No subject

out unlettered Southerners. But researching Sweet Soul Music, he came to
realize that another class of middle-class white people shared this
knack: the marginal entrepreneurs and music lovers who ran the companies
that recorded such artists. That book celebrated not just Stax's Jim
Stewart and Estelle Axton and Otis Redding manager turned 
Capricorn
Records founder Phil Walden, but, through them, the de facto integration
of the soul industry as Guralnick defined it--which excluded the poppier
Motown and Philadelphia substyles, both masterminded by black bizzers.
And some of Dream Boogie's most memorable descriptions are of white
businessmen: in addition to many lesser figures, Specialty Records' Art
Rupe, the liberal gospel enthusiast who chiseled his artists a bit less
than was customary and was so affronted when they chiseled back that he
quit the business; Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore of RCA, whose
unbridled crassness in no way interfered with their candor, intelligence
or sense of fun; and Allen Klein, the accountant turned manager who
wrested Cooke's catalogue away from RCA and ended up controlling it
himself--as he does, for instance, the Rolling Stones' sixties music.

This is a mark of quality, and an impressive leap for Guralnick,
initially a folkie romantic for whom Elvis "never recaptured the spirit
or the verve of those first Sun sessions." To reread Wolff's received
takes on the above-named is to understand why not being a hack is never
enough--there's no sense of these human beings' humanity. Still,
Guralnick's taste in bizzers has to make you wonder. At stake isn't just
the conundrum of why white executives dig gritty putative authenticity
more than black ones, and whether this predilection doesn't arouse
untoward sympathy in folkie romantics (not to mention observers who've
mocked folkie romanticism for decades, like me). In this book,
there's also the Allen Klein problem.

Klein is one of the most widely mistrusted figures in the history of the
music business. In late 1963, with Cooke an established star who craved
total autonomy, Klein formed a dummy corporation to receive Cooke's
payments from RCA, named it after Cooke's daughter Tracey, installed
Cooke as president and reserved 100 percent of its ownership for
himself--an arrangement that, after Cooke's death, had a dire effect on
the extended family Cooke had always propped up. By 1968, according to
Rolling Stones chronicler Philip Norman, there were fifty lawsuits
against Klein, who by then had his mitts on half the British Invasion,
and much later he did two months for income-tax evasion. But although
Guralnick details the Tracey setup, he pays less mind to its
consequences than to Klein's financial genius in devising it. He
stresses that when Cooke died intestate he was emotionally estranged
from his wife. He pooh-poohs rumors that Cooke hoped to dump Klein as he
had first manager Louis Tate and crossover-guru manager Bumps Blackwell,
Specialty's Art Rupe and Keen's John Siamas, sixties manager Jess Rand
and sixties booking agent Jerry Brandt. And by establishing Cooke's
taste for reckless sex and, occasionally, prostitutes, he forestalls
speculation about the singer's death, which some fantasists have even
tried to pin on Klein.

As Guralnick says, it's "impossible to know exactly what happened" at
that motel, although I wish he'd gone somewhere with the possibility he
leaves open that prostitute Elisa Boyer and manager Bertha Franklin were
in cahoots. Like him, however, I buy the semi-official version, in which
Cooke had his money and clothes stolen by Boyer and was then shot by
Franklin when he went looking for the thief (perhaps in one of those
rare rages, Guralnick implies). But though Dream Boogie offers more
interpretation than the Presley books, Guralnick continues to disdain
speculation and unanswerable questions. Thus he never points out what is
obvious--that whatever his feelings about Barbara, Cooke would certainly
have preferred to leave his assets to some version of his family than to
Klein. Nor does Dream Boogie engage the animadversions Wolff and
others--especially Arthur Kempton, whose 2003 Boogaloo isn't even in the
bibliography--level at Klein, who in Guralnick's portrait is a prince of
a fellow, if a bit of a rogue, who was deeply touched by Sam Cooke.
Since Guralnick makes clear that the book couldn't have been written
without Klein and his archive, this smells bad. It's one thing to ignore
Albert Goldman while you demolish him. Goldman was a liar and a cad.
Wolff and Kempton are neither. You-are-there aesthetic or no
you-are-there aesthetic, they deserve more respect--and Klein deserves
less. By declining to defend Klein--and I don't assume he's
indefensible--Guralnick effectively whitewashes him.

