Yeah, but I was so fortunate.
It must have been fate or some shit,
but next-door neighbour, there was only one woman,
she was a widow
and I used to be able to play the gramophone.
And what I used to do was sing in front of the mirror
with a tennis racket.
You know, we've all been there.
And when I first started, an incredible ego.
- Pardon? - How old were you?
About 12.
Yeah, full of shit.
Still am.
Yeah, we used to deliver the papers all around this area.
We both worked for the same paper shop.
But Joe had got a slightly different round
to the one that I had.
We didn't get much money, but it was money.
Kept us out of trouble.
Gracious me!
Early in the morning, at weekends and stuff like that,
after the paper round had finished
I'd go round and see Joe.
But I would come in and he'd always be listening to music.
And his breakfast was always two Weetabix
with a load of sugar and milk on.
This is Joe looking incredibly smart
with his mum and me.
And...
Then we get him slightly more Joe-like,
looking slightly tousle-haired.
Joe and elegance always had a bit of a dispute.
Joe in his teens looking reflective,
looking over the cliffs.
A pal of mine, Dave Brooksbank,
said that we were gonna set up a skiffle group.
I think we were playing at some youth club
and Joe came up and joined us on one of the numbers.
And Joe was only, I think, 72 at the time, 72 and a half
he came up and sang along with us.
I'd really got no idea up to that point
that he'd got a good voice.
Being an older brother,
you didn't necessarily look for that sort of talent
in your younger brother.
This is a rare photograph of Joe in his swimming trunks.
And there he is showing off his tummy
to great effect.
He used to get on great with everybody, Joe.
And he was the life and the soul of the party.
Everybody wanted to be around him.
He'd got kind of a following.
Wherever he went, he would create a kind of a party.
He had a little transistor radio and
I remember one night he said, "listen to this,"
because he'd been waiting for it to come on.
He always used to have it to his ear like this.
And it was "what'd I say" by ray Charles.
It was a bad reception,
but just the voice suddenly did something to me.
Everyone disowned me
because I became so obsessed with listening to the man.
I was singing at nights and working in the daytime.
Everybody was expecting me to get a job. My folks did
I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do.
And this gas fitting thing came along when I was only 76.
I took this apprenticeship up.
I was a gas fitter
I was like a plumber, only you're fitting gas appliances.
But the singing bit was always the strong thing in my head.
But every night, we used to go out and sing in these pubs.
I can't remember definitely. You're going back a year or two.
But, I mean, it would have probably come from Joe,
the inspiration to kind of get a band together.
My mother, god bless her,
she bought me a guitar called a "Lucky 7"
which was a completely white guitar.
Joe used to play a snare drum
and his parents were fine about us kind of using the back room
to kind of rehearse.
I first learned how to bend a string
in that room down there to the right.
I remember that vividly.
"Oh, that's how you do it!"
So, yes, this is where it all started for Joe, yeah.
I was in a band
and we were playing at the Locarno in Sheffield
and one night Joe appeared
in the audience and he came up to me
and he said, "would you join my band?"
It was like a rival band.
And he was doing blues and all the good stuff
that I would like to do.
And so I said, "yeah, I'd love to join you."
He was sort of scruffy.
He didn't really care about how he looked
he had massive curly hair,
really scruffy-looking, but I just liked him
because he was a genuine guy. He was a real guy.
It was strange that our paths had never crossed
all those years we had lived in the same town, until 7967
when we both could feel the twilight.
If we didn't do something fast, we were going to get lost.
That's when we started writing songs together.
It was an instrumental that I'd done at home
on my little tape recorder in the front room
and it developed from there.
For percussion I had a brass fruit bowl
of my mum's which I was bashing on.
My mother was upstairs in the bedroom,
knocking on the floor for me to shut up.
It was like two in the morning.
I played it for Joe and he loved the sound of it.
And about three days later he came back
and he'd written words to it.
Denny was particularly good at picking musicians and songs.
I don't think I ever heard him come up
with a musical idea as such.
I mean, I never heard him give anybody a part.
I don't think he could whistle a tune.
But he provided a really, really creative atmosphere
in the studio and was a really good producer.
It was awesome for me, really, this big Olympic studio.
And all this equipment and fabulous desks and stuff
and Glyn Johns was, of course, a total genius.
The one thing I remember more than anything is Chris Stainton
coming in the control room at the beginning of the session
and saying to me,
"I have a way that I want you to record my piano,"
which didn't go down very well with me.
I don't normally like a musician telling me how to record.
I didn't know who he was at that point.
He was quite amused by me, I think.
I told him where to put the microphone on the piano.
I said, "if you stick it round the back, it'll sound great."
"If that's what he wants, I'll do it."
Actually, it was very effective,
so my hat was tipped to him immediately.
He's not exactly an Adonis, Joe.
He wasn't sort of pop star material, really,
but I thought his voice was extraordinary,
which is why I thought we had a hit.
They put it out as a single, I think.
I think it actually got to number 43 or something.
I used to listen to others, like the Beatles or the stones
and feel he could do as well if not better.
All it needed was just some sort of breakthrough, really,
that was gonna get him to the public attention.
