Which One Is Joe?

The stage blacks out. "Now get ready for Joe Cocker!" a voice cries at New York's Fillmore East. In the darkness out in the hall, whispering slowly rises toward muted hysteria. Some 2,600 strong, the audience is primed for the evening's headliner, English Blues Singer Joe Cocker. The shouts begin: "Joe!" "Joe!" "Joe!" The lights come up.

Problem: which one is Joe? Out there on the stage is the largest--and most piebald--rock band in captivity. At stage left stands the chorus, 13 girls and boys dressed in everything from shawls to what look like tablecloths. At stage right sit the piano and organ. At stage rear, two drummers and three percussionists flex for action. The guitarists get ready. So do a trumpeter and saxophonist. A little black and white dog curls up happily near the footlights. Two little children romp around, just as happily. Is that Joe in the stovepipe hat, with the hair down the back and the beard down the front? No, that's Joe's second banana, Pianist-Arranger-Composer Leon Russell. Joe's the one in the jeans, knit shirt and track shoes who is now shaking his way spastically into the first number, Honky Tonk Woman.

Vibrating Vertebrae. How you sing the blues depends on who you are. For Joe Turner (who originated Shake, Rattle and Roll), the blues was a bossy, defiant shout. For Bessie Smith, it was a womanly wail that somehow remained proud of its woe. When Joe Cocker sings the blues, with a rasping wail unlike that of any other singer, his performance suggests one of the most helpless of God's children making a pitiful appeal for grace. To see Joe for the first time is to wonder why no one has yet made a star out of a camel with the staggers. His knees tend to buckle inward. Each finger goes in its own direction. His arms get in each other's way. When Joe sings With a Little Help from My Friends, he seems to need it literally.

Joe is healthy enough, of course. His central nervous system is definitely not plugged into the nearest A.C. outlet, as his flying hair, vibrating vertebrae and gibbering grimaces suggest. He cannot explain what seizes him when he gets onstage. "It's not contrived, you know," he says. "I can understand, though, how some people could really be turned off watching me go like that. When I was on Ed Sullivan, they surrounded me with thousands of dancers to keep me hidden."

Hiding Joe Cocker is no longer that easy. In just eight months he has become the most popular white male blues singer in the U.S. At 25, he boasts a popularity matched only by that of the No. 1 white female blues singer, Jam's Joplin. Well deserved, too, at least by certain rock standards, which place less value on vocal prowess than on energy, sincerity and "give." Joe's voice is as dusty as a bag of coal, and in truth there is not much variety in his rough-hewn delivery. Explains one Cocker fan: "It's just that Joe works like hell." When he comes running off after a set, he is like a boxer after a victorious ten-rounder--beat, breathless, happy.

Cocker is his real last name, but "Joe" is assumed. He was born John, and that, for some reason, just would not do. Before changing his given name, he worked by day as a pipefitter in his native Sheffield, 140 miles north of London, singing in the local pubs by night. For a while, he billed himself as Vance Arnold. The next year he changed his name again and hit the top-50 charts with a single called Marjorine, then reached the top ten with A Little Help from My Friends. Most of the time since, he has spent in the U.S. "At least in America people want to change things," says Joe.

When things cannot be changed right off, though, the blues can be a big help. Like a lot of other white blues singers today--Joplin, Johnny Winter, John Mayall--Cocker occasionally encounters resentment that he, a white man, should dare to sing the black man's music. His reply to that is that the blues is now so important a music that it transcends racial boundaries. "Blues are in the back of everybody's mind," he says. "Everybody needs an outlet, 'cause no matter what you've got in possessions, you're still up against the wall."

A British blues singer sounds like a contradiction in terms, but U.S. professional music folk took to Cocker from the start. Among them was Herb Alpert, who issued Joe's first two LPs on his own A. & M. label. Now Cocker is a hotter draw than Alpert's own Tijuana Brass, the legendary combo that made millions blending Dixieland and mariachi. As the new Warner film Woodstock (see CINEMA) makes emphatically clear, Joe was one of the hits of last summer's historic Woodstock festival. In those days, working with an instrumental quartet called the Grease Band, Cocker had the habit of taking light rock, such as softer ditties by the Beatles, and giving it the heavy treatment. Now Joe has a large new group (36 friends known as Mad Dogs and Englishmen). It can back him up in anything from jazz to low-down blues to gospel singing. Gruff and virile of tone, but now obviously a star, Joe belts out his songs as to the manna born. He knows just when to shout, just when to pout, just when to let a phrase die with a low, sad whimper. At the Fillmore, Cocker's group came on, in fact, a bit like a white revival meeting. With his friends churning away at an old Julie London hit, Cry Me a River, Joe created a shouting, cathartic revival hymn.

Souls saved, the Fillmore faithful leaped on their seats and screamed approvingly. For a while, even Actor Michael J. Pollard (Bonnie and Clyde) was out onstage playing tambourine, until Impresario Bill Graham pulled him off by the lapels. "I didn't mind, except that he couldn't keep time," said Graham --as though anyone could have heard what Pollard was doing.

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