I was probably three when I first heard his voice at a wedding when You Are So Beautiful played during the first dance, though I have no recollection of it occurring. I definitely heard his voice during the opening credits of The Wonder Years back in the late 80s, but I still had not been fully awakened. I didn't know it at the time, but I had also heard him sing When a Woman Loves a Man on the Bull Durham soundtrack. It wasn't until I was nine that I knowingly fell in love with Joe Cocker.
I was in my dad's living room, settling in for a card game, and Dad put on Joe's Greatest Hits album. When those opening guitar chords of With A Little Help from My Friends hit, I immediately recognized it as The Wonder Years theme song. Although I was engrossed in the game at hand, a part of me was soaking in this soulful yet gritty voice. It screamed and howled like a wild beast, yet at times it could be soothing, deep, and rich. But it wasn't just his voice. It was how it melded with the music, and how everything he did he made his own. (I didn't know at the time that almost all Joe did was covers. For the longest time I thought he wrote the song that he is so famous for covering.) The days that followed would find me plugging in the headphones to my dad's stereo and practically blasting my ears off (along with dancing my nine year old tail off) to tracks like Cry Me a River, Feeling Alright, and Delta Lady. (I was particularly fond of the latter due to the guitar riff near the end where my left shoulder would give a little shimmy.) I lost track of how many years I listened to that album on repeat, but it remained a constant favorite.
I can still remember that moment when, not long after my new found fandom, I was watching Sleepless in Seattle for the first time. There's that one scene of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan each walking alone on their separate coasts, and Bye Bye Blackbird seems to say everything that a script cannot, and never could. Being ten years old at the time, however, I could not feel the depth of emotion that the scene evoked. But I recognized the voice, and that was enough. It wasn't the screaming wolfman with persistent drum beats, wailing organs, and growling guitars; it was the man behind the animal: mournful, soulful, and beautifully brokenhearted. "No one seems to love or understand me," his rich voiced lamented, and somehow, even at the tender age of ten, I felt like I understood what he meant.
In middle school I brought home a cassette tape with him on the cover: a little shaggy in the hair and the just-grown-in beard on his face. His appearance and expression is not unlike that of a dog that's been on the streets for far too long, yet is still looking for his master: hardened by the road, yet still soft behind the eyes. Little did I know, but I found what I believe to be one of his best albums. Other than You Are So Beautiful, "I Can Stand A Little Rain" yielded no other hit. Yet, I wore that tape out, falling asleep night after night to tracks like Don't Forget Me, Performance, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Guilty. It is decidedly a more mellow album with only a few tracks that are dedicated to his more rock and roll roots. But it's also an all around consistently good album, with only a couple of odd tracks. I love it precisely because, overall, it doesn't try to be something that it's not. It's just Joe doing what he did best: interpreting the works of others and making them his own. (Side note: the album was released 40 years ago this year.)
Strangely enough, dedicated fan as I was, I had yet to see any recordings or footage of one of his performances. It wasn't until I was in high school when I happened upon a PBS showing of "Woodstock" that I finally caught a glimpse of the man behind the voice. I was both appalled and mystified by what I saw. I tried to take in what I was watching: a man who looked like he was on the verge of a drunken collapse, with uncoordinated bodily contortions, and a face that seemed like it was possessed by some underworld entity; yet he could hit every note and musical phrase with perfect timing and expression, not to mention his voice was so completely and totally present (if not altogether coherent in its annunciation). My viewing of the performer did not change my love for the singer; it just gave me a more complete picture, and later, an appreciation for the artist as a whole.
In college I finally acquired the album that he is probably best known for, and which helped rocket him to fame in the 1970s: Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Here again, I found myself gyrating in my room to my heart's content to songs like Honkey Tonk Woman and Sticks and Stones, along with live versions of Feeling Alright and Delta Lady. I also found myself being lulled to sleep with his and Leon Russell's rendition of Bob Dylan's Girl from the North Country. In particular, Joe's under-phrasing for the verse about his love having a coat so warm was goosebump inducing in its tenderness and longing. Finally, the track Space Captain contained both the screaming soulfulness of Joe, the playfulness of Leon Russell's piano as well as the backup singers' intermittent "woos" and "ahhs" that made it one of the most enjoyable tracks of the album. In addition, it contained a message straight out of the decade that they had just left behind: we gotta learn how to live together till we die. It's as true then as it is now, though the level of optimism seems to have diminished significantly over the years. Even so, the sentiment and energy contained within the track has not diminished even after 40 years.
I'm not sure why, but it seems to be my habit in life to approach things backwards. (Just ask me about how I ended up reading the Harry Potter series.) Joe's debut album was the last of his that I bought, and it was largely due to happenstance. Had it not been for Change in Louise coming up in my search for tracks by the artist, "With a Little Help from My Friends" might not have shown up on my radar. It is probably my least favorite of his albums that I own, though it's not without appreciation. His cover of I Shall Be Released is the stuff of end-of-life send off unlike any other, and seems a more than fitting track to acknowledge when remembering a man whose voice was simultaneously ethereal and nearly-six-feet deeply rooted in the earth. It is the epitome of his gift: to breathe a life and a soul into what was already beautiful, and make it a new being to behold.
Joe Cocker, the mad Englishman and the broken soul man, has followed me throughout my life, even before I knew who he was. His music was his gift to everyone who would listen, and has been part of my personal soundtrack on so many occasions, more than I can count or remember here. I held no interest in his most recent releases, preferring to remain instead in the annals of his hey-day for the most part, so I cannot say that I will miss him in the sense of feeling the loss of potential new creations. But I say I mourn his passing because the presence of one who brought so much light and uniqueness to the world of music is now gone, and I wish he knew how we are all the better just from him showing up.
