(4) Joe Cocker, “With a Little Help from My Friends”
outlasted
(1) Whitney Houston, “I Will Always Love You”
266-261
and will play in the elite 8
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/22/22.
EMILIE BEGIN ON WHITNEY HOUSTON’S “I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU”
When I lived in DC in my twenties, I participated in an adult competitive karaoke league. During that time period, I found myself at least twice a month at a karaoke night with janky microphones, a messy sign up sheet, and beer-stained binders filled with titles of former chart-toppers and inexplicable deep cuts. My favorite for a while was a live karaoke band night at a local bar/restaurant on Wednesdays where you could pick a song from the band’s roster and play lead singer for four minutes. I went to this live band karaoke night so often that I came to recognize the regulars.
From the months of May to August, you had at least one gaggle of Capitol Hill interns that would sing Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA'' every week or Backstreet Boys’ “I Want it That Way,” featuring at least one intern attempting Nick Carter’s “don’t want to hear you saaaaaaay!” key change with varying results. Another regular was a teenage girl whose relative was one of the band members. Every week, her parents would drive her to the bar just to sing Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” and then she’d leave almost immediately afterwards. I’ll never forget the juxtaposition of a 15 year-old in a baggy sweatshirt singing a beautiful rendition with all her heart while drunk, sweaty twenty and thirty-somethings clad in Banana Republic or Ann Taylor Loft workwear yelled along and cheered her on.
The last time I heard this girl sing I was 27. I moved to California that year after spending months trying to find an opportunity that would force me to leave behind a life where I had always lived within the same 60-mile radius. Despite knowing three people who lived there at the time, I accepted a job offer in San Francisco in June of that year and one month later my sister Camille and I drove my Volkswagen Rabbit across the country.
There’s a term in astrology called the Saturn Return, which refers to the point at which the planet Saturn returns to the placement it was in the day you were born. It takes Saturn 27-29 years to return to that point and signifies a set of major changes in someone’s life. The first Saturn Return we experience in our late twenties is usually tied to feelings about adulthood and settling down, and often stirs up decisions around marriage, career paths and overall life direction. As a late bloomer to the astrology world, I learned this term not through a horoscope book but rather through No Doubt’s underrated album Return of Saturn, which features several songs Gwen Stefani wrote about her late twenties.
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Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You” on the same day she wrote “Jolene” in 1973, the ultimate Capricorn move. At 27, she wrote that song to signify her Saturn Return, which meant branching out as a true solo artist and ending her musical partnership with Porter Wagoner, the man who had made her famous but controlled her career and wanted to call the shots. The song, though sad, is a feminist anthem in its own way, a one-sided farewell where the singer expresses all the best to the person on the receiving end but makes it very clear that she’s leaving. She leaves no room for the other person to protest her decision, maybe because she knows nothing will convince her otherwise or maybe because she’s afraid she’ll change her mind if she hears what they have to say.
Dolly was 28 when the song topped the country charts in 1974, and she was later approached by Elvis about letting him record the song that same year. At the time, it was customary to sign away half of the publishing rights to Elvis whenever he recorded a song written by someone else. Dolly, newly in charge of her career, tearfully apologized and said no to Elvis and his manager Col. Tom Parker. She couldn’t give it up.
*
In the days after I signed my job offer letter I began the process of telling my friends and family I was moving and quitting my job at a company where I had worked for five years, the only job I had known outside of college. I accepted the offer verbally on the spot and signed the letter within minutes of receiving it, offering my resignation at work an hour later. I didn’t want to second guess my decision and feared that someone would try and talk me out of it if I asked what others thought.
*
Whitney Houston’s own Saturn Return appropriately coincided with the filming and release of The Bodyguard and its soundtrack. In 1991, at 27, she was cast as the female lead Rachel Marron. Stakes were high, with the studio hesitating to cast someone with no acting experience but her co-star Kevin Costner insisted on her, going as far as to delay making the movie a year to accommodate her schedule. Always a Leo, Whitney fought to prove herself good enough for the role.
