I spent last night listening to Joe Cocker. Not because I had a sudden, undirected urge, of course, but because he passed away yesterday at age 70 after a battle with cancer. It’s a writer’s ghoulish duty, taking an artist’s death as an opportunity to contemplate what they gave us in life.Joe Cocker, may he rest in peace, has a very odd legacy. Most of it — the weighty, history-making part driving the tributes he’s been receiving for the past 24 hours — hinges on his work from the late 1960s, and in particular, on his interpretation of the Beatles’“With a Little Help From My Friends.”
It’s odd to think of one five-minute song – a cover of someone else’s song – as a staggering, timeless achievement, but this one is. The Beatles’ original is goofy and lazy and a bit melancholy, and appeared on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album right about on the cusp of the Beatles’ transition from honed pop sensation into a machine of soul-crushing grace.
Cocker, improbably, turned the song into a statement of purpose for the entire Woodstock generation (of which admittedly there are more than a few), slowing it down and wailing it and giving its once throwaway lines about love and friendship and loneliness an immense gravity. He infused the song with his own palpable complexity and longing.
Here’s the eight-minute long version from Woodstock, 1969.
It’s enough. That right there, that’s enough for an entire life.
Through the 1970s, Cocker enacted similar intense transformations on other songs, including “You Are So Beautiful” and the Boxtops’“The Letter.”
But (and this is where this whole deal of surveying someone’s life right after they’ve died becomes uncomfortable), it’s a good deal harder to appreciate the work he was doing through the '80s and '90s. Though his voice was as gritty and deep as ever, his production and song choices became stiff, clean and saccharine.
“Up Where We Belong” is one of Cocker’s biggest hits of the period, and while both he and duet partner Jennifer Warnes are amazing enough to animate the nearly comical lyrics (“Where the eagles cry / On a mountain high”), the electronic backing track is absolutely stiffening. There are plenty of other examples.
Cocker did great work during an era of intensity and rawness – the ‘60s and ‘70s – and was tamed for the corporate music eras in the decades that followed, though he certainly wasn't the only one.
There are plenty of what-ifs – like, what if Cocker hadn't become quite so ensnared in the anodyne corporate sound of an era when, on the whole, music served Mammon instead of Art? What if Rick Rubin had set his sights on Cocker when he was helping artists like Johnny Cash return to their raw, intense roots? What if Cocker had kept his vitality in our current, more democratic and chaotic musical era? What if he'd managed to channel the sense of loss, threat, possibility, rage, and hope he gave the Woodstock generation into work that spoke to our own increasingly desperate times?
That could’ve really been something.