Review: Sam Cooke - Hits Of The 50's (1960)

Tracks: 1) Hey There; 2) Mona Lisa; 3) Too Young; 4) The Great Pretender; 5) You, You, You; 6) Unchained Melody; 7) The Wayward Wind; 8) Secret Love; 9) The Song From Moulin Rouge; 10) I’m Walking Behind You; 11) Cry; 12) Venus.

REVIEW

There are some conflicting reports on whether Cooke’s Tour, Sam’s other 1960 album for RCA, was commercially released before or after Hits Of The 50’s — some sources say May 1960, others say November — but in the long run, it probably does not matter too much, since the first couple of years spent by Sam at RCA generally followed the principle already introduced by Keen with Tribute To The Lady: leave the tasteful teenage-oriented stuff for the singles, use the LPs to pander to the boring bourgeois tastes of the businessmen and businessmen’s wives who can actually afford to buy an LP. Blaming Sam for going along with this strategy would be near-sighted — he strove to break through to every audience, white and black, young and old, and this was probably a winning strategy for him — but striving to understand the reasons behind the existence of such records certainly places no obligations on us to like them, either.

This particular LP, as well as every other single and album recorded by Sam at RCA, was produced by «Hugo & Luigi», a duo whose names probably bring on anachronistic associations with Super Mario Bros. but who were really Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore, cousins (not brothers, but close!) who wrote some songs out of the Brill Building (mostly known for Elvis’ ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’) but more commonly acted as producers for RCA; quite tellingly, their most famous client besides Sam was Perry Como. And Hugo & Luigi’s mission — at least, the way they saw it in early 1960 — is so clearly stated in the liner notes to the album that I feel like heavily quoting the opening paragraph: "When rock hit the Fifties, a lot of sensitive citizens corked their ears, crawled into their woofers and occasionally sent messages to the outside world, demanding, ‘Where is the good new music — and where are the good young singers?’ Well, this album gives the answer, for the music was there all the time. Out of the Fifties we have chosen a dozen ballads... to prove that along with The Chicken Scratch and other record hop pops there were new songs, beautiful by any standard. And the answer to the second part of the question is Sam Cooke, a young man who has developed his own style and sensitivities to a song."

I am not even altogether sure which particular ‘Chicken Scratch’ the two Italian gentlemen are referring to, but if it is this particular wild mix of surf guitar with yakety-sax on the Commandos’ single from 1958, then count me as a severely de-sensitized citizen who would rather listen to ‘Chicken Scratch’ twelve times in a row than ever put on Hits Of The 50’s again after having properly listened to it three times for the purposes of objective, analytical, scientific evaluation (not). I mean, they couldn’t even dare bring themselves to write ‘Tutti Frutti’ or ‘Hound Dog’ — obviously so, since Elvis had the same RCA Victor contract as Sam — so they had to go for a dirty cheap trick instead and still fell flat on their faces. Well, I guess the most appropriate answer for this entire tirade would be "OK Radio Baby!"

Almost every single criticism voiced in the preceding review of Tribute To The Lady applies here, and to this should be added that this time around, the songs are mostly crappy. Billie Holiday’s tasteful and generally down-to-earth vocal jazz and blues numbers could still be spoiled by generic production and a superficial approach to singing — but this stuff is mostly overblown sentimental schmaltz, a mix of well-known chestnuts like ‘Mona Lisa’, ‘The Great Pretender’, and ‘Unchained Melody’ with largely forgotten oldies — although, honestly, I couldn’t really bother to think about what makes ‘Mona Lisa’ so memorable next to, say, ‘You, You, You’.

The mere fact that this corny schlock  is being covered by one of the greatest voices in the history of soul and R&B means absolutely nothing, because the purity of the voice and the precision of the phrasing cannot compensate for the fact that Sam is unable to provide these creations with new lives; instead of appropriating the material, he is enslaved by it. The lounge-jazzy production may not be the worst ever — at least Hugo and Luigi do not oversaturate the recordings with Mantovani strings, relying instead on harps, chimes, and woodwinds to concoct their desired Candyland atmosphere — but there’s only so much walking on puffy clouds that a thoroughly insensitive citizen like me can endure, particularly since the production is pretty much the same throughout all the twelve numbers.

Admittedly, few of the songs are just simplistic head-over-heels-in-love serenades; many carry a deeper, darker melancholy vibe, and apparently Hugo & Luigi took a serious approach to the selection process, choosing the songs they thought would best fit Cooke’s natural talent for expressing unfulfilled yearning and sadness. Sometimes this strategy backfires, though. For instance, ‘The Great Pretender’, which is probably the only song here I’d ever agree to listen to by my own free will in the Platters’ original, is indeed slower, sadder, and more vulnerable than the Platters’ louder and more upbeat version; however, that one actually agreed better with the lyrics — certainly a line like "I’m lonely but no one can tell" as delivered by the Platters is more efficient than the way Sam sings it here, where just about everybody can tell that he’s really very, very, very lonely. The whole "being a pretender" thing just sails out the window in this interpretation. (Try to imagine Robert Smith or Jeff Buckley covering Lennon’s ‘I’m A Loser’ and judge for yourself if the product of your imagination could ever outperform the effect of the original).

Anyway, I cannot even end this album on a wishful "I sure hope I could be awesomely different from the rest and give the record a positive assessment" note (if you do want a positive assessment, here is Sam Scott’s take on the album that proves, once again, that there is no single piece of music on Earth that would not be loved by at least one person) — because I do not want to be awesomely different here. Certain things are sacred to me, like insisting that most of the whitebread schmaltz from the Fifties continues to be just that; re-evaluating it as some sort of meaningful and genuinely emotional art form, especially with the aid of such a revered black singer like Sam, is out of the question. Of course, if you got the hots for Cooke so much that you’d enjoy his singing the phonebook, Hits Of The 50’s is just as impeccable as the rest. But I think I’d rather have him actually sing the phonebook than ‘The Song From Moulin Rouge’ or whatever.

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