Rock Heros

The road is long, there are mountains in our way

Posted on by brucehhackett

I have this love-hate relationship with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

When it was first proposed in 1985, I embraced the idea. If country music and other genres can honor their pioneers and heroes, why not rock music? Over the years since, I’ve visited the museum in Cleveland four or five times and have always enjoyed the experience. But I’ve sometimes taken issue with the worthiness of some of the people selected for induction, and I’ve been miffed about bonafide candidates who have been perennially ignored for far too long.

This year’s inductees were announced this week, and I’m pleased to see several vintage rockers finally get the nod: Joe Cocker, Bad Company, Warren Zevon, Nicky Hopkins. I’ll be writing about these artists in the coming weeks, beginning today with Joe Cocker.

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In the late 1960s, when I was starting to buy albums and pay closer attention to rock music beyond just the Top 40 hit singles, I found that I didn’t like it at all when artists recorded cover versions of songs I already knew by other artists.

The first one I remember hearing, and hating, was Puerto Rican acoustic guitarist José Feliciano doing a re-interpretation of The Doors’ classic “Light My Fire.” (I eventually learned to like and admire it.) The other one that rubbed me the wrong way was Joe Cocker’s radical rearrangement of The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends.” I considered Beatles songs as sacred and couldn’t stomach anyone messing with them.

Cocker performing at Woodstock, August 1969

When the documentary film and triple album of the 1969 Woodstock Festival was released in the spring of 1970, I rather quickly had a change of heart about Cocker’s soulfully powerful version of what had been a singalong tune in its original form on the “Sgt. Pepper” album three years earlier. I happily conceded that Cocker had transformed the song into something entirely his own, something far more invigorating and vital. I was especially entranced by his visual performance of it in the movie — the frenetic stage presence, the flailing arm movements, the tie-dyed shirt and sweaty hair, and the stunning vocal delivery that alternated between plaintive and howling. I was sold.

I learned later that Paul McCartney and George Harrison had been mightily impressed by Cocker’s treatment of “With a Little Help From My Friends,” which had reached #1 on the UK charts upon its release in 1968. Said McCartney, “”it was just mind blowing, totally turning the song into a soul anthem, and I was forever grateful to him for doing that.” They took the unprecedented step of endorsing his use of Harrison’s ballad “Something” and McCartney’s rocker “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” for his second album, “Joe Cocker!” even though The Beatles’ original versions hadn’t yet been released as part of “Abbey Road.”

“Joe Cocker!” zoomed up the charts in the US to #11, and it remains my favorite of Cocker’s 22-album catalog. In addition to the convincing Beatles covers, it also includes riveting renditions of Leon Russell’s “Delta Lady,” Bob Dylan’s “Dear Landlord,” Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire,” John Sebastian’s “Darling Be Home Soon” and the contagious “Hitchcock Railway.”

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Born in 1944 in the north central British industrial community of Sheffield, Robert John “Joe” Cocker showed an early fascination with blues and skiffle (a British variant of folk and country), and considered Ray Charles and Lonnie Donegan his early influences. At 17, he took the stage name Vance Arnold and fronted a group called The Avengers, playing mostly American blues tunes by Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker in Sheffield pubs, usually as a headliner but at least once as a warm-up act for the up-and-coming Rolling Stones.

His first attempt at fame came in 1964 when he recorded a bluesy cover of The Beatles’ “I’ll Cry Instead,” but it failed to chart, and Cocker dropped his stage name and formed Joe Cocker’s Blues Band, but that effort went nowhere as well. In 1966, he formed a partnership with guitarist/songwriter Chris Stainton and assembled an early lineup of what they called The Grease Band (inspired by a jazz musician who described a soul musician as “having a lot of grease”). They attracted the attention of producer Denny Cordell, who worked with The Moody Blues and Procol Harum, and Cordell encouraged Cocker and Stainton to relocate to London and recruit a better caliber of musicians for a new Grease Band lineup.

Cocker in 1967

By 1968, Cocker had honed his act with a regular gig at the famed Marquee Club and won a contract with Regal Zonaphone in the UK and A&M Records in the US. The debut LP includes what has become the definitive version of “Feelin’ Alright,” the classic song Dave Mason wrote for Traffic, as well as a couple Dylan tunes and some competent Cocker/Stainton originals, and it reached a respectable #35 on US album charts, even though the “With a Little Help From My Friends” single stalled here at #68.

