Soul man

The best argument for why Guralnick the critic should be more present in "Dream Boogie" (the title is taken from a Langston Hughes poem) is that Cooke was at his most complex in his music. For much of this book, Sam Cooke comes off as somewhat indistinct. Everyone Guarlnick interviews tells us he was a charmer, highly motivated and ambitious, but they also refer to a veiled side. And while we see the flashes of temper, the ease with which he left groups and labels when he had a chance to further his own career, the callous attitude he had toward women (including his second wife, Barbara, who had fallen in love with him when she was a little girl), he remains something of an enigma -- except in the music.

Cooke comes most alive toward the end, when he is both realizing his greatest popularity and suffering as he never has following the drowning death of the infant son who, because of (unfounded) doubts of his siring, he held distant in his affections. And it's those washes of darkness and turmoil that serve Guralnick so well in the account of Cooke's death suggesting that some sort of recklessness wasn't out of the question. Cooke was shot to death by Bertha Lee Franklin, the proprietor of a $3 Los Angeles motel. He had gone to the motel with Erica Boyer, a hooker and, more to the point, a roll artist (someone who picked up men, took them to a hotel and, before any sex had taken place, absconded with their money). What happened there will always be a matter of dispute. Boyer claims she was kidnapped by Cooke and escaped with Cooke's clothes when he went into the bathroom. Cooke, coming out and finding most of his clothes and money gone, started banging on the motel office, demanding Bertha Lee Franklin produce the girl. They got into a rough scuffle during which Franklin fired a shotgun into him.

Even if, as is likely, the homicide was justifiable, there are questions that have never been answered about whether, also as likely, Cooke was Boyer's specifically chosen mark for the night. A private investigator hired by Allen Klein was on the verge of finding out, but Klein, fearing the results would damage Cooke's reputation, dropped the investigation as he was requested to do by Cooke's widow, Barbara. Inevitably, as with so many pop deaths (Tammi Terrell, Marvin Gaye, Kurt Cobain), all sorts of conspiracy theories have sprung up about the killing.

It was not uncommon to hear Cooke's death talked of, bitterly, as the comeuppance that a racist society metes out to black men who got above themselves. Without diminishing Cooke, without denying Erica Boyer's probable culpability in creating the situation that got Cooke shot, Guralnick understands the death as the sad, stupid waste of life and talent that resulted from Cooke putting himself in a very bad position.

For all the things that keep "Dream Boogie," a solid, scrupulous, thoughtful biography, from being a truly great book, there's no doubt that rock 'n' roll history, and, hell, American history, needs Peter Guralnick. His magisterial work on Elvis Presley, which can leave you feeling unmoored for days, convinced that you have just read, as Guralnick claims, "the saddest story" he knows, can stand alongside Taylor Branch's ongoing "America in the King Years" and Robert Dallek's two-volume life of LBJ as one of the greatest recent accomplishments in American biography. No subject Guralnick approaches in popular music is likely to have that immensity. But there are still pieces of the story of American music that call out for his perspicacity and decency and smarts.

We are in a period where, instead of turning our cultural past into the vast library it promised, technology has, by its pace, accelerated the culture of disposability. The CDs and DVDs available to us may form a library of the past, but the speed of our culture encourages us never to get past the new-releases wall. Rock journalism -- God, even that name sounds like a relic -- far from being the great enterprise it seemed 30 years ago, has given way to a sort of undifferentiated fandom. There is simply too much music for any critical sensibility to present a clear overview of our pop present. And so the solipsism Lester Bangs envisioned in his obituary for Elvis has, just as he predicted, come to hold all the cards. Too much pop music criticism no longer seems even interested in talking to an audience beyond the small one that will already know what the writer is talking about.

Which is why, even at the risk of seeming a mere archivist or even an old fogy, Guralnick needs to bring his talents to other figures who are in danger of becoming relics of a past that many people no longer believe they should care about. Buddy Holly and Otis Redding are just two of the titanic figures who need solid biographies written about them, as does an artist Guralnick has written about so lovingly in the past, Charlie Rich, still the least acknowledged great American singer of the 20th century. I can't imagine how exhausting it must be to work on the scale that Guralnick does. I pray for his stamina. Our past needs the love and respect he continues to show it.

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