WITH the passing of Joe Cocker, another legend has left us.
Cocker died at his US home aged 70 after a battle with lung cancer.
Cocker had quit smoking more than 20 years ago but told interviewers it had “already done its damage” on his voice. He had lost his falsetto and now, tragically, his life.
The singer had also quit drinking at the turn of the century after years of abuse which had seen him nicknamed Mad Dog.
Cocker’s first hit was his soulful remake of the Beatles’ With a Little Help From My Friends in 1968.
Rock legend ... Joe Cocker in 2002 was still drawing crowds. Picture: Supplied.
His biggest hits in Australia included Delta Lady, You Are So Beautiful, Up Where We Belong, You Can Leave Your Hat On and Unchain My Heart.
Paul Cashmere, of music website Noise 11, said Cocker was one of the best live performers he has seen.
“Joe Cocker was that link between soul and rock music,” Cashmere said. “He always cited Ray Charles as his biggest influence and used the passion of a Charles performance to reinvent songs like The Beatles’ With A Little Help From My Friends, The Box Tops The Letter and Leon Russell’s Delta Lady into totally unique and emotional performances. When Cocker covered a song, it became his own.
“Joe Cocker used his entire body as a vocal instrument. When you witnessed a Joe Cocker performance you could see the vocal erupting from inside. It was like he immersed his vocal inside his heart and soul and expelled it on stage to create one of rock’s most unique sounds.”
Wilder times ... Joe Cocker in Brisbane for some concerts at Festival Hall. Picture: Supplied.
Cocker was a gas fitter who began singing in Sheffield clubs in the 1960s before a breakthrough performance at Woodstock in 1969 made him a global star.”
Promoter Michael Gudinski said even after his well known troubles in Australia (including being arrested and deported) he never blamed the country.
“I toured him in Australia a few times, we did Festival Hall after the `72 tour when he got arrested and deported. The guy was a legend. He continued performing for so many years which was remarkable when you consider the well documented problems he had. He was one of the acts who came out of Woodstock as a superstar. His version of With a Little Help From My Friends is one of those defining songs. You play it today and it stands up.
“He was a true gentleman to work with. He loved Australia and he toured here a lot, even though he had that incident it never put him off the country. We ended up releasing a lot of his albums here actually, and then an Australian, Roger Davies, became his manager. He certainly was the biggest export from Sheffield apart from steel.”
Davies also manages Pink, Sade, Tina Turner and Cher.
Mad Dog ... English singer Joe Cocker is arrested in Melbourne 19 Oct. 1972 after becoming involved in a drunken brawl with police and security staff at his hotel. Picture: Supplied.
Cocker won a Grammy and an Academy Award for Up Where We Belong, the theme from the movie An Officer and a Gentleman in 1983.
The musician was awarded an OBE in 2011.
His final studio album, Fire It Up, was released in 2012 and contained I Come In Peace, written by Australian musicians Ross Wilson and Rick Brewster.
His last Australian tour was in February 2011, touring with George Thorogood.
Billy Joel dedicated With a Little Help From My Friends to Cocker in September, noting that he “is not very well right now.”
Joel also called for Cocker to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, adding “I’m amazed that he’s not yet.”
Among the onslaught of dedications on Twitter included Delta Goodrem, whose parents named her after seeing Cocker perform Delta Lady in concert.
“His music was played my whole childhood,” Goodrem said, adding she was “heartbroken.”
A statement said Cocker ``enjoyed long walks in the mountains with his dogs, fly fishing in the Black Canyon, playing snooker with friends and growing tomatoes in his greenhouse year-round.”
He is survived by his wife, Pam; his brother Victor Cocker; his step daughter, Zoey Schroeder and two grandchildren, Eva and Simon Schroeder.
Hard living ... Joe Cocker performs in Melbourne in 1972, with local newspaper The Herald reporting he was swigging from whiskey bottles on stage.
JOE COCKER IN AUSTRALIA
Joe Cocker’s hard-living reputation was the stuff of rock and roll mythology.
However his first Australian tour in 1972 was remembered for more than just the music.
Getting back into touring after the rigours of his infamous Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour of America in 1970, the tour was derailed when Cocker and five bandmates were arrested in Adelaide for possession of Indian hemp and fined $300 each.
The tour made its way to Melbourne where Cocker, who was 28 at the time, was arrested after a brawl in the Commodore Chateau Hotel when management asked the singer and his entourage to leave the venue.
He was charged with assaulting police, indecent language, common assault, offensive behaviour and refusing to leave licensed premises.
The Herald said at his Festival Hall review Cocker drank from whiskey bottles and told the crowd of his deportation order “they can touch our bodies but they can’t touch our souls” and added “anyway marijuana will be legal here in five years.”
After the Melbourne incident the Immigration Department issued Cocker with a deportation order, and promoter Harry M Miller was forced to cancel shows in Perth and Brisbane as Cocker left the country.
Changed image ... Cocker went on to tour Australia again without any incident.
Cocker told the ABC four years ago of his 1972 tour “I was a bit disillusioned (and) we kind of got set up ... the night before we’d been looking for some pot and it was really awful stuff and it all turned in to a big thing of ‘let’s deport Cocker’ and it was a nasty scene.”
In his autobiography Miller wrote Cocker “had the misfortune to be in Australia when the conservative knee-jerk was lethal and the Federal Government of the time was reacting to an electorate disillusioned with its political performance.”
He returned in 1975 and would tour regularly without incident, scoring glowing reviews.
Cocker was unwittingly involved with the Liberal party’s introduction of GST in 2000 when his song Unchain My Heart was used in advertising campaigns for the tax.
The Howard Government paid $270,000 to use the song, which was written by Bobby Sharp and was a hit for Ray Charles in 1961, then covered by Cocker in 1987.
It was part of the $420 million spent to introduce the new tax to Australians.
However the ads included the tag ‘spoken by Joe Cocker’ at the end, which was seen as a political endorsement even though it was required by law.
At the time his Australian record label said “The licensing of a song shouldn’t necessarily be construed [to mean] that the artists are endorsing the product.”
In his memoirs Peter Costello said Unchain My Heart was “one of my favourite songs” and the campaign “introduced a new generation to the music of Joe Cocker.”
