SAM COOKE - 50 YEARS GONE

A sobering fifty years after Sam Cooke's untimely death, I mark this anniversary - December 11 - by re-publishing the entry on Sam in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Cooke, Sam [1931 - 1964]

Sam Cook was born 22 January 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, but grew up in Chicago, one of eight children of a Baptist preacher; they formed the Singing Children when he was nine. Later he moved over to the Highway QCs and then replaced R.K. Harris as lead tenor of the Soul Stirrers. With this innovative and contemporary gospel group he began recording in 1951 (though his singing at this point is often overrated: his version of Thomas Dorsey’s great song ‘Peace In The Valley’, pallid and unmemorable, cannot compare with those by ELVIS PRESLEY and LITTLE RICHARD).

            He ‘went secular’ in 1957, becoming Sam Cooke and starting a long and splendid run of hits, almost all his own compositions, many of which have been covered time and again by artists of the stature of VAN MORRISON. He was a consummate vocalist and a bright, lithe, sexy young man, whose TV appearances helped make black sexuality visible to young white America. He may have learnt his trade in gospel but church-going modesty was not his style.

Sam Cooke was very popular but never popular enough. Most of his work is of undimmed excellence: great records by a terrific songwriter and a masterful soul singer of panache, integrity and expressive generosity. In 1960-63 he was in his prime, not least in live performance (try One Night Stand: Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963).

            By the end of 1963, Cooke had notched up eighteen Top Thirty hits since 1957; but pop success was not enough. Earlier that year he had heard Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and is reported to have felt shaken that it had been ‘a white boy’ who had written so potent a song  -  a song that eloquently, if implicitly, addressed the urgent issues of political struggle that so deeply involved his own race. He began performing the Dylan song himself (a version is captured on the album Live At The Copacobana, 1964), but his more profound response was to write the moving, thoughtful and dignified ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ (originally called ‘My Brother’) which he recorded on January 30, 1964.

            Despite the quality of the song and Cooke’s recording of it, it was slipped out as an album track (on Ain’t That Good News) and its release as a single was long delayed. On December 11, 1964, Cooke died after being shot in unclear circumstances in an LA motel. He was 33 years old. Two weeks later, and with one verse edited out, ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was released… as the B-side of ‘Shake’.

Dylan mentions the song in Chronicles Volume One; the context is complex but this is what he writes: ‘Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it  -  like in that song of Sam Cooke’s, “Change Is Gonna Come”…’ And in an interview in 2001, he reveals an awareness of Cooke’s early gospel group the Highway QCs, recalling that when he was ‘12 years old, listening to the radio… at midnight the gospel stuff would start, and so I got… to be acquainted with the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie Hummingbirds and, you know, Highway QCs…’

Dylan cut a version of Cooke’s ‘Cupid’ with GEORGE HARRISON in a New York City studio in May 1970 (which would have been effective had Dylan remembered more than a handful of the words) and attempted Cooke’s hit ‘Chain Gang’ at March and April 1987 studio sessions for the Down In The Groove album. (These remain uncirculated.)

‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was revisited by THE BAND on their Moondog Matinee album of oldies in the 1970s, and on Dylan’s 1978 world tour, on which various of his back-up singers were given solo spots (with Dylan and the band playing behind them), CAROLYN DENNIS sang ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ in Hitler’s old Zeppelinfeld stadium at Nuremberg that July 1 and again at Blackbushe Aerodrome in England two weeks later.

Matching song to venue with his usual quiet shrewdness, Dylan finally performed a respectful version of ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ himself live at the home of early-60s R&B and black aspiration, the Apollo Theater in Harlem, NYC, on March 28, 2004, forty years after the creation of the song for which his own work had been a catalyst.

            In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine asked 172 prominent music-industry figures, including artists such as JONI MITCHELL, to vote for the all-time 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Sam Cooke’s ‘Change Is Gonna Come’ came in at no.12  -  two places higher than ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’.

            Dylan, however, was at no.1 with ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.