We were doing gigs in London
and at some point Joe said
he wanted to do "a little help from my friends",
but not like the Beatles.
For some odd reason,
I thought of "little help from my friends"
and I was sat on the outside toilet in Tasker road
with my pants down at my knees.
I don't know why that should have given me any inspiration.
He liked the six-eights of...
Sort of beat.
A lot of Aretha's records had that.
I said "why don't you do a Ray Charles scream?"
I got invited round to Apple, right?
And George was there.
I think they were just finishing 'Abbey Road', right?
And George sort of played me something.
And I said "OK, I'll have that."
Then Paul McCartney drifted in
and he said "you can have this one."
We'd had this number one record with "little help" in England
I remember Dee Anthony came to see us in London in this club
and said "you want to come to America, guys?
I'll pay you $2,000 a week"
you know, or $2,000 a night.
You can imagine from Sheffield England to suddenly hear this
and we were thinking, "my god!"
You know, because we always wanted to go to the states.
We didn't really have any sort of influence on America
until "little help from my friends"
which was a hit, so all of a sudden we were...
We were over there.
We were making money. We were top of the world.
We were playing to bigger and bigger audiences across America.
And we were like schoolkids thinking
the bubble's gonna burst at any moment.
And there were groupies throwing themselves at us
and all this stuff.
I ran out and I got the album.
I said, this guy's gotta be pretty good
if all these people are playing on this recording.
Jimmy page was on the album.
Steve Winwood was on the album.
They had some of the best musicians in Britain
on that first album.
We were all curious. "who's this guy Joe Cocker?"
It was just a brilliant record.
And it was met with great feeling from the radio people...
That I respected and...
I knew we were on to something really big.
He was one of the most articulate people I'd ever met
for just a schoolboy education.
He was charming, absolutely charming.
He was looking forward to his career.
He was into the business and it was just very exciting.
When I booked Joe, I hadn't seen him perform
and the first time I heard him
I think Denny Cordell had sent a tape of Joe.
And when I first listened to it, I thought it was amazing.
I thought he was black.
I thought it was some sort of black blues singer.
We had to go in by helicopter.
But I threw up out of the helicopter
because I'd taken some LSD, I'd taken some acid.
Everybody was taking everything in those days,
so I'd taken some acid and it was a bit heavy.
And I don't know how the hell I managed to play.
I was at Woodstock.
One of the people I was there to see was Joe Cocker.
It's startling how strong his voice was.
It was shocking.
He was like a skinny English guy with scraggly hair.
Kind of making funny moves with his hands.
He was basically playing air guitar
before there was air guitar.
And clearly it was an instrument.
It was part of the way he produced what he did.
He was kind of shaking and contorting.
The clenched fist and kind of the body movements said to me
this guy is at the heart of what he sings.
This is not some shtick.
This is really the way he is. Wow!
Right from the beginning, he was always like that.
He was always like 150%.
He used to go totally frantic every time
and put his whole life into it.
I don't know how he managed to maintain such intensity.
That Woodstock moment was the real breakthrough
in terms of creating his image.
Somehow everybody got it.
They saw what he was about, really.
There's three things I remember about 1969.
Woodstock.
The Led Zeppelin album came out and the Joe Cocker album.
And that's how I sum up 1969.
It seemed to be a fairly common opinion at the time
that Joe was the number one male artist in the United States.
He was massive, absolutely huge.
His manager Dee Anthony had booked an extensive tour
in the United States
and Joe had just come off of a tour in England
and I know he felt like he was going to be able
to just kick back and get some rest.
It was five, six days before the tour started
and Dee Anthony said, "no.
This is not a time to rest.
If you don't do these dates, you'll never work
in the United States again."
I could imagine Dee saying that too, but
I wasn't privy to that, but all I know is that
everybody was in lockstep
to make this tour as successful as it could be.
He was saying people's legs are gonna get broken.
"These contracts are signed, the venues are booked.
The tickets are sold. You have to do this.
And if you don't..."
The implied part of that
was that somebody was gonna hurt Joe.
This is his manager talking to him,
the guy that's supposed to be helping him
and building his career.
Maybe Dee was just stating what he felt might happen.
But to me it wasn't coming from a warm and fuzzy place.
- What are we circling about? - I can feel energy in the room.
- I can feel it. - We're circling before we land.
- Yeah, that's space for you. - A spaceship.
I met Joe the day that he came in to record with Leon.
I think he was recording "Delta Lady"
and I met him that day and just fell in love with him
because his presence, everything about Joe was so gentle
and sweet.
Leon came on board and said, "I'll put the band together,
I'll do the arrangements. The tour will go forward,
but I have to make all the decisions."
And at that time I think Joe felt like
that was not such a bad thing because he really was exhausted.
So we found ourselves with Leon Russell
and I'd already sort of worshipped him from afar
because of all that gospel stuff.
And I thought, "bloody hell!
That's how a piano should be played."
Leon said "I'll come out with you on the condition
I put the rest of the band together."
And in the space of half an hour
he's got about another 40 musicians lined up.
I was just totally overwhelmed by how good they all were.
They were brilliant, all of 'em.
I felt not as good as them.
I felt like, "oh..."
Before the tour Joe said, "do we really need four drummers?"
