In some ways Joe Cocker, who died last week at 70, was a man out of time. A simple laborer from Sheffield, England, primarily known for its steel (Sheffield Steel was the title of one of Cocker's albums, in fact), Cocker began his working life as a gas pipe-fitter. As we all hope, though, talent will out: Cocker burst onto the music scene in 1969 with two albums--which wasn't unusual in those times; I think people maybe just worked harder-- With A Little Help From My Friends and Joe Cocker! which immediately established him as a unique (Ray Charles comparisons notwithstanding) voice and, shall we say, an idiosyncratic live performer. What also set him apart, in those times, is that he wrote almost none of his own material.
Back in the day, of course, there were, really, only interpreters of others' songs. Sure there were anomalies such as some of the blues guys, like Robert Johnson, and Mel Torme did write "The Christmas Song," which he also performed, but for the most part writers and singers were two distinct groups and came together only on record. Sinatra, Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, all the famous vocalists, relied on the Cole Porters, Harold Arlens, Yip Harburgs, all of the Tin Pan Alley songsmiths to provide them with their material. That tradition continued mostly unchanged into the 60's with the Brill Building songwriters like Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Boyce & Hart, Neil Diamond, Sonny Bono (!), Gerry Goffin & Carole King, Greenwich and Barry, Leiber and Stoller, Mann and Weil: the list goes on and of familiar names who were contract songwriters, churning out hit after hit for others to perform.
The shift to performers writing their own material probably had its beginnings as did, arguably, rock 'n' roll, with Chuck Berry, and was taken to new levels, as were most things in that era, by a couple of fellas named Lennon and McCartney. Publishing, see, was where the real money was. A songwriting credit on a hit album was a goldmine, as royalties roll in year after year from every performance of your credited song. That's why you stopped seeing covers on Beatles and Stones records, for the most part, and why John and Paul would reluctantly throw George a bone of one song per album, which eventually resulted in All Things Must Pass; Harrison had all those songs stockpiled, and when the Fabs split everyone was stunned by the wealth of his material. Well, he was finally in charge.
So the Joe Cockers of the music world became anomalies, "mere" interpreters of others' material. And yet, and yet: whose version of "With A Little Help..." would you rather listen to? Ringo singing lead on the original, endearing as it is, or Cocker's all-stops-out throat-wrencher? With whom do you identify "Feelin' Alright? Traffic, and Dave Mason's original version, which is great in its own right, or Joe's cover? "Something," "...Bathroom Window," "Darlin' Be Home Soon," all were done quite satisfactorily for most folks' needs, but Joe Cocker made them his, even through--or maybe partly because of--his often indecipherable delivery. There are passages in nearly every Joe Cocker song, especially early in his career, that I defy anyone to translate, maybe even if you already know the originals. Dylan's "Dear Landlord," from Cocker's second album, for instance: it's absolutely indecipherable, but it really doesn't matter--and it's a Dylan lyric, for chrissake.
The reason he was able to put such an indelible stamp on the songs he sang, I think, is that he was inseparable from them: He was the song, and the song was him. Cocker inhabited the songs and they inhabited him simultaneously, a Mobius strip of sound, sight and emotion. He was transported by the music and his performance, to the point where his very body became possessed, moving involuntarily as it tried to let out all the emotion that even that amazing voice was incapable of expressing on its own. If you've seen early videos of Cocker performances, maybe especially from Woodstock, then you know whereof I speak. Sweating profusely from the energy he expended, hair drenched, hands and arms flailing seemingly uncontrollably, mimicking the movement of hands on a guitar neck or a keyboard, tugging at his hair, he was the very personification of uncontrollable, unvarnished, all-encompassing emotion. Those performances are perhaps the closest secular--if, indeed, music can rightly be called "secular;" I think it is mystical and holy-- embodiment of the Sufi dervishes, whose unrestrained, wholly-given dancing is an attempt to reach religious ecstasy. Joe Cocker's performances showed that he was already there, in his own musical/secular/mystical trance.
And so the passing of another great, another icon from my youth, a circumstance which will of course only increase in frequency in the coming years, leads me to this week's show, a tribute to Joe Cocker, someone whose like we really may never see again. I'm going to play his first two albums in their entirety, maybe mostly 'cause that's how I have to hear 'em. The last, stinging guitar note in "Lawdy Miss Clawdy, leads necessarily and inexorably into the fuzz-tone guitar crescendo intro to "She Came In Through The Bathroom Window," for instance. To separate them would be criminal. I'll supplement those albums from among this list:
The Letter (The Boxtops, originally)
Many Rivers To Cross Jimmy Cliff
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress Jimmy Webb
Into The Mystic Van Morrison
Let's Go Get Stoned Ray Charles
Cry Me A River Julie London, et al
You've Got To Hide Your Love Away The Fabs
The Weight The Band
Put Out The Light Joe Cocker (!)
Jamaica Say You Will Jackson Browne
See you on Tuesday, from noon till two, on WOOL-FM, 91.5, or www.wool.fm on the net.
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