[The Soul Stirrers: ‘Peace In The Valley’, nia, CD-reissued on Sam Cooke: My Gospel Roots, Xtra 26471, UK, 2005. Sam Cooke: One Night Stand: Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963, NYC, 12-13 Jan 1963, RCA PL85181, Rome, 1985; ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, NYC, 7-8 Jul 1964, Live At The Copacobana, Victor LPM /LSP-2970, NYC, 1964; ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, 30 Jan 1964, RCA 8486, NYC, 1964. Bob Dylan: ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, NYC, 28 Mar 2004, broadcast on NBC TV’s program ‘Apollo at 70: A Hot Night In Harlem’, NY, 19 Jun 2004; Chronicles Volume One, 2004, p.61; interview for WTTW-TV, Chicago, 27 Oct 2001. The Band: ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, Bearsville NY, Mar-Jun 1973, Moondog Matinee, Capitol SW-11214, 1973. Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone poll seen online 7 Aug 2005 at www.rollingstone.com/rs500moretext.]

QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST NO. 11

I'm so glad this exists: a “lost" slice of documentary footage by a French filmmaker, 11 minutes long, of people arriving at, and then being at, the 2nd Isle of Wight Festival of Music, in 1969: the year the performers included The Who, Richie Havens, The Band and Bob Dylan. There's hardly a moment of The Who or Dylan, but that's not the point. As so often with documents of the past, it's the footage of ordinary life that fascinates: plus, in this case, the way it catches that moment when there was, or appeared to be, a cultural gulf between “straights" and “underground" people:

TURNING VINYL INTO WRITINGS & DRAWINGS

I don't go in for endorsing products but I make no apology for passing on my enthusiasm for an outfit named Vintage Vinyl Journals. They have had the good idea of making rather beautiful big journals/notebooks by bookbinding substantial numbers of blank pages inside hard covers made from real old American LPs. I have one made from an old copy of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II. The front, as you see, is made from Side 4 of the 1971 double-album, and the back from a key part of the album cover:

The outside cloth binding on mine is a darkish blue but I see from their website that you can get a journal made from another copy of the same Dylan album with a different back cover and with the cloth binding in bright red. Others available include one from the Rolling Stones' Aftermath and this rather lovely one using The Band's Music From Big Pink, which features much of Dylan's cover painting on the back:

To be specific, each journal is handmade from a real vinyl album and contains 220 unlined pages on 7-7/8″ x 7-1/2″ acid-free paper (70lb weight). The paper colour is Cool White and the case binding is sewn and glued.

I asked Katie Pietrak, who makes these journals, whether it worried her that she was in effect destroying a lot of terrific old records. Her reply seemed fair enough:

“95% of what we used is damaged and unplayable or at the very least uncollectable... some albums have peoples name written on the label, album covers have water damage (a lot of people store/stored their old records in their basements), most are scratched, promo copies where the album cover has a hole in the cover or a cut slit in it.. As you know there are millions of millions of records out there being destroyed and sent to landfills... I have boxes and boxes of vinyl that people have given to me (mostly “crap” that nobody wants) which most people were about to throw in the trash and I saved them hoping that I can bring new life to them by repurposing. (I’m working on pitching some private label journals, eg. Hard Rock, and then I can use these as I would cover the label).

I’m a vinyl collector -- I have boxes of vintage albums I would never cut (eg a sealed White Album) and boxes of new stuff that I won’t even take the plastic off of (for music I listen to now and I love I buy 2 vinyl copies - one to listen to, one to keep sealed and collect)... I wouldn’t lie, we do produce some (5%) journals out of new vinyl -- for example, Radiohead, Bon Iver, Taylor Swift -- it’s not our “core” business but we do offer that service. In this case we are taking new vinyl and cutting it.”

I admit I'm a stationery freak - I loathe other forms of shopping but take me to a classy stationery shop and I'm calm and happy - so it isn't surprising that I appreciate a decent journal when I find one. The promise dancing from all those clean, blank pages.The alluring smell. As writer and actor John Turturro (so great in O Brother, Where Art Thou?) said: "If I was a criminal, stationery stores and bakeries would be the two kinds of places I would concentrate on."

LEVON

 photo taken from www.drummerworld.com; no photographer credited there

Others have written eloquently and with evident sincerity about what a loss Levon Helm's death represents, and how his voice both personified and defined Americana. I echo those feelings and observations, and can only republish here the entry on the man inside my Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. I haven't updated it to make it a posthumous account (and the names in capital letters just indicate that there are entries in the book on them too). If it contributes anything extra in present circumstances, perhaps it's in the amount of detail it logs about Levon Helm's career and its focus on how much he also added to Bob Dylan's:

Helm, Levon [1940 - ]

Mark Lavon Helm was born on May 26, 1940 in the tiny town of Marvell, Arkansas, 20 miles west of the Mississippi River and 75 miles southwest of Memphis. He learnt to play guitar as a child but switched to drums after being taken to see that time-warp outfit, the F.S. Walcott Rabbits Foot Minstrel Show (slightly rechristened the ‘W.S. Walcott Medicine Show’ on a song written by Canadian BAND member ROBBIE ROBERTSON on the group’s third album, Stage Fright).