And Leon said, "well, which three are you gonna fire?"
I knew it was important for the label
to be able to mount something like this
because this was getting the attention of all the big labels.
And I knew if we didn't back it up,
it would look as if we weren't really supporting this artist.
Jerry Moss said this is something that's different
from anything that's ever happened
and we've got to film this,
then they start pulling in the film crew.
Suddenly, instead of 25 people, there are 50 people
and it just kept growing up to the minute we got on the plane.
"Mad Dogs & Englishmen", that was a great title for the tour.
You walk in expecting a circus and that's exactly what it was,
even complete with a ringmaster with a top hat on.
Leon Russell
and I had not run into such a bizarre scenario before
in terms of just the number of people involved.
I forget how many of us...
There were like 40 people on stage at times.
But it was the fact when something becomes so communal,
you're all getting into the spirit of things, you know
I mean, for me, it was really Leon's band.
Even Joe looked a bit lost sometimes on it.
Leon was just simply a superb showman
and a natural leader.
The main musical arranger, producer, director,
choreographer, whatever you might say about him.
The only time that Joe really fit in
was when he walked to the centre of the stage
and commanded that stage
because he had such raw, incredible, god-given talent.
I don't think that he really realised
that everything was gonna be out of his control,
that he simply was the guy
that walked to the centre of the stage and sang the songs.
I think Leon tried to upstage him a lot of the time,
but he didn't.
He never could
There were always people clamouring to get to Joe
for whatever reasons.
Let's go.
And he just always had that little...
"Heh-heh." that little laugh and that little smile of his.
And his eyes would roll back in his head
and he just didn't know what the heck was going on.
"How do I get out of here? Where's the door?"
There was too many drugs going around
it was horrible, really.
And it wrecked Joe, you know
nobody was looking after him at all.
It was just like, "oh, have this.
Go on, Joe. Good old Joe."
Nobody seemed to care what happened to him.
It caused me to have an understanding
of what is the record label's responsibility here.
Our responsibility basically was to put out a good record.
But we couldn't manage him
and I remember Bill Anthony saying to Dee
who was upset over something Joe had done on the west coast.
Bill was supposed to be on him.
Bill would say to me, "I can't be with him 24 hours a day.
That's impossible.
How could any manager do that?
I'd have to sleep with the guy. And I'd rather not do that."
It started out all peace and love
and by the end of the tour it was like...
Everybody was at each other's throats. It was terrible.
It was an experience. It was something else.
You know, we all thought we were off to Venus
or heading for outer space, the next stop after that.
And of course it didn't evolve that way.
I ended up in a heap in Los Angeles,
just very disillusioned with the whole rock business.
It didn't surprise me that there was no money left
at the end of that tour.
When you look at the number of people on the road
with the film crew, the cost of the film crew,
the cost of 50 people,
there was really no way
that anybody could have come out of that with money.
Leon didn't come out with money. None of us did.
And Joe had just literally given all of himself
and there was nothing to show for it.
And when the tour was over,
he actually went to Denny Cordell's house
and was staying there for a while.
And actually sleeping by the front door.
He didn't have a place to live.
He didn't have enough money to even buy a guitar.
I do remember him appearing home.
He just looked like a wild man, really.
My mum and dad were very worried about him.
It was quite shocking to see him, really.
He could hardly talk, you know
he just threw out the odd little phrase.
It was no complete sentences.
How do you regard Sheffield?
Do you still regard it as home, a kind of place to escape
from all the pressures you're exposed to or what?
Not really, no.
I don't believe you can escape anywhere.
He was in a state.
He was doing heroin, acid, all sorts of stuff.
Yeah, he was not in a good state.
That tour left a scar on him.
Originally, he was articulate and funny and warm
and appreciated the work that everybody did for him.
He was friendly with people at A&M
and people liked him and loved him and wanted to help.
But after that tour, he was a little less agreeable.
He'd rather become a bit of a commodity, really.
He was just expected to be the singer with this band
There was a kind of innocence about him
which never went away.
He came from Sheffield
and was just thrown into stardom literally.
And I think that he never really adjusted
to the clamour and the noise and the adoration.
I think it's one reason that he took drugs.
Any time anyone would hand him anything,
he would put it in his mouth.
Not to be deprecating,
but Joe would get high with high school kids.
If they were playing a date somewhere, he'd go out the back
and there were fans waiting and he'd sit and talk to them.
He was a man of the people for sure,
but he did have this liking of the stuff you know
walking to the stage,
if somebody handed him a pill, it went right in his mouth.
He never looked at it.
I don't know how he performed and never missed a lyric,
never missed a note.
I said, "Joe, how do you do it?"
He said, "the only difference
in one tab of acid and 11 tabs of acid
is the pain in the back of my neck."
Joe had been in a very high profile
during that tour, before that tour,
then after that tour, he just kind of dropped off the map.
We always wondered "what happened to Joe?
Where's Joe Cocker?"
And the music business being what it is,
people tend to just write it off to,
"he dropped off the charts and that's the end of that."
What happens now to Joe Cocker? What are you going to do now?
I'm still not that sure. I'm just gonna...
Rock on in one way or another.
