L.C. Cooke, 1932-2017

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L.C. and I always called each other on our almost-shared birthday.

It was always great to talk to L.C. He had a positive word for, and about, everyone. How’s your Dad? he would say. Give your wife a kiss for me. Grandkids doing good? That’s good. It was just his nature.

If you met L.C., you might think you were meeting his older (by 23 months) brother, Sam. Like Sam, he was charming, talented, outgoing, and thoughtful (L.C., he said, which in fact was his full Christian name, stood for “Loads of Charm”) – but he wasn’t Sam. He was L.C., and he knew it. If you asked him how he was doing, he declared, “I’m better than good.”

He was, as I say, one of the warmest and most gracious people you’d ever want to meet. Also, one of the most truth-telling. Nothing was ever prettified or embroidered. Nothing ever changed in his account. And he was always able to paint a picture, right down to the last vivid, eidetic detail. Because, without ever saying anything negative about anybody (there was only one person I ever heard L.C. speak ill of, and he was quick to point out that was the only one), he was a keen observer, an appreciative student of human nature, who didn’t believe in leaving anything out. “What’d you tell that man that for?” his sister Agnes said of some R-rated scene he had recounted to me for my biography of Sam. L.C. just shrugged. “Because it’s the truth,” he said.  To L.C., a deeply religious man, who was a member of Christ Universal Temple, where his wife, Marjorie, served as assistant minister, for over fifty years, there was nothing alien in the human experience – which meant there was nothing to be ashamed of either.

There was unquestionably a cocky side to him, too. (L.C. would have called it confidence – though I’ll bet he would have accepted “cockiness.”) You could see it in his walk, hear it in his talk. And like all the Cooks (Sam added the “e”), he was not going to allow himself to get pushed around. He and his brothers and sisters had been taught by their father never to shrink from a challenge – whether it was from the cop on the beat or the massed forces of Jim Crow. It got him in trouble in the army, where he was almost court-martialed for defying the accepted rules of segregation. You could see it surface occasionally – but only occasionally – when he felt he was being disrespected. In situations like that, whether public or private, he was not about to back down. But you rarely got to see it – it was reserved for that rare moment when his charm failed to deflect what he perceived as a direct affront.

When I first met the family in Chicago in 1996 – I had known L.C. at that point for several years, but this was the first chance I got to meet his four living brothers and sisters and his 98-year-old father – I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I told L.C., “Man, I want to be a Cook.”  “Okay,” said L.C., without seeming to give the matter a whole lot of reflection, “you are.” I said, “L.C., you can’t just speak for the whole family, can you? Don’t you have to consult with anyone else?” He looked at me like I must be crazy. “Naw, I’m the head man now,” he said. “You’re my brother.” And while I don’t really know how anyone else in the family felt about it, I felt great. And I still do.

For as long as I knew him, L.C. was pretty much of a homebody. He had long since stopped performing, and while he maintained all of his far-flung show-business connections (L.C. knew everybody, and everybody knew L.C.), he never showed any interest in returning to the life he had led. He cherished his friends. He cherished his family. He cherished his memories. And he cherished his wife, Margie, whom he met when her family had a restaurant on the South Side that all the r&b singers frequented. The church, while always important, became more and more so in later years. At his funeral at Christ Universal the story was told of how he became an usher, a position of great respect, when he started going to prayer meetings and, after a number of invitations, offered up a prayer. When he finished, everyone was in agreement, they wouldn’t need to have church now, because, after L.C.’s comprehensive praying, they had already had it. As an usher, he was given the honorary title of “Bishop,” the same as his father, a prominent evangelist in the Church of Christ (Holiness), and he wore it proudly until his death.

In his last years he suffered from a debilitating condition which left him in a wheelchair, but with the help of Margie and his good friend, “Junior” Mayfield, he remained undaunted in spirit, dedicated to his rehabilitation, and to the end he never gave up the hope that someday he might walk again. “You don’t ever have to check up on anything I tell you,” he said the first time we met. “Because I’m going to tell it to you the same every time.” And he expected me to hold up my end of the bargain, too. “Didn’t I tell you that before?” he would say with some exasperation, when I tested my own understanding of the story from time to time. “Thank you.”

