Guralnick applies producer Sam Phillips' theory of "perfect imperfection" -- the greater beauty is in the flaws that real life presents -- to the singer who had huge hits with such self-penned compositions as "You Send Me," "Chain Gang" and "Cupid." He seemed to always be in control, right up until the news hit of his tawdry demise. The greatest male gospel singer ever and pioneer of soul was shot to death in self-defense by the night clerk of a $3 motel in South Central Los Angeles on Dec. 11, 1964.

Though 650 pages might be too long for the casual, and even the ardent fan, to wade through, Guralnick needed that much paper to fully lay out the contradictions and complexities of Cooke's life.

Appealing to both white and black fans during the time of segregation, the preacher's son was a chief ambassador of the civil rights movement, penning "A Change Is Gonna Come" months before his death at age 33 because he thought the black community needed its own "Blowin' In the Wind." The first R&B artist to own a publishing company and record label, who wrote his own songs even as RCA early on hooked him up with pop puppeteer producers Hugo and Luigi, Cooke was forever looking to advance his cause.

Through his years of touring, first on "the gospel highway" and later on the upscale supper club circuit, where he'd swing like Sinatra and get mellow like fellow Chicago native Nat King Cole, Cooke assembled an army of acquaintances. Everyone from waiters he'd overtip to Muhammad Ali, who pulled Cooke into the ring after he won the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston, loved the attractive singer with the voice of smooth elasticity. But Guralnick concentrated on those who truly knew the real Sam Cooke.

"I could've gone out and interviewed 500 people who Sam had had an impact on, and they would all have great anecdotes about how cool he was to them, but after a certain point I realized that all these stories were, to some degree, the same, based on the image that Sam displayed to the world," Guralnick says. "That's the outer Sam. I wanted to focus on those who knew Sam from the inside. That was the deeper picture."

Guralnick interviewed more than a dozen times each many of his key sources, such as Alexander, Cooke's younger brother L.C. and protege Bobby Womack. He wanted to know everything, every little detail.

"Dream Boogie" was so long coming because, he says, "it took me 15 years to set up the conditions that would enable me to write the kind of book that I wanted to write, where I had free and unimpeded access to all the court records, all the papers and most of all the people who knew him best, particularly his family, who'd been largely unavailable up to that point."

Barbara Cooke, who had never been interviewed before, finally agreed to sit down with Guralnick after six years of requests. But instead of the reluctant witness being shy and withholding, she unloaded her deepest feelings and told on herself almost as much as she did her former husband.

The cheating was a two-way street, and Barbara candidly discusses some of the affairs she had while Sam was stepping out. The couple, who never had a happy home life, virtually disintegrated save for public appearances after their 18-month-old son Vincent drowned in the family pool in 1963.

Guralnick casts a penetrating eye into the darkness. "I don't think the picture-postcard view applies to any of our lives and we do a disservice to the complexities of life" by whitewashing off-color moments and events. In the end, Guralnick declares Sam Cooke's life was unquestionably a triumph, using that word in the title after reading a poem by Anne Sexton that praised the risk-taking of Icarus. It reminded him of Sam.

In contrast to such iconoclastic, self-involved music writers as Lester Bangs and Nick Tosches, Guralnick does not hang his reputation on style, which is ironic because he set out to be a fiction writer, earning a masters in creative writing at Boston College.

His love of music, especially the country blues he discovered as a 15-year-old, was all-encompassing, however, and when he was asked to write a piece on Muddy Waters for an alternative paper in Boston, Guralnick had found his calling. "What could be a better job than telling people about the music that you love?" he told his friends.

His strength, established with "Sweet Soul Music," perhaps the best book about musicians ever written, is as a cultural historian. He sees the larger scope in Cooke's story, weaving together rich details about race, sex, music and religion as sturdy context.

You'd think that, at 650 pages (750 if you count the notes and bibliography section), Guralnick would've seemed to have emptied his notebooks with anecdotes about Cooke. But the writer says he had to be selective, using only the details that advanced the story or the understanding of the character, and some of the juicier bits never made it to the page.

It seems almost implausible that Cooke had even more sexual partners than portrayed in "Dream Boogie," where he's constantly entering a room full of people, choosing the most attractive female and leading her off. But Guralnick says he had to limit the liaisons. "I included instances like when he (has sex with) the radio program director's wife in the bathroom, because that speaks to his anger" at having to suck up to radio bigwigs, Guralnick says.

Because of the circumstances of Cooke's death, the singer's dalliances, a pattern of behavior than became increasingly alarming, are a big part of the story.

Guralnick reveals, for the first time, the results of a private investigation into Cooke's shooting, which concludes that Cooke was lured to the motel by a professional roller whose method of operation was to tell the mark that it was her custom to have partners bathe before sex. While the shower was running, she left with Cooke's clothes, except for a coat he donned to go to the motel's lobby. Drunk and enraged, thinking night clerk Bertha Franklin was in on the fleece, Cooke charged her, even though she was pointing a gun at him. "Lady, you shot me" were his last words.

Told that many readers will probably go first to the ending, curious about the mysterious death of Sam Cooke, Guralnick says he never considered opening his book with that attention-grabber and then pulling back to Cooke's early years. When you're Peter Guralnick you can do it your way, even though a movie version would undoubtedly open with the scene of a body being wheeled out of a motel lobby in a bath of whirling red hurry lights.

"That would constitute a falsification of the true story," Guralnick says. The point of the life is not the death. The death is the accidental way in which it ends. It's no different than if someone gasped out their life with emphysema. It doesn't speak of their aspirations -- what drives them."

"Admire his wings!," Anne Sexton wrote in that poem about Icarus, who scorched his wings by flying too close to the sun. "Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea?"

Peter Guralnick will speak at the Texas Book Festival at the Capitol 3:45 to 4:30 p.m. Saturday in the House Chamber and 11 a.m. Oct. 30 at the South Steps of the Capitol. Free. www.texasbookfestival.org.

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