Jim price had run into Joe
and he wanted to produce the next record with Joe.
I was happy to have any kind of record and I said, "great."
Here's a song,
a little taster from Jim Webb, Jimmy Webb.
Somewhere out of the blue came this call from Jim price,
saying, "Joe Cocker wants to do this song."
I never missed a beat because I thought,
"of course, he's the guy to sing this song."
One night, Jim price called me and he said
"I'd like you to come down to the studio and meet Joe Cocker."
And I said "wow, I'd love to do that."
And Jim price greeted me at the door
and it seemed like the studio was almost deserted.
I walked towards the back and he said,
"well, yeah, Joe's been very, very excited to meet you."
And he took the control room door and flung it open
and said, "ladies and gentlemen, meet Joe Cocker."
And there were these two legs sticking out
from under the console
with these size 15, like, brogans, work shoes.
And he was sleeping very soundly under the desk.
However he spent his time, it was not getting sleep
and getting up in the morning
to understand that he was going to work, to say the least
we couldn't help it.
All we wanted to do was make as good a record as we could.
I don't want to rub salt in the wound, but Joe was...
You know, he was wild.
He was showing up at odd hours.
Sometimes he was able to perform.
Sometimes he wasn't able to perform.
And in some crazy way, it's all on the record
it was like splicing a tape,
one take from another take and how we assembled the record.
And Joe approved it, but that's what it took
to get the best out of him at that time
because he was a bit addled.
He was like a big Teddy bear.
He was all frowzy and his hair was going in all directions.
He radiated nothing but goodwill and sweetness to me.
After we did the album,
Jim said "how about doing a showcase?"
It had been two, almost three years since I'd been on a stage.
It's not so great to remember this one,
but it was at the Roxy, you know,
and this was put together just to present Joe to everybody,
to prove that he was back.
And night before that weekend a friend of Joe's showed up
who we know he used to get drunk with
and we tried to get this guy to go to palm Springs or something.
We offered him a free weekend in palm Springs
and he said, "no, I want to be with Joe."
And Joe showed up for that show not prepared to perform.
It was kind of a rough concert
because I remember going out on stage
and he's in the middle of the stage
and he's weaving slightly and I'd go...
And Joe doesn't sing. He doesn't do anything.
He's just kind of like...
I'll tell the whole truth here.
He had a bottle of Napoleon Brandy in his hand.
And the place was packed.
And so he didn't sing, so I went...
And he didn't sing again.
The evening ended
with him kind of sitting down in the middle of the stage
and the show was over.
He ended up on the stage in a sort of foetal position.
People were crying and feeling for him.
Some very famous people. I don't want to mention names.
But it was a colossal failure, this show.
I asked the curtains to be closed and just forget about it.
Everybody sort of drifted into the night.
And Jim price came up and announced,
"I don't know what you guys are doing, but I'm going fishing."
I think he did because he disappeared for about two years.
He had really destroyed himself in the eyes of the industry.
With the entire business there, to see him come back.
It was just an unbelievably tragic period for him.
I was on my way to an airport with Billy Joel
and "you are so beautiful" came on the radio.
Billy said, "how many times do they count this guy out?
He keeps getting up."
I remember thinking to myself, "he's like a cockroach.
Joe Cocker-oach."
I didn't mean it in a mean way. I meant like you can't kill it.
I didn't know where he was.
I never heard from him for years.
I was driving along in my little car, broke.
And all of a sudden, on the radio comes
"you are so beautiful".
And I burst into tears.
It was fantastic.
And there was this magic note at the end of the song
where he goes, "you are so beautiful to me!"
He can barely hit the note, but he hit it in a way
that just defined everything he had gone through.
Thank you very much.
Well, it was weird.
I went through this phase.
I was sick on stage just about every night.
- Every date we did. - Yeah.
It was a bit embarrassing.
I had to leave in the middle of the song,
go round the back of the stage, bring it up and back out again.
I felt comfortable enough
to probe about, "why were you getting sick at your shows?
Why are you getting this press
that is saying that Joe's career is pretty much over,
that he is a pathetic mess, that he is wasted
that he is ripping off the fans by not doing a show
or not being in condition to do a song properly?
And you have to respond to that
because you are charging people money to see you perform.
Not to see you plastered and unable to work."
He had been painted broad-brushed with this image
of being this unreliable, drunken, drugged-up,
washed-up performer.
Jerry moss was saying to get you back on the road at first
was more or less a hard thing to do
after such a long period of being off.
He got these worries that I was turning into an alcoholic.
And he asked me to go into this hospital to get a check-up.
And the doctor wouldn't let me out for three days.
Nothing wrong with me.
He came to my home here in San Francisco
and he showed up by himself
carrying a six-pack of Heineken beer
and proceeded to sit and drink and talk.
And this was before his engagement
that evening at the night club.
And that just knocked me out.
That of course opened up the question of...
You're enjoying quite a few beers before showtime, huh?"
"Well, it keeps my whistle wet.
That's basically it. It's just a professional tool."
"All right, fine, Joe, you're the performer, not me."
People are reading a lot into the new album,
saying that you chose these songs, they're confessional
and self-exposing. That kind of thing.