The only time I ever had reason to question his total reliability not just as a family chronicler but as a social historian arose when we were looking at a bunch of family photographs supplied by his sister Agnes. “That’s Sam!” L.C. said proudly, holding up a picture of a young boy in a button-up sweater, with a kerchief around his neck. A year or two later, when my friend Susan Marsh was designing the book, she said, “That looks an awful lot like L.C. to me,” and Alexandra thought so, too. “Well, they were brothers, weren’t they?” I said. “I mean, they did kind of look alike.” At Susan’s insistence, though, I went back to L.C., and was met with the predictable reaction, which fell somewhere between indignation and hurt. “Man, I already told you that was Sam,” he said. Which necessarily settled the matter. But then, not long after the book came out, I was talking with Agnes, and she asked me why I had labeled the boy in the picture as Sam, when anyone could plainly see it was L.C.  I told her that her brother had been very emphatic on the subject. Agnes just laughed. “That fool don’t know his own self,” she said. But, of course, he did, with perhaps that single inexplicable exception. And he laughed about it afterwards, reluctantly conceding that Agnes was right.

I can still hear his liltingly assertive voice, the seductive rhythms of his speech. I will always recall his warm smile, that warm laugh. And I think about when his debut SAR album came out in 2014, fifty years after it had been completed and announced for release just before Sam’s death. (SAR was the label Sam started to record some of the artists he most admired both in gospel and pop, artists like the Sims Twins, Johnnie Taylor, Bobby Womack, and the Soul Stirrers.) What was revelatory about hearing so much of L.C.’s early work all gathered together on one disc was not how much L.C. sounded like Sam (everyone already knew that) but how much he possessed a voice of his own. “Sam wanted me to be different from anybody. He wanted me to stand out alone,” L.C. said, and even though Sam wrote most of the songs and produced all of the SAR sessions, it is L.C.’s voice that comes through most of all: jaunty, buoyant, upbeat, but more than capable, as it turns out, of really bearing down on a deep-soul classic like “Put Me Down Easy.”

He started out at the age of five singing bass with his brothers and sisters in the family group, the Singing Children. He sang with Lou Rawls in a teenage gospel group, the Holy Wonders, and met Elvis Presley at the WDIA Goodwill Revue in Memphis when he was singing with the Magnificents in 1956. (“You’re not related to Sam Cooke, are you?” Elvis said with almost awestruck wonder, at a time when Sam was still singing gospel with the Soul Stirrers and scarcely anyone in white America knew his name.) Even after L.C. stopped performing professionally, he might still sing occasionally with old friends at informal gospel singing reunions or events like Lou Rawls’ 2006 funeral. When the album came out, he relished the attention that both he and the music were getting, without ever being tempted by the numerous offers to perform that came his way. Talking to him about the album just before it came out, I asked if he had any favorites, and of course he named “Put Me Down Easy” as one. But it was his own, self-penned “If I Could Only Hear,” recorded for Chess just before he started recording for his brother’s label, that he felt represented him best. “It was probably the best song I ever did in my life,” he said. “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.”

Mr G: Thinking About Don

We used to talk about Don Covay – me and Joe (Mr. C to you), Peter Wolf, and Freddy Blue.

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He was the shadow king – not because he was any less of a talent than any of the other great soul singers, he was just different in that his talent was expressed primarily through his pen. Well, through his writing, through his

scheming and dreaming.

We used to kid around – was it Don or was it Mick? They sounded so much alike, particularly, of course, on “Have  Mercy” (“Have mercy, baby – have mercy on…ME”). Which one of them took his style from the other?

Peter was the one who knew him best, who shared adventures and eventually songwriting credits with him. (Someday the world will beg loud and sweetly enough to persuade Peter to write about those adventures –whether with Don, or Alfred Hitchcock, or Tennessee Williams, or Van, or Bob, in an elegant, Christopher Isherwood-styled memoir.)

I think it was Solomon who first introduced me to Don. He said in that inarguably (I mean, who was going to argue with Solomon) persuasive voice of his, “Pete, you got to meet the guy. I mean, come on. ‘You’re Good for Me.’ ‘Tonight’s the Night.'” And he reeled off a string of Don’s hits – and some I’d never heard of – as if he were sharing the secret of the universe with me. Which of course, he was, in his own deeply allegorical Solomonic way.

Don was truly a free spirit. The Soul Clan, in all its permutations, both real and highly imagined, was perhaps the fullest extension of that freedom. With Solomon he was forever the warm, witty, irrepressible younger brother (even though I think he was in fact older). Each got such a kick out of the other’s eccentricities and foibles – but there was never any question who was in charge.

