And so they were. As Guralnick writes,
There was nothing soft, measured or polite about the Sam Cooke you saw at the Harlem Square Club; there was none of the self-effacing, mannerable, 'fair-haired little colored boy' that the white man was always looking for. This was Sam Cooke undisguised, charmingly self-assured, "he had his crowd," said [guitarist] Clif White approvingly - he was as proud as he has been raised to be, not about to take any scraps from the white man's table.
Indeed, everything Sam Cooke sang at the Harlem Square club took on new weight as if reflected in some complimentary funhouse mirror. Lightweight teenybopper pop fare like Cooke's fad single "Twistin' The Night Away" becomes somehow more serious, like the last party before Judgement Day. The lovely teen-romance crooner "Cupid" turns into an essay in joyous singing as Cooke takes flight all around the calypso melody and sells the young love story to the hilt. Cooke calls on his gospel roots on the rowdy "Feel It (Don't Fight It)," riding the band hit by hit, exhorting the crowd higher and higher and walking a line between sanctified and sinful that conventional wisdom would maintain was never Cooke's to discover. The darker subject matter of Cooke's "Chain Gang" comes fully into its own with the band and backup singers digging into its groove, and Cooke bearing down on the chorus.
On the medley of "It's All Right" and "For Sentimental Reasons," you can hear the crowd singing along rapturously as Cooke scats in Coltranesque sprays of notes. In the liner notes to the album, Peter Guralnick (again!) writes about the importance of community to the chitlin circut, and this is where it all comes together. Cooke and the audience are one, trading energy, good humor, and the sweet melancholy of the songs between themselves fearlessly. By the time we come to the closer "Having A Party," a frantic five-minute workout, Sam Cooke and the band have transcended pretty, transcended slick, transcended easy, transcended everything Sam Cooke seemed to embody to the (white) public and taken the audience to a place blissfully like the white-hot crawl-on-the-floor frenzy of James Brown's classic Live At The Apollo.
The remastering has fixed the crowd noise at a level that is audible but doesn't get in the way of the incandescent performances of Sam Cooke, King Curtis, and the band. Between songs you can hear the crowd begging for mercy, begging for more. They sing, they cry, they scream for Sam Cooke to take them higher, and as the last notes of "Having A Party" fade into the smoky Miami night, you can hear them erupting in an ecstatic chaos that feels a little like afterglow.
Article comments
1 - Al Barger
John Owen, this right here is some good writing. Dare I say, this is one of the better pieces of music writing I've read this millenium.
""Twistin' The Night Away" becomes somehow more serious, like the last party before Judgement Day." Yeah. Maybe it's partly tinged by us knowing his fate fairly soon to come, but now that you mention it he does sound a bit as if he's partying like it's 1999.
Again John, outstanding work.
2 - John Owen
Thanks, Senator!
3 - Eric Berlin
This is great stuff, John -- you really set the scene and then take us there.
4 - Nukapai
Wow, I think I'll just give up trying to write music reviews. ;)
Ehh, what I mean to say: this could have been an article in the newspaper I read (Guardian). Professional, informative, interesting.
5 - Jaime Nichols
VERY nice.