Critics loved Cocker’s grittily authentic voice. “He has one of the best rock voices in England, and he has no inhibitions about using it,” wrote Robert Christgau in The New York Times. “Cocker is the best of the male rock interpreters, as good in his way as Janis Joplin is in hers.”

After a grueling US tour in 1969 that included the appearance at Woodstock and at other major festivals, Cocker was exhausted and eager to take a break, but another set of dates had already been booked. He chose to dissolve the Grease Band (except for Stainton) and instead enlisted Leon Russell to assemble a crackerjack lineup of more than 20 musicians, including a 10-person “soul choir” and a three-man horn section, a confederation that became known as “Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” The group performed and partied hard for their 50-date tour in the spring of 1970, offering a spirited cross-section of rock and soul music.

The subsequent live album kept Cocker’s and Russell’s names in the limelight by reaching #2 on US charts in the fall of 1970. It spawned two Top Ten singles: a reworking of “The Letter,” the 1967 #1 hit by The Box Tops, and a rollicking take on the ’50s torch song “Cry Me a River.” Things looked good on paper, but under the surface, Cocker was coming apart at the seams, drinking heavily and suffering from severe depression. He withdrew from the L.A. music scene and returned to the care of his family back in Sheffield to recuperate. In his absence, A&M released the single “High Time We Went,” which peaked at #22 in the US in 1971.

By 1972, he was back on the road, and his next LP (also entitled “Joe Cocker,” later retited “Something to Say”) offered a combination of studio and live tracks, including the aforementioned “High Time We Went,” “Pardon Me Sir” and the minor hit “Woman to Woman” (all co-written by Cocker and Stainton) and a remake of Gregg Allman’s “Midnight Rider.” When Stainton decided to retire from touring and build his own recording studio to concentrate on production, Cocker relapsed into depression and began using harder drugs, with his alcoholism continuing to bedevil him.

And yet, in 1974 he was back on top with “I Can Stand a Little Rain,” a new album that showed a lighter side of the Cocker oeuvre, particularly the Billy Preston ballad, “You Are So Beautiful,” which peaked at #5 on US charts, his biggest success yet.

Cocker and Belushi on “Saturday Night Live,” 1976

The pendulum swing of recovery and relapse was on display in 1976 when Cocker made a memorable appearance on the then-new “Saturday Night Live.” He struggled through a performance of “Feelin’ Alright” while John Belushi brazenly did his famous Joe Cocker imitation standing right next to him. Was Cocker being a good sport, or was he being ridiculed? He said years later that when he watched a tape of the show, he felt humiliated, and finally got serious about recovery, staying sober for the rest of his life.

Two positive developments occurred in 1982 that gave Cocker a renewed sense of pride. In a guest gig with the jazz group The Crusaders in 1981, he had recorded “I’m So Glad I’m Standing Here Today,” written expressly for him by Joe Sample and Will Jennings. Because it was nominated for a Grammy, he and the Crusaders were invited to perform it at the Grammys. Later that same year, Cocker teamed up with singer Jennifer Warnes to record “Up Where We Belong,” a song also co-written by Jennings, which was used as the theme song for the Richard Gere/Debra Winger film “An Officer and a Gentleman.” The song was an international #1 hit, won a Grammy for Best Pop Performance by a Duo , AND won the Best Song Oscar at the 1983 Academy Awards, where the two singers performed it together.

Cocker and Warnes sing at the Oscars, 1983

Said Warnes at the time, “I’d been a huge fan since my teens. I had a poster of him at Woodstock on my bedroom wall. I remember seeing him sing ‘I’m So Glad I’m Standing Here Today,’ and I was so moved, I was hollering out loud with joy, jumping up and down. After a difficult battle with drugs and alcohol, Joe was in total command once again. I knew at that moment that I would sing with Joe. Some people felt we were an unlikely pair to sing a duet, but I was thrilled, and I think it worked out pretty well!”

Cocker scored three more hits in the 1980s. He transformed Randy Newman’s sensually amusing song “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” which was used prominently in the film “9-1/2 Weeks” during Kim Basinger’s erotic striptease scene; he revitalized the early ’60s R&B classic “Unchain My Heart,” first made famous by his idol Ray Charles; and he reached #11 on US charts in 1989 with “When the Night Comes,” co-written by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance.