Sadly, Don’s warm, antic spirit never fully translated on stage – maybe it just couldn’t be harnessed. For all of his discipline as a songwriter and a recording artist, Don simply didn’t seem to possess the ability to pace himself. “He never,” said Solomon sorrowfully (but I’ve got to say, mirthfully, too), “knows when to stop.” But his music, of course, will unquestionably live on – and on – and on – well, just listen to it, and tell me he didn’t hit an eternity note.

The last time I spoke to Don, Peter and I called him up at the care facility outside Washington D.C., where he had been living since his stroke of eleven years before. Not every day was a good day, Don said, but this one was, and while his speech had been affected, his spirit shone thorough. He talked a little about his breakthrough as a songwriter, how after talking to his idol, Sam Cooke, he finally came to embrace his vocation. “Write about what you know, write about what you’ve experienced, write about what you observe,” Sam told him. “Write about natural things – you’ve got to come out of the future and get back to the past, to what you knew when you were a little kid.” Most important of all, Sam said, “All you got to do is be yourself.”

And that’s what Don became in his writing, his own pure, pluperfect and incontrovertible self. It was in that realization that he wrote “Have Mercy,” his first real Don Covay song. And after that he never looked back – his goal was, simply, to express himself, following whatever path his muse took him, never feeling the need to explain, just to express – himself.

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Talkin’ About Live Soul

This post originally ran on www.okayplayer.com here. It was intended as a list of some favorite soul tracks released on live albums (kind of an abbreviated soundtrack to the new enhanced eBook edition of Sweet Soul Music). Okayplayer used youtube audios, with one alternative Ray Charles video performance thrown in for good measure. (Now, that might be the start of a future great-live-soul-videos list!) For those of you without Spotify, we’ve included the youtube versions here, too.

There’s nothing like live music.

I don’t know what it is. Many record producers and engineers see it as an illusion – it looks better than it sounds – but for me it’s the essence of all music.  From the first time I saw Lightnin’ Hopkins when I was sixteen years old to catching James Brown and Solomon Burke in person (not to mention Howlin’ Wolf and Jerry Lee Lewis) when I wasn’t much older, I’ve never found anything to match it.  With the soul and gospel shows it’s more of the incantatory nature of the experience – I don’t know of anything that can equal the wildness and out-of-control control of a groove that draws you in even as it keeps you at a tantalizing remove. Often the live versions of familiar songs are slower, more drawn-out, they deepen the emotional resonance of lyrics you thought you knew by heart – but not always. It’s the unexpectedness, the spontaneity of the moment that makes it different (same as jazz), whatever expression that hypnotic moment  may take. 

So little of this music has been recorded the way it actually sounds – in the clubs, on-stage, with an audience that is as much a part of the experience as the performer him or herself. Here are just a few, a very few, live recordings that suggest some of that untrammeled freedom. In answer to the Desert Island Disc question (what’s the one record you would take with you to that mythical desert island, assuming all obstacles of technology could be overcome and records still existed?), I’ve always said that I would gladly give away all my records, CDs, recorded music, just to see Howlin’ Wolf shatter reality one more time. He was one of so many who was never recorded properly in his own milieu. In fact, apart from B.B. King Live at the Regal, I can’t think of any of the great blues singers who were recorded live in a manner that reflected the unparalleled range of moods and emotions that you could take from their in-person performance – unless you count the history-before-it-happened Alan Lomax Library of Congress recordings of Muddy Waters and Son House. Or the Harry Oster field recordings collected in the electrifying Country Negro Jam Sessions on Arhoolie, featuring the fiddle-guitar duo of Butch Cage and Willie Thomas. From my perspective – and I know this is heresy – I would argue that neither Aretha nor Otis Redding nor Al Green, say, was ever adequately captured in the full flowering of an unvarnished live performance.

But then personal preference is always a matter of personal taste. So without begging the question, and without seeking in any way to invite invidious comparison, here is a select selection of live soul(ful) performances,  with directions toward a few more. But, seriously, don’t stay home pondering my list or anyone else’s – or even dwelling on memories. Go out and hear some live music – right now!

 RAY CHARLES – DROWN IN MY OWN TEARS

Slow, slower, slowest. There is no one who can tease out a feeling – the feeling – better than Ray, even as he continues to keep the pulse of the music going, keeps the listener on the edge of his/her feet.  Listen to the way he uses the horns to permit his voice to weave sinuously in and out of the arrangement, to delay and deliver the message until finally, toward the end, the Raelettes come in for the first time and Ray plays off of them instead, in a warm human interchange that culminates in a searing falsetto inspired to begin with by Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Only to followed, after many professions of faith have already been elicited from the audience, by the reassuring repetition: “I want to know, don’t it make you feel, all right?” And it DOES.

