When Sam Stabbed Dave

I seem to have lost the beginning of the new year. I thought it was somewhere in my notebook, but it wasn’t and what I thought I’d written I hadn’t written at all, it was only a memory I hadn’t yet memorized.

I seem to remember making two 2023 new year’s resolutions—to ask only good questions and to tell no lies—to which I now add a third: to clear up any previously held misconceptions.

Sam of the famous soul duo “Sam and Dave” (‘Soul Man’, ‘Hold On, I’m Comin’) did not stab Dave onstage as previously reported in a blogpost of 2013, nor did Dave stab Sam. It is true that Sam disliked Dave and Dave abhorred Sam, and that once they dissolved their partnership they never spoke to one another again.

Sam did not stab Dave or vice versa, and certainly not on-stage in Zaire, Africa where they once gave a concert. It made for a good story and I harbored the illusion that one or the other of them had done so, no doubt telling others the story as I came to actually believe it was true. The music of it sounded so good on paper! 

It is true however that the comedian Ernie Kovacs intentionally lit a curtain on fire on live TV when he was informed that ABC had cancelled his show. Kovacs was sponsored by Dutch Masters cigars and the cancellation news was delivered while he was performing and smoking a Dutch Master. I wasn’t there, I didn’t see it happening, it happened in the day of black-and-white TV, but my father was watching and loved every minute of it, telling my mother and my brother and I about it the next morning at breakfast.