If We Can Make It Through December

1/19/2007

Welcome to the Countdown Lounge where whenever the music beckons you'll get some cultural rumination from yours truly. Since this is my first post and since it comes during the first month of the year it feels appropriate to kick off the tale with a look back at that most seductive and yet treacherous and dangerous of months, December. Of couse I call it seductive because of its servitude to the cult of Mr. Claus and the obsessive pursuit or all things shiny and bright. Behind that door of course waits the tiger, but it's even a little diceier than that if you happen to be a musician. Listen:

In 1964 with two weeks until Christmas the greatest soul singer of all time
was at the top of his game. Sam Cooke was as successful as any black singer had ever been and that was a list that included Nat King Cole and Ray Charles. Sam was the number two selling artist on RCA, owned his own record company, and sold equally to to audiences black and white. He was doing screen tests for movies and t.v.and his future was as wide and bright as his killer smile, a smile that brought him a legendary amount of female companionship. That December night he went into a Hollywood bar, picked up a woman who may or may not have been working the room and drove her to a two dollar motel in east l.a. Some hours later when the police were called he was dead with two bullets in him, fired by the manager of the hotel who said that she had feared for her life when Sam broke down the door to her room. Cooke had been looking for the woman who had taken his pants along with several thousand dollars in folding money. The manager told Sam she knew nothing about the woman and when he stepped toward her she answered with gunfire. The inquest ruled it justifiable homicide but to this day there are many who wonder. December.