*
After accepting the job offer, selling off my furniture, and donating about half of my wardrobe, I took a quick trip to San Francisco a few weeks before moving to find an apartment. I remember sitting in a coffee shop on the ground floor of a skyscraper by myself, and for the first time the weight of this decision hit me. I had lived in or near the same city my whole life, a city where no building was taller than the Capitol and almost every street downtown was named after a letter, number, or state so it was always easy to know where you were. I hated not knowing the succession of streets, I worried about having no friends, and I wondered if I would get fired within the first few months of my job once they figured out I was unqualified.
*
At the same age when the song became a hit for Dolly, Whitney recorded her rendition of “I Will Always Love You” in April of 1992 at 28. Maureen Crowe, the film’s music supervisor, suggested an arrangement based on Linda Ronstadt’s cover of the song in response to scrapping the originally-planned cover of Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” which had been featured in Fried Green Tomatoes. When David Foster, the soundtrack’s producer, called Dolly to tell her, she pointed out that Ronstadt’s version didn’t have the third verse and then proceeded to sing it for him on the phone so he could write it down.
Though she brought back the third verse to stay truer to the source material, Whitney made the song her own, beginning with an a cappella rendition of the first verse, a stylistic choice David Foster didn’t agree with but she and Kevin Costner insisted on keeping. Whitney’s version also gains momentum over time, softly singing Dolly’s words at the beginning with unbelievable control and slowly getting louder over the chorus and following verses. Then, at 3:08, after she sings the third verse, almost tricking us into believing she’s going to end on “I wish you love,” her belt punches through, accompanying arguably the most famous key change of all time.
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Much like the scene in The Bodyguard where the song plays, I had my own tearful goodbye at the airport as I dropped my sister off to fly back to DC after driving out to California with me. A true Pisces through and through, my emotions were only compounded by a residual hangover stemming from a drunken night of karaoke. Driving away from SFO, I decided I would just give it a year, and if I hated it, I could always move back. No one would think any less of me.
*
Released November 3, 1992 when she was 29, Whitney’s cover spent 14 weeks at the top of the Billboard charts, won two Grammys, and helped The Bodyguard soundtrack become the best-selling soundtrack of all time. Dolly was always supportive of Whitney’s cover, and when she died, she wrote that she would, “always be grateful and in awe of the wonderful performance she did on my song, and I can truly say from the bottom of my heart, 'Whitney, I will always love you. You will be missed.'"
Today the song gets lost in Soft Rock station shuffles while you’re waiting to get your teeth cleaned and the cheesy saxophone interlude is dated, but it represents many important choices made by two women at pivotal points in their lives. Dolly’s choice to professionally split from Porter Wagoner, write a song about it, and then deny Elvis the chance to record that song resulted in reportedly $10 million in royalties in the ‘90s alone (or as Dolly has said, “enough money to buy Graceland”). Whitney’s choice to record “I Will Always Love You” made her an even bigger star and gave her a signature song so ubiquitous that most people don’t know it’s actually a cover.
*
Almost seven years later, I’m still in California. I can easily rattle off the succession of streets in downtown San Francisco and I can tell you the best place to sing karaoke in the city. It’s The Mint for entertainment value, Martuni’s for live piano and showtunes, and Silver Cloud if you want to hear a gaggle of Marina Girls sing “Party in the USA.”
Emilie Begin graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a BA in Creative Writing in 2010 and currently lives in Oakland. She co-hosts the Old Millennials Podcast and occasionally writes an essay here and there (most recently for the RS 500). You can find her on Twitter talking about how underrated some forgotten '90s power pop band was @emilieabegin.
SOMEBODY TO LOVE: KATIE MOULTON ON JOE COCKER’S “WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS”
What would you do if I sang out of tune?