Typically, I’m not much of a fan of live albums, but his 1990 release “Joe Cocker Live” is an impeccably performed and produced collection of Cocker’s best material from a 1989 show that reunited him with Stainton as well as The Memphis Horns.

Although he never made the US charts again after that, he released eight more LPs between 1994 and 2012, which did respectably in the UK and especially in Germany, where he has always had a huge fan base and performed there often. At the 25th anniversary of Woodstock in 1994, Cocker and Crosby, Stills and Nash were the only artists from the original festival to return, and they drew enthusiastic responses from the younger crowd.

Joe Cocker in concert, 2004

Although Cocker wrote a handful of songs during his career, the vast majority of material he recorded was written by others. Some were unknown tunes that he made famous, while many were really good covers of tunes already made famous by others (“I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” “Summer in the City,” “Watching the River Flow,” “I Put a Spell on You,” to name just a few).

In 2007, he reflected on his continued popularity. “The actual singing experience, I really do still get a buzz out of it. I treasure the performances more, I think, because you’re kind of wondering how long you’re going to be doing it, so you tend to get into it. I think that’s what’s kept me going. There are other guys who have better voices, but I’ve worked hard to keep my live shows exciting. In many respects, that’s why the fans have hung in with me. I had my rough times in the ’70s, but I always try to get wrapped up in the tunes.” 

He died in 2014 from lung cancer at age 70. Now, 11 years later, he’s belatedly joining the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I wish he was still here to see it happen.

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Let me live in your blue heaven when I die

Posted on by brucehhackett

Apologies to bass players everywhere, but the average music fan doesn’t give much thought to you and what you might provide to a band’s sound. Singers, guitarists, keyboard players, sax players, even drummers all seem to get more attention than the guy or gal off to the side who dutifully plays that four-stringed instrument.

There are exceptions — extraordinary bassists like Paul McCartney, James Jameson of Motown’s “Funk Brothers” house band, John Entwistle of The Who, Jack Bruce of Cream, Carol Kane of LA’s “The Wrecking Crew”, Chris Squire of Yes — but even these virtuosos’ names aren’t necessarily familiar to casual rock music followers.

I’m NOT a casual follower. I’m more of an obsessed fanatic who has been accused of having encyclopedic knowledge of classic rock music and its players. And yet, I concede I’m guilty of not having mentioned the name of Phil Lesh when I’ve listed the top-flight bass players of his age.

Lesh, who died last week at age 84, anchored The Grateful Dead from inception to dissolution, a 30-year span in which he participated in 14 studio albums, eight live albums and somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,300 concerts. That in itself is a monumental achievement but, because I was never what you’d call a huge Dead fan, I wasn’t really aware until after his death how influential, how imaginative, how remarkable his bass playing was.

As Jim Farber put it The New York Times: “Lesh’s bass work could be thundering or tender, focused or abstract. On the Grateful Dead’s studio albums, his lines held so much melody that one could listen to a song just for his playing alone. At the same time, he shared his bandmates’ love for unusual chord structures and uncommon time signatures. In constructing his bass parts, he drew from many sources, including free jazz, classical music and the avant-garde.”

Unique among rock bass players was Lesh’s background as a classical violinist and trumpeter, an orchestral composer and student of avant-garde musical genres in the years preceding his joining the original lineup of The Warlocks, the band Jerry Garcia founded from which The Grateful Dead was born. Lesh had never played a bass before but told Garcia he wanted to learn it. Said Lesh years later, “It never really mattered to me very much what instrument I was playing, so long as I could make some music.”

It was his lack of experience with the instrument that allowed him to reimagine its role in rock music, drawing inspiration from the harmonics present in works he admired by Bach and the jazz bassist Charles Mingus. It was this unique montage of influences, Lesh wrote in his autobiography, that resulted in the sound that he and the Dead devised as “not rock, jazz or blues, but some kind of genre-busting rainbow polka-dot hybrid mutation.”

Lesh used the bass to provide continually evolving counterpoints to Garcia’s ethereal lead guitar lines, as well as the forceful chords of rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, the dynamic synchonicity of drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, and the appealing keyboards of Ron “Pigpen” McKernan (until his death in 1973). In particular, the exciting interplay between Garcia and Lesh was probably the band’s most important feature. The two men complemented and contrasted each other’s styles to such a degree that they could go off on lengthy improvisations with little risk of alienating listeners.

