Cocker's secret: booze and total absence of irony

'With a little help form my friends' may be his biggest hit. My eternal favourite Joe Cocker song is and remains The Letter. No Cocker's vocal acrobatics here, turning the rather side-splitting Beatles song into a screaming victim's plea. In The Letter, the man who did mostly brilliant covers actually changes bitterly little about The Box Tops' already pretty ok-sounding original.

I got to know Cocker thanks to my three-year-older brother, who was good enough to initiate me into almost every kind of music. That we grew quite apart musically after that is a matter of different friends and different generations, and does not diminish those things we have in common. So three years of age difference does matter whether you stay true to Jackson Browne, Eric Clapton, Dan Fogelberg, Neil Young and The Rolling Stones, or move on to David Bowie, Brice Springsteen, The Clash and Rufus Wainwright.

Brother played Mad Dogs and Englishmen, the live album that eventually threatened to become Cocker's downfall, and the music immediately stood out from the other live albums you all had to have heard at the time: Get your ya yas out by The Rolling Stones, and Derek & The Dominos Live by the then tightly heroin-addicted Eric Clapton, who forgot to end an entire album side with a guitar solo that went absolutely nowhere.

I didn't understand much about that whole Cocker album. Yes, it all sounded great, but as a budding adolescent you weren't supposed to have anything to do with 1: a cover artist and 2: horns and 3: choirs. That was basically old-school music. Why Cocker managed to close that generation gap on Mad Dogs? Energy, I suspect. But more so: that music could be a party, even if you didn't have a speck of irony in your body yourself.

Because Cocker, then, did not do irony. Very un-Sheffields, but perfectly suited to America. Which is why we all felt acutely sorry for him when he sang. Especially in The Letter: the primal cry of a naive lovesick twit who has been dumped by his girlfriend, but goes absolutely crazy with joy when she sends him a note saying she wants him back. The tragedy is in the second line of the chorus: 'I've got to go back to my baby once more.' Note that 'Once more': it is not the first time she has wanted him back, nor will it be the first time he is back on the streets a few months later.

But that would be irony. When Joe Cocker sings that line, you believe with him that this time it will be for good, happiness is eternal and disappointment will lead to death.

And then brought all this in a celebratory concert where at least half the attendees are on another planet. I had honestly never seen the video before looking it up for this piece. But what a state of affairs. Of course lovely all those dancing flower girls, but what was going on with pianist Leon Russel? His piano part carries the whole album, but he himself sits there as if the latest cocktail of hard and not so hard drugs had launched him completely off the world. Especially after the saxophone solo, you can see Russel looking up as if he just woke up and discovered he was on a stage, instead of hanging out in front of the tube at home.

Booze, drugs, lots of sex with all kinds of life forms: Rock 'n Roll. The US tour of Mad Dogs & Englishmen almost killed Joe Cocker. Also because of that total abandonment, that total lack of irony with which he made his renditions so inescapable. Such parties still exist, although we rarely see totally drunk and drenched artists on stage anymore. In fact, we would all be disgraced. Amy Winehouse lost all her friends by regularly having to be carried off stage because of total drunkenness, while Doors hero Jim Morrison became more famous with every minute he spent lying on stage because of drug addiction.

http://youtu.be/2GPEbWnh2pQ

There is only one concert series left where it is allowed for an artist to perform slightly drunk or stoned, and get away with it, sometimes leading to embarrassing situations, and sometimes to highlights: Jools Holland's Hootenanny, on the BBC at the turn of the year. While in the Netherlands people bombard each other with deadly mortars and roadside bombs, a revival of that legendary Joe Cocker concert series is taking place there: with horns, with choirs, with covers. And sometimes with irony. Because we are wiser.

Quite a shame, actually.