It Was Just Past Closing Time: Laughin' And Clownin' With Sam Cooke

"It was just past closing time when we dropped into the club to talk with Sam Cooke that night. 'Mr Soul' was singing for himself and for the small group of musicians who accompanied him. Standing to the rear of the club, we watched the young singer - tie off, jacket slung on a cane-backed chair - settle into a mood. We heard him sing through a smoky after-hours haze. The night's work was done. This was for the pure pleasure of performing..."

This was the way that Hugo And Luigi, successful hit-making pop producers working for RCA, described their first encounter with the live sound of the artist they had been trying to generate a pop hit for in the classic mould. They had gone to the Town Hill Club in Brooklyn in April 1960 to listen to Mr Sam Cooke:

"One song, two songs, and then even the waiters, busy with get-home chores, stopped work to listen. One by one they paused for a cigarette, pulled up a chair. Conversations lowed and ceased."

Hugo and Luigi were more accustomed to making mainstream pop that was successful and catchy. While they had dabbled in the r&b field with Della Reese, scoring a spectacular success with a r&b No. 1 and Pop No. 2, they had been struggling to understand what it was exactly about Mr Cooke. What were they not bringing out in the studio? Now they were experiencing the side to Sam's music that was not captured on any number of their records together to date...

"It was an experience to live through, to see Sam singing to a black audience... it seemed like it was effortless, the audience just loved every nuance, they fed on every little thing, they were enwrapt", recalled Luigi in an interview with renowned author Peter Guralnick.

Hugo and Luigi had been chosen by Sam because they could provide production values to complement Sam's music, make it successful in a mainstream pop market, without drowning it in traditional pop production. They sometimes did not necessarily connect with the deeper messages in some of Sam's songs, but on this occasion, they could sense that this was more than pop music for the sake of it. Soon after seeing Sam perform, they returned to the studio with a small band, like the one Sam had played with, and rerecorded Chain Gang, a pop classic with a personal message about the pain of incarceration. The hits, and a connection with the concerns of Sam Cooke, had been established...

Last summer, I did a post on poetry for a change. I chose Paul Lawrence Dunbar's classic, We Wear The Mask. I discussed briefly how Dunbar's work had impressed well-known black disc-jockey and black history collector Magnificent Montague, and set him upon his life-long and continuing journey to conserve the cultural heritage of African-Americans. What I did not know then was that it had also made an impact on his friend Sam Cooke, whose brother LC had sung in Montague's band The Magnificents.

In Peter Guralnick's frank and absorbing biography of Sam Cooke, Dream Boogie, he explains how Wear Wear The Mask inspired Sam to write Laughin' And Clownin', a track for Night Beat, the album he recorded in February 1963. It was his first LP with a small group backing, organised by close associate Rene Hall (as opposed to the strings arrangements Sam had gone for with most of his albums up to that point.) As an aside, Billy Preston, then just sixteen years old, is playing organ.

The song echoes the poem's themes of a hidden aspect of character for African-Americans, at a time when survival in white-dominated society required they conceal their true opinions. It was a way of coping with discrimination that everybody associated with Sam Cooke agree he simply would not accept. That was the truly inspiring thing about Sam Cooke, who had succeeded in becoming the most successful singer since Elvis on RCA, owner of his own record label, without ever compromising his beliefs or dignity.

Recalling that first time they went to meet Sam in a club, three years before, Hugo and Luigi wrote:

"What we witnessed that night was not a performance in the accepted sense. The effort had all of Sam's artistry and style, but there was something more intense and personal about it. Actually, we were eavesdropping on a top singer in those dark hours...
This, we know, is it. It's just past closing time, and Sam is singing for himself. There's an empty table over there. Welcome to Night Beat."

The mask is off, and it won't be worn.

Sam Cooke - Laughin' And Clownin' (Night Beat LP RCA LSP-2709) 1963

Liner notes written by Hugo and Luigi from the LP Nightbeat. Other information and quote from Luigi from Dream Boogie by Peter Guralnick, and Burn Baby Burn by Magnificent Montague and Bob Baker.

Magnificent Montague: Put Your Hand On The Radio, Touch My Heart!

Remarkable people are often best know by their remarks, but on occasion they can be held hostage by them. When I mention the name of Magnificent Montague, it would probably be another phrase, not the one in the heading of this post, that springs to mind, and you might well associate it with the turmoil, anger and violence that erupted in Watts in August 1965. Yet the association would be a misapprehension, and the life of Magnificent Montague is of far greater significance for many other reasons...

Nathaniel Montague was born in New Jersey on the 11th January 1928. Possessed of keen intellect, confidence and desire for experience, he ran off to Los Angeles several times in his youth, and in 1942, with his close friend Tony Williams (later of The Platters), joined the Merchant Marine, making numerous convoy journeys supplying the Allies during WWII. He learned to be creative, independent, organised, and was fast to pick up on the niches and opportunities that others didn't.

One particular opportunity whch Montague tried his hand to on a few shore leaves was as a radio DJ, and thus began the most well-know part of his career, first working out of stations in Houston and Galveston Bay, a little later in Louisiana, then off to Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and to his dream audience of Los Angeles. Eachtime he moved city, Montague was aiming at reaching a bigger audience and increasing his chances of making a living in a difficult commercial business. Montague was particularly adept at cultivating female listeners, using his love of poetry and writing verse. It was, as he realised, the target audience most coveted especially by advertisers of household products, and if you couldn't sell airtime to advertisers, you were out of a job.

