Cancer silences famed raspy voice of Cocker
JOE COCKER, the raspy-voiced British singer known for his frenzied cover of With a Little Help From My Friends, the teary ballad You Are So Beautiful and a contorted performing style uncannily parodied by John Belushi on Saturday Night Live, has died. He was 70.
His London-based agent, Barrie Marshall, said Cocker died yesterday of lung cancer in Colorado, where he has lived for the past two decades.
Cocker, an interpreter more than a writer, became a star through his dazzling transformation of the Beatles’ With a Little Help From My Friends. Featuring a gospel-styled arrangement and furious call and response between Cocker and the backup singers, the song became a No 1 hit in England and the highlight of his characteristically manic set at the Woodstock festival in 1969.
In a statement yesterday, Paul McCartney remembered hearing Cocker’s cover of the song he and John Lennon cowrote for Ringo Starr and finding it ‘‘just mind blowing,’’ ‘‘soul anthem.’’
‘‘I was forever grateful for him for doing that,’’ McCartney said. ‘‘I knew him through the years as a good mate, and I was so sad to hear that he had been ill and really sad to hear today that he had passed away.’’
Cocker’s ‘‘Mad Dogs & Englishmen’’ tour and travelling party of 1970, featuring Leon Russell and numerous top session musicians, produced a film and a recording that went gold. But future success was more sporadic, and Cocker suffered from both drug and financial problems.
He had a top-10 hit in 1975 on You Are So Beautiful, his voice cracking on the final, emotional note, and won a Grammy Award in 1983 for his Up Where We Belong duet with Jennifer Warnes, the theme of the movie An Officer and a Gentleman.
His voice, at times so worn it seemed in danger of shredding, was just one part of his legend. No Cocker fan could forget his intense, twitchy stage presence, his arms flailing, his hips stretching, his face contorting.
Cocker moved to Crawford, Colorado, a town of fewer than 500 people, in the early 1990s. He and his wife, Pam, ran a children’s educational foundation – the Cocker Kids Foundation – that raised funds for the town and schools, and ran the Mad Dog Cafe for several years in town, said Tom Wills, publisher of The North Fork Merchant Herald, a local community newspaper.
Wills said Cocker bought about 16 hectares of property and built a hillside mansion – which he called Mad Dog Ranch – when he moved to Colorado.
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