Joe Cocker a powerful blast from the past
Published: May 06, 2009, 12:30 am
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Joe Cocker came to the Woodstock festival 40 years ago a relative unknown and left that gig a rock icon.
Tuesday, Cocker brought a different band to UB’s Center for the Arts, but the song remained blissfully the same. At nearly 65, Cocker indulged in his old magic before a sold-out Mainstage Theater, breathing new life into old favorites and banishing the notion that rock — even rock with its feet firmly planted in African-American Rhythm & Blues—is far from a young man’s game.
It was apparent from the outset that Cocker is still in possession of the mighty, meaty blues growl that so endeared him to audiences four decades back. His apprenticeship served listening to the recordings of Ray Charles prepared him for a life of soulful singing, which was in full evidence during Tuesday’s show.
Opening with “Hitchcock Railway,” and proceeding rapidly through “Feelin’ Alright” and “The Letter,” Cocker seemed to channel the music being made by his eight-piece