(ABKCO)
!!! A+ COMPILATION !!!
i have been thinking a great deal about love lately. love as a cultural force and an act of protest. perhaps it's my mood this summer, perhaps it's changes i don't necessarily want to be dealing with and i'm hanging on hard to what stands like a beacon among the dross, hanging on to words and pictures and emotions as if attempting to store them away for future use. perhaps it's this dark weekend full of dark thoughts and dark news, the point really being that i have lately felt this need to strip things away and find what's important to me. existence itself, i guess, privileged or not, is predicated on the constant peeling away of "business" that distracts us from our absolute nature and our absolute loves. i'm 28 and maybe i don't know what i'm talking about -- i can't even bother to use the shift key right now, apparently -- but gradually i've come to believe we are all, every one of us, too aware of ourselves to harness our deepest whims and stay true to them in any but the most achingly, lovingly fleeting moments. it's like something that we steal here and there. and i find myself looking everywhere in the art i digest for that action, that sudden -- for lack of a better, less chopra-ian term -- oneness with being loose and capable of surprise and joy. there's a moment in the film the lavender hill mob that's like this, when two men are running down the eiffel tower getting dizzy and their hats fall off. it's exhilarating, but even that is busy and cluttered compared to the music of sam cooke.
portrait of a legend, a sam cooke cd i bought in 2004, is maybe the best hour of music i know to exist. i'm not convinced it isn't the apex of everything i love about popular music; in fact, i'm almost positive it is. this is one of many reasons (chuck berry's the great twenty-eight and pet shop boys' discography are two others) why i roll my eyes all the way back behind my brain when some rockist informs me that albums, lps, whatever are the prime medium for all this stuff. this cooke collection is cobbled together from singles, b-sides, and rarities spanning much of the great artist, singer and soul innovator's career and there is simply no question that it's better than any album that could ever exist. indeed, there are two lengthy stretches on it that are rapturous like something immaculate or cosmic and i don't know of anything else like it, but the compilers at abkco were brilliant to do it like this: how the devastating "sad mood" spins out into "cupid" into "wonderful world" into "summertime," how "twistin' the night away" swells up into "shake" which sighs into "tennessee waltz" into "another saturday night" and into the peerless "good times." they also arranged two explicit climaxes in the hardened, cathartic "bring it on home to me" and the ghostly, almost unlistenably emotional "a change is gonna come." yeah, the tracklist is great and the pacing is crafty and all that. but this really all sam cooke -- he did the hard work. you never ache for him to have had the chance to do more of it like you will after spending 70-odd minutes with this unbelievably perfect, pure-heaven collection of songs.
the voice is everything -- what i mean is how he will operate on the basis of singing astonishingly well, technically: "you send me," his big breakthrough, is carefully phrased and sweet; he wraps around standards like "for sentimental reasons" and reinvents doo wop as this crazy large thing on "just for you"... but then he completely throws you off with this sudden interlude of absolute purity like the stunningly felt "i'm coming home one of these days" bridge on "chain gang" or the "la-tatatatata-tatata"s on "wonderful world," and there are variations on this everywhere. what sam cooke is doing when he is singing about how good the good times are and how happy he is and how he doesn't know if he'll feel this good again is not just giving vent to something unexpectedly guttural within himself but validating our own emotions, those we hear in the song itself and those spurred by the nuance in his angelic but tough singing, which goes so much beyond what could be explained merely as "smooth" or "soulful." words are inherently reductive when dealing with it; there is no way to contend with what cooke could do other than to listen and respond inwardly or bodily. to return to real life after hearing him is the strangest and harshest of transformations.
yet real life is what he enlivened. those aforementioned validated emotions, well, even in an innocuous thing like "cha cha cha" he's achieving pure release and joy to give comfort in the deepest hopes, sexual and emotional and every other way in the listener -- that's the reason he's often defined as having "invented" soul, which who knows if he did but it hardly matters. he's such an overpowering force, on originals and outside compositions both, rendering us barely able to notice how inventive the cha-cha-cha proto-'60s strum on a cut like "win your love for me" is when we're so fixated on how he so magically phrases that completely undiluted, relentless "whooaooaaa little girl, how happy i would be"... and all this is magnified, inevitably, on the songs that struggle mightily with loss and desire and need, "chain gang" to "cupid" to "another saturday night." but all the same, the consistency of his work as showcased here is remarkable. there's not a single weak cut. there are some you've never heard, some you haven't heard in a while, but he is compelling across all of it, making you feel like you're at home whether you know the tune or not. it's revealing to hear a shred of his sacred material like "hem of his garment" and "jesus gave me water," correcting the tendency of so many cooke compilations to ignore that early phase, and it speaks to how much his lilting phrases and wordless flights of ecstasy can mean anywhere. "lovable," the sad reflective hop "only sixteen," the archetypal chamber pop "you were made for me," the quiet "i'll come running back to you" are all songs that might be pleasant but utterly benign in some other context, but thanks to cooke's nuanced delivery, they feel like classics. the stomping "sugar dumpling," rhythmically diverse "good news," and wicked horn-filled "meet me at mary's place" deserve the status anyway, and the illusion of spontaneity he always presents is manifested impressively in the impressive blues "little red rooster."
