The devil and Mr. Cooke

ON Dec. 11, 1964, Sam Cooke suffered one of the more bizarre deaths in show business history. At 3 that morning, a clerk at the seedy $3-a-night Hacienda Motel in southwestern Los Angeles fired three rounds at the singer from a .22 revolver. Two of the bullets missed, but one struck Cooke in the chest, prompting him to remark, “Lady, you shot me.” Police arrived to find him dead from the gunshot wound, with his head bloodied and various bruises on his body from a scuffle. He was naked except for an overcoat. Cooke was just 33 and had only recently finished final edits on “A Change Is Gonna Come,” one of the most powerful anthems ever written about the civil rights struggle and the song some critics would later call his masterpiece.

When Sam Cooke died on that motel floor, popular music lost one of its most enduring talents, a singer whose trademark vocal style of adding “oohs” to the end of lines -- most evident on hits like “You Send Me” and “Cupid” -- gave his recordings the transcendent ability to capture the emotional flutter of new love. That Cooke crossed over from gospel, and imported those “oohs” from the church, didn’t diminish the smoldering sexuality of his best work. Although artists like Al Green and Elvis Presley produced songs that were at times both secular and spiritual, few gospel singers have ever had as many pop hits as Cooke. His story, then, is a perfect vehicle to explain not only the subtle relationship between gospel and rock, but also how that mirrored larger changes within the music industry.

Cooke succeeded in pop music for the same reasons that he became a star on the gospel circuit: He was a gifted performer, he was handsome and he had a way with the “oohs” that made women actually swoon. In the words of Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler, Cooke was the “best singer who ever lived, no contest.”

That accolade would in all likelihood be echoed by Peter Guralnick, whose “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke” must be considered the authoritative rendering of the singer’s short life. Ten years in the making, filled with both minutiae and a sweeping back story, “Dream Boogie” is a remarkable testament to Guralnick’s skill as a researcher, even if at times that very strength diminishes the story’s narrative arc. When a book is as deeply researched as “Dream Boogie,” it seems heretical to argue that it would have been more powerful were it shorter, but this is a case where less might have been more. “Dream Boogie” runs more than 700 pages, and though it contains a wealth of detail, only the most rabid fans will be interested in the history of every one of Cooke’s gospel hits. Daniel Wolff’s 1995 Cooke biography, “You Send Me,” does not have the scope of Guralnick’s effort, but it is an equally credible work.

The biggest problem with “Dream Boogie” is not of Guralnick’s making: The more we learn about Sam Cooke, the less we like him and, correspondingly, the less we care about his music. Cooke was truly a groundbreaking artist; one of the first African American performers to have his own record label, he became a huge star in two genres (pop and gospel) in the same year, a feat that few have equaled. Because he knew so many important cultural figures -- he was a close friend of both Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali -- his life offers a chance to tell a much grander saga of the times. In places, particularly when writing about civil rights, Guralnick achieves that larger vision. But Cooke was also a deeply troubled man, as the numerous tales here of his infidelities, the children born out of wedlock and the abandoned business partners will attest. He had two fractious marriages and was absent from his children’s lives.

Guralnick has tackled similarly difficult material before, in his masterful two-volume biography of Elvis Presley. But even at his Graceland jungle-room weirdest, Elvis came off as a victim of fame, whereas Cooke seemed to be actively pursuing his demons. That he managed to juggle a serious sexual compulsion -- and serve jail time for possession of pornography -- while he was a gospel star makes the story all the more unpleasant. Such sordid details do not make for compelling biography.

Much as he did in writing about Elvis, Guralnick relies on a straightforward style of narration that leaves no room for judgment or explanation of Cooke’s life. But whereas Guralnick had enough distance from Elvis to give readers a fly-on-the-wall feel, here he seems at times affected by a biographical Stockholm syndrome -- so in love with his subject that he can excuse any character flaw. Guralnick is clearly enthralled with Cooke; in addition to “Dream Boogie,” he contributed a chapter to another book on the singer, penned liner notes for several Cooke CDs and wrote the script for a television project. Even before the publication of “Dream Boogie,” rock critic Robert Christgau described Guralnick as having “taken over rock history’s Sam Cooke concession.” In these pages, though, the author pushes that engagement to unlikely limits, as when he re-creates a number of Cooke’s interior monologues. Not only does this seem inauthentic, it’s also at odds with the very real assets of Guralnick’s previous writings, which relied on a skillful use of foreshadowing, juxtaposition and flashback.

The greatest strength of “Dream Boogie” is Guralnick’s spare prose and his dead-on descriptions of Cooke’s songs. When, in a discussion of “Jesus Gave Me Water,” he writes that “[f]rom the day the record came out, Sam Cooke was a star,” Guralnick offers the same kind of authority that made his writing about Elvis come alive. His portraits of the many colorful characters around Cooke -- like Bobby Womack and record producer Bumps Blackwell -- are concise and telling, and his account of Cooke’s death finally sets the record straight. But Guralnick paints such a sympathetic portrait of promoter Allen Klein that it seems inconsistent with reality. Much of Guralnick’s research was made possible by Klein, who gave the biographer full access to Cooke’s vaults. The promoter’s co-opting of the Cooke estate is presented here so matter-of-factly -- while other carpetbaggers are hammered -- that one wonders what Guralnick has left out.

Cooke’s true majesty emerges when you hear his voice, and it’s a majesty that lives on in his recordings, if not in the pages of “Dream Boogie.” To coincide with the book’s publication, three of Cooke’s albums have been reissued by his estate (which is still controlled by Klein): 1963’s “Night Beat” and the brilliant “One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club” (both of which feature liner notes by Guralnick) and “The Best of Sam Cooke,” which now comes with three bonus tracks. Unfortunately, this last re-release is a pale collection compared with “Sam Cooke: The Man and His Music,” which contains 28 hits but is out of print.

The song that ends “The Man and His Music” -- yet isn’t on “The Best of Sam Cooke” -- rises to such heights that even Cooke’s self-destructiveness cannot diminish its power. “A Change Is Gonna Come” is the cornerstone of the singer’s achievement, and when he sings of his fear of death and his questions of faith, he exhibits a grand moment of heroism and clarity. “It’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die,” he intones in a lyric that seems prescient. “I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky. It’s been a long, long time comin’, but I know a change is gonna come.” *