[Note: the audio of this performance was recorded  in 1959 and can be found on the album Ray Charles in Person, the clip above is the same song performed live at Newport Jazz Festival. – ed.]

James Brown – LOST SOMEONE

Much the same could be said of James Brown’s historic 1962 live album (recorded at his own expense because his record company had so little faith in its potential). Listen to the way James draws out the tension with his mastery of repetition and homespun advice. (“Don’t go to strangers /Come on home to me…. You know, we all make mistakes sometimes. And the only way we can correct our mistakes/We got to try one more time.”) Listen to the way he draws in the audience (us), listen to the way he teases and tantalizes in much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock moment by moment intensifies the suspense in his films. (Suspense, as Hitchcock defines it, is not the same as surprise – everyone knows what’s coming, we just don’t know when.) And then the audience explodes as first James, after a suitable tease (“I feel like I want to scream.” “Scream!” comes back at him) lets loose with his own apocalyptic version of the Archie Brownlee-inspired scream, then takes it one step further by getting the audience to scream, too. Then, and only then, as James declares after nearly ten minutes of apocalyptic drama, “I believe my work will be done.” And so it is – until the next time, the next show, the next moment of revelation. 

If this only whets your appetite for more (and how could it not?), check out Live at the Apollo Volume 2, from 1967, just five years later, for an entirely different (but no less satisfying) experience, when everything has become rhythm and James dances madly on the precipice of funk. Or try “Oh Baby Don’t You Weep” from the faux-Live at the Royal (with faked audience applause), which in its own way is just as apocalyptic in its studio recreation as it ever was on stage. . And don’t under any circumstances miss Alex Gibney’s brand-new documentary, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown. You won’t believe your eyes (and ears) – but, on the other hand, I know you will.

WILSON PICKETT – IF YOU NEED ME (don’t be put off by the mistitling; it really is “If You Need Me”)

This is the song that Solomon Burke popularized after Jerry Wexler bought the publishing but forgot to lock up the record. So both artists had hits with it, on different labels. Solomon always sang the hell out of the song in his warm, pleading style, but I don’t know if anyone ever beat Wilson’s version, recorded here at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theatre with all the harsh intensity of Pickett’s imperiously scoured voice. After a long, exhortatory introduction (it goes on for almost half the length of the song itself) Pickett offers up the same sermon that Solomon interjected into his version virtually word for word (“People have always said that I didn’t mean you no good….But one thing I know, way deep down in the bottom of my heart I’ve done the best I could”) – but with an entirely different tonal meaning. And, of course, as befits a song of such sturdy melodic construction, you get full audience participation, underlining the sense that what is being shared here is a particular experience, but universalized in such a way that it can evoke both an inner core  of aloneness and a spirit of community at one and the same time. This is what Sam Phillips sought in the studio, music that is at once real (“R-E-A-L,” Sam always said) and fully aware of how hard it is to create a convincing simulacrum of reality. Not unlike a Bruce Springsteen concert.  Can I get a witness?

SAM COOKE – BRING IT ON HOME TO ME

This, of course, is not just one song – it’s a symphony of Sam, arranged as a kind of showcase (in much the same way that Solomon Burke or James Brown, but not Ray Charles, arranged their medleys) for his various songs, moods and styles. It was conceived very consciously as a reaction to the way that he and his friend and business partner, J.W. Alexander, felt he had been upstaged by Little Richard, by all the explosive energy that Richard put into every performance, on a tour of England in the fall of 1962. Sam came home and constructed an act of his own to match that energy, and this January 1963 date at the Harlem Square Club was one of its earliest unveilings. Not only that – spurred on by the news that James Brown had recorded his show at the Apollo three months earlier (James Brown Live at the Apollo would not come out for another few months), Sam persuaded RCA to record his Harlem Square Club performance in Miami for an album that was to be titled One Night Stand. It might just as well have been titled Another Night on the Chitlin Circuit as far as RCA was concerned, because it was almost immediately set aside – and was not in fact released until 1984, twenty years after Sam’s death. What is most notable about it, apart from the immediacy of the musical experience is that it really was another night on the chitlin circuit, one of the very few club dates of this sort that was ever recorded. But more to the point, Sam is singing in that hard-edged gospel style that he seemed to have abandoned altogether with his departure from the Soul Stirrers in 1957. It stands as solitary, secular testament to the intensity of that style – and to the way in which Sam was loved by his audience, something which you can hear over and over again in an audience response that turns almost into a singalong. I can’t think of an album with greater charm, or greater intensity. It continually arrives at a point where it seems both singer and audience are about to lose control, only to be deflected by the saving grace of Sam’s polished showmanship, as, much in the manner of one of his most accomplished students, Solomon Burke, he declares, “I better leave that one alone,” every time the temperature in the room threatens to get too hot.

