solitude’ and ‘Good Morning Heartache’, which used to be the perfect
vehicles for conveying an atmosphere of bitter melancholy in Billie’s hands, here
sound like fluffy crooning lounge ditties, a reasonable accompaniment for
digesting your lamb chops or steak in some high-class nightclub and nothing
more. Perhaps the
worst offender is Sam’s recording of ‘T’Ain’t Nobody’s Bizness (If I Do)’,
once a powerful statement of self-assertion for Bessie Smith, later subverted
and personalized by Billie, and now turned into a meaningless lounge husk of
a song by Sam — of course, this was
the song to be released as the lead single from the album (fortunately, it at
least flopped). Does this mean that Cooke cannot sing the blues? Definitely
not, as he would later prove with Night
Beat; but on this album, he is not really singing the blues — he has been
saddled with the idea of Billie Holiday as a glitzy nightclub entertainer,
charming the pants off all the gentlemen the same way Sam Cooke is expected
to charm the skirts off all the ladies. Consequently, this all ends up being
more of a tribute to, say, Dinah Washington than Billie Holiday; a good
analogy for this perception would be learning to love the Beatles by only
listening to those artists whose songs they had covered, rather than to the Beatles’
own compositions. But what do we really have left if we try to flush
out «linguistic relativity»? Well, in that case we simply replace the
reaction of embarrassment with that of boredom. I find nothing interesting in
René Hall’s perfunctory arrangements, and no quirky traces of color
introduced by Sam in his performances. I have no worthwhile observations on
any particular details, on anything
that would stand out at least slightly from these utterly generic readings.
If you are enamored with Cooke’s voice as such — losing your head over every
note the man ever sang — by all means, go ahead and dive in; I myself prefer
to be similarly enamored with Billie’s voice instead. To me, this remains a
very proverbial case of how somebody’s love for somebody else is not at all
guaranteed to produce worthy results (a situation more than common with 21st
century artists influenced and inspired by all the great musical output of
the 20th century, but one which obviously goes all the way back to at least
Icarus’ appreciation for his Dad’s craftmanship). It is also an
interesting case of how moving to a bigger, more overtly «capitalistic»
record label actually improved things for the artist — although Cooke’s
discography for RCA would still include old-school crooner material (Hits Of The 50’s), the label would at
least not make such a rigid distinction between placing all of his good stuff
on singles and all of his schlock on albums, like Keen did. God only knows
what sort of ridiculous LP projects Bumps Blackwell would put Sam through,
had he continued along that same trajectory. |
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Album
released: August 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) Hey There; 2) Mona Lisa; 3) Too
Young; 4) The Great Pretender; 5) You, You, You; 6) Unchained Melody; 7) The
Wayward Wind; 8) Secret Love; 9) The Song From Moulin Rouge; 10) I’m Walking
Behind You; 11) Cry; 12) Venus. |
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REVIEW There are some conflicting reports
on whether Cooke’s Tour, Sam’s
other 1960 album for RCA, was commercially released before or after Hits Of The 50’s — some sources say
May 1960, others say November — but in the long run, it probably does not
matter too much, since the first couple of years spent by Sam at RCA
generally followed the principle already introduced by Keen with Tribute To The Lady: leave the tasteful
teenage-oriented stuff for the singles, use the LPs to pander to the boring
bourgeois tastes of the businessmen and businessmen’s wives who can actually
afford to buy an LP. Blaming Sam for going along with this strategy would be
near-sighted — he strove to break through to every audience, white and black,
young and old, and this was probably a winning strategy for him — but
striving to understand the reasons behind the existence of such records
certainly places no obligations on us to like them, either. |
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This particular
LP, as well as every other single and album recorded by Sam at RCA, was
produced by «Hugo & Luigi», a duo whose names probably bring on
anachronistic associations with Super Mario Bros. but who were really Hugo
Peretti and Luigi Creatore, cousins (not brothers, but close!) who wrote some
songs out of the Brill Building (mostly known for Elvis’ ‘Can’t Help Falling
In Love’) but more commonly acted as producers for RCA; quite tellingly,
their most famous client besides Sam was Perry Como. And Hugo & Luigi’s
mission — at least, the way they saw it in early 1960 — is so clearly stated
in the liner notes to the album that I feel like heavily quoting the opening
paragraph: "When rock hit the
Fifties, a lot of sensitive citizens corked their ears, crawled into their
woofers and occasionally sent messages to the outside world, demanding,
‘Where is the good new music — and where are the good young singers?’ Well,
this album gives the answer, for the music was there all the time. Out of the
Fifties we have chosen a dozen ballads... to prove that along with The
Chicken Scratch and other record hop pops there were new songs, beautiful by
any standard. And the answer to the second part of the question is Sam Cooke,
a young man who has developed his own style and sensitivities to a song." I am not even
altogether sure which particular ‘Chicken Scratch’ the two Italian gentlemen
are referring to, but if it is this particular wild mix of surf guitar with
yakety-sax on the Commandos’
single from 1958, then count me as a severely de-sensitized citizen who
would rather listen to ‘Chicken Scratch’ twelve times in a row than ever put
on Hits Of The 50’s again after
having properly listened to it three times for the purposes of objective,
analytical, scientific evaluation (not).
