Review: Sam Cooke - The Wonderful World Of Sam Cooke (1960)
Tracks: 1) Wonderful World; 2) Desire Me; 3) Summertime; 4) Almost In Your Arms; 5) That’s Heaven To Me; 6) No One; 7) With You; 8) Blue Moon; 9) Stealing Kisses; 10) You Were Made For Me; 11) There I’ve Said It Again; 12) I Thank God.
REVIEW
While all through 1960 RCA was busy «grooming» Sam Cooke to push up that proverbial respectability quotient, his old label, Keen Records, was doing something that, under different circumstances, would only have qualified as an equally proverbial cash-grab — but in the context of 1960, might have looked almost like an attempt at redeeming the artist’s plummeting artistic reputation. That is, they were collecting every archived outtake and obscure B-side they could find, and putting them on a Sam Cooke LP of their own. The result was The Wonderful World Of Sam Cooke, named after the LP’s most famous and successful song; and although the album made no more impression on the charts than its tackier RCA competitors, it is at least consistently listenable.
The chief incentive here was, quite naturally, the impressive commercial success of ‘(What A) Wonderful World’, originally recorded in March 1959 at Sam’s last session for Keen, briefly forgotten during the turbulent period in which he switched to RCA, then resurrected about a year later as there was hardly any sense to just keep sitting on that potential pot of gold. Allegedly, Lou Adler and Herb Alpert, who wrote the song for Sam, regarded it as a mere trifle, but Cooke really took to the song — apparently, there was something about its unvarnished simplicity that really got him in the feels, and, for that matter, it is no surprise that some of Sam’s most enduring classics are as musically simple as they come: sentimentality works best when it is not masked with a barrage of orchestral flourishes and witty Bacharach chord changes, but when you simply get the instant urge to hum along with it.
The song features a very sparse arrangement indeed — just an acoustic guitar, a rhythm section, and some modest backing vocals — and (from the point of view of a lenient schoolboy, at least) some of the most memorable lyrics in the world. "Don’t know much about history / Don’t know much biology" almost brings back memories of Chuck Berry’s "American history, practical math / You studyin’ hard and hopin’ to pass", but where Chuck Berry sought his salvation in sweet rock’n’roll, Sam, with a little help from Adler and Alpert, finds it in love, which, according to the song, only requires knowledge of the fact that 1 + 1 = 2. It is just as easy to ridicule the song’s naïve message as it would later be to do the same for the likes of ‘All You Need Is Love’ or ‘Imagine’ — in fact, year after year shows us that knowing at least something about history and biology, in addition to the arithmetics of human passion, is absolutely essential to making the world a much more wonderful place than it happens to be. But at least, in his delivery of the song, Cooke is not being disrespectful of such matters: he sings the words geography and trigonometry with such politeness and consideration in his voice that you quickly get the impression his protagonist is simply not given the choice to study such complex matters, rather than skips it of his own volition in favor of amorous adventures.
Arguably, the song’s only serious flaw is that it is virtually impervious to modified interpretations — and, as such, no matter who covered it over the next fifty years, from Herman’s Hermits to Art Garfunkel to, God help us, Michael Bolton, all they could do is detract from the original rather than add to it. Perhaps Devo or Oingo Boingo should have tried to make a run at it, or, at least, Weird Al could have written a parody; as it is, ‘(What A) Wonderful World’ stubbornly refuses to open up any additional dimensions, unlike its similarly-titled little cousin by Bob Thiele and Louis Armstrong, which somehow ends up existing in 30,000 different places at once (the Flaming Lips cover alone takes it to another planet). But that’s fine — every great artist needs some legacy that cannot be taken away from them at any cost, for fear of forfeiting their legitimate claim to (relative) immortality.
Three months later, Keen Records tried to repeat their luck, releasing ‘With Me’, another sweet ballad whose much less captivating lyrics, they probably hoped, would not get in the way of commercial success — but the old-fashioned doo-wop rhythmics and the lack of a distinct original vocal hook ultimately did. The difference between ‘Wonderful World’ and ‘With Me’ is that the former is still a great song even when Peter Noone or, Lord save us, Michael Bolton take over the microphone; the latter only works with Sam Cooke shooting it high up in the sky and then giving it his trademark smooth landing at the end of each verse. At least it’s a Sam Cooke original, rather than some worn-out old standard; but a rather lazily written original at that.
Undeterred at the single’s failure, Keen went all out and followed it up with this entire LP of «new» material, most of which had actually been officially released as B-sides from 1957 to 1959 and made relatively little impact. It is definitely not true, though, as some retro-reviewers suggest, that there is nothing of special interest on the LP except for ‘Wonderful World’ itself. At the very least, there is ‘You Were Made For Me’, the original B-side to the corny pop song ‘Lonely Island’ — written by Sam himself, it is another of those simple-as-pie, parallelism-peppered rhythmic ballads that contain some odd magic depth inside their superficial triviality. In this particular case, I’m talking about the overtones on that chorus: Sam starts each verse off with lightweight, breezy nonchalance ("a fish was made to swim in the ocean, a boat was made to sail on the sea...") and finishes it in a deeper, moodier, more serious tone that might even betray a note of anxiousness — that I know you were made for me line is not so much a simple expression of admiration for his loved one as it is a subtle, manipulative voodoo enchantment, occasionally followed by a bar or two of moody humming to cement the effect. It’s difficult to write about it, though — when your impression of a song depends on tiny fluctuations of amplitude rather than on the actual chord structure. This is where subjectivity in perspective rules supreme.
The rest of the material, assembled by Keen, is here and there, mostly decent but unexceptional. ‘Desire Me’ is a sweet, uninventive attempt to repeat the success of ‘You Send Me’. ‘That’s Heaven To Me’, an outtake from the earlier days with the Soul Stirrers, is like ‘The House I Live In’ without the extra bombast, but still a bit spoiled by the unnecessary angelic strings. The recording of ‘Blue Moon’ is somewhat musically unusual, with heavy emphasis on a thick bass line and the same descending acoustic chords we shall later hear on the Beatles’ ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret?’ — but the vocal delivery is rather perfunctory for Sam, and the strings in the background, this time, just add extra clutter to the already odd arrangement. And the version of ‘Summertime’ on here seems to be ‘Pt. 2’ — a little sped-up soulful jam session built around the original cover; interesting, but passable.
The important conclusion to take away with you is that even Sam’s second-rate material, reserved for filler B-sides on Keen singles, is still preferable to most of the material he was cutting for RCA in his early days on the label. At the very least, most of this is naturally-sounding and «progressive» (for the times) R&B and soul, rather than pre-war Tin Pan Alley stuff or hits from recent Hollywood musicals. It is still pop — make no mistake about it, even at his best Sam Cooke would never go for the soulful depth of Ray Charles or the aggressive grit of James Brown — but at least it’s pop that tries to pander to young, contemporary listeners of all races, rather than schmaltz for TV-watching middle-aged white-only audiences. Much to Sam’s honor, he would finally begin crawling out of that hole by early 1961, rather than sinking even deeper; and who knows, perhaps The Wonderful World Of Sam Cooke, released right around the lowest point in his artistic career, might have actually played its part in reminding him of what was really the right thing to do. (Then again, we must also thank the TV-watching middle-aged American public for not buying either Hits Of The 50’s or Cooke’s Tour — had any of those become big hits on the LP market, it’s a safe bet that a change would never gonna come!).
Only Solitaire reviews: Sam Cooke