Just imagine how tired he is—let us consider, first, the blessed exhaustion of Ringo Starr. Let us examine the mellow glory of that goodheart with the hangdog eyes. The weariness—not of the boss, the rallyer, the conductor or composer—but of the Steady One. The one who shows up, probably even on time, who sits mostly silent through the squabbles and trips and big bangs of the Beatle-verse. You could be forgiven for thinking he’s not paying attention; sometimes he is definitely not—he’s napping inside a high paisley collar. But as soon as the petty business and fucking-about is concluded, Ringo’s eyes open, and his wrists and ankles kick in right on time. Not flashy, but with a distinctive feel, a push-and-pull. The beat that reminds the others of their united frenzy in Hamburg, the days when they could still be a crack live act. The just-right flourish that assures the others they’re not doing the same old Beatles thing again. He can take a note. He’s been listening, but he doesn’t try to take the reins. He makes it go.
And then—what now?—they want him to sing. Ringo’s the one who rarely steps out for a tea or tantrum, who doesn’t have to record his parts in isolation. It’s true that in 1968, during the long White Album sessions, he’ll quit for three weeks, but for now it’s late March 1967, and Ringo just wants to go to bed.
Would you stand up and walk out on me?
This is the story of the first recording of “With a Little Help from My Friends”: For the final song added to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul McCartney and John Lennon had been crafting a song for Ringo as “Billy Shears,” the lead vocalist of the alter-ego band. Ringo had his own fans, and Lennon/McCartney tried to write one song per album for him to sing. Until this point, these Ringo songs had been almost farcical covers, like “Act Naturally,” or whimsical kid-friendly singalongs like “Yellow Submarine.” According to McCartney, “You had to write in a key for Ringo and you had to be a little tongue in cheek.” In a studio session that began at 7 p.m., the band did ten takes of the “With a Little Help” rhythm track before they had a keeper. Nearing dawn, the session presumably wrapped and a long photoshoot day looming, Ringo trudged toward the door. McCartney called out, “Where are you going, Ring?” Then Lennon and George Harrison joined in to cajole him into recording the vocals then and there. All four Beatles stood close together around the microphone, coaching and encouraging Ringo’s performance of the carefully designed five-note melody line. It took a few tries to make the octave-spanning leap to hit and hold that final off-kilter high note, but they got it. At 5:45 a.m., Ringo got to go home.
The next day, the Beatles shot the famous cover for Sgt. Pepper, then returned to the studio at 11 p.m. to record overdubs. Tambourine, guitars. Harrison, Lennon, and McCartney sang in unison the questions of the call-and-response lyrics and added sporadic harmonies. Then McCartney stayed to create the striking, meticulous bass parts, which Rick Rubin would later describe as “lead bass,” a funky through-line that adds a shadow to the straightforward tune. “With a Little Help” may have been truly a group effort; Lennon may have added the wit; and McCartney may have gotten the final say, but it’s Ringo who has used it to close most shows with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band for the last thirty years—the theme song of a real-life bandleader in the end.
What do I do when my love is away?
When Sgt. Pepper dropped in May 1967, the album immediately belonged to everyone. Within days of its release, Jimi Hendrix opened his London show with a searing and playful distortion of the title track—with McCartney in the crowd. The album’s second song, “With a Little Help,” with its simple style, major key, community-oriented lyrics, and Ringo’s down-to-earth baritone, could be heard as a gesture of inclusivity.
But the album has mostly been perceived as a declaration of artistic separateness—an answer to Pet Sounds, a psychedelic hodgepodge of childhood influences and contemporary values, mixing vaudeville, music hall, Indian classical, tape manipulation, and avant-garde with a warm and innovative touch. It was understood as momentous in The Moment. Folks were hungry to mark the time as a turning point, to dose deeply in the Summer of Love, to see their hopes reflected and projected by pop heroes. Like the counterculture that embraced it, Sgt. Pepper was a concept album that circled back to itself. The truth is, you can never call a thing what it is while you’re still living inside it.
