The Night Beat: I'm Lost And Lookin' For My Baby

Recorded for the Night Beat album in 1963, this song has an utterly compelling quality, as, just embellished by a bass and cymbal, the lilting voice of Sam Cooke perfectly putting across the sensation of a man haunted and put to distraction by love lost.

That is one of the remarkable qualities of Sam Cooke - his lyrics are always so direct. They simply tell you exactly what he wants to say, and his delivery is always meticulously pitched to convince you that he means it.

H W Saxton, writing at BC Music, suggests a similarity here between Sam's singing and that of Reverend Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones.

Written by Sam's faithful friend and partner J W Alexander, it was based upon a gospel song Alex had sung. You get the feeling that Sam is so much more comfortable with the material from these sessions. In some ways, Hugo and Luigi were perhaps hoping to package it as a kind of Frank Sinatra after-hours collection, but they too must have sensed that it was more than that. Here was Sam Cooke releasing an album even more firmly rooted in r&b and gospel, divested of the strings and things, and soaring at the top of the mainstream pop market. It was a testament to Sam's achievement and a stake to a claim to respect for black artists that went beyond the next 45. Some see a link between these February 63 sessions and the recording of A Change Is Gonna Come, possibly Sam's most transcendent song, a few months later.

Sam Cooke - Lost And Lookin' (from 'Night Beat' RCA LSP 2709) 1963

Information for this post garnered from Dream Boogie by Peter Guralnick, album liner notes and H W Saxton. Photo scanned from album back cover. Listen to the hiss from the vinyl!

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.

Soul Britannia: Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?

1956. This Is Tomorrow. Richard Hamilton presents his collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? Pop Art starts in Britain. Bring us America!

From Belfast to Birmingham to Newcastle, to Liverpool and back to London, Britain is emerging from the years of rationing into a more prosperous era. Full of new consumer goods and other influences from America. New musical sounds of America making their way across the Atlantic and reaching young people…

Not r&b, or even rock and roll, but skiffle at first. The music that first encouraged thousands of British youths to pick up an instrument and form a band. Lonnie Donegan and other British jazz musicians, playing a spin-off from New Orleans in the jazz era in Soho clubs. A BBC reporter investigates:

“In London, the skiffle movement provides entertainment at several dozen coffee-houses [playing] blues, ballads, shanties, work songs, country songs, cowboy songs, railway ditties and even evergreen popular tunes.”

Tune in to Saturday Skiffle Club on the BBC Light Programme on the family radio, half an hour for the teen-agers on a Saturday evening, starting in 1957. It’s the place we encountered real gospel spirituals, bluegrass, country, blues and r&b for the first time. Sometimes the authentic sound of Leadbelly on a recording. More often than not (thanks to strict rules on not allowing too much ‘needletime’ on radio), interpreted by a British skiffler in a live performance.

Skiffle sound doesn’t hold sway for long. Rock and roll hits British shores. The rechristened Saturday Club plays us more Gene Vincent, Cliff Richard, more American acts. But just half and hour still. If you want to hear some more, wait until early evening when the signal bounce is stronger off the ionosphere, sneak a transistor radio under the covers and tune into Medium Wave 208, Radio Luxembourg. They play the latest hits from the major record companies, who vied to sponsor a show to plug their products. The sound fades in and out in the south on England, but up North things are clearer…

TV! Neighbours rented one, it costs 10s a week from Rumbelows. Turn it on at six on Saturday and catch your favourite British rockers on Six-Five Special, Drumbeat on the BBC, or live from the Palladium on Oh Boy! on ITV. See some film clips of the American stars we wish would come to Britain.

1960. Finally, the end of the Musician’s Union ban on American performers. Finally hear Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, Duane Eddy and Bobby Darin, Chris Montez, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bo Diddly - performing live on Saturday Club! Finally get to see some of their rock and roll heroes in the flesh, and along with them the latest stars of soul music, a new sound, mixed with gospel music – Little Richard and Sam Cooke, at Brighton Hippodrome in 1962, Richard jumping on the piano, never been a performance like it before. Solomon Burke in 1963, Chuck Berry in 64.

Want more?

1964. Here come the pirates, broadcasting from out at sea, far away from the reach of the BBC. Radio London, Atlanta, and most of all Radio Caroline. All aboard the good ships MV Mi Amigo and the Frederica. One stays south anchored off Essex, and one goes North, carrying a cargo of several thousand rare jazz and r&b records. Now everybody can hear the new sounds of British beat, and the sounds of America, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the old and the brand new. Whatever young people are listening to in Britain, now it all originates with the music of Black America…


Information about Saturday Club is from an article by Spencer Leigh. There is a nice list of all of the artists who appeared on Saturday Club here. I read up on Six-Five Special here. Also from The Story Of Radio Luxembourg website. Radio Caroline information is everywhere on the web, I have enjoyed looking through the Radio London scrapbook on Radio Caroline, and The Pirate Radio Hall Of Fame.

Darling, You Send Me, Honest You Do

Some say that To Love Is Our Soul Purpose. It's February 14th, and so I thought I should help everyone to get into the spirit of things. Who better to help than Aretha Franklin, singing one of Sam Cooke's simplest yet most sublime love songs, his first secular hit, You Send Me. It's just a single verse and then an endless repetition of how they make you feel...

Aretha Franklin - You Send Me (Atlantic 584186B) 1968

P.S. For all you free spirits, a warning - this song does mention the phrase 'marry me'. On the single, guys, you would have of course just sat through the tirade of Think on the a-side, with a finger-wagging Aretha telling you exactly what's what. Weakened, you then hear this, apologise for everything you did and for the things you didn't (and a few things you didn't know you did or didn't do), make up, and succumb.