Live at the Harlem Square Club captures an amazing moment in Sam Cooke’s career. Riding high off a nearly unbroken string of chart successes, he was yet to enter the great and terrible eighteen month perioud which would see his infant son die, see the recording of possibly his finest music, and end in his death. All that was in the future.

When Sam Cooke took the stage at the Harlem Square Club, it was with Little Richard’s dirty sound in mind, the future out before him, and a songbook of pop, standards, and what we now call “soul.” Imagine the scene: the big room sweating in the humid Florida night. Three shows, at 10:00, 1:00 and 4:00 in the morning. Sam Cooke, fresh off his European tour, with the rowdy King Curtis on sax beside him and a band of crack players behind him, energized, inspired, and ready to take the crowd as high as they want to go.

It is a little strange how dated some of Sam Cooke’s songs sound today. With such strong roots in the pop of the 1950s, the I-vi-IV-V “ice cream” changes and uptempo R&B swing of his most famous songs tie him more securely to Frankie Valli and doo-wop than to his musical children like Al Green and Otis Redding. And surely, his clean-cut image was an artifact of his ambition, his intention to appeal to as many people as possible, white or black, rich or poor. But that night at the Harlem Square Club, Cooke strained against the urbane felicity and pop sheen that had made him famous and brought a roughness and grit to his voice that surely few in the audience had ever heard from him before.
In his biography, Guralnick dwells at length on the contraditions embodied in Sam Cooke. He was the American dream, a good-looking and well-mannered young black man singing music that transcended racial boundaries: he was “safe.” He was the preternaturally talented, even arrogant architect of his own career, ruthlessly moving from one opportunity to another as he saw fit, leaving behind him a wake of disappointed compatriots and business partners. He was the most charismatic guy in the room, the ladykiller who made every one of them feel special, leaving behind him a wake of single mothers and dying hopes. That same charisma came through loud and clear on stage, on vinyl, and on camera, drawing audiences into the vortex of his personality through the sheer power and swing of his musical genius. He was the generous friend. He was the big spender. He was, from time to time, the source of towering rage and fury when his trademark savoire-faire was exhausted.

Every single one of these features of his outsize personality are on display on Live at the Harlem Square Club. The audience is delirious even before he takes the stage, and as Cook asks the crowd, “How are you doing out there? ... How ARE, you DOING, out THERE?” there is something powerful, smug, and almost cold behind his voice, as if he already knows the audience is his without even asking: he is really saying “you are mine.” And so they were. As Guralnick writes,

There was nothing soft, measured or polite about the Sam Cooke you saw at the Harlem Square Club; there was none of the self-effacing, mannerable, ‘fair-haired little colored boy’ that the white man was always looking for. This was Sam Cooke undisguised, charmingly self-assured, “he had his crowd,” said [guitarist] Clif White....

Indeed, everything Sam Cooke sang at the Harlem Square club took on weight. Lightweight teenybopper pop fare like Cooke’s fad single “Twistin’ The Night Away” becomes more serious, like the last party before Judgment Day. The lovely teen-romance crooner “Cupid” turns into an essay in joyous singing as Cooke takes flight all around the melody and sells the young love story it tells. Cooke calls on his gospel roots on the rowdy “Feel It (Don’t Fight It),” riding the band hit by hit, exhorting the crowd higher and higher and walking a line between sanctified and sinful that conventional wisdom would maintain wasn’t Cooke’s to discover. The darker subject matter of Cooke’s “Chain Gang” comes fully into its own with the band and backup singers digging into its groove, and Cooke bearing down on the chorus.

On the medley of “It’s All Right” and “For Sentimental Reasons,” you can hear the crowd singing along rapturously as Cooke scats in Coltranesque sprays of notes. In the liner notes to the album, Peter Guralnick (again!) writes about the importance of community to the chitlin circut, and this is where it all comes together. Cooke and the audience are one, trading energy, good humor, and the sweet melancholy of the songs between themselves fearlessly. By the time we come to the closer “Having A Party,” a frantic five-minute workout, Sam Cooke and the band have transcended pretty, transcended slick, transcended easy, transcended everything Sam Cooke seemed to embody to the (white) public and taken the audience to a place blissfully like the white-hot crawl-on-the-floor frenzy of James Brown’s classic Live At The Apollo.

The remastering has fixed the crowd noise at a level that is audible but doesn’t get in the way of the incandescent performances of Sam Cooke, King Curtis, and the band. Between songs you can hear the crowd begging for mercy, begging for more. They, they cry, they scream for Sam Cooke to take them higher, and as the last notes of “Having A Party” fade into the smoky Miami night, you can hear them erupting in an ecstatic chaos that feels a little like afterglow.

Sam Cooke invented sweet soul music and then died too soon. In the years intervening, that mantle has passed to cofounder Ray Charles, to Al Green and Marvin Gaye, to the R&B crooners who I recently denigrated, and of course back to the world of gospel. Live At The Harlem Square Club is not only a very fine live album but a call for a drastic reassessment of Sam Cooke’s legacy. With excellent and informative liner notes by Peter Guralnick (first written twenty years ago with a postscript added for this reissue), the entire package is a loving revival of an unjustly neglected moment in music history.

I really hate to say this twice in one week, but Live At The Harlem Square Club is one of the finest releases I have heard this millennium, worthy of standing next to James Brown’s landmark Apollo Theater date (recorded just a month earlier) as one of the great moments in the history of soul music. Don’t fight it, just feel it.

This review also appears at blogcritics.org.