Does it worry you to be alone?
Before and during the Beatles era, there was a different public and artistic relationship to popular music; these songs were part of a shared lexicon, and peers frequently performed and re-recorded the hits. Interpretation and acknowledgement of lineage were common practices across folk, traditional, jazz, and pop standards, but less common in the rise of rock. From our twenty-first-century vantage, we’re so busy praising Beatles’ melodies that we forget that they were always riffing other people’s songs on the long and winding roads to their originals. We’ve accepted the Beatles as pop-music auteurs, and generations of songwriters have interpreted their later discography as a mandate to privilege originals and to take your work—and your pleasure—seriously.
How do I feel by the end of the day?
Friends, thank you for your patience! We’ve arrived now at Joe Cocker: the singer of the song in question, the Sheffield shouter, the performer who was often called the Greatest Rock Interpreter of all time.
But in 1968, the 24-year-old singer from northern England was unknown when he released, only a year after Sgt. Pepper, a cover of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends”—and hit instant success. The song went to the top of the British charts and became the title track of Cocker’s breakthrough album in 1969. (The Beatles never released it as a single.) This version—I hope you’re listening to it now—is a radical rearrangement of the original, made possible with a little help from Cocker’s friends: Jimmy Page (somewhere between the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin) on lead guitar, Procol Harum drummer B.J. Wilson, Tommy Eyre on organ, Chris Stainton on bass, and American soul singers Madeline Bell, Rosetta Hightower and Patrice Holloway lifting up the call-and-response. The arrangement shifts from the Beatles’ plunking 4/4 tempo into a 6/8 waltzing dirge. The song begins with a freak-out: an organ bubbling out of the black swamp of the cosmos, a rapid drum build that erupts into Page’s scorching guitar vamp. All goes quiet.
Then Cocker’s voice steps into the clearing. His voice is deep and dynamic. If it is gravelly, it is like a stone pitched into the dark to measure distance. If it rasps, it is the cracking of a canopy of branches. The voice growls and bellows, yes. But the voice also whispers, considers and colors each syllable, vibrates low and lays itself bare. It is all ache, ecstatic in its desperation. It shakes and blows. It emerges from Cocker’s mouth and leaves him blistered and shredded. Yet the performance seems effortless; the voice can’t seem to help it.
At some point in the performance, you realize that Cocker isn’t playing any instruments. But it feels like he is. Because Cocker emotes as he sings, and he seems to sing with his whole body. He shakes, grimaces, flails to the ends of his fingers.
“What happens when you give Ray Charles LSD?” said Glenn Gass, professor at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. “[Cocker] does what a lot of us do at four in the morning when there’s a song we love: these spasms of emotion, playing air guitar. He took that age-old problem of ‘What do you do if you’re a frontman, and you don’t have a guitar?’ Elvis and Mick Jagger solved it their way, and Cocker just became the music.”
Cocker’s live version is the version. And there are many incredible, extended live performances preserved on video—from trippy black-and-white clips on British and German TV to the iconic rendition on stage at Woodstock. “With a Little Help” is the final song of the Grease Band’s set, and Cocker lets it rip from the first note—playing air guitar, and air drums, and air organ with rigid, intricately moving fingers. He sways and bangs his head and throws his arms around. He’s begging not to be left alone, making any deal he can against a foregone conclusion, and the breakdown is a triumph.
Are you sad because you’re on your own?
Friends, the times when I have felt most connected to other people, but especially to a room full of people, is deep inside a singalong.
It’s true I may have first heard Cocker’s “With a Little Help,” as so many of my generation did, accompanying the opening credits of the TV series The Wonder Years. But more than the grainy faux-home-reel footage, meant to inspire late-80s nostalgia for a suburban dream of what America was like in 1968, when I think “Wonder Years,” I think of the voiceover. I think of Daniel Stern, whose sweet nasal strains I love tremendously. When I think of Daniel Stern, I think of his first film role in 1979, as Cyril in the great movie Breaking Away, all lanky six feet, four inches stretched out against a limestone slab of a decommissioned quarry outside Bloomington, Indiana. Which sends me right back to Bloomington, where I lived some personally momentous wonder years, and where I was surrounded by friends who were always singing.