            Levon Helm was well placed to absorb country and blues music, R&B and early rock’n’roll, and after gigging locally with his sister on washtub he formed a high-school group, the Jungle Bush Beaters. Moving to Memphis he managed to sit in with CONWAY TWITTY and then got ‘discovered’ by RONNIE HAWKINS (another Arkansas good ole boy).

            Helm joined The Hawks and they moved up into Canada, making Toronto their base. In 1959, signed to Roulette, Hawkins & the Hawks had two immediate hits with the derivative ‘Forty Days’ and its follow-up, ‘Mary Lou’. From there the other members of what would eventually become The Band were brought into the group  -  Robbie Robertson (then known as Jaime) as guitarist, RICHARD MANUEL as pianist, RICK DANKO as bass-player and GARTH HUDSON on organ.

            Quitting Hawkins eventually (each side has its own version of how this came to pass) the group went out as Levon & The Hawks, then briefly as the Canadian Squires, and then as Levon & The Hawks again.

            They met up with Bob Dylan in 1965 and Levon was the drummer on the early electric gigs that followed the NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL electric début  -  starting at Forest Hills, New York that August 28. The rest of Dylan’s band at this point were Robbie Robertson on guitar, AL KOOPER on organ and Harvey Brooks (aka HARVEY GOLDSTEIN) on bass. This unit lasted only a short time, and after a Hollywood Bowl concert on September 3, Dylan got together with Helm, Robertson, Danko, Hudson and Manuel to rehearse in Woodstock, New York, for further live gigs.

            On October 5 they went into the studio with Dylan for the first time, followed by more live concerts and a second studio stint on November 30 (from which comes the single ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?’)  -  but Levon wasn’t with them for this session (though he’s credited as drummer on the session in the sleevenotes to Bootleg Series Vol.7). He’d quit, playing his last Dylan concert of the tour in Washington DC on November 28. He couldn’t stand all the booing that Dylan’s electric performances were bringing down upon their heads. He went home to Arkansas, worked on oil rigs in the Gulf and felt like giving up, but played some dates around Memphis with the Cate Brothers Band. By December 4, at Dylan’s Berkeley concert, the rest of the Hawks were still in there, but Levon had been replaced by BOBBY GREGG. The whole of the amazing 1966 tour took place without Levon Helm.

            He returned to the fold only for the last part of the informal Basement Tapes sessions. Those sessions began without him in June 1967 at Dylan’s house in Woodstock and contined over that summer and autumn, partly at Dylan’s house but mostly at ‘Big Pink’, the group’s house at nearby West Saugerties  -  in the Basement. A total of 145 tracks plus 7 further fragments were recorded, with the band members spreading themselves out into multi-instrumentalism, so that when Levon Helm rejoined them he was sometimes drumming but on other occasions played mandolin and bass. Yet he had only come back among them in October. Exactly when he arrived, what he missed and what he played on are impossible to say reliably.

            When Dylan made his first public appearance for 20 months in January 1968 at the WOODY GUTHRIE Memorial Concerts, the Hawks (or The Crackers) played behind him, and Levon Helm was on stage with them for the first time in over two years. The group went on to become The Band, and it was Levon’s lead vocal carving into us on ‘The Weight’, ‘Rag Mama Rag’, ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’, ‘Up On Cripple Creek’, ‘Jemima Surrender’ and later on ‘Strawberry Wine’, ‘All La Glory’, ‘W.S. Walcott Medicine Show’ and, on the rock’n’roll revival album Moondog Matinee, ‘Ain’t Got No Home’, ‘Mystery Train’, ‘Promised Land’ and ‘I’m Ready’.

            The Band accompanied Dylan again at his Isle of Wight Festival appearance on August 31, 1969. In turn, at their 1971 New Year’s Eve concert in New York City, Dylan came on in the early hours of January 1, 1972 and as well as singing ‘Down In The Flood’, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, he also played guitar behind Levon as Helm sang on ‘Don’t Ya Tell Henry’. (These performances were finally released in 2001 among the many extra tracks on a 2-CD reissue of The Band’s Rock Of Ages album.)

