Last month, last days

In 1967 Sam Cooke's heir to the throne of soul had just finished the greatest year of his life. Otis Redding had set fire to the Monterrey Pop Festival that summer, proving almost as incendiary as that lefty from Seattle, the difference being that Otis had no need to set a stratocaster on fire during his signature tune "Try A Little Tenderness" While he was out on the west coast Redding wrote a song that he recorded in late November, a tune about gazing at the San Francisco Bay. Two weeks later after that session that brought us "Dock of the Bay" Otis' plane went down into a Wisconson lake almost three years to the day after Sam's last night at the motel.

James Brown exited this Christmas having lived long enough to have made himself a national institution, a long way from the kid who danced on street corners and later recorded the tune that Sonny Liston trained to as he prepared to meet a young poet from Louisville.

In 1985 in the midst of constant touring to meet the conditions of a large divorce settlement and perhaps to fuel some personal bad habits Rick Nelson died in a plane incident in Texas. There were allegations that the fire in the plane that claimed the lives of Rick and his band was caused by an unexpected freebasing accident, but the official line was that fault space heaters started the fire that claimed the life of the underrated rocker and t.v. star.

In 1980 perhaps the most famous rock and roll star alive was making a comeback. John Lennon on the night of December 8 was returning from the studio where he was riding a burst of creative energy and looking to follow up his recently released Double Fantasy. Mark David Chapman waited with a copy of Catcher In the Rye and a warm gun.

Finally, on New Year's Eve 1952 the greatest country singer and songwriter of the century breathed out his last tortured breath in the back of a powder blue caddy on his way to a date he never kept. Hank Williams was only twenty nine. A quarter of a century later Merle Haggard would write "If we can make it through December we'll be fine........." Amen to that.