Did you feel that yourself?
If I'd written the songs, I could see it that way.
But the fact that it was other people's material,
I can't read it like that.
I got a call from Michael Rosenfeid his attorney,
who said "Joe really needs help, he needs a manager.
He needs someone who will care about him. Are you interested?"
And I remember the first time I went to his house.
It was in Hollywood.
And...
There were 20 people living in his house.
And he'd be drunk under the piano.
He was completely out of it and paying for everything
and not having really an income.
People were encouraging his drinking and his drugging.
I knew my first mission was to get him out of that.
I'd go to that place, got a bit scary, Nichols canyon.
You'd end up knowing about nine or ten dealers in no time
with it being so close to Hollywood
these cats would come round
"do you mind if we use your piano?" You know, they'd be rehearsing.
So it got ridiculous, you know
while I was away,
they learnt how to take the window out and everything.
- Oh, no. - Just go in.
I remember coming down one day
and they were all sat in the living room.
I thought, "oh, oh, this is getting a bit weird"
had he continued I can't see him
living for much longer at that pace.
Cos the amount of drinking and, I'm sure, drugs was huge.
Good night!
I thought a fresh start would be good
and I talked to Jerry about it and just told him that, really.
He needed to get out from under all this debt and
Jerry agreed and said, "go. Do it. Good luck."
Well, I said, "you're a brave man, you know.
We've had a lot of ups and downs with Joe.
At his best, he's unbelievable, you know,
but to get him there is a difficult road, you know."
And I felt very strongly about Joe as a talent
I'd gotten to know him over the years and I believed in him,
but Mike said and I agreed that he needed to go somewhere else.
In thinking about putting a band together for him,
to start working again,
I didn't want to get a bunch of rock'n'rollers
who were out there in the rock'n'roll world.
So I found this band in Boston called American Standard Band
they were good musicians, solid kids. They were straight.
They didn't drink. They didn't do drugs. Nothing.
I remember clear as day that we were playing at a club
in Worcester called the last chance saloon.
And I'd seen Woodstock a few days before.
And in walks Michael Lang.
And I said, "yeah, I know that guy."
I brought Joe up there to meet them and that went...
You know, he was a little out of it, but it went OK.
They determined they wanted a younger group
without any baggage, I think.
Again there was always this elephant in the room,
try to not have Joe be around people
that were gonna drag him down.
The plan went awry rather quickly
because they augmented the band
with Bobby keys and Nicky Hopkins
who were coming right out of the rolling stones.
So now Joe had playmates.
Welcome to Australia for a start.
Thank you, Ian.
What does it feel like to be back in a band
like Joe Cocker's band?
Well, it was a compromise.
I knew that I needed the basis of the band
to be straight, upright, some what innocent.
But I also knew that for Joe and for the world at large
to put him in the right frame
that you needed some heavyweight people with him,
that he'd feel comfortable with,
that he wouldn't feel like he was going back to high school.
And to a degree, you know, it worked pretty well.
I mean, you know, if it had been a bunch of
Nickys and Bobbys in the rest of the band,
it would have been a complete disaster.
And I don't think Joe would have been able
to relate to just the band on their own.
You know, he needed guys to hang with.
Hello! Hello, Mabel!
We made a deal
that if he was ever drunk before a show,
I was gonna cancel the show.
We found out rather quickly,
and certainly I found over the years,
the last thing you'd tell Joe
is not to do something.
Joe was a guy that there was no stop
and if he wanted to drink, he was gonna drink.
If he was gonna do drugs, he was gonna do drugs.
And if anybody said no to him, he did more.
Joe never copped an attitude, never once was the diva.
He wasn't that way. We were all in it together.
Charming, charming guy.
We used to talk about the fact
that our nine or 72 square feet on stage was sacred
you can fool with us out there.
Not here.
He was pretty strong and his voice was coming back.
And the shows were pretty good
not that the drinking was in hand
but it was certainly in hand enough,
so that he was a stronger person
and could deliver a better show
I had taped the shows and I was able to make a record deal
based on those tapes.
When I first moved to Santa Barbara,
I rented a house from Jane Fonda.
He didn't have all that great a reputation at the time!
In fact, there was a lawsuit against him
for a house that he had been staying in in Malibu
that got trashed totally trashed
but you know, I was a fan of Joe's and
I just really wanted to meet him and so I really pushed for it
and I was the one speaking with his management at the time
and I said, "well, maybe if he put up a really large
security deposit, we could work something out."
He was just very dear.
He was really, really, very sweet, a really nice man,
and over the course of the next six months or so
we just became better friends and started going out to dinner,
and yeah, dating a little bit,
but then he'd be off and he'd be gone
for six, eight, ten weeks while he was on the road.
Then he'd come back and we'd start to see each other again.
So it went on like that for quite a few years, actually.
The first time we ever met her,
I was just totally surprised at the sort of person she was.
You know, so organised and together,
compared to a lot of the people he'd been with.
I'd never quite seen Joe ever having that sort of partner,
but it was what he needed
and it was partly, I guess, the English upbringing,
but he would always introduce me as his "old lady".
And I just hated that, as you can imagine.
And I said, "you know,
call me your partner, call me your significant."