I mean, they couldn’t even dare bring themselves to write ‘Tutti Frutti’ or
‘Hound Dog’ — obviously so, since Elvis had the same RCA Victor contract as
Sam — so they had to go for a dirty cheap trick instead and still fell flat
on their faces. Well, I guess the most appropriate answer for this entire
tirade would be "OK Radio Baby!" Almost every
single criticism voiced in the preceding review of Tribute To The Lady applies here, and to this should be added that
this time around, the songs are mostly crappy. Billie Holiday’s tasteful and
generally down-to-earth vocal jazz and blues numbers could still be spoiled
by generic production and a superficial approach to singing — but this stuff is mostly overblown sentimental
schmaltz, a mix of well-known chestnuts like ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘The Great
Pretender’, and ‘Unchained Melody’ with largely forgotten oldies — although,
honestly, I couldn’t really bother to think about what makes ‘Mona Lisa’ so
memorable next to, say, ‘You, You, You’. The mere fact
that this corny schlock is being
covered by one of the greatest voices in the history of soul and R&B
means absolutely nothing, because the purity of the voice and the precision
of the phrasing cannot compensate for the fact that Sam is unable to provide
these creations with new lives; instead of appropriating the material, he is
enslaved by it. The lounge-jazzy production may not be the worst ever — at
least Hugo and Luigi do not oversaturate the recordings with Mantovani strings,
relying instead on harps, chimes, and woodwinds to concoct their desired
Candyland atmosphere — but there’s only so much walking on puffy clouds that
a thoroughly insensitive citizen like me can endure, particularly since the
production is pretty much the same throughout all the twelve numbers. Admittedly, few
of the songs are just simplistic head-over-heels-in-love serenades; many
carry a deeper, darker melancholy vibe, and apparently Hugo & Luigi took
a serious approach to the selection process, choosing the songs they thought
would best fit Cooke’s natural talent for expressing unfulfilled yearning and
sadness. Sometimes this strategy backfires, though. For instance, ‘The Great
Pretender’, which is probably the only song here I’d ever agree to listen to
by my own free will in the Platters’ original, is indeed slower, sadder, and
more vulnerable than the Platters’ louder and more upbeat version; however,
that one actually agreed better
with the lyrics — certainly a line like "I’m lonely but no one can tell" as delivered by the Platters
is more efficient than the way Sam sings it here, where just about everybody
can tell that he’s really very, very, very lonely. The whole "being a
pretender" thing just sails out the window in this interpretation. (Try
to imagine Robert Smith or Jeff Buckley covering Lennon’s ‘I’m A Loser’ and
judge for yourself if the product of your imagination could ever outperform
the effect of the original). Anyway, I
cannot even end this album on a wishful "I sure hope I could be awesomely
different from the rest and give the record a positive assessment" note
(if you do want a positive
assessment, here is Sam
Scott’s take on the album that proves, once again, that there is no
single piece of music on Earth that would not be loved by at least one
person) — because I do not want to
be awesomely different here. Certain things are sacred to me, like insisting
that most of the whitebread schmaltz from the Fifties continues to be just
that; re-evaluating it as some sort of meaningful and genuinely emotional art
form, especially with the aid of such a revered black singer like Sam, is out
of the question. Of course, if you got the hots for Cooke so much that you’d
enjoy his singing the phonebook, Hits
Of The 50’s is just as impeccable as the rest. But I think I’d rather
have him actually sing the phonebook than ‘The Song From Moulin Rouge’ or
whatever. |
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Album
released: November 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) Far Away Places; 2) Under Paris
Skies; 3) South Of The Border (Down Mexico Way); 4) Bali Ha’i; 5) The Coffee
Song (They’ve Got An Awful Lot Of Coffee In Brazil); 6) Arrivederci, Roma
(Goodbye To Rome); 7) London By Night; 8) Jamaica
Farewell; 9) Galway Bay; 10) Sweet Leilani; 11) The Japanese Farewell
Song; 12) The House I Live In. |
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REVIEW If you agreed with me that Hits Of The 50’s was pretty
embarrassing, you might want to know that
album’s corn factor was almost nothing next to Cooke’s Tour — by all means, the absolute nadir of Sam’s artistic
career, a record so utterly stupid and pointless that it drags the very idea
of a «concept album» through the thickest mud before it even has had the time
frame to properly crystallize. It was bad even by the standards of 1960; by
those of the 2020s, it is much worse. So, of course, you just got to hear it. It gives a pretty good
idea of where the average «bourgeois American society» was at the end of
1960, and of what the white record executive’s idea of a «polite» musical
program by a black artist used to be at the time. (Not taking a big part of the responsibility off Sam’s own
shoulders, though: he was quite consciously and of his own free will
embarking on this path of endearing himself to conservative white audiences
by pandering to their cheapest tastes). |
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Anyway, Cooke’s Tour is indeed a «concept
album» — basically a Broadway / Hollywood musical in the good old-fashioned
musical tradition, where each of the songs, usually nicked from its own
musical, deals with one of the world’s locations, from European cities like
Paris, Rome, and London, to Asia (Japan, Melanesia) and Central / South
America (Mexico, Brazil), curiously leaving out Africa in the process; the
list is bookmarked at the beginning with ‘Far Away Places’, an old Bing
Crosby standard that acts as a general prelude to the «travelog», and ends
with ‘The House I Live In’, a song originally written by Lewis Allen and Earl
Robinson as a human rights anthem but, in the context of this album, feeling
more like a patriotic «after all,
there’s no place like home» conclusion. I will refrain
from saying that the album sucks because, to the best of my knowledge, up to
1960 Sam Cooke had never even set foot on any territory outside the United
States of America and its closest neighbors in the Caribbean — at the very
least, his recorded touring schedule indicates that he would only visit
Germany and England as late as 1962, and no records exist of Mr. Cooke ever
setting foot in Japan or Brazil. (In theory at least, he may certainly have
taken a vacation in Hawai’i or Mexico, but I have no idea). Even so, it is
very close-minded to insist that somebody is physically incapable of
conveying the atmosphere of a certain environment without having «lived» it
to the fullest — even if the result is an approximation, it can be a very
deeply felt one, or one that actually offers a unique angle (e.g. I could
never understood the artificially puffed-up hatred that some people spew at
the California-bred Creedence Clearwater Revival for daring to sing from a
«Southern» perspective — all that mattered to me is that John Fogerty deeply
and sincerely loved the world of the bayous, which, as far as I’m concerned,
gave him a perfectly valid right to eulogize them in his beautifull crafted
songs). However, this
is clearly not the case with Cooke’s
Tour. Sam Cooke was by no means an ignoramus — he is usually described in
biographies as always having had an inquisitive mind, and well-versed in both
movies and literature — but the «setlist» in this «program» has nothing
whatsoever to do with anybody’s love for anything, except for the general
American public’s love for the candy-colored «a whole new world» aesthetics. Most of these songs are stiff,
stuffy, cheesy pieces of musical-exotica, borrowing superficial bits of other
countries’ musical stylistics (Paris = accordeon, Mexico = castanets, Hawai’i
= steel guitar, Japan = koto, etc.) only to drown them all in the monotonous
and equally superficial sentimentalism of old school Tin Pan Alley
songwriting. Sure, if we go down history lane, there are some nice stories
behind some of them — like Harry Owens’ dedication of ‘Sweet Leilani’ to his
newborn Hawai’ian daughter, etc. — but absolutely none of it matters under
these particular circumstances. If this was not
a concept album — if, say, I’d encountered some of these songs individually,
scattered around some of Sam’s other records where they would be mixed
together with more contemporary and meaningful material — the individual
impressions of some of them could,
perhaps, be slightly ameliorated. Thus, the 1946 Sinatra-sung joke tune ‘The
Coffee Song’ ("they’ve got an
awful lot of coffee in Brazil") could simply be perceived as a joke
tune, at least if you take a time trip to 1946 when lines like "a politician’s daughter was accused of
drinking water / and fined a great big fifty dollar bill" were
indeed considered cutting-edge humor. But (a) in the context of this album, the song sort of pretends
to occupy a «culturological» niche, introducing listeners to the
peculiarities of Brazilian society as opposed to Italian or Jamaican society;
(b) at least Sinatra sang this with his usual humorous flair — Sam’s
performance almost gives the impression that he takes the lyrics seriously, with his usual perfect
vocal tone and a caressing lightness that, however, betrays no hints of
irony. This is one of Sam’s natural limitations — he could perfectly convey
beauty, tenderness, or melancholy, but irony and humor were largely out of his reach — and it just makes me
wonder about who were the idiots who suggested that he sing this kind of
material. Hopefully we don’t have to blame it on Hugo & Luigi, who, after
all, would do a good job of producing all those good songs for Sam... eventually. In the end, of
all the tourist stops made along the way, there is only one toward which I
feel a little bit partial: ‘Jamaica Farewell’. Unlike most of the Tin Pan
Alley / Bing Crosby / Frank Sinatra fluff, this one is at least somewhat
«authentic», written or re-invented by Lord Burgess, the acknowledged master
of all things Caribbean and a frequent writer for Harry Belafonte; likewise,
Sam was also well-versed in the Caribbean spirit, having been a frequent
visitor to Kingston on his tours (probably the only place outside of the U.S. proper that he’d visited more than
once). And the song, for once, is recorded in style, with a sympathetic
woodwind / electric guitar melody making a nice change from Belafonte’s
original acoustic guitar recording. Each time Sam melancholizes about having
"to leave a little girl in Kingston
Town" in the chorus, there’s a tiny authentic shiver running down my
spine — the only time this generally wretched album does it to me. ‘Jamaica
Farewell’ is the one song I’d heartily recommend here for any Sam Cooke
playlist; everything else is mostly just fodder for objectively sarcastic
culturological analysis. Unfortunately,
it also applies to ‘The House I Live In’, the pompous conclusion to the album
which, technically, should count as the first authentically «socially
conscious» song recorded by Sam — a good four years before ‘A Change Is Gonna
Come’. Given the album’s overall fluffy popcorn nature, the decision to
finish it off with a song by Earl Robinson, blacklisted until only recently,
may feel almost unusually brave; but since there is nothing specifically
«communist» in this people’s anthem (originally conceived as an anti-racist
rather than anti-capitalist manifesto), in the context of Cooke’s Tour it rather just plays the
part of a home sweet home epilog.
It’s sort of as if the protagonist of the album took his stereotypically
clichéd tour all around the world, then came back only to placate
himself with the idea that "all
races, all religions, that’s America to me", or that "the air of feeling free, the right to
speak my mind out, that’s America to me", and this makes him feel
just a little bit better after having to leave that little girl behind in
Kingston Town, not to mention all his other seedy love affairs in Paris,
Rome, London, and Japan. I mean, who really needs to break little girls’
hearts all around the world when all races and religions are already
available back in the USA? Again, if you
fish the song outside its stupid
context, it works much better — unlike ‘The Coffee Song’, this is the kind of
material that Sam was really born to sing — but it is still smothered in
cloying, mawkish strings and chimes that try to carry us back to 1945, when
Sinatra introduced the song to the world, rather than to any place in the
near future. If you are able to concentrate exclusively on Sam’s hypnotizing
overtones and smooth phrasing — in fact, if you can do this throughout the
entire album — then Cooke’s Tour
may indeed turn out to be not just a delightful journey through a set of
locally-flavored happy-or-sad frames of mind, but firm proof that Sam Cooke
is, by definition, incapable of turning out a single bad LP, or even a single
bad song; everything he sings turns to gold just on the strength of the Magic
Voice. If, however, like myself, you are typically immune to the Magic Voice
factor and always require a little something extra to bring out the full
effect of the Magic Voice, I don’t see how Cooke’s Tour could be perceived as anything other than an awkward
lapse of taste in a rather ruthless hunt for public acceptance. Perhaps it is
best to rewrite history and pretend that the album simply never happened —
which would be quite in line with the 21st century’s multiple attempts to
rewrite history in whichever way pleases the concerned party — but then
again, it is also true that a deeper understanding of the embarrassment of
artistic failure can often gain a deeper insight into the wonder of artistic
success, isn’t it? |
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Tracks: 1) Wonderful World; 2) Desire Me;
3) Summertime; 4) Almost In Your Arms; 5) That’s Heaven To Me; 6) No One; 7)
With You; 8) Blue Moon; 9) Stealing Kisses; 10) You Were Made For Me; 11)
There I’ve Said It Again; 12) I Thank God. |
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While all through 1960 RCA was
busy «grooming» Sam Cooke to push up that proverbial respectability quotient,
his old label, Keen Records, was doing something that, under different
circumstances, would only have qualified as an equally proverbial cash-grab —
but in the context of 1960, might have looked almost like an attempt at
redeeming the artist’s plummeting artistic reputation. That is, they were
collecting every archived outtake and obscure B-side they could find, and
putting them on a Sam Cooke LP of their own. The result was The Wonderful World Of Sam Cooke,
named after the LP’s most famous and successful song; and although the album
made no more impression on the charts than its tackier RCA competitors, it is
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The chief
incentive here was, quite naturally, the impressive commercial success of
‘(What A) Wonderful World’, originally recorded in March 1959 at Sam’s last
session for Keen, briefly forgotten during the turbulent period in which he
switched to RCA, then resurrected about a year later as there was hardly any
sense to just keep sitting on that potential pot of gold. Allegedly, Lou
Adler and Herb Alpert, who wrote the song for Sam, regarded it as a mere
trifle, but Cooke really took to the song — apparently, there was something
about its unvarnished simplicity that really got him in the feels, and, for
that matter, it is no surprise that some of Sam’s most enduring classics are
as musically simple as they come: sentimentality works best when it is not
masked with a barrage of orchestral flourishes and witty Bacharach chord
changes, but when you simply get the instant urge to hum along with it. The song
features a very sparse arrangement indeed — just an acoustic guitar, a rhythm
section, and some modest backing vocals — and (from the point of view of a
lenient schoolboy, at least) some of the most memorable lyrics in the world.
"Don’t know much about history /
Don’t know much biology" almost brings back memories of Chuck
Berry’s "American history,
practical math / You studyin’ hard and hopin’ to pass", but where
Chuck Berry sought his salvation in sweet rock’n’roll, Sam, with a little
help from Adler and Alpert, finds it in love, which, according to the song,
only requires knowledge of the fact that 1 + 1 = 2. It is just as easy to
ridicule the song’s naïve message as it would later be to do the same
for the likes of ‘All You Need Is Love’ or ‘Imagine’ — in fact, year after
year shows us that knowing at least something
about history and biology, in addition to the arithmetics of human passion,
is absolutely essential to making the world a much more wonderful place than
it happens to be. But at least, in his delivery of the song, Cooke is not
being disrespectful of such matters: he sings the words geography and trigonometry
with such politeness and consideration in his voice that you quickly get the
impression his protagonist is simply not given the choice to study such
complex matters, rather than skips it of his own volition in favor of amorous
adventures. Arguably, the
song’s only serious flaw is that it is virtually impervious to modified
interpretations — and, as such, no matter who covered it over the next fifty
years, from Herman’s Hermits to Art Garfunkel to, God help us, Michael
Bolton, all they could do is detract from the original rather than add to it.
Perhaps Devo or Oingo Boingo should have tried to make a run at it, or, at
least, Weird Al could have written a parody; as it is, ‘(What A) Wonderful
World’ stubbornly refuses to open up any additional dimensions, unlike its
similarly-titled little cousin by Bob Thiele and Louis Armstrong, which
somehow ends up existing in 30,000 different places at once (the Flaming Lips
cover alone takes it to another planet). But that’s fine — every great artist
needs some legacy that cannot be taken away from them at any cost, for fear
of forfeiting their legitimate claim to (relative) immortality. Three months
later, Keen Records tried to repeat their luck, releasing ‘With Me’, another
sweet ballad whose much less captivating lyrics, they probably hoped, would
not get in the way of commercial success — but the old-fashioned doo-wop
rhythmics and the lack of a distinct original vocal hook ultimately did. The
difference between ‘Wonderful World’ and ‘With Me’ is that the former is
still a great song even when Peter Noone or, Lord save us, Michael Bolton
take over the microphone; the latter only works with Sam Cooke shooting it
high up in the sky and then giving it his trademark smooth landing at the end
of each verse. At least it’s a Sam Cooke original, rather than some worn-out
old standard; but a rather lazily written original at that. Undeterred at
the single’s failure, Keen went all out and followed it up with this entire
LP of «new» material, most of which had actually been officially released as
B-sides from 1957 to 1959 and made relatively little impact. It is definitely
not true, though, as some
retro-reviewers suggest, that there is nothing of special interest on the LP
except for ‘Wonderful World’ itself. At the very least, there is ‘You Were
Made For Me’, the original B-side to the corny pop song ‘Lonely Island’ —
written by Sam himself, it is another of those simple-as-pie,
parallelism-peppered rhythmic ballads that contain some odd magic depth
inside their superficial triviality. In this particular case, I’m talking
about the overtones on that chorus: Sam starts each verse off with
lightweight, breezy nonchalance ("a
fish was made to swim in the ocean, a boat was made to sail on the sea...")
and finishes it in a deeper, moodier, more serious tone that might even betray
a note of anxiousness — that I know you
were made for me line is not so much a simple expression of admiration
for his loved one as it is a subtle, manipulative voodoo enchantment,
occasionally followed by a bar or two of moody humming to cement the effect.
It’s difficult to write about it, though — when your impression of a song
depends on tiny fluctuations of amplitude rather than on the actual chord
structure. This is where subjectivity in perspective rules supreme. The rest of the
material, assembled by Keen, is here and there, mostly decent but
unexceptional. ‘Desire Me’ is a sweet, uninventive attempt to repeat the
success of ‘You Send Me’. ‘That’s Heaven To Me’, an outtake from the earlier
days with the Soul Stirrers, is like ‘The House I Live In’ without the extra
bombast, but still a bit spoiled by the unnecessary angelic strings. The
recording of ‘Blue Moon’ is somewhat musically unusual, with heavy emphasis
on a thick bass line and the same descending acoustic chords we shall later
hear on the Beatles’ ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret?’ — but the vocal delivery
is rather perfunctory for Sam, and the strings in the background, this time,
just add extra clutter to the already odd arrangement. And the version of
‘Summertime’ on here seems to be ‘Pt. 2’ — a little sped-up soulful jam
session built around the original cover; interesting, but passable. The important
conclusion to take away with you is that even Sam’s second-rate material,
reserved for filler B-sides on Keen singles, is still preferable to most of
the material he was cutting for RCA in his early days on the label. At the
very least, most of this is naturally-sounding and «progressive» (for the
times) R&B and soul, rather than pre-war Tin Pan Alley stuff or hits from
recent Hollywood musicals. It is still pop — make no mistake about it, even
at his best Sam Cooke would never go for the soulful depth of Ray Charles or
the aggressive grit of James Brown — but at least it’s pop that tries to
pander to young, contemporary listeners of all races, rather than schmaltz
for TV-watching middle-aged white-only audiences. Much to Sam’s honor, he
would finally begin crawling out of that hole by early 1961, rather than
sinking even deeper; and who knows, perhaps The Wonderful World Of Sam Cooke, released right around the
lowest point in his artistic career, might have actually played its part in
reminding him of what was really the right thing to do. (Then again, we must
also thank the TV-watching middle-aged American public for not buying either Hits Of The 50’s or Cooke’s
Tour — had any of those become big hits on the LP market, it’s a safe bet
that a change would never gonna come!). |
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Tracks: 1) Swing Low, Sweet Chariot; 2) I’m
Just A Country Boy; 3) They Call The Wind Maria; 4) Twilight On The Trail; 5)
If I Had You; 6) Chain Gang; 7) Grandfather’s
Clock; 8) Jeanie With The Light Brown Hair; 9) Long, Long Ago; 10) Pray; 11)
You Belong To Me; 12) Goin’ Home. |
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I do not know whose idea it was to
continue the «conceptual conveyor» of «Sam Cooke Becomes Billie Holiday»,
«Sam Cooke Becomes Frank Sinatra», «Sam Cooke Becomes Tony Bennett», etc.,
with the gimmick of «Sam Cooke Becomes Johnny Cash», but I do know I owe a
debt of surprising gratitude to that person — for providing me with the first
Sam Cooke LP in quite a long time where enjoyment of his wonderful voice is mostly free of any accompanying pangs
of cringe at the corny material he is provided with or at the schlocky
arrangements in which the material is draped. That the album was titled
simply Sam Cooke, the same way as
his old debut for Keen (although it would later be retitled Swing Low in some countries to avoid
