"American Idol" Gets It Right With David Cook

Wow. I'm still flipping out that "American Idol" viewers chose the right David. The David who rocks over the David who emotes. Stubble boy over ballad boy. The bartender over the professional pageant kid. The David that I wanted to win. David Cook was a favorite from just about the beginning - most people spotted him and David Archuelta as the Final Two months ago - but few thought he could beat the very cute, very 17 "Archie" and his driven stage dad. The final performances on Tuesday night were pronounced an Archuleta "knockout" by Simon Cowell. Still, with a record 97.5 million votes cast, Cook won by 12 million. The decision was announced at the end of two hours of the strangest television I've ever seen.

Voters were won over by Cook's rock-charged remakes of classics like "Eleanor Rigby," "Billie Jean" and "Baba O'Reilly," often accompanying himself on his distinctive left-handed, white Gibson Les Paul guitar. No one seemed to mind that the unusual arrangements were often borrowed from other artists. Cook is 25 and a veteran of the midwestern bar-band circuit; voters also may have been swayed by the maturity and class with which he handled the show's many non-musical challenges - from the sniping of Cowell to the indignities of mugging through mandatory Ford commercials each week. By last night's show, Simon was apologizing for having been too hard on him.

Other, more dramatic parts of Cook's story were written on his guitar, where the letters AC are clearly visible. They're there for his two brothers, Andrew and Adam. Andrew was the one who originally wanted to audition for "Idol," while David was a tagalong; Andrew could be seen around the stage at the end of last night's show, tears in his eyes, mouthing That's my brother! He seemed genuinely thrilled. Adam is undergoing treatment for brain cancer and was flown in to see the show once. A turn for the worse in Adam's condition led David Cook to be hospitalized for high blood pressure after one early April performance. But he didn't exploit this to gain sympathy, and even the "Idol" producers uncharacteristically did little to milk it for melodrama.

It's hard not to feel for Archuleta, who clearly has been training for the "Idol" gig since a very young age. Perhaps news reports of his father's pushy backstage antics hurt him with voters. But Cook deserved to win. And now we'll see if he can follow in the footsteps of Carrie Underwood (How good did she look and sound last night?) and become a genuine music-biz phenomenon. The trick is for him to maintain control during the months of "Idol"-directed touring and promotion and recording to come. He can't let the "Idol" braintrust forget the unique sound that made him a winner and push him toward MOR blandness. He's got to remember to rock.

A trio of footnotes:
1) As widely noted, DialIdol.com called Cook as the winner yesterday. Kinda ruins it, though, if you listen to them, doesn't it?
2) Watch for lawsuits from pissed-off DVR viewers who found the last couple of minutes of the show got cut off, depriving them of the big moment.
3) Go read the first graf of our friend Aaron's column, in which he compares the contest between the Davids to another big voting competition that's going on...