Joe Cocker the Making of a Soul Legend

FIVE decades ago, a sometime gas fitter from Northern England's Steel City had a brainwave. Having listened to drummer Ringo Starr performing a track on The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album, he felt inspired to take it to a new dimension. What he had in mind would transform a bouncy little pop tune into a rock classic - and introduce John Robert Cocker to American audiences as the finest white male soul singer to emerge from the UK. Local legend had always insisted that Joe (right), as he was known from childhood, had his brilliant idea while ruminating in the outside toilet (a flash in the pan?) of his parents' home in the Crookes area of industrial Sheffield, Yorkshire. While the authorised biography confirmed this, it would still have been an earthy anecdote well worth the retelling even it had stayed in urban mythology. How author JP Bean recalls the sequence of events in With a Little Help from My Friends is that they began with Joe pestering his then Grease Band for numbers in waltz time.

He sounded out fellow Sheffield bandmate Tommy Eyre about the feasibility of creating a heavier version of the Ringo track, With a Little Help from My Friends, in ¾ time with a Bach-like intro a la Procol Harum's highly successful A Whiter Shade of Pale. Although the other musicians groaned at the prospect, Tommy, a classically trained keyboard player, reckoned Joe might just have hit on something. After the reworking had taken shape, the number was blooded on the road then it was time to go into the recording studio with, at the second attempt, such luminaries as guitarist Jimmy Page and Procol's BJ Wilson on drums. The result was stunning and Joe had a UK No 1. It wasn't his first cover of a Beatles' composition because I'll Cry Instead, from A Hard Day's Night, had been his failed debut single four years earlier and it wouldn't be his last as George Harrison and Paul McCartney donated unreleased Something and She Came In Through the Bathroom Window for the Joe Cocker! album, but With a Little Help was the ultimate Lennon & McCartney interpretation.

If 1968 was a very good year for Joe, the next 12 months would be career-defining. America welcomed him with open arms to the Ed Sullivan Show, the Fillmore East and West, and a series of music festivals, with Woodstock - where his gravelly vocals and mesmerising stage mannerisms wowed the masses - as the main event, among the standouts. There were darker days ahead, causing a lot of pain for Joe himself and those who really cared about him, but the man would prove to be made of Sheffield steel and become a survivor of the madness afflicting the music industry, defying the odds when he seemed in danger of joining rock 'n' roll's illustrious casualty list. He married the former Pam Baker in 1987 and she has been his rock in a solid relationship that has taken them from Santa Barbara to the somewhat ironically named Mad Dog Ranch at Crawford, Colorado.

In 2007, he was recognised with an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in the Queen's Birthday Honours List; it was Joe's reward for services to music, well-deserved and, many felt, long overdue. A month earlier, Hymn for My Soul, reportedly his 25th album, had entered the UK chart at No 9. Borrowing from the title of the 1981 single he fronted for The Crusaders, it was so good to see him standing there. But Joe was far from finished. On April 17, 2009, he kicked off a North American tour in Florida, winding through to Memphis on July 18. May 20 found him at Primm Valley in Clark County, Nevada, close to the California border, on his 65th birthday. Joe Cocker OBE had graduated to OAP (old-age pensioner); the once flowing locks might have thinned out and the waistline thickened, but it was business as usual.

Joe Cocker just keeps on rocking and hitting 65 was no excuse for putting his feet up. On the road for yet another North American tour, he celebrated with a birthday gig at Primm Valley Resorts in Nevada.

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If you've enjoyed PART 1 of the JOE COCKER tribute, then please use the link at the bottom of the page to go to PART 2. I hope you enjoy that just as much.

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Joe Cocker:
The Authorised Biography

Joe Cocker:
The Authorised Biography