but what courses through all this in its most inimitably powerful sequences is memory. you're a fucking master if you can manage "sad mood" without at least feeling
like shedding a tear or two, in part because cooke never wallows in his desperation -- he always sounds like he's just feeling it all and pulling his way through. same for "chain gang," which you know well of course but which you might not remember is absolutely heartbreaking and a moment of total release for singer and audience both. the voice is really so loud, calling out and yearning and echoing down through the years. i remember my dad turning the radio up when "cupid" inevitably came on the radio as he drove me to town, and it seemed present then as now as ever -- "wonderful world" was a mainstay too. you put it on and people dance, slow-dance usually. that's what the song's about. or someone asks you to dance and you say no and then wish you had said yes, and you stand alone for the rest of the song... and that's what it's about too. it's even about how i really did try to impress my best friend i had a crush on in high school by getting straight a's one semester. it didn't really work but it helped my gpa, and it adds to my trust of cooke, who never seems to try to elevate any of what he's saying. just meets it on its own level heroically, without talking down.
gershwin's "summertime" is here too. only sam cooke ever made it sound so vital, so far from a staid staple of a different era. every era is his. i remember SHOUTING along to "bring it on home to me" in a bar with my friend eric and not just believing but feeling every trace of the sentiment, smiling and thrilling at the sleazy drunkenness of the moment but also participating in the things cooke meant to illustrate. you might do the same thing with "another saturday night," do you realize what he's saying and how painful it is? he's got nobody... and there isn't a person alive who doesn't get it, who doesn't connect immediately with that and how directly and free of abstraction we find it expressed here. there's an infinite solace in that open expression of sorrow. there's time for joy too -- we don't talk enough about the pure dancing happiness in "twistin' the night away" and "shake," and those are masterpieces too.
but there's a way in which solitude is what i feel is really being celebrated on these records, a sense i don't get from as much rock & roll as i used to want to. on "tennessee waltz" -- the definitive version of what can be an either great or terrible song (see patti page for an instance of the latter) -- he sings about his brokenness and loss of his lover to his best friend with an almost admiring, resigned tone, as if he knows that such pratfalls are an essential element of romantic being: that loss and happiness only really compound one another. by the same token, it seems almost like "i'm havin' such a good time" is expressed with some regret on "having a party" -- as if he knows it can't last, a fear he directly contends with on the wondrous, overwhelming "good times" (covered equally beautifully by the rolling stones later). next to ben e. king's "stand by me," this might have the greatest lyric in pop music -- the temporary but rich lifting of a head above depression has never been so eloquently articulated anywhere:
the evening sun is sinking low
the clock on the wall says it's time to go
i got my plans, i don't know about you
i'll tell you exactly what i'm gonna do
get in the groove and let the good times roll
i'm gonna stay here till i soothe my soul
if it takes all night long
it might be 1:00 and it might be 3
time don't mean that much to me
i ain't felt this good since i don't know when
i might not feel this good again
the baseness of that, the simplicity of it. it means everything already, but even more so the way he sings it. again, it's indescribable, really. it's the loneliest kind of romance, the kind most helpful in a dark time.
and why does "a change is gonna come" sound like the song of a man who knew he would die soon? why did he die when there was so much left to give? his mark is rich, deep, wide, there is no one else in his category. only buddy holly was as innovative, no one would ever be quite as emotionally rich, and no one would seem to understand people and specifically the people who love rock & roll with such intimacy and care. there is still an instantaneousness to his appeal when one discovers him, a shockwave of recognition, comfort, and joy when his music is heard every time thereafter. these are feelings we need and they are here for us. we will always, always need sam cooke, because no artist in these annals can be pared down so simply and easily to just the word, the emotion, the need "love."
[SEE ALSO:]
The Man Who Invented Soul (1957-61)