Congratulations, L.C.!

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It’s not often you get to congratulate someone on the release of an album that’s been held up for fifty years.

But that is the case with 81-year-old L.C. Cooke’s Complete SAR Recordings (plus three). Originally scheduled to come out in 1964, it was initially postponed – and then, with Sam’s death, shelved – until its release just a week or two ago.

Even for me, for all my familiarity with both L.C.’s recordings and L.C. himself, it came as a real revelation.

You sang higher, I said to L.C. You sang harder. “I know it,” L.C. said. “Because if I sung in my natural voice I’d sound too much like Sam. Sam said, ‘I hear you, man, and I swear to God, if I didn’t know different, I’d think it was me.’ So that’s when I started singing in a higher pitch.”

He does sound like Sam – a lot like Sam. No one who gave L.C’s recordings even a cursory listen could deny it. But that’s because they both shared the Cooke sound, L.C. says – that’s what their father sounded like when he was preaching, that’s what their brother Charles, who sang lead with their brother-and-sister family group, the Singing Children, and retired from singing forever the day he turned twenty-one, sounded like, too.

I don’t doubt it. If L.C. tells you something, you can believe him. “I’ll tell you something, Pete,” he told me, not long after we met, over twenty years ago, “some people tell you different things different times, but my stories never change. Because I’m gonna tell you the truth, no matter where it fall.”

Early on, he told me matter-of-factly about the time he met Elvis. He was singing with the Magnificent Montague’s group, the Magnificents, performing their hit, “Up on the Mountain,” at the WDIA Goodwill Revue. This was the famous occasion in 1956 when Elvis unexpectedly showed up and the all-black audience went crazy. “I’ve got all of your hits – ‘Up On the Mountain’ and the other side,” Elvis told the group with disarming good humor, but once he heard L.C.’s last name, the Soul Stirrers were all he could talk about, as he offered up titles and verses from their gospel songs. Like all of L.C.’s stories, it is a tale not of glorification but of recognition.

Sometimes L.C. can get in trouble with his penchant for the truth. “What you tell that man all those things for?” his sister Agnes demanded of him after my biography of Sam came out. Both Agnes and L.C. told me the story – Agnes simply thought he had gone too far in his frankness, not just with regard to Sam but with respect to himself. But L.C. had no second thoughts – just as he does not entertain any regrets. “I just told the truth.”

I was reminded of this when I went out to Chicago with Teri Landi and Jody Klein to talk with L.C. last year. I was writing the liner notes for his album, and we were talking about his memories of the various sessions (“Sometimes he remembers things he shouldn’t remember,” said his wife, Marjorie, an ordained minister, laughingly), and L.C. was talking about one of the ten songs on the album that Sam wrote, the previously unreleased “Gonna Have a Good Time,” a carefully crafted number made to sound, L.C. said, “like it’s from long ago” and yet at the same time remain resolutely contemporary. It was one of the few times, L.C. said, that his brother offered him advice in the studio. “He never told me how to sing,” L.C. said unprompted as we listened to the tracks on the album, just before “Have a Good Time” came up. “The one thing he ever said – when I said ‘before’ he said, ‘Don’t say before, say ‘fore. Remember our heritage!’ In other words, I was singing too correct.” And then sure enough, there it was on the tape, which L.C. had not previously heard, just as he remembered it from fifty years before.

There are some wonderful songs on the album – “Let Me Down Easy” could take its place in any collection of soul or r&b – but not just the songs Sam wrote. L.C.’s favorite is one he wrote himself. “’If I Could Only Hear’ was probably the best song I ever did in my life. To me. You know, sometimes you cut a song and you listen. You say, ‘I could have done that better.’ But ‘If I Could Only Hear’ – if I had sung that song for 100 years, I couldn’t have done that song no better than what I did. That’s always been my favorite song. And I think you all will agree.”

Well, you be the judge. But I think this eminently listenable album offers something for everyone. And how great is it to have L.C.’s debut SAR album come out after 50 years sounding as fresh and new as if it were recorded yesterday.

My Travels

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Trowbridge’s, Florence, AL (Sam Phillips’ Favorite Hometown Restaurant)

Sorry to have been out of pocket for so long.

One of the biggest reasons is that we (Alexandra and I, with Robert Gordon and Jake coproducing, and David Leonard and Robert shooting) have been doing video interviews for the enhanced digital versions of the various books, which are slated to start coming out in December.

We shot in Memphis, Florence and Muscle Shoals, Nashville, and Chicago – at Phillips Recording Studio, Lauderdale Courts, Audubon Drive, Fame, Stax, and Sun International. Much of the interview material was with me alone, talking about how the books came to be written as well as some of the different approaches that I took to the material (like the huge difference required – just from the standpoint of structure and style  – in telling the two contrasting stories of Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love).

But then we had conversations, too, with old friends like William Bell (straight from the White House celebration of Stax to the Stax Museum itself), Rick Hall, Dan Penn, Jerry Phillips, Roland Janes, L.C. Cooke, and Sleepy LaBeef, among others. It was really fun (with the one unavoidable downside the bittersweet memories of all those now gone), and here are just a few pictures from our trip.

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With Roland and Robert at Phillips Recording

Roland, in case anyone doesn’t know, played guitar on every big Sun record from the arrival of Jerry Lee Lewis on. He has managed the Phillips studio for the last thirty years and writes the most wonderful short stories, which he sends out every Christmas. Around the middle of our conversation, Roland announced, “Now I’m going to interview you.” And he did. Robert’s new book on Stax, Respect Yourself, is at this moment just about to go to press

 

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With Alexandra and Jake at 706 Union Avenue

The last time I had been here was with Steve Bing and John Fusco, who was researching the script for Last Train to Memphis at the time. Matt Ross–Spang was just beginning to put together recombinant versions of all the original Sun equipment then. Now he has it nearly assembled, with the equivalent of Sam’s RCA 76-D console and, I believe, two Ampex tape recorders. So for anyone who wants to record just like Elvis did, you can have your chance soon. And who knows, maybe we’ll even start shooting the movie before too long!

 

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With Rick Hall at FAME Studios

A couple of nights after this interview we went with Rick to the Nashville Film Festival screening of the documentary Muscle Shoals, a vivid evocation of the music (produced by Stephen Badger and Greg Camalier) in which Rick was characteristically and irrepressibly himself. In fact, he pretty much stole the show, leaving the way wide open for a sequel focusing on some of the other aspects of the story. Rick’s still-unpublished memoir, Hell Bent For Fame, as told to Muscle Shoals historian Terry Pace and edited by Robert Gordon, is an even more amazing and graphic story, particularly of his early years, growing up in the desolate badlands of the Freedom Hills. He wanted it to be like a combination of Harry Crews and Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, he told me when he first began work on it more than ten years ago – and it is

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With L.C. Cooke at his home in Chicago

L.C.’s got a new album coming out only 48 years after its originally announced date. Well, that’s not quite true – I mean, not literally true in that it’s not exactly the same album as the one SAR Records would have released if his brother Sam hadn’t died. This one will have some of L.C’s pre-SAR Checker and post-SAR Destination sides as well. But, as you can imagine, it’s very cool – totally cool. There’s one song on it that as we listened to it, L.C. said, “That was probably the best song I ever did in my life – to me. You know, sometimes you cut a song and you listen and you say, I could have done that better. But ‘If I Could Only Hear’ – if I’d have sung that song about 100 years, I couldn’t have done that song no better. And that’s always been my favorite song.” And then we listened to it. Watch for a fall release on ABKCO!

Next up on Our Tour: Thomson, Georgia, Birthplace of Blind Willie McTell

50th Anniversary of Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club


imageIt was so great to hear Gregg Geller’s voice on NPR talking about Sam Cooke’s Live at the Harlem Square Club on the fiftieth anniversary of its recording.
The album itself was not released for another twenty-two years – and it might not have come out then if it hadn’t been for Gregg.
We all knew about it – J.W. Alexander, Sam Cooke’s business partner and friend, whose voice you can hear among the on-stage back-up singers, had described it in detail to Joe McEwen and me, and Gregg had no trouble finding it in the vaults. But Allen Klein controlled the rights, and his relationship with RCA over the years could only be described as fraught at best.
Gregg was not RCA, though – Gregg was Gregg – and Allen quickly recognized the difference, making a deal which would include Harlem Square, a wonderful Greatest Hits package which would become the model for the current Portrait of a Legend: 1951-1964 (ABKCO), and planned reissues of Live at the Copa and Night Beat (both of which ended up coming out on ABKCO).

Gregg produced the Harlem Square album, I wrote the liner notes, Joe was “spiritual adviser” (something like that), and it led to a life-long friendship with Allen for the three of us. Sam was Allen’s favorite all-time artist, no contest – maybe his favorite person – and “Nothing Can Change This Love” was his favorite song, a typically bittersweet Sam Cooke composition (all sweet on the outside, with its “cake-and-ice cream” lyrics, but undercut by both subtle minor-key allusions and Sam’s deeply wistful delivery). That is what this interview ends with, by Gregg’s altogether appropriate choice. 

Listen to the piece on NPR: click here

More about Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke: click here