            In 1974 The Band rejoined Dylan for his so-called Come-Back Tour of North America, from which came Before The Flood, which followed their working together one more time in the studio, on Dylan’s Planet Waves. In 1975 a S.N.A.C.K. Benefit gig in San Francisco featured Dylan, NEIL YOUNG, Rick Danko and Levon. And then came the end of The Band, with the concert at the Winterland Palace in San Francisco on November 25, 1976, filmed by MARTIN SCORSESE as The Last Waltz, and one last album, Islands.

            Levon would make his feelings about the last years of The Band, and about the Scorsese-Robertson partnership, in many a subsequent interview and then in his 1993 autobiography This Wheel’s On Fire (which carried this endorsement by Dylan: ‘Torrid and timeless… wisdom and humor roaring off every page… you’ve got to read this’.)

            After The Band split up, Helm made a series of solo albums, all calling on a huge cast of friends in the studio, beginning with Levon Helm and the RCO All Stars in 1977. Dylan sang ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ as a guest at a Levon Helm & Rick Danko gig in New York City on February 16, 1983; Dylan & Helm performed ‘Nadine’ during Helm’s Lone Star Café gig in NYC on May 29, 1988, and the two were reunited again on the ensemble finale song (‘Only The Lonely’) at the ROY ORBISON tribute concert in LA on February 24, 1990.

            By this time The Band had reformed in a partial sort of way, with Earl Cate of the Cate Brothers and without Robbie Robertson (in 1983), but after Richard Manuel’s suicide in 1986 the trio that was left took years more before they made a new Band album, Jericho, recorded in 1993 at the studio Helm now owned in Woodstock. It included a version of Dylan’s ‘Blind Willie McTell’; when Dylan subsequently took to performing it in concert, he followed their way of doing it rather than his own.

            Ahead of making Jericho, a rather enfeebled version of The Band appeared at Dylan’s so-called 30th Anniversary Concert in New York City in 1992, and on January 17, 1993, Levon (and Garth and Danko) played live with Dylan once again, at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration party, the so-called ‘Absolutely Unofficial Blue Jeans Bash (For Arkansas)’. More albums billed as by The Band followed  -  including High On The Hog in 1996, which included Helm singing the Dylan-HELENA SPRINGS song ‘I Must Love You Too Much’ -  but in the late 1990s Helm formed a new blues-based band of his own, Levon Helm & The Barn Burners (featuring his daughter Amy).

            He and Dylan came to one more conjunction of sorts in 2003, when the Dixie Hummingbirds’ recording of Dylan’s ‘City Of Gold’ was included on the Masked and Anonymous soundtrack. It came from their album Diamond Jubilation, on which Levon and Garth Hudson both played, as indeed did Dylan tour-band members LARRY CAMPBELL, TONY GARNIER and GEORGE RECILE, and which Campbell produced. In 2007 Campbell also produced a significant new Helm album (and Levon's first in 25 years), Dirt Farmer. This award-winning work was followed by Electric Dirt.

            Helm has also appeared in (and sometimes narrated) a number of TV profiles of other artists (including ELVIS ’56, 1987, Legends: The Who, 1997, and JOHNNY CASH: Half A Mile A Day, 2000) but has also put in plenty of time as a movie actor. His 13 rôles to date have included playing Loretta Lynn’s father very creditably in the 1980 bio-pic Coal Miner’s Daughter and a bible salesman in Feeling Minnesota, 1996.

            Levon Helm may not be the intellectual of the group and he may not be a prolific songwriter  -  on the original Band albums he co-wrote only ‘Jemima Surrender’, ‘Strawberry Wine’ and ‘Life Is A Carnival’  -  but his vocals were a crucial part of the classic sound of The Band, a sound that influenced so much music, and he has always been a superb rock’n’roll drummer.

_______

So. One more thing. It said much about Levon Helm's spirit as man and as musician that he was one of those who loved the unpredictability of working with Bob Dylan. Look at his face, in The Last Waltz, when Dylan comes on stage and Helm is seen, thrilled and delighted, at the immediate prospect of not knowing what the hell is about to happen. It's one of the several reasons I loved the musician and admired the man.

         

BEST OLD ROCK TRACK I'VE HEARD IN QUITE A WHILE

I discovered only days ago that the 2005 DeLuxe 2-CD “reissue" of the 1970 Mad Dogs & Englishmen live album includes seven extra tracks - and that among them is this superb Joe Cocker version of ‘The Weight'. No comparison with the original studio track by The Band is implied: it wouldn't even be possible. Cocker's version is its own fine creature: