Joe Cocker RIP

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Joe Cocker RIP

12-23-2014, 12:03 PM, (This post was last modified: 12-23-2014, 12:27 PM by Tusk.)

Tusk

jonesing for some Gingerbread Cake

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RE: Joe Cocker RIP

How Joe Cocker conquered the Beatles

[Image: 141222151914-03-joe-cocker-restricted-ho...allery.jpg]

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.