Guralnick's reluctance to polemicize doesn't merely reflect his humble
subservience to the material. It also keeps him above the
fray--especially the critical fray. He seems to regard himself as beyond
disputation. So where his early work implied an informed version of the
old blues-and-country-had-a-baby theory of rock and roll, writing about
former Soul Stirrer Cooke--as in Sweet Soul Music, but not the Presley
books--he has little choice but to emphasize rock and roll's more
recently recognized gospel roots. Ex-gospel performers go pop by the
dozen in Dream Boogie, while Guralnick's beloved blues is barely
mentioned even though Cooke grew up in Muddy Waters's Chicago and sang
the bejesus out of Howlin' Wolf's "Little Red Rooster." Because blues
implies an outlaw ethos while gospel carries with it images of sustained
social responsibility, blues-versus-gospel has become a contentious
issue in rock history. Guralnick has the range and, here, opportunity to
concoct a unified field theory. He doesn't. 

In the end, what's most frustrating about this redolent story of a black
hero killed by his irresistible attraction to--or principled refusal to
abandon--"black" (or is it?) street life isn't a mere music writer's
inability to convey tragic psychological imponderables. The
imponderables render the book compelling in any case. Nor is it the
Klein matter, which shouldn't be ignored but (as Guralnick might argue)
is peripheral to Cooke's larger meaning. The frustration has to do with
music. For sure, Cooke was a black hero cut down in his prime. But one
must wonder whether he was also a great artist cut down in his prime.
And if he wasn't, how does that inflect his heroism?   

Too proud to forswear the white audience, Cooke presaged the soul style
without bringing it to fruition, and his prolific songwriting, as
Kempton is one of the few fans to say flat-out, mixed much corn with the
likes of "Bring It on Home to Me," "Good Times" and the unquestionable
masterpiece "A Change Is Gonna Come." So more than any other major rock
artist--more even than Al Green or Aretha Franklin, and certainly more
than any other charter member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame--his
artistic power is bound up in how the individual listener responds
to the physical reality of his voice. Guralnick works hard to pin down
the specifics of this voice, isolating the genesis and impact of his
yodel and analyzing his fusion of white-identified crooning
techniques with the contained passion of his epochal Soul Stirrers
predecessor, Rebert Harris. As often happens with great voices, however,
he's reduced to metaphor when it comes down to cases, and they don't
always suffice: "flexible and playful," OK, that's important, but
"aching sense of loss, of lostness" won't ring as many bells. By now
Guralnick knows Cooke's music better than almost anyone, so there's
assuredly some truth value there. But it's not the kind of universal
truth value Cooke aspired to. What is it about Sam Cooke? We still don't
know. 

In fact, it seems possible, despite how late Guralnick came to church
music, that he's one of those who deep down prefers Cooke's Soul
Stirrers recordings to his pop output. Although he has the wisdom to
fight it, Guralnick is a folkie at heart, moved to his bones by pastoral
versions of the simple, the true and the real. Intellectually, he gets
this--he's not jiving when he praises the late Elvis milestones "In the
Ghetto" and "Suspicious Minds." But emotional connection comes
harder--he can explain what made "Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha" a hit,
but designating it "irresistible" doesn't help everybody love it.
This is probably why Dream Boogie's assessments of Cooke's music fall
short. 

What kind of story would it have been if, despite some masterstrokes and
a few performances like the 1963 Miami show Guralnick annotated back in
1985, the most durable art the hero left behind predated his brave
crossover quest? What kind of story would it have been if the price of
the cultural triumph Cooke never fully achieved was musical compromises
and trial balloons his truest believers can't get their hearts around?
As someone who prefers Aretha Franklin's "You Send Me" to the original,
no contest, and whose own response to Cooke's voice suggests that it's
about on a par with that of the young 
Dionne Warwick, dissed in passing
by 
Guralnick here, I believe those are stories worth being told. And
like Greil Marcus after Goldman's Elvis, I fear they never will be. As
monumental as Dream Boogie is, it could have been more monumental still.



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