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Joe Cocker, born on May 20, 1944, in England, is a legendary rock and blues singer.
Joe Cocker – Unchain My Heart 2002 Live Video
Joe Cocker – Unchain My Heart 2002 Live concert at the Limelight Club in Cologne, Germany 2002 Joe Cocker – Vocals Mick Milo – Keyboards Gene Bloch – Guitar Jack Bruno – Drums Onelda James – Bass Derik Dyer – Saxophone Maxine Green, Amy Keys – Backing Vocals
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Joe Cocker, the unique voice of a tortured soul
On the top floor of the old Café Berlin in Madrid there was a piano. It used to sit novel artists or small bands from the latems of the Movida. One night, after an interview with one of the most genuine artists of the 20th century, I understood how music could save a sensitive and unique being after going through the hell of drugs and alcohol. As members of his entourage and my team asked themselves for some reeds, Joe Cocker took to that small stage to improvisely sing a session that the handful of humans we attend will never forget. A whole show of love for this art.
It was already 1994 and the radios were flooded with pure soul while listening to a 1966 theme of The Lovin’ Spoonful, in Cocker’s version of the unequivocal voice.
If it weren’t for leaving us just 20 years later, in 2014, today one of the best-known voices in world music would have turned 80. A father who never went to any of his concerts and a brother who sang him in one of his own when our boy was barely 13 years old were the family with whom he listened to the soul’s greats in the record player of his Sheffield home, in the British industrial belt. There was his love for Ray Charles, from whom he even made his own one of his songs, “Unchain My Heart.”
The appearance of this eleventh album of his in 1987 meant a lot. It was his return after his passage through what artists often fell on: the ghost of drink and other toxic substances. What was your secret? His special way of singing. There can’t be artifice on that.
A man in Woodstock
But let’s go to the moment the myth was born. Woodstock. Sunday, August 17, 1969. Shortly after noon and just before a torment, our artist comes on stage with a hand-painted T-shirt that became emblematic. And it wasn’t a short concert. He threw himself an hour and a half ago because the next ones didn’t arrive amid the chaos of organizing the concert that changed the world. His success was to grab a Beatles theme and give him a soul point, which was always his forte.
They arrived in the 70s, pulled out a couple of discs in the middle of the lysergic fever and bathed in alcohol. Joe missed those years, because he always recognized not being able to remember them. In the midst of a struggle to locks his head amid legal and health problems, in 1974 he was able to sing beauty in a simple and unique way with this song written to him by Billy Preston, the black Beatle. It’s so simple and at the same time so powerful, “You Are So Beautiful”.
She has rarely sung to beauty in such a naked way, musically speaking. I imagine that way of singing as the result of his problems and that song as his safe space. That’s why he infected the world and became among the five most important topics of that year.
A voice for the 80s
Within a decade of stars like Madonna or Michael Jackson, there was room for Cocker thanks to the cinema. Specifically thanks to a film that all of us who lived that time remember: Officer and Knight. Impossible to forget that 1982 soundtrack: “Up Where We Belong.”
Before that tape, the military and romantic weren’t used to mix. Cocker was awarded his only Grammy award, and the song won the Oscar for Best Original Song. It seemed that such a peculiar form of singing could be part of some more soundtracks, and came the one that is still being used today for any striptease: “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” included in another of the classics of the 80s cinema, Nine and a half weeks.
It was indelible to see Kim Basinger dedicate his particular show to Mickey Rourke… that provocative scene has forever stayed in the collective unconscious. Randy Newman’s 1972 original didn’t cause so much stir. Notice the difference, respectfully speaking.
Feeling good in the midst of chaos
It wasn’t one of his most acclaimed hits, but he was one of those he made known to the world in the late 1960s. It is certainly a good way to end this memory of a unique artist who was born 80 years ago today. Joe knew how to give his blues touch to “Feelin Alright,” the song written by Dave Mason for his band Traffic in 1968, and which Cocker versioned more successfully a year later.