Soul man

The horrors and humiliations of the road might have been enough to impress themselves on anyone. Cooke's upbringing ensured they did. Cooke was the son of a conservative preacher, so it might be supposed that Cooke -- who gave up sacred music for secular, who loved his women, who enjoyed all the advantages that money and being a truly beautiful-looking man brought him -- was a rebel. In truth, he took his father's advice to heart. "Respect your elders, respect authority," Guralnick recounts it. "But if you were in the right, don't back down for anyone, not the police, not the white man, not anyone." It's possible that what protected Cooke in some confrontations was the astonishment he provoked in others by being a black man who did not back down. Guralnick tells a story about Cooke's running out of gas on tour in Memphis. Waiting for Charles to come back from the service station, Cooke was approached by a white cop who told him to move the car, to push it if he had to. "His name was Sam Cooke, and he didn't push cars," is what he told the cop, before finally saying, "You push the fucking car. You may not know who I am, but your wife does. Go home and ask your wife about me." The unmistakable sexual nature of that taunt makes you gasp, as does the fact that Cooke got away with it.

"Dream Boogie" leaves you wishing that Guralnick had more fully explored how Cooke's career embodied both the desire to integrate and the belief in black self-determination (and also how, if Malcolm X and Martin Luther King had lived, how those views might have reconciled themselves). Cooke wanted to find the widespread popularity that Nat King Cole and Harry Belafonte had (Belafonte's "Calypso" LP had spent three years on the charts), which inevitably would have meant moving more toward the middle of the road. But he also seemed adamant that that popularity would give him the freedom to move beyond pop, to meld together all his influences, and to have an audience that was primed to follow him as he did.

Guralnick records several incidents that reveal Cooke was aware of the changes taking place in pop music. He admired the Beatles. Hearing "Blowin' in the Wind" on "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" inspired him to write "A Change Is Gonna Come," which has rightly been called the greatest soul song of all time. And Guralnick quotes Bobby Womack, whose "It's All Over Now" was covered and turned into a hit by the Rolling Stones, telling Cooke that this guy -- Mick Jagger -- couldn't sing. Womack simply wouldn't believe it when Cooke told him the Stones represented the future. (In fact, the Stones would soon be represented by Allen Klein, the accountant-turned-agent who managed Cooke during the last year and a half of his life. Not the least important accomplishment of "Dream Boogie" is its portrait of Klein, more complex and nuanced than others that have painted him as one of the principal villains in the breakup of the Beatles.) Could a man with such catholicity of musical taste (matched, from everything Guralnick tells us, by his omnivourous taste in reading) be satisfied with making middle-of-the-road pop?

Certainly those two recently reissued RCA recordings suggest not. "One Night Stand! Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club" hints that Cooke still had some musical integration of his own to accomplish. Recorded at the Saturday night late show in a packed Miami club in 1963, it can stand with "Otis Redding Live in Europe" as one of the greatest live albums ever. This was the show Cooke did on the soul circuit, quite different from the one he'd record the next year before a largely white audience at the Copacabana in New York City ("Sam Cooke at the Copa"), and it took RCA more than 20 years to issue it. It's a raw show; Cooke's voice is raspy throughout and the sort of call-and-response interaction between performer and audience marks just how fully Ray Charles and others had succeeded in bringing the fervor of gospel into R&B. The accounts of Cooke's live performances in "Dream Boogie" suggest that he relied largely on his voice to seduce a crowd instead of the theatrics that were a staple of Jackie Wilson's act. Whatever his physical presence was that night in Miami, you can hear, just by the vocals, what whips the crowd up, why every song is punctuated by shouts of excitement. By the time Cooke and the band reach the closer, an extended "Having a Party," you feel as if you could die from sheer happiness, and as if you're ready to.

"Night Beat," which might be the only satisfactory studio album Cooke completed in his lifetime, suggests that Cooke was well on his way to merging the direct emotion of soul with the sheen of pop. Obviously taking some inspiration from the "themed" albums Frank Sinatra had made at Capitol in the '50s, "Night Beat" aims to get the feel of the blues and spirituals (the album opens with "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" and includes numbers by Willie Dixon and Charles Brown) into a relaxed late-night groove. The album succeeds in creating a sound that is both mellow and deeply emotional, which, of course, is not a contradiction in terms.

Next Page: Sam Cooke's last night -- with a hooker

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