Karaoke was more than a pastime, a dare—it was a practice. Wednesday nights crammed into the Root Cellar, Thursdays at the Back Door. Nights when the bars weren’t hosting karaoke, we made our own. House parties revolved around a TV screen and a portable karaoke machine with two microphones. When the catalog ran out, we pulled up lyrics and backing tracks on YouTube. Sometimes we sang from the center, moving the coffee table to hit our knees at the climax; sometimes we sang horizontal, deep in the crease of the couch and a night that would last as long as we stayed where we were.
I know karaoke is polarizing, but I love it. If you step onto that humble stage, grip the mic tightly or tenderly, I will fall in love with you for the duration of your performance. It’s an act of radical vulnerability to stand up alone in a room of strangers and friends and sing—not because you’re musically gifted but because this is what you’ve all agreed to do together. To share what you love not by explaining it, but by carrying it through your body. And in every shared love, there’s shared risk.
I am not a strong singer, but I am a solid mimic. I am not an extrovert. I can hold a spotlight, even around a dinner table, for about three minutes before I get uncomfortable. In my karaoke days, I learned that the best approach was to work against my natural inclinations. Karaoke success lies in the singer’s level of commitment to the performance. That’s why you have to go alone, leaving even your non-singing self back at the table. The fastest way to get committed was to choose a song I knew in my spine—not a song I could comfortably take on, but a song that would take over me.
To paraphrase Mary Oliver, and yes, I believe she was writing about karaoke: The point is not to be good. The point is to go all the way.
Do you need anybody?
We started this thing with the original “With a Little Help from My Friends” because that song is the secret knowledge that Cocker’s cover spins around. Because covers are about convoluted and overlapping lineage, about how songs are passed throat to throat.
The ideal cover does not improve, does not dominate, and does not supplant the original. It may sound like an oxymoron, but the function and success of a cover song is how it uncovers. How it reveals the hidden capacity of a song in a manner that the writer or first performer could neither deliver nor predict.
Yes, the boldness of Cocker’s rendition is enhanced by the similarities he shared with the Beatles. He was a contemporary—only a couple of years younger than McCartney, a fellow northerner, a young white Brit profoundly influenced by Black American artists and traditions. But the power of this version is in its divergences transposed on our knowledge of the original—the listener’s ability to recognize them as changes even as they are shocked by the new. There’s this first irony: A simple melody written for the Beatles’ most modest singer is transfigured by the possessor of a world-class, powerful, versatile vocal instrument. Secondly, there’s a refutation of irony: McCartney said that songs they wrote for Ringo had to be “tongue-in-cheek,” but Cocker blasts through pretense with a howling, post-verbal earnestness. Where Sgt. Pepper was defined by the Beatles’ technical innovations and studio fussiness, Cocker’s “With a Little Help” is a raw jam, a moment-to-moment vocal reaction to the sound and fury. Less a performance, more a channeling. Cocker’s song is defined by its all-out aliveness.
[screams]
Let this be the part where we howl. Let this essay cradle a call and response. Let it illuminate the spot in the yellow wood where we could have gone in one direction but instead climbed a tree. Let it air-guitar so hard you feel the breeze from these windmills. Let it tap out this tense dance between the individual and the collaboration, the ego and the collective. Let it show its ragged seams. Let it tear out the stitches with its teeth. When we ask questions, let us take this spasm for the only answer that feels right.
Could it be anybody?
