Joe Cocker: Love Cockers All
Long before Joe Cocker and his Mad Dogs and Englishmen had begun their procession to the stage, the Fillmore West was a ballroom filled with talk about what a knockout evening it was going to be, with both Van Morrison and Joe Cocker on the bill. Now, as the 42-member troupe carved out places for themselves on the large platform, the talk was about how crowded it was, about the fire hazards, about Bill Graham’s uniformed rent-a-thugs rousting people from cramped aisles. Even locked on the floor behind a huge concrete post, you couldn’t lie down without a flashlight coming down on you, and a barked command to “Sit up, sit up!” At one break, one cat shouted at Graham, who was on stage, “Hey, Graham, there’s still standing room in the bathroom!” and got an ovation from that sector of the ballroom.
And, on stage, Graham was on his king-of-the-mountain riff again, raging and pushing people off the stage, pushing them like dominoes that ended up piled against the walls. Bill Graham/jam session time again.
But when Cocker and Leon Russell and their traveling soul commune swooped into the first song, even Graham was diminished, a pencil-thin flash-light beam to Cocker’s writhing presence bathed in spotlights. He was top of the bill. And even if it took fighting through the arms and legs of stoned neighbors to get up, 3000 (or however many there were) persons got up to hail this white Manchester king of soul when he’d finally finished his set.
Joe Cocker, outstanding among the sea of faces and instruments and clapping hands, sometimes mild and meek among the wildness, had arrived. And Graham, who can always be counted on to come to his business senses, had him at the larger Winterland the next two nights. Cocker Power, as Joe’s family calls it.
But just a year ago — –less than a year ago– — you didn’t go to no ballroom to see no Joe Cocker.
A blast from the past: It’s June, 1969, and the Fillmore West is, typically, crowded. The Byrds, after all, are in town, and they’re billed with the up-and-coming PG&E. And third on the bill is this cat with the funny name who’d had this top 40 hit, “With a Little Help From My Friends,” this singer named Joe Cocker. The first stories about him– — in the British trades– — had surprised me. I’d thought he was black, a man just lucky enough to latch onto a Beatle tune and make it work.
And when the Byrds had finished their set– — mostly a workmanlike medley of old album tunes and a number of countryish songs (They were into “Wheels of Fire” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” at that time) — –at midnight, at least half the crowd straggled up and split. That left Joe Cocker, bottom of the bill, with maybe 500 spectators.
But he had it all down. Just like a soul revue, the Grease Band came out first and warmed up. Wispy Chris Stainton, old buddy, on organ and ready to shift to piano; Henry McCullogh, ghostly pale, with dark eyes, on guitar; Alan Spenner, chubbier, naughtier looking, on bass, and Bruce Rowlands on drums. A couple of catchy tunes, yes, but the reaction was, Who’s this Cocker think he is, getting the stage set for him, man?
Then Joe came on, eyes dazed, chunky in an orange T-shirt and bells, medium-long hair resembling a well-used SOS soap pad. He picked up a styrofoam cup, drank, and, with a whipping motion from his right hand, spun the Grease Band into frenetic motion and proceeded to show that he could do it all alone.
It didn’t matter that people discussing his first LP would invariably talk about the use of Stevie Winwood and Jimmy Page and Matthew Fisher to help grace and sell the album; it didn’t matter that the critics seemed engrossed by the Ray Charles influence in Cocker’s voice and phrasings; and it didn’t matter that so many spent so much ink discussing his spastic stage style. Nothing mattered then as nothing matters now.
Or, as his producer Denny Cordell says today: “Joe is a strange guy; he has no ambitions at all. He just likes to rock and roll, and he has no dreams about how he could do it, because he could rock and roll any way he wants to.”
That June night last year, Joe kept his right foot planted and contorted everything else, bare hands playing lead guitar licks while McCullough picked out the notes; rolled up T-shirted fat boy’s arms fluttering around playing themselves, then breaking at the wrist to allow the fingers to glide up to the high notes of his invisible electric organ, then crash, and both elbows swoop down to turn the body into a baton, stopping the band. Then a half motion pitcher’s windup, and Stainton glides in again, and all through this, Cocker is dreamily laying out this sandpaper/soul voice, distorting words, “What do I do when my love airs away,” or, months before Abbey Road, “Something in the way she moves … ‘tracks me like no otha lover …”
And my god, the light show! With that foot planted and the rest of the body lost in smokey space, Cocker is some kind of a pub-fighter surfer, swirls of blue and green sailing behind his flowing visage. Rippling undercurrents of music by the tight Grease Band, little flashes like McCullough and Spenner singing falsetto to cover the parts sung by Madelene Bell and Su and Sunny Wheetman on the first album.
Fillmore West never felt so good. Just 500 of us scattered around the floor in front of the stage, a fan (A fan!) blowing a gentle breeze down from the high ceiling while Cocker surfed and washed and rapped stoney little raps. 500 people discovering something truly incredible. We leapt up to an ovation for the band, forced Joe back for an encore, jumped up and down while he sang that last song, and pretty much forgot what the Byrds had done– — something about a medley of old album tunes …
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