Anything! And so it ended up he started doing it
just more as a joke to make me mad than anything else,
but I'll never forget when he did ask me to marry him.
We were down in Australia and he goes, "I guess
I'll have to marry you if I can't call you my old lady."
So, he says, "then I can call you my wife."
And that was really sweet.
After a number of years, he was back as a person
and getting his confidence back
and it was like watching someone come back to life, frankly,
someone who you kind of knew was heading the other way.
When you go on tour, is it only hard work?
- No, no... - Or is it fun?
We do have a lot of fun. That's the danger.
You can have too much fun.
A lot of musicians...
We look at singers like, "they're just yelling in key."
Joe had an instrument in there and we appreciated it,
we understood it, we got it.
Wow, nobody sounds like that.
For me, it was just pure soul, whatever that means, you know.
Pure heart. I don't think he could sing any other way.
Somebody described him as "the original man",
which was the man...
This is how the average bloke
would like to sound after he'd had three or four pints, yes.
To me, he was like a jazz singer, really.
He literally got inside
the piece of music he was performing
and it sort of took him over.
The actual voice just has something in it.
I mean, if it wasn't indefinable,
then everybody else would be able to do it, I suppose.
Let's go back to number 25 with a song
which is destined to be number one,
being sung live by a gentleman
who hasn't been on "top of the pops" for 15 years.
Welcome back to Joe Cocker with Jennifer Warnes.
I got a call about a film called "An Officer and a Gentleman".
And they wanted Joe to do a title song.
We were on tour and Joe wasn't that excited about
stopping the tour to go and record.
Actually, he hated it when he was asked to do it.
He thought at the time, he wondered whether it was right.
Finally they found a space and got him
slipped him right into the studio one day
and just, you know, "Joe, we're here, we're going."
The first time I heard it,
he sort of pulled it out of a bag and put it on.
It was immediately clear to me that it was a hit.
And he just sort of nodded. I think he knew it was as well.
One thing we can do right here,
we're going to solo up Joe
and hear how he started the song.
This is the ad lib.
You hear a little squeaking in his voice. Hear that.
We'd always sort of been looking for a ray song to do.
I think it was Charlie and I were on an airplane going to la
when it struck me, "unchain my heart".
Perfect for him.
I have to give Michael Lang credit.
I would like to take credit,
you know, because we are in show business
and you're supposed to take the credit whenever you can.
Well, Ray's been called a genius.
That word's been slung around a lot.
I mean, you know, he's a god to me,
but, I mean, a genius he certainly is.
Always hitting at me, "don't you think he sounds like you?"
And I say, "well, if he does,
he's the best replica in the whole world."
- And I mean that. - God bless you for it.
You know, they were definitely soul brothers.
Ray said, "this kid's been sleeping with my albums."
It was true! He had been.
You know, he would always go back to ray Charles,
he'd go back to Aretha, back to Donny Hathaway.
You know and study those guys.
He loved the blues and that's all he would listen to.
He had a big voice and he had instincts for the blues
that were impeccable.
- Yeah, baby. - He's always got...
I always wanted to sing like ray Charles.
That was my guy. I thought he had the best voice.
A lot of other people thought the same thing,
they thought ray Charles was the best singer.
And we were all trying to sound like ray Charles.
The only guy who even got close was Joe Cocker.
"Some fella."
Watching Joe in the studio was like watching a concert.
It was the same movement, just like he was on stage.
And he would just sing with every ounce
of sweat and blood and whatever else he had.
Joe could do an album
of all songs that have been done by other people
and it could be a great album
because when he sings a song and the song's arranged for him,
it takes a different turn. It takes on a life of its own.
It's an honour when someone of that quality does your stuff.
There aren't many people of that quality, really.
No, really. That have some emotional impact every time out.
There are very few singers
who have made it by covering other people's material
and therefore that has to take
a particularly extraordinary talent, really.
And Joe certainly is at the forefront of that.
I started thinking of a 20th anniversary for Woodstock
and what I'd sort of come up with was
this idea of doing a show at the Berlin wall.
Actually, over the Berlin wall.
There had been concerts at the Reichstagsgelande,
which was a big building just on the western side of the wall.
Michael Jackson, a lot of big acts were playing it,
but kids on the eastern side of the wall were close to rioting,
you know, just to hear the music.
The army built the site in east Berlin.
An hour before the show, there was nobody in the audience.
An hour later, a couple of hundred thousand kids there.
Thank you, Joe!
Greetings, Joe Cocker
after that, Joe was well-established in Germany
and they did embrace him.
And it was the cornerstone of Joe's European success.
Joe, you know, he gave everything
for that two hours on stage.
It didn't matter if there was ten people or there was 76, 000.
Joe would just come alive on the stage.
In fact, he would go into a trance on the stage.
Once he was on stage, he was another person.
I'd be at the side of the stage
and Joe would come off twice during the show.
And it was my chance to say, "Joe, how's the lights?
The mics? Everything good?
Is the bass too loud? The drummer..."
We would go through that. And Joe would be in a trance.
He would just turn around and go right back out there
towel himself off and go back out.