Last week, Weir offered this summary of Lesh’s influence on his and the band’s development: “Phil turned me on to the John Coltrane Quartet, and the wonders of modern classical music with its textures and developments, which we soon tried our hands at incorporating into what we had to offer. This was all new to most peoples’ ears.”

Indeed, Lesh’s work with the Dead was held in such high regard by the fan base that his most ardent followers would often position themselves at concerts in an area that became known as “the Phil Zone,” in order to better see and hear what he was bringing to the overall sound.

Lesh also chipped in some of the backing vocals to the multi-voice harmonies the Dead showcased. More important, he made major songwriting contributions to the group’s catalog, writing or co-writing such iconic tracks as “Truckin’,” “St. Stephen,” “Cumberland Blues,” “Box of Rain” and “Unbroken Chain,” the last of which also featured Lesh on lead vocals.

While I admired their musical chops and what they were able to achieve in their three decades in the business, I would say I’ve been no more than a modest fan of The Dead over the years.  I own the two marvelous LPs from 1970, “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty”; the awesome triple album, “Europe ’72”; and their surprising commercial comeback in 1987, “In the Dark.”  But if I were to list my favorite rock artists, The Dead wouldn’t make my Top 30.

Part of the reason, I think, is that I felt like I wasn’t really part of the one-of-a-kind bond the band shared with its core audience.  I felt like an outsider, even though I was sympathetic to the sweet devotion, sharing and general kindness that were the hallmarks of the relationship between the band and its fans, who are lovingly referred to as Deadheads.  I feel as if I missed that era.

Lesh noted, “An article in a music magazine once stated, ‘The real medium of rock and roll is records.  Concerts are only repeats of records.’  The Dead represent the opposite of that idea.  Our records are definitely not it.  The concerts are it, but we’re not in such total control of our scene that we can say, ‘Tonight’s the night, it’s going to be magic tonight.’  We can only say we’re going to try it again tonight.  Each night was like jumping off a cliff together.”

Still, Lesh said he was incredulous when the band made the seismic shift from jam band in 1969 to a purveyor of conventional length songs with pleasant melodies and engaging harmonies. “The almost miraculous appearance of these new songs on ‘Workingman’s Dead’ and ‘American Beauty’ would also generate a massive paradigm shift in our group mind: from the mind-munching frenzy of a seven-headed fire-breathing dragon to the warmth and serenity of a choir of chanting cherubim. Personally, I was thrilled that the band could make such a complete musical about-face while still maintaining the flat-out weirdness that I’d come to know and love.”

As the story goes, the name Grateful Dead happened serendipitously when Garcia opened a big book and saw the two words positioned opposite each other on facing pages. It turned out the phrase had a deeper meaning: It refers to folk tales in which “a dead person, or his angel, shows gratitude to someone who, as an act of charity, arranged for their proper burial.”  They found this act of kindness in keeping with their overarching spirit of community. Stumbling on that phrase in a book was just the sort of cosmic randomness that fascinated the group, and it came to dominate how the band would exist throughout its lifetime.  “Every night that we went out on stage, you never knew what might happen,” said Lesh.  “We rarely had a prepared set list.  We just played what felt right at that moment.  I just loved that about us.”

Lesh compared the Grateful Dead’s music to life itself. Both, he said, were “a series of recurring themes, transpositions, repetitions, unexpected developments, all converging to define form that is not necessarily apparent until its ending has come and gone.”

In 1994, a year before Garcia’s death brought the band to its end, The Dead were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Lesh played in the offshoot bands the Other Ones, the Dead and Furthur, as well as with his own assemblage, Phil Lesh and Friends, releasing the surprisingly strong “There and Back Again” in 2002 (a few tracks are included on the Spotify playlist below). He retired from regular road work in 2014 following a series of health challenges, including a liver transplant, prostate cancer and bladder cancer, and back surgery.

“I would have to say that music and performing are as essential as food and drink to me, but even more so as I get older,” he said in 2005. “While it can sometimes be more of a challenge physically than it was when I was a young whippersnapper, I’ve found that age brings wisdom, and with that comes musical experience and knowledge that I didn’t have when I was younger.”

Added Weir, “Phil wasn’t particularly averse to ruffling a few feathers. We had our differences, of course, but it only made our work together more meaningful. Given that death is the last and best reward for ‘a life well and fully lived,’ I rejoice in his liberation.”

R.I.P., Mr. Lesh. You can be proud of the music and life experiences you shared with the world.

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