Quote:Singer Joe Cocker dies aged 70 after cancer battle

Singer Joe Cocker, best known for his cover of the Beatles' With A Little Help From My Friends, has died aged 70, his agent has confirmed.

The Sheffield born singer-songwriter had a career lasting more than 40 years with hits including You Are So Beautiful and Up Where We Belong.

His agent Barrie Marshall said Cocker, who died after battling lung cancer, was "simply unique".

Sir Paul McCartney said he was a lovely guy who "brought so much to the world".

Cocker's friend Rick Wakeman, keyboard player for the rock band Yes, called his rendering of With a Little Help From My Friends "sensational" and said: "He had a voice that was just unique."

"The great thing is with someone like Joe is what they leave behind, and that will be with us for years and years," Wakeman told BBC Radio 2.

Known for his gritty voice, Cocker began his singing career in the pubs and clubs of Sheffield in the 1960s before hitting the big time....

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-30582761

Quote:Casey Abrams @CaseyBassy · 2h 2 hours ago
Joe Cocker will forever be the man http://youtu.be/uTklPETuo-g

Quote:He seemed, at that moment, less like a rock star than like someone who sort of wandered on stage from the multitudes of motley young people jostling and undulating in the meadow. He appeared dazed and confused: a scruffy, spectacularly unglamorous fellow who somehow found himself among the rock 'n' roll aristocracy who showed up in Woodstock, New York, 45 summers ago to help administer a collective blessing upon a generation.

Then Joe Cocker started to sing a song that, it's safe to say, everybody within hearing range of that stage knew by heart. It was what was widely recognized as the "Ringo" number from the already classic Beatles album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," from two years ago.

"With a Little Help From My Friends" was the kind of catchy, user-friendly ditty that even a stuffy grown-up could love enough to sing along with decades before anyone heard the word "karaoke." Anybody, in other words, could make the song work for them, whether in a shower or a corner bar.
Joe Cocker, at that moment, did more than just make it work. He worked that song over, ripping its delicate, amiable stitching apart and transfiguring it into something with more grandeur, tumult and dramatic tension than the Beatles could have imagined.

The cameras that captured that transfixing performance for all time stayed on him for practically the entire song, drifting up and down Cocker's spasmodic form, focusing on his hands as they mimed an invisible instrument wrenching every lick, spin and extended variation he could summon through the vibrant coarseness of his voice.

That little ditty Ringo Star introduced to the world became, in Cocker's fitful, jerking hands, an epic flag waver, a soul-music anthem. Cocker didn't just "cover" that song. He conquered it and made it his own.

Quote:Ringo Starr ‏@ringostarrmusic 24h24 hours ago
Goodbye and God bless to Joe Cocker from one of his friends peace and love. R

Quote:kreeharrison 21 hours ago

Joe Cocker. Boy I wish I would've seen you live, mesmerizing everyone like you did.

Quote:haleyreinhart
I wish so too!