Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
The elusive man and his accessible music, 10 Jan 2006
As you might expect from Elvis Presley's definitive biographer, this tale of one of soul music's pioneers can be highly recommended. I haven't reread the earlier biography of Sam Cooke, Daniel Wolff's You Send Me, since its publication ten years ago, but my impression is that that Guralnick's account is more vivid, taking into account a wider range of points of view. Be warned that the Sam Cooke who emerges in these pages is not a wholly likeable character, though if he seems more elusive than Guralnick's earlier subject that is, perhaps, intrinsic to the man rather than any failing on the author's part. His widow, Barbara, features prominently: a childhood sweetheart whom he eventually married in order not to lose his daughter to another man, she seems to have been the victim of the introspection and anger concealed from others in his compartmentalised life. A frequent theme of many, less close, interviewees is the charm he exerted which made them feel the sole focus of his attention during a conversation, though many seem to stumble when trying to define that appeal more precisely. This is not a sensational book, though it doesn't flinch from describing Cooke's sexual adventures. But finally it's the music that is left and it's clear that Cooke, despite his boundless professional self-assurance, was always pushing himself, always trying to develop further. This undoubtedly meant crossover success, so even though some people have lamented the fact that he signed for RCA and not the indie Atlantic, it's debatable how much change there would have been had he recorded elsewhere: commercial success meant producers Hugo and Luigi learnt to trust his instincts, and the greater freedom engineered by new manager Allan Klein (painted in a wholly positive light) allowed him to take as much time as he needed to get the results he wanted. Cooke had also been warned off Atlantic by a disaffected Clyde McPhatter, so it seems it wasn't simply a question of RCA having more money. Guralnick fills in as much of the background as you could possibly want, giving us life on the road and the odd mixture of offstage cameraderie and onstage warfare that characterised the gospel quartets. If you’re fascinated by Cooke’s story,as I am, you will devour every morsel, although details in parenthesis can break up the flow: at times you need to go back to the start of the sentence to make sense of the whole thing. But this is a tiny point: Sam Cooke is probably as present as he could ever be in this book and if you care about his life or the development of soul music you owe it to yourself to read it.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Sam Cooke A Difficult Life To Categorise, 25 May 2006
How do you write about a man who for all intents and purposes was many men ? I have read Daniel Wolfes You Send Me and Erik Greens Our Uncle Sam and they all paint a different picture of this unique individual. One of my qualms with this book is the way Peter Guralnic rushes through the murder of Sam Cooke . For somebody with his reputation for investigative journalism I was disappointed that he seemed to accept as fact many thing that were to say the least strange . For instance he states that Sams fingers and nails were ragged and broken and probably his arms were broken . How does that happen to a young man wrestling with a woman almost twice his age . The police record with which Guralnic seems to concur is to say the least improbable . While nobody expects Sams family to agree with the sordid official details of his death one can sympathise with them as his legacy is soiled with his final deeds in this life . Peter Guralnic said he was told lots of stories as to why Sam Cooke had to die . A couple of instances would not have gone amiss in this book .
I still enjoyed the read but felt the last chapters were rushed almost to the point were they let the rest of the book down.
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6 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Not "Dream Boogie" but Nightmare Boogie, 19 Mar 2007
2005 brought me two books I had been eagerly anticipating: Peter Guralnick's "Dream Boogie" and Erik Greene's "Our Uncle Sam". Guralnick's had all the promotional fanfare that his connections with the record industry and previous publications virtually (if not justifiably) guarantee. Erik Greene, although he is a member of Sam's family, had to rely on his own resources and (relatively) small-time, self-promotional publication. But only one book tells the truth and does justice to Sam Cooke: Erik Greene's. Guralnick's "Dream Boogie", for all its prolixity and pretensions to a wide range of inside information, ultimately and inevitably presents a diminished Sam Cooke, a demeaned, slandered, betrayed Sam Cooke. Why? Because (contrary to my great expectations that his book would have something new to say) he remains enslaved to the old White lie about Sam's death. He had a chance to put the record straight, but chose instead to remain the (well fed) mouthpiece of the record industry, and obediently reproduce the same old dirty story that so vilifies Sam and denies him his true, full role in history.
Sam was not just the great singer, composer and sex idol that Guralnick's book portrays him as. Sam fought to create a brave new world in which Black musicians were free agents, independent of the White profiteers who exploited and robbed them, in control of the money they earned and the publishing rights of their music. This was a heroic, innovative and profoundly ethical mission, but because it hit at the rotten heart of big business in White (racist) America, because it would have exposed large scale corruption and, in that process, led to a redistribution of wealth, Sam Cooke had to be got rid of. Sam Cooke could not be bought off or cowed by threats (from the underworld cohorts so invaluable to the ruthless and megalomaniac record industry). Sam Cooke was phenomenally intelligent, and far better educated than the Whites who became his blood-sucking `mentors' (the likes of Jess Rand, Hugo and Luigi, and above all Allen Klein). He knew how to investigate false audits and ferret out the crooked machinations by which he and others were being bled of their hard-earned money and publishing rights. Sam knew too much, and for that knowledge (a knowledge which could and should have changed the world for the better) he was murdered. Brutally murdered under the auspices of the White-dominated record industry, whose financial domination and fraudulent practices had to be preserved at the expense of a moral revolutionary who was Black.
Of course powerful magnates could cover their damning tracks by staging a fictional drama which would feature Sam as a victim of his allegedly uncontrollable sexual drives. Down and out women (one ?Eurasian, one Black), so easy to silence and suborn, would feature as the protagonists instead of the real criminals from befouled White business, in a seedy scenario that the real Sam Cooke would never have gone anywhere near. Ironic, isn't it, that the risibly improbable fiction (invented by White men but forcibly perpetrated by women of `inferior race') has for so long been allowed to stand uncontested, while any attempt to present a truly credible alternative has always been branded a conspiracy theory? In fact the version presented so feebly and docilely in "Dream Boogie" (for the umpteenth time, and with fictional additions which are astoundingly incriminating) is the conspiracy theory. Erik Greene's reconstruction, lucidly, cogently, logically argued from evidence, is what the conspirators and murderers have for so long succeeded in keeping hidden. But the truth will out, and Erik Greene has been courageous enough to out it. Miraculously, enough evidence has survived to present a scrupulously argued, utterly credible case. Any fan of Sam Cooke has moral duty to read "Our Uncle Sam", spread the truth about his murder, and help fight the injustice that robbed him and his family of the rights to his music.
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