confusion), is probably just a coincidence, but a symbolic one: starting with
this «reboot» of sorts, Sam’s subsequent LPs for RCA would slowly, slowly,
slowly gain in artistic quality, reflecting both the gradually improving
artistic status of the LP medium in pop music and Sam’s own maturation. Had
he lived but two or three years more, who knows, we might eventually have
gotten a What’s Goin’ On or a Talking Book out of him. In the
meantime, though, it is almost amusing that it took the image of Sam Cooke as
a «lonesome cowboy» to inject some true artistic value in his long-players. |
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It still begins
with a single, though. Released on July 26, 1960, ‘Chain Gang’ was arguably the most important song in all of
Sam’s career — a turning point that was necessary to prepare the ground for
‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ four years later. Prior to that moment, pretty much
all of the songs Sam wrote himself were love ballads; what exactly triggered
his brain to write a (mildly, but still) «socially conscious» number instead
is a mystery we won’t be able to solve — all we can say is that it was
probably bound to happen sooner or later. Of course,
unlike ‘Change’, ‘Chain Gang’ did not mark too much of a stylistic change in Sam’s writing. It’s a bouncy, fun, danceable
tune whose mood could be easily taken for that of a love song, especially if
you’d failed to notice the lyrics or did not pose yourself the question of
why exactly does that ringing percussion in the background sound like a
hammer on rock, or why the background "ooh, aah" vocals sound like
rhythmic work grunts. But this, precisely, was the trick: by sending the song
all the way up to #2 on the Billboard charts, Sam Cooke made the entire
nation swing its hips to a sad tale of a bunch of convicts lost in the
monotonousness of their daily duties by the roadside. And then there’s the
sublime agenda of stirring up pity for his protagonists, as he takes that
same wistful melancholy of his lost-love serenades and applies it to the
plight of men in prison uniforms. There’s even a nice textual throwback here
— at the very end of the song, when he begins to ad-lib while impersonating a
convict, the line "give me water,
I’m thirsty" clearly hearkens back to Sam’s gospel days with The
Soul Stirrers when one of their main highlights was ‘Jesus Gave Me Water’. Indeed, the
much-lauded inventive gimmick of conveying «road work atmosphere» through the
available studio means of a pop song production does not amaze or move me
nearly as much as hearing a great human voice realizing its true potential.
As a romantic crooner, Cooke could easily slip into schlocky sentimentality
when he gave it his all; but when he used his voice to channel mercy and
compassion, there was simply no way he could fail. So even if the main hook
of the song is its chorus — in which even the final nasals of the heavily
accentuated words (‘mennn’, ‘chainnn’, ‘gannnnng’...) echo the relentless fall and resonance of the
hammer — the main message of the song is in the verses, which don’t even
arrive until about one-third-way into the tune. It’s quite a subtle
achievement, and a sort of double-agent trick on Sam’s fanbase. Once, along
with Ray Charles and others, Sam would use his experience in the gospel genre
to inject the «sacred» spirit into the «profane» (or, at least, «secular»)
art of serenading. Now here, he is taking the fully-formed sexual body of the
pop song and inverting it with a message that is as close to that original
gospel as possible — which makes ‘Chain Gang’ an absolutely outstanding
number even in comparison to most of the other highlights of his catalog. I do not know
if the success of ‘Chain Gang’ had anything to do with the concept of this
LP, but I do know that the song itself, stuck right in the middle of the
album, fits it like a glove. The overriding theme here is life outside the
big city — the Wild West, the countryside, the roamin’ and the ramblin’ — and
the image of the ‘Chain Gang’, "working on the highways and
byways", becomes an appropriate part of a larger whole, even if not a
single one of these songs comes close to mirroring its impact or importance.
But they are tremendously helped by
Hugo & Luigi’s decision to cut down on the bombast a little, and give Sam
more space at the expense of monumental orchestration. Not that strings and
brass are going anywhere, but they are used more sparingly and subtly —
surprisingly, the most notable instrument on the record is the bass, always
at the center of the groove and a perfect «dark» counterpoint for Sam’s
«light» singing style. Given that all the bass work is credited to Milt
Hinton, a veteran of the Cab Calloway orchestra and one of the most prolific
bass session players on both the jazz and
the pop market, this is perhaps not such
a big surprise... Obviously, the
opening ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ is a natural highlight; even the
«poppified» arrangement of the gospel classic cannot detract from the fact
that this material and Sam Cooke were born for each other — unlike, say, Sam
Cooke and ‘Under Paris Skies’ — and although the brass fanfare at the end
spoils the mood a bit, the verses deliver exactly the way we’d expect them
to. I do suppose that to some gospel purists, Sam’s approach to the genre,
particularly in his post-Soul Stirrers days, might feel a bit blasphemous,
what with that same purring, seductive voice he’d used for his lady fans now
directed to singing the Lord’s praise — but lighten up, people, you don’t
always need to put on the heavy boots of Mahalia Jackson to talk to the old
man up in the sky. Soft and sentimental works, too, as long as it’s not
overpowered by dazzling glitz and flashing glam, and this recording mostly
stays away from such excesses. It is difficult
to dwell too much on the other songs individually — what should I write about
cover versions of ‘They Call The Wind Maria’ or ‘Jeanie With The Light Brown
Hair’? — but, as I said, collectively they do not prompt such a repulsive
reaction as the material covered on Hits
Of The 50’s or Cooke’s Tour.