Not that this was without its potential dangers, as a black DJ working in a still segregated nation. He was once thrown out of a toilet by police in a railway station in Washington D.C. minutes after his arrival, and on one terrifying occasion, his station manager in Houston called him from his booth to introduce him to the assembled dignitaries of the local Ku Klux Klan who complained: "By God, you been makin' love to white ladies, boy!", referring to the huge number of female callers to his show. Only thanks to the quick intervention of another, large-built white DJ called J.P. Richardson were tensions lowered, as he put his arm jovially around Montague's small shoulder and joked, "All Negroes seem to have that touch, I try to get it myself. That's why I try to be hep!" A successful songwriter, J.P. would later write Chantilly Lace, and was better known as the Big Bopper.

Who knows what those KKK crackers would have thought had they known that Magnificent Montague was actually courting a white woman, unseen, through his poetry on the airwaves. Soon after meeting in her home town in Louisiana, he and Rose Catalon were married, and driving north, in great peril should they be spotted together, to new pastures. They remain happily together to this day.




His career in the entertainment business brought Montague into contact with numerous major talented people. Montague was most closely associated with recording Johnny Keyes and his group The Tams, whom he renamed The Magnificents; and for producing L.C. Cooke, younger brother of Sam Cooke. Montague began arranging shows comprised of astonishing arrays of black musical talent. One show at Rockland Palace in the South Bronx in Januay 1963 saw Ben E King, Gene Chandler, Sam & Dave, Carla & Rufus Thomas, Dionne Warwick, Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, the Orioles and the Fascinations, many more, plus a guy called "Otis Reeding" thrown in to raise his profile on condition that Stax Records get Booker T & the MGs to back all the other acts for the show! To top it off, Sam Cooke heard about the show while it was on, and dropped by to sing too!

Sam Cooke was one of the people who also helped to develop Montague's wider understanding of the status of black people in America. Paul Robeson was the first to awaken a sense of the wider injustices that ingenuity and talent could not overcome. He recorded a young singer named Calypso Gene, who was soon to become Louis Farrakhan, and Montague came to be wary of the misdirection of anger that inequality could lead to. He has an abiding dislike of the anti-semitism Farrakhan promulgates, and was drawn closer to an appreciation and adoption of Judaism, in whose struggles he saw parallells with black American experience. Yet, in distinct contrast to Farrakhan, of all the great thinkers he was lucky enough to know personally, it was Malcolm X whom he most admired, for his lack of fear and "tell-it-like-it-is" attitude about the frustrations of ordinary black American with the pace of change.

In August 1965, Magnificent Montague became embroiled in a political controversy of his own. He had been using a catchphrase "Burn, baby burn!" on air for a number of years to describe the excitement of particularly great records; but as the Watts Riot exploded in the streets, rioters appropriated the slogan for themselves. Officials, assuming Montague intended to incite the rioters, demanded he stop using it. For Montague, although horrified by the way his words were being misunderstood, it was a demand that missed the point. His slogan hadn't been the cause of the rioting, and simply removing it was not going to stop it. In fact, if word spread that a popular black figure was being put under political pressure, it might further agitate the situation. So, Montague hatched a plan to embarrass the mayor Sam Yorty, live on air, then came up with a new slogan, "Have Mercy!", to suggest a healing vibe to his listeners.

The way in which Montague had been pressured led eventually to his decision to not buy but actually build from scratch his own radio station, KPLM in Palm Springs. Having been barred because of race from the established radio union, and having to get by on his own initiative, Montague also got involved in founding the National Association of Radio Announcers, to provide security for other black people in the industry. It was part of Montague's constantly increasing awareness of the signficance of black Americans in the history of the United States, and awareness of the way that their role was often overlooked and erased from the public record. He had for many years been avidly collecting different kinds of memorabilia concerning black history, on a huge scale, and in the 1980s he attempted to found a Museum of Black History to display his vast collection. Sadly, this vision has been thwarted by lack of funding from official sources, who instead wanted it donated for nothing to an institute, and lack of interest from the Black American celebrities Montague thought would willingly participate. The collection, described by one curator as "greater than any public collection of its type" and as a "reference library" of black history, is currently up for auction for a private collector, and may be lost for the public forever.

Maybe, if Montague was still on the radio, willing us to listen hard, more would heed his call. Such a shame that noone will champion the preservation of utterly unique artifacts of a history untold. Let's go back to New York in 1963. Montague wrote a new theme song to begin his programme, and persuaded some of the great female soul singers to participate. It was also released as a 45, and sold over 200,000 copies. It builds up to a crescendo of feeling, and burns with Montague's plea to: "Put your hand on the radio, touch my heart!"

Aretha Franklin, Cissy Houston, Dee Dee Warwick - Montague the Magnificent Theme (1963)

Information for this post taken from Magnificent Montague's autobiography, "Burn, Baby! Burn!" , published by the University of Illinois Press 2003. The theme song and other classic recordings can be found on Magnificent Montague's own website.