Life Exploding in Every Direction
Sam Cooke: 'Blowin in the Wind' (Live at the Copacabana) + Swagger + Freedom + The End of One Movie + The Start of Another
First thought: this is… wrong. Wrong! This is a somber song about suffering. Violence. Subjugation. Man’s inhumanity to man. About the feeling that things have to change, and the possibility that they won’t, that maybe it just goes on like this. And now here’s Sam Cooke, doing it up Copacabana style, crooning over a swinging, upbeat arrangement. Absolutely owning the delivery, and knowing it, and knowing his audience knows it. It feels like a celebration. It feels… wrong.
I hit ‘skip.’ My four-year-old son protests. He doesn’t see anything jarring or inappropriate about the juxtaposition of lyrics and performance. He wants more “Blowin’ in the Wind.” We’ve already listened countless times to the Dylan original (acoustic, spare, pure), the Peter, Paul, and Mary version (angels around a campfire), and Neil Young’s take (slow, Vietnam-inflected, the electric guitar solo intertwined with piped-in gunshots and sirens). My son likes ‘em all. Who knows how these things happen. He loves “Blowin’ in the Wind.” He wants to hear the rest of Sam Cooke’s version. Back we go.
It gets more Copa as it goes. Triumphantly Copa. Building to its climax, it reminds me of the music that plays in a certain type of cinematic end montage that I think is less common now than it used to be. The movie is basically over – maybe the credits are already showing up on screen – and we’re seeing quick flashes of everyone moving on with their life, conflict resolved for now, narrative time accelerating toward its vanishing point. It’s up, it’s warm, it’s swaggering. It’s… wrong for “Blowing in the Wind” – right?
I do some research. I read about how Sam Cooke at the Copa was recorded over two nights in 1964. This was the second time Cooke had played the club. The first time, eight years earlier, he felt he didn’t do well. Or maybe – reports vary – the mostly white Copa crowd just didn’t like soul music delivered in high gear. In 1964 Cooke stuck more to standards and show-tunes, kept his performance tamer. It’s widely regarded as an accomplished live album by a performer at the top of his game – but a distinctly lesser achievement than the the high-voltage, sweaty Live at the Harlem Square Club, which was recorded the previous year but shelved until after Cooke’s death by his record label, where they feared that the intensity of the performances would hurt his pop image.
When I read about this, I feel smart. See? I say to myself. I knew it. I knew something was wrong at the Copa!
Except that, well, I’ve actually changed my mind. Now I love the Copa “Blowin’ in the Wind.” I love its happy punchiness, and I love how by the end the happy punchiness adds up to something like an argument. There’s no one way to sing a song, no one way to approach a given subject as art. You can do whatever you want, as long as you’re somehow able to make it work. With your technique, with your energy, with whatever. And Cooke makes it work. The joy in his delivery doesn’t, in the end, actually obscure the heaviness of the lyrics. What it does is show you you there’s no one way to sit with what’s heavy. We have options, and picking one doesn’t mean tossing the others out of our toolbox. They’re all still there. If I were to reduce what I’m talking about to one word, the word I would pick is freedom.
Apparently when Cooke first heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” he was amazed that a song written by a white man could speak so perfectly to the black American struggle.
He didn’t know, as far as I can tell, that Dylan had borrowed heavily from an old black spiritual, one sometimes called “No More Auction Block for Me,” sometimes called “Many Thousands Gone.”
It was “Blowin’ in the Wind” that inspired Cooke to write “A Change is Gonna Come,” his first song to touch on politics, history, and current events with any real degree of directness. It’s one of the greatest American songs of the 20th century, supercharged from within by perfectly calibrated currents of hope and dread, the small and the grand, life and mortality.
“Change” was released on Ain’t That The Good News, which came out in February of 1964, months before Cooke’s second Copacabana stint. But he played it live only once, on a February episode of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Apparently, afterward he told Bobby Womack that he didn’t want to play it ever again; it sounded too much like death. NBC didn’t keep a tape of the performance, so it exists only in the minds of people who saw it and are still living. I wonder how many people that is.
Even if Cooke hadn’t sworn off playing “Change” live completely, it’s hard to image the song fitting the mood of the Copa performances, or his goals for the set and the album he knew would come from it. It’s a beautiful song but also a frightening one, full of foreboding. It sometimes feels to me like a massive star preparing to collapse on itself. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing or a bit of both – it’s happening.
The more I read about all this, the more I hear “A Change is Gonna Come” running underneath the Copa “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The star has died and it’s been revealed to be a good thing. Life is exploding out in every direction: punchy horns, dancing guitar lines, Cooke’s vocal flourishes. The movie is ending and another movie is starting. It might be a good one. Cooke was killed later that year, in conditions that remain mysterious. Of all the “Blowin’ in the Wind” versions, his is probably my favorite, and my son’s too (I think). I gotta go, he tells the audience as the end approaches. By this point he’s made the song so completely his own that it feels like he could keep it going forever by sheer force of will. I don’t wanna, he says. But I gotta go. And the band plays on. ✹
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Oh, also:
Another great “Blowin’ in the Wind” rendition, to which a similar reading might apply: Stevie Wonder’s!
Other Tracks considerations of multiple versions of the same song: Song Diary #4 (on “Isn’t It A Pity?”); Teddy Brown’s piece on, umm, “Isn’t It A Pity?”); Song Diary #5 (on “The Star Spangled-Banner”).
Listening to this now at your recco. Thank you.
A well-told story, thank you.