It was a big awakening to me of what this job entailed
because it entailed looking after Joe and I had
some idea of what that may have been,
but it definitely was an eye-opener for me.
It was up to me to keep Joe in line,
to know where he was, to make sure he was eating,
just everything about him.
You know, as Pam would say,
"his other wife."
Cos when we were gone, she'd say, "you've got him now, ray."
You know those nights when you can't face the world?
And someone wakes you up and says,
"Joe, you're on stage in five minutes."
Thank god I got some friends.
We were somewhere in Europe and..
I think Michael added some extra dates in,
moved things around and Joe didn't want to do it.
And he... He'd really had enough.
And he just decided to make a move after that tour was done
and change management.
I got a letter.
From a lawyer.
That was it.
I would have expected him to have been the one
to pick up the phone and say something,
but once it was done I think he just went on.
I have to give Michael Lang credit
because he was responsible
for Joe being alive at that time.
I mean, Michael was the man.
I loved him as an artist and as a person.
It certainly went beyond business, I'd say.
You don't go through the things that we went through
for all those years just as a business.
But I have no regrets.
When he left Michael Lang, he never talked to Michael again.
And I saw that with band members
and with other people that were close to Joe.
Once he closed the door, that was it.
He could be very emotional about certain things
and other times he could be very cold about things.
Especially relationships.
So it was hard to really know him.
To really know him. Know his heart.
So here we are with Roger
and Roger had been with Tina Turner now
and had brought her from almost obscurity
back into view of the world basically,
as an international artist.
So we followed in that track.
You know, we cleaned.. I say cleaned Joe up.
We dressed him now with more flashy clothes
and we had more production.
And it brought everything up another level,
which supported Joe into finding his way
to being this international artist.
Today
We, literally, were on the road
doing 170 shows maybe a year.
Really pumping it.
The 90's were when he was just touring almost non-stop.
And we had moved here to Colorado
by that time in '94.
But it was never more than, I'd say, four or five weeks
that either he didn't get to come home
or I went to visit him.
But that's how it was our entire marriage,
our entire 38 years that we were together.
Joe just was really crazy about it.
He just loved it here in Colorado.
And loved the hiking.
And we got our first dog,
which was very important for Joe.
He got into gardening. That became such a passion!
It was the isolation, it was the fact that he could
walk out this door and walk into those mountains.
He could walk for days and never see another soul.
And when he did see people,
he was just a neighbour, he was just Joe.
He could just totally forget
that he was even involved in the music business when he was here.
Joe was still drinking.
He was drinking a lot.
And..
It was really difficult for everybody involved
because the shows were good,
and some weren't so good.
He would be drinking on stage while performing and
he would go through seven, eight beers at the time on stage.
I remember guys running out as soon as Joe's cup was empty.
One of the roadies would run out to fill the cup with beer again.
And between the lights, the stress, the heat,
Joe would get sick all the time.
He'd suddenly disappear in the middle of a song
and run round the back
and some guy had a bucket for him, ready to throw up in.
And we would gauge the show by how many buckets,
meaning how many times did Joe throw up
and the crew had to clean it up.
Then after the show, we'd go out to eat
and he'd start the drinking.
I'd be in a restaurant with him
and he'd down a bottle before the food came.
Then he'd get another bottle of Bacardi and start on that.
There were times that we'd have to keep an eye on him,
every minute.
I would have to have a key to his room.
It was frightening at times.
You know, I never knew
what I was going to find when I walked in that room.
And sometimes it was really bad.
It was rare when Joe drank to excess here,
when he was home.
He knew I didn't like it for one thing
and, you know, the pressure was off.
But when he started gearing up for another tour
or working on a new album
and the pressure would start to build
then he would tend to drink more.
He had the demons, you know
Joe had the demons that would come out every now and then.
And he would get dark and wouldn't come out of his room
or would prefer to just be by himself and just walk
or just wander, I should say.
You know, we always thought maybe you should go to AA,
see a psychiatrist.
You know, some help.
But Joe was totally against any of that.
He says, "no, I can control it myself I can do it."
We'd come back here and he'd be fine
and then it was just like, well,
he's just a social drinker when he's here.
He never really takes it to extremes.
So then you'd forget about it, until the next situation.
We had a party here. It was the first of march.
And we were getting ready to go on tour
and, for some reason, Joe started drinking that afternoon.
And was drinking and drinking and drinking.
By the time the guests arrived around six o'clock,
he was already pretty well drunk.
Before we even sat down for dinner,
I had to help him upstairs to bed.
Pam sort of gave Joe an ultimatum.
You know, "either you shape up or it's over."
And Joe shaped up.
He called me and said, "I'm gonna quit drinking this week,
so don't schedule anything. I wanna try this."
I spent about a year in disbelief,
thinking this is not going to last.
And then I think I spent the second year
being really mad at him.
Not mad that he wasn't drinking,
but mad that he could do it so easily.
Why hadn't that happened 15 years before?
And then I finally realised "no, he's serious.
This is it. This is the new Joe. This is our new life.
This is our new relationship." and I just was so thankful.
Joe realised after he had stopped drinking for a while,
and Roger was really instrumental in showing Joe,
"Joe, if you pull this together,
you can be a major international artist"
and he also realised
that, "I can sing 'little help' every night."