Somehow, there’s an atmosphere of improved sincerity and authenticity, as if
this kind of «saloon music» were closer to Sam Cooke’s essence than «cabaret
music» or «casino music», if you get my drift. But also the emphasis on
quiet, solid rhythm, only occasionally spruced up by brass, woodwinds, and
strings helps immensely. Another piece
of good news is that for the first time ever,
the album boasts not one, but three
Sam Cooke originals: in addition to ‘Chain Gang’, there are ‘If I Had You’
and ‘You Belong To Me’, two straightforward love serenades co-written by Sam
with his manager, James W. Alexander. Of those, ‘You Belong To Me’ is
especially notable, like a perfect illustration of how much can be done by a
beautiful and versatile voice with the tiniest of lyrical means — hear how
Sam sings the line "all of my love
belongs to you" in three different ways (call them «tender»,
«pensive», and «ecstatic», if you wish), only to cap it off with a "because you, you belong to me"
that is at the same time respectfully sentimental and sternly possessive.
(How am I doing with my adjectives so far?). You can definitely feel how this
kind of modulation, bearing much more meaning than the words themselves,
would influence Paul McCartney, for instance, in his early (and not just
early) Beatle days. But even if Paul McCartney would write more interesting
and innovative melodies, his control of his own voice’s overtones would never
even remotely approach Sam’s. By the time the
album closes down with the appropriately placed ‘Goin’ Home’, Cooke has more
or less repaired his reputation as an LP artist (with me, anyway) — even if
the record could certainly profit from the inclusion of a couple more of his
contemporary singles, such as ‘Sad Mood’ from November 1960, which was, I
think, recorded during more or less the same sessions that yielded the bulk
of this album (it definitely has Milt Hinton on it as well, given the
prominence of the simple, but important bass line reinforcing the «sadness»
of the song). With the power of ‘Chain Gang’ behind it and, for the first
time, a consistently satisfying background sound for the man’s vocal
artistry, Sam Cooke should really
count as a reboot, and the opening statement of Sam’s «mature» period, which
would, unfortunately, only last for three years, but which would also be one
of the major blessings for the American pop music scene specifically in its
(generally rather bleak) pre-British Invasion period. |
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Tracks: 1) Don’t Get Around Much Anymore;
2) Little Girl Blue; 3) Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out; 4) Out In
The Cold Again; 5) But Not For Me; 6) Exactly Like You; 7) I’m Just A Lucky
So And So; 8) Since I Met You Baby; 9) Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home; 10)
Trouble In Mind; 11) You’re Always On My Mind; 12) The Song Is Ended. |
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On May 16, 1961, the world was
treated to ‘Cupid’, a song Sam allegedly wrote for some nameless lady singer
but was then convinced by Hugo and Luigi to keep for himself. It wasn’t a
tremendous hit in the US — compared to ‘Chain Gang’, its chart success was
much more modest — but it did become one of his biggest hits across the
Atlantic, and possibly did more to popularize Cooke in the UK than anything
else. Most importantly, it was just a great pop song, and up until this day,
it remains one of Sam’s three or four most recognizable calling cards. (Heck,
it was even sampled by frickin’ Carly Rae Jepsen for her own ‘Tiny Little
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It’s a bit
oddly structured, basically collating verse and chorus in one so that the
short bridge sections end up feeling like actual verses. I don’t particularly
like that bridge — the entire "now
I don’t mean to bother you but I’m in distress..." part sounds
lifted from some generic Mexican dance number, rather lightweight and
unimaginative. But given that it’s twice as short as the verse-chorus thing,
repeated thrice in its entirety over the song, it is clear that Sam’s focus
of pride here was the "Cupid draw
back your bow..." section, and for a good reason: it features one of
the greatest open-close vowel alterations in pop music history. Let’s get a
little on the phonetic side, okay? Some of the finest emotional contrasts can
be gotten out of the "oooh"
– "aaah" juggling of
close rounded vowels and open unrounded ones, like at the very start of the
Beach Boys’ ‘I Can Hear
Music’ (not in the original
Ronettes version), or in the variation between "ooh ooh OOH ooh" and "aah aah AAH aah" in the Stones’ ‘Miss You’. It’s not just
cool because it’s cool; it’s emotionally
cool because the close vowels create a sort of «introspective», «inward-soul»
feeling while the open vowels, of course, give the reverse, and when done
properly, this thing gives the song a multi-dimensional flavor where it feels
like the singer(s) is/are alternately pouring their feelings out to the world
and channelling them within
themselves (or towards God dwelling in our heart, if you so desire). ‘Cupid’ has
precisely that effect, with its delicious contrast between "Cupid, draw back your boow-oow... and let
your arrow goow-oow..." (introverted) and "Cupid, please hear my cry-y-y-y and let your arrow fly-y-y-y"
(extraverted). I have heard several covers of the song by people who
supposedly «get» Sam Cooke, from the Supremes to Rod Stewart, and out of all
the crowd, only Otis Redding comes close to getting that contrast right — but
still not as emphatic or disciplined as on the original version. So the next
time somebody asks you the question, "what’s so great or special about
Sam Cooke?", just say, "who else can juggle their oooh’s and aaah’s
with such simple elegance and emotional depth?" (and then hit them on the
head with something heavy while they’re busy trying to come up with an answer,
take their money and run away). Given the
brilliance of ‘Cupid’, a good idea might have been to follow it up with an
album of original or mostly original material that could have finally
unveiled the talents of Sam Cooke, the songwriter, on a large-scale basis.