But to hear Joe Cocker, you have to hear Ray Charles. From the very start, Cocker’s singing style was compared to Charles, the pioneer of soul, the American singer, songwriter, and pianist known as “the Genius.” The music critic Henry Pleasants described Charles as a “master of sounds”: “His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics and rhythm.” Here’s the part that sounds like Charles’ far-flung follower, Cocker:
It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what is in his heart and mind or of one whose feelings are too intense for satisfactory verbal or conventionally melodic articulation. He can't tell it to you. He can't even sing it to you. He has to cry out to you, or shout to you, in tones eloquent of despair—or exaltation. The voice alone, with little assistance from the text or the notated music, conveys the message.
Cocker learned these approaches, learned what might be expressively possible, by listening to Charles. He learned so well that he never stopped being compared to Charles—or rather, never stopped being contrasted with Charles. Because the difference did matter to critics, to listeners—that Cocker was white and young from England, and that Charles was Black (and still young) from the American South. The dissonance was important to the narrative of Cocker as a performer—and perhaps also important to the pleasure in the listening, an added marvel of his talent—particularly, probably, for white rock audiences.
You can’t write about white rock ‘n’ roll stars without talking about the Black artists they emulated and Black traditions they drew from, or about the dynamics that reward cultural co-option. Of course, before they were auteurs, the Beatles cut their teeth playing Chuck Berry tunes and fanboying over Little Richard. They never stopped being excited about rock ‘n’ roll’s progenitors, rumbling through old favorites continuously during writing sessions and rehearsals, a safe and joyful zone they could still enter together. Even at the precipice of their power, when the band invited Billy Preston, their friend from Hamburg, into the Let It Be sessions, they discuss with excitement Preston’s work playing in Ray Charles’s band. Before Cocker sang a McCartney song in the style of Ray Charles, McCartney himself was trying to sing like Ray Charles.
This is to say that the question of appropriation was present in the earliest days of Cocker’s career. The dissonance of Cocker’s figure was important, but so was the agreed-upon perception—to these same presumably white audiences—that his interpretive style was cool, by which we mean acceptable.
You can read early critics contorting themselves to address it. In 1969, Rolling Stone wrote, “Cocker has assimilated the Charles influence to the point where his feeling for what he is singing cannot really be questioned.” In 1970, the New York Times determined, “In Cocker’s case, the obvious relationship his music bears to Charles’s is not offensive.” Critics seemed to be discerning whether his chosen mode was exploitative parody or tribute or honest expression. If Cocker hewed too closely to his influence, how honest could the expression be? It’s an old question, older than Elvis—Can I, a white man, embody the blues? Have I earned the right?—and it’s resulted in horrifying acts of erasure. (Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time.)
These days, we think a lot about how influence can veer into appropriation. But I don’t think Cocker was singing the blues. On the first album, he took the contemporary pop songs of Bob Dylan, Traffic, and the Beatles, as well as a Tin Pan Alley number, and delivered them in an emotive, bluesy style. (One exception is “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” which was first recorded, memorably, by Nina Simone in 1964. In fact, on Simone’s album, To Love Somebody, released the same week as Cocker’s in August 1969, she also covers Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” In that battle of the covers, she won in a landslide.) The only tradition he is laying claim to is mass-market global pop. If we look at his catalog, his two other biggest hits—“You Are So Beautiful” (a slower re-working of Billy Preston’s funky ode to his mother) and “Up Where We Belong” (an inspirational ballad and the theme of 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman)—are pure schmaltz. Like Adele, our current best-selling voice, Cocker’s true allegiance was to sentimental feeling, and he applied his instrument the only way he could.
Would you believe in a love at first sight?
Is it enough to be the singer of other people’s songs, in a voice you half-borrowed?
“As soon as I heard Ray Charles, I stopped listening to anybody else,” Cocker says in a 1987 TV interview.
In the clip, miraculously, Ray Charles is sitting in the chair next to him, laughing.