One time when he didn’t leave anything alone was on the Specialty album, The Great 1955 Shrine Concert, which presents the Soul Stirrers and half a dozen other Specialty Records gospel acts, live at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Sam’s “Nearer to Thee,” perhaps his greatest gospel composition, goes on for over eight-and-one-half minutes, with Sam and second lead Paul Foster trading leads until the tension becomes almost unbearable and then in the end, just as in the secular world of soul, finally finds release.  

GENE CHANDLER – RAINBOW ‘65

An epic tale of doomed romance, recorded at the Regal Theatre in Chicago, the furthest point of the chitlin circuit theater tour that also included the Apollo and the Uptown, along with the Howard and the Royal in DC and Baltimore. Once again we are drawn in by the incantatory pulse – at one point it seems almost as if the needle has gotten stuck in the groove, as the singer repeats, “I’m asking you baby I’m asking you baby” over and over again, until finally he breaks into an extended, wailing, squealing  falsetto “Pleasssse.” And then, after playing with words and sounds and clicks and gasps (words at this point no longer have meaning – or at least that is not their primary purpose) finally arrives at his cataclysmic conclusion: “I just want to ask you one thing [three times, four times] I want you to stop, stop THIS RAINBOW….IN MY HEART.” 

ETTA JAMES – SOMETHING’S GOT A HOLD ON ME

This could probably be better called rock ‘n’ soul, of which, if Solomon was the king, Etta would surely make a fitting queen. (There is, of course, only one Queen of Soul.) It’s the only uptempo number in the group – I think most people would agree that deep soul, in order to get deep, generally takes a more measured pace – but here Etta adopts another mode and loses nothing in the process. The raw power of her voice alone, particularly in the extended intro, with its straight-out evocation of the church, would be enough in itself, along with the pumping gospel piano and lyrics that could just as easily be applied to the sacred (and unquestionably have) as the profane. A sense of transport fills the New Era Club in Nashville – here, once again, it need hardly be said, it’s not the song, it’s the feeling.

SOLOMON BURKE – SILENT NIGHT

Listen to the laughter. That says it all, expressing the sense of delight that not just soul music but gospel music, too (hell, all kinds of music) is able so effortlessly to convey. In the end it’s the sound of surprise, the exultation of discovery, the sense on the part of both audience and performer that – hey, (s)he/I didn’t just do that, did we? In Solomon’s case, it is, of course, amplified by one of the most glorious voices you are ever likely to hear –along with the most astonishing talent for improvisation, verbal, musical and, not entirely irrelevantly, comical, too. In this case the listener doesn’t really have to know that the number was recorded in a Macon church on a steaming July day (“It was at least 105 degrees, Pete!” Solomon told me with that sense of conspiratorial wonder that always made you kind of…wonder) to appreciate the anomaly of the situation. Nor is it necessary to put your full, literal faith in Solomon’s pronouncement to producer Fred Mendelsohn as he pointed out the church window, “Look, Fred, it’s snowing!” to recognize the extent to which music can take you away from the literal, the diurnal, your everyday cares and woes. If you put your faith in music, Solomon says over and over again in his songs, both sacred and secular, you can move mountains, you can change the world. (Don’t forget, it was Solomon who announced without irony in one of his early hits, “There’s a song that I sing, and I believe if everyone was to sing this song, it would save the whole world.”)

Now – if you want to get a dose of Solomon at his most gloriously secular (and at his most alive), you can’t by any lassitude of the spirit allow yourself to overlook his Rounder album Soul Alive! Captured with wall-to-wall verisimilitude and fervor at a Washington D.C. club in 1981, it’s like Sam Cooke’s live album, a true symphony of soul. But the thing about it is, as Solomon would be the first to tell you, when the feeling’s right, whether it’s at a little church in Georgia, a bedraggled club that hasn’t bothered to remove its Christmas tinsel in years, or a command performance for the Pope, it really doesn’t matter – when the feeling is right, that’s when a true miracle is achieved.