Naturally, instead of that Hugo & Luigi followed it up with a bad idea — another album consisting of
nothing but covers of mostly old, pre-1950s material; as you can probably
tell by merely looking at the track listing, My Kind Of Blues uses a pretty wide definition of the word
«blues» — if you’re hoping for Sam Cooke’s take on Robert Johnson or Muddy
Waters, you’re stark out of luck here. The closest the record comes to actual
«blues» in the sense in which we still use the word today is in its inclusion
of several vaudeville-style urban blues from the legendary black queens of
the 1920s, e.g. ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out’ (Ida Cox) or
‘Baby Won’t You Please Come Home’ (Bessie Smith). The rest are essentially
pop standards with a bluesy or jazzy vibe to them, ranging from Duke
Ellington to Gershwin to Rodgers & Hart — something like a tightly
condensed summary of the Ella Fitzgerald series of Songbooks. Well... I guess it might
just be «Sam Cooke’s Kind Of Blues», because I would have a hard time imagining Sam singing ‘Come On In My
Kitchen’. (At least, singing it with the generally desired psychological
effect, that is). Still, My Kind Of Blues is not the worst of
all those cover / tribute albums plaguing Sam’s career. As an LP, it is, of
course, a temporary disappointment after the right moves made with Swing Low. However, the choice of
source material usually makes sense — there’s barely any glitzy-corny stuff
such as made Cooke’s Tour
virtually unlistenable, and no conscious attempts to emulate Sinatra or Nat
King Cole, or, Heaven forbid, «emulate» Billie Holiday. As for the
production, it is predictably Vegasy as usual, but with much more emphasis on
horns and pianos than strings — definitely not enough to make things feel
«gritty», but enough to make them feel a little less «schmaltzy» than usual.
Actually, there’s some pretty tasteful piano playing on these numbers: a
stripped-down version of the whole thing, maybe with just Sam and a small
jazz combo with those piano players would have earned him a lot more
reputation points in retrospect. Curiously, the
biggest overall problem with the album is not even the production, but Sam’s
attitude. Needless to say, his singing is technically impeccable and
inimitable; but the flashy, on-top-of-the-world vibe of the music also
infects the vocal delivery, and this leads to a whole lot of oversinging —
it’s as if Sam felt himself way overconfident at the mike this time around,
and so he chokes the songs with lots of ad-libbing, extra melismatic runs,
quasi-scatting, and suchlike, filling up almost any hole in the vocals that
allows for filling. This sort of «wild vocal rampage» was hardly invented by
Cooke — he probably borrowed it from some of the jazz singers — but I cannot
help feeling that this is the first time, chronologically, that I am
witnessing it on a soul-pop record, and so, ultimately, I guess you could
even trace all of Robert Plant’s annoying baby-baby-babies
someplace back here, because Robert Plant really inherited all those from the
likes of Rod Stewart and Steve Marriott, and both Rod and Steve were big Sam
Cooke fans back in the day. If not for all
the unnecessary vocal acrobatics, this opening rendition of ‘Don’t Get Around
Much Anymore’ would be pretty decent: the occasionally overbearing horns
usually make enough openings for the rhythm section to swing and the piano
player to exercise his Art Tatum-influenced runs, keeping you busy each time
Sam pauses to take a breath. Unfortunately, as the song progresses, the horns
become ever more glitzy and Sam gets ever more carried away; the song pretty
much ends with the singer on top of the world, even if the song’s lyrics
never ever suggested anything of the sort. This Vegas-style crescendo is then
repeated on many, if not most, of the other numbers, with the album quickly
settling into a predictable formula — it actually sounds better if you press
the skip button around halfway through most of the tracks. Similarity of
the arrangements and Sam’s adoption of the same «all-out» approach to singing
on all the tracks leads to an inevitable consequence: no matter the original
mood or purpose of these songs, they all sound the same in the end. Clearly,
the message and mood of ‘I’m Just A Lucky So And So’ and ‘Nobody Knows You
When You’re Down And Out’ could not be any more different, but you wouldn’t
ever know it just by listening to the two songs outside of any context. As
beautiful as Sam’s voice is, there is no danger of this «showtune» version of
‘Nobody Knows You’ ever wiping out memories of Bessie Smith’s original; and
for all the melancholy generated by the opening verse of ‘Baby Won’t You
Please Come Home’, those silly horns still do a great job of blowing all
those clouds away. Who needs their baby to come home, anyway, when there’s
top hats and neon lights and showgirls a-plenty? Probably the
most musically satisfying little bit on here is Sam’s interpretation of
‘Little Girl Blue’, which cuts down on both the thickness of the horn sound
(in favor of a slightly more pastoral attitude) and the incessant ad-libbing.
I can only wonder if this in any way reflects the impact of Nina Simone’s
then-recent version, but the pure fact is that it is the only song on this
album without the obligatory Vegas touch — though, of course, it still does
not even begin to poke at the melancholy depths of Nina’s take. All said,
though, as I have already pointed out, My
Kind Of Blues is on the whole imminently more listenable than any of
Sam’s previous LP of «old-timey» material. Two years later, Sam would make a
step in the right direction and update this vibe for Night Beat, with its comparatively minimalistic and tasteful
arrangements; but even here, the selection of material allows him — at least,
formally — to come across not just as the stereotypical «breaker of hearts»,
but occasionally as a man who’s got his own heart broken, adding a bit of a
cloudy sky to the usual eternal sunshine. That’s not much of a consolation
for those who would rather have themselves a full LP of songs like ‘Cupid’, I
know. But it’s all we got when it comes down to satisfying our appetites for
something that would go beyond a mere greatest hits compilation. |
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