That was always an indicator, "a little help",
because of the scream at the end.
I think that was a factor in Joe's sobriety.
When Joe realised he couldn't hit the high note,
the scream, that he had to do something.
What they wanted Joe to perform was "A Little Help".
Which Joe would never perform outside of a stage performance,
meaning it took Joe 19 songs to warm up
in order to hit the scream at the end of it.
What changed Joe's mind was the queen! As simple as that.
"It's my queen. I'm gonna do it."
Joe's adrenaline was working and I think that did it for him.
Joe was so proud to be a part of it.
With all his peers.
Between Clapton, McCartney, Paul, sir Paul and Phil Collins.
Just everybody was there.
You know, Joe was very pleased
and felt like he still had his heart in England
Here in Colorado, our neighbours
and people that became our friends
certainly knew his history,
but they weren't obsessed by it.
It didn't matter to them at all.
It mattered that we were good neighbours,
that we were part of the community
and Joe really liked that.
He liked being part of a community.
He liked that his friends were the local plumber
and the electrician and the real estate agent
and the little country lawyer.
He just loved those guys.
And it made Joe a better person to have that kind of support.
He loved the air, he loved the blues in the sky
he'd just go, "look at that sky. It's just so incredible."
So I think it made him happy. It really made him happy.
He was content with himself and he said,
"I think I've become a mountain man."
That was when he was most at peace,
walking the trails with his dogs.
He was on the road and he'd been playing for seven nights.
And he came in on the eighth day.
It's kind of biblical!
He came in on the eighth day
and recorded "The Moon's a Harsh Mistress" with us.
His voice reminded me of
a civil war battle flag.
You know, it's still intact, it's completely intact,
but it's been shot at and it's got some torn bits
at the edges that are sort of streaming off.
It was like a voice that had been through a war.
This voice has fought the good fight.
This voice has never given up
and it's not giving up today either, you know
I kept thanking him over and over for coming in.
I kept hugging him and hugging him.
You know, I didn't want to let him go.
We did a wonderful show in Cologne.
And it just was spectacular.
Everything went off exactly as we wanted it.
It looked fabulous, Joe sang well.
76,000-plus there that night.
But as this happened Joe was starting
to feel pains in his sides.
He would come off the stage. "Ray, my sides are killing me.
I can't catch my breath."
He made it through the tour.
As heroic as he can be.
And bull-headed. He just fought it.
Good night, Germany!
We love you! Keep on rocking!
Everywhere!
He came home on September 8th
he just looked awful.
And he was completely exhausted.
I'd never seen Joe that exhausted.
This was a Sunday. Pam takes Joe in on Tuesday.
By Friday, he's diagnosed with stage four
small cell lung cancer.
I don't know that I would have...
Been able to be as strong as he was.
He didn't complain. He never complained.
He never said, "oh, why me? Why is this happening to me?"
In fact, he was almost kind of like,
"well, considering my background and my history
and smoking for all those years
and drinking for all those years,
why not me?"
We just kept it quiet.
The word was that Joe has just taken an extended vacation.
But we were trying to have Joe be nominated
for the rock and roll hall of fame.
With all of Roger's power, all the label power lobbying them.
We had signatures from fans around the world.
This is dated September 10th, 2014.
To members of the rock and roll hall of fame committee.
"As a member of the rock and roll hall of fame since 1999,
it has been one of my fondest hopes
to see Joe Cocker inducted into it as well.
When I first heard him in 1969,
I was very inspired by the sound of his incredibly raw
and soulful vocal style.
In my opinion, no one has since come even close to him
as one of the great, primal rock vocalists of all time.
I hope you will consider putting his name
on the voting ballot this year.
Sincerely, Billy Joel."
Just for his performance at Woodstock,
he should be in some hall of fame.
Because it was transcendent.
It was a performance for the ages.
He isn't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
Why could that be?
I think Joe was as big a talent as anyone
in the industry.
I think, really, in the history of rock'n'roll,
I think his talent was unique
and certainly a match for anyone's.
He was an interpreter. Like Sinatra was an interpreter.
Like all the great, really great singers were interpreters.
They did it their way.
So, hats off to Joe.
I knew that he was ill,
but I had no idea that it was that far along.
And so it really did come as
quite the unpleasant surprise to me.
I was watching CNN at the time
and there was just a crawl across the bottom of the screen
that said something like,
"rock singer Joe Cocker dies."
All the accolades were very warm
and people were very kind
so it was it was very touching.
He could be difficult, but everybody loved him.
Everybody.
Those who knew him, had the privilege of knowing him,
know actually what a sweet, kind man...
He was a lovely man. He was a lovely man.
You can't really get past it.
Which I try to do,
but, no, I just accept it that that's what happened
and I was happy I was part of it, for sure.
We were looking forward to our old age, you know
and doing some travelling just on our own,
but, yeah...
That's life, you know.
You get thrown all kinds of things, don't you?
He was born to be a star, to be up front in a band
you know, that's him.
What else is he going to do?
Looking like that, singing like that.
From the Blues Band and myself, thank you all very much indeed.
See you again. Beautiful.
A big thank you to Joe Cocker!