[Mb-civic] 'In Search of Sam Cooke' from The Nation

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   In Search of Sam Cooke 
   by Robert Christgau


Peter Guralnick's Dream Boogie follows You Send Me, Daniel Wolff's
serious and authoritative Sam Cooke biography, by ten years. It's nearly
twice as long--too long, like so many doorstops before it, including
Careless Love, the second volume of Guralnick's life of Elvis. But it
draws on research that would have justified an even more monumental
book. Guralnick doesn't add much to Wolff's thesis. Both argue that
though the soul singer who predated soul music made many records that
fell short of his artistic potential, he was nevertheless a heroic
figure, topping a voice that for those who loved it was liquid
magic--cool, relaxed, infinitely inviting--with a questing intelligence
and cultural ambition startling in a teen idol whose most important
compositions included "You Send Me" and "Twistin' the Night Away." As
Cooke strove for pop success, he funded one of the most resolutely black
labels the record business has known. He supported the civil rights
movement in word and deed. He studied black history. At the time of his
death in December 1964, he really was a hero, cut down in his prime at
33, and Guralnick's sense of this man, and of the lesser men and women
who surrounded him, is vastly more complex and vivid than his
predecessor's.

That Wolff is no hack hardly puts him in a league with Guralnick, who
alongside the more eccentric and intellectually ambitious Greil Marcus
is the prestige brand in rock authordom. By 1986 Guralnick had published
two major profile collections and Sweet Soul Music, which remains the
go-to history of the style. Yet only with the 1994 publication of Elvis
I, Last Train to Memphis, did many outside the specialist audience
recognize his gift. Even in the intermittently clumsy 1971 Feel Like
Going Home, where five of the eight subjects are bluesmen, Guralnick's
self-effacing eye lent a cinéma vérité authority
lacking in, for instance, Michael Lydon's hipper and slicker collection
Rock Folk. By 1979's Lost Highway, which focuses on country and
rockabilly, he was a master of the journalistic portrait. Yet for
Guralnick, who until the 1990s made his living running a summer camp
he'd inherited, journalism was only a means to literature. Despite a few
shortcomings, Last Train to Memphis justified his ambitions--it is a
book that grows in the mind. I can't see how any reader could come away unmoved by Elvis Presley's intelligence, musicality and sense of spiritual adventure, or still crediting the character assassinations of Albert Goldman's Elvis, which Marcus once predicted would be conventional wisdom in perpetuity. 

Formally, Last Train to Memphis represented a major change. In the
profiles, Guralnick aimed for the intensive reporting of New Journalism,
but he also exploited the freewheeling first person of sixties rock
criticism. While he was most often the nerd in the corner, jotting down
details as his subjects lived their lives and, occasionally, answered
his questions, at moments--in introductions, conclusions, afterwords,
interjections and sometimes whole essays--he became the A student
dazzled by meeting one of his highly unsuburban heroes, or explaining
what makes that hero tick, or figuring out how rock and roll changed his
life. From the first he had confidence in opinions he adjusted as he
learned more. Over the years, however, he grew more discreet about
revealing them as such--where in Sweet Soul Music the narrative he was
compelled to impose on a welter of secondhand evidence also proved a
story of personal discovery, in Last Train to Memphis Guralnick
disappeared entirely, avoiding the "I" and limiting psychological
interpretation and critical judgment.

The book tells Presley's story you-are-there fashion, with
he-said-she-said at a minimum, and dazzles anyway because
Guralnick's interviewing persona--where he presumably maintains his
admirer-not-expert pose--induces people to tell him the damnedest
things. Arcing up toward infinity before crashing to the death of
Gladys Presley and Elvis's induction into the Army, Last Train to
Memphis is an unflinchingly affectionate argument for democratic
genius. But Guralnick found it harder to extract tragedy from Presley's
decline into drugged isolation, and though Careless Love was praised
profusely, even gratefully--rock and roll's challenge to the
reading classes exposed as a sham--its accreted detail becomes
as boring as the second half of the King's life. Because Cooke's life
didn't divide down the middle, Dream Boogie fuses the moods of the two
Presley volumes. But in the end it's diminished--not drastically but
markedly--by Guralnick's reluctance to say what he thinks, an MO in
which formal principle and professional convenience are difficult to
distinguish.

Sam Cooke already envisioned a musical career as the 6-year-old lead
tenor in the Singing Children, the family gospel group organized by his
hard-hustling preacher/factory worker father, and as a young teenager he
was both bookish and charismatic, one of those people who convinces
anyone he talks to that he's there only for him--or her. Clean-cut and
ingratiating, he was consciously set on stardom even then, and not just
black stardom. The gospel equivalent of a matinee idol by age 22, he
spent four years figuring out how to breach the pop market, which he
conquered when the simple vocal showcase "You Send Me"--the B side of
his first secular 45, a version of "Summertime" released under a
pseudonym that fooled no one in the gospel world--turned him into an
instant idol, adored by girls black and white. With young male fans he
was never quite such a hit, but despite an ill-timed flop at the Copa in
1958, white adults took to him, and though he had his ups and downs, he
was a consistent commercial presence: not the first gospel-trained
singer to go pop, but until Aretha Franklin the biggest.

But Cooke's opaque and compulsive sides also surfaced early. Exhibit A
is the womanizing that would end with the race hero shot dead in his
underwear by an ex-madam in a cheap southwest LA motel. He did jail time
for "obscene literature" as a teenager, and even when he was the
17-year-old leader of the fledgling Highway QCs, his sexual appetites
stood out on a gospel circuit that never equated holiness with chastity.
By the time he'd joined the much bigger Soul Stirrers, Cooke was a
well-known dog. Multiple witnesses recall his taste for orgies and much
greater danger--once, in Texas, he had sex in the shower with the wife
of a white radio man, who was passed out on Cooke's motel bed. He drank,
too. He saw a continuing street connection--playing craps with the boys,
greeting winos in the alley--as integral to his black pride. And like
many driven charismatics, he held even intimate friends at a distance,
in his case with "an inscrutably cheerful and impenetrable calm which,
for all they knew, might merely have masked the simple fact that it was
all as much a mystery to him as it was to them." That unknowability took
other forms, including sudden rages all the more troubling for their
infrequency. And then there was the way this affable, generous,
idealistic guy screwed one manager, agent and label head after another.

Most of the peripheral characterizations that bring Dream Boogie alive
are of African-
Americans. There's Cooke's wife, Barbara, who avoided
Guralnick for years before opening up. There's his singing brother L.C.,
his player brother Charles and his relentlessly striving father. There
are satellites and running buddies like replacement Soul Stirrer Leroy
Crume and Cooke's protégé Bobby Womack, who married
Barbara two and a half months after Cooke died. The colleagues include
civil rights pioneers like staunch NAACP supporter Clyde McPhatter and
bandleader Harold Battiste, whose visionary musicians' collective became
the house band at Cooke's SAR label, but most are on the wild side:
gangster-friendly singer Lloyd Price and pugnacious Cooke imitator
Johnnie Taylor; lost proto-soul balladeer Little Willie John, who would
die in prison, and night-crawling Johnnie Morisette, who preferred
pimping to singing. And there are disc jockeys, promoters and pros, like
fast-talking Bumps Blackwell and Cooke's longtime advisers S.R. Crain
and J.W. Alexander. But beyond Barbara Cooke and Bobby Womack,
Guralnick's chief supporting players are white businessmen.