In 1960, Charles had his first number-one hit with “Georgia on My Mind.” The song was penned thirty years earlier by two young white men in Bloomington, Indiana: Hoagy Carmichael, the pianist/composer who would write many standards of the so-called Great American Songbook, and Stuart Gorrell, who became a banker after graduation and never wrote another lyric in his life. Charles didn’t write it, no, but that song, once he had hold of it, truly belonged to him.
In that ’87 interview, Charles doesn’t brush aside the comparisons—or what one artist owes to another.
“There’s a difference,” Charles says, “when someone tries to emulate you and it’s a poor copy. It’s another thing when you hear the person and his soul…Like a good writer who reads Hemingway; he doesn’t try to be Hemingway, he takes from him the good thing that he can use for himself. [Cocker] has taken some of the things that he’s heard from me over the years and put himself into it and made it fresh.”
Somehow, over the decades, the two musicians—dynamos of voice and interpretation—got to know each other, shared stages, tracing and resting on the webs that connected them. “When we sing together,” Charles once said, “it’s almost like we’re an extension of each other.”
I don’t know if Charles’s endorsement is a convenient reason to accept Cocker’s music and performance without further interrogation. There are questions we have to live with a while, that keep opening up inside us. But I think Cocker honored his influences and approached his interpretations with reverence and, critically, an awareness of what he was and was not.
What do you see when you turn out the light?
I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine
That’s the center of the original song, the only lyrics that Lennon took credit for, the year he died. And those are the lines that Cocker fucks with the most. He sings it differently nearly every time:
I can’t tell you, but it sure feels like mine
I can’t see nothin’, nothin’, but it suuuuuuure feels right
I don’t see too much…but it suuure, it sure feels like mine
Recently, regarding the book of McCartney’s lyrics he edited, the poet Paul Muldoon said something like: poetry strives for a kind of perfection, it has to bring its own music—but lyrics leave a lot of space. This question, “What do you see when you turn out the light,” is the only lyric here where a yes or no won’t do, and where the stakes are high and lonesome, the only hint of unraveling darkness in the original. In those lines, and the way the drum hits the snare so hard at the end of the phrase, the swell of the backup chorus rushing to bolster the singer, Cocker uncovers desolation and consolation entwined.
Cocker’s producer Denny Cordell once described the singer like this: “Joe is a strange guy; he has no ambitions at all. He just likes to rock ‘n’ roll, and he has no dreams about how he could do it, because he could rock ‘n’ roll any way he wants to.”
I disagree; I think you have to have ambition to make your debut singing a song by the biggest band of all time in a style learned from one of the greatest singers of all time. But Cocker confounds because he never aspired to be the rock auteur; he was always, truly the Rock Interpreter. He asked questions of a piece of music, even if that question was, What is here for me to find? The world would be worse if he had never sung “With a Little Help from My Friends,” if he’d never wrestled its tensions to the surface.
So here are some more questions, these calls we’ve been sidestepping:
What is the point of all our close looking and hard listening?
What will it take for you to stay with us to the end, or until we go to sleep, or until we shuffle off this small stage?
Don’t you know I’m gonna make it with my friends?
Friends, you too must believe in the power of interpretation—to be here at the end with me. But ultimately, the Interpreter must remain a little on the outside. We know this. For all our analysis and our craft, we are separated from that first creative impulse. But we, the singers of others’ songs, the writers writing to other people’s music, we gotta believe that something meaningful can be made in this in-between. In our flailing hands, in a gesture made visceral, in praising the vast web of songs passed throat to throat. We have to believe it’s worthy, sometimes, to muster our small skill and limited air supply, and let what moves us move us.
Katie Moulton's rock-obsessed memoir Dead Dad Club is forthcoming from Audible in 2022. Her writing about music & culture has appeared in The Believer, Oxford American, No Depression, Consequence, Sewanee Review, The Rumpus, Village Voice, and other places. After seeing Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band in elementary school, Katie developed a deeper appreciation for the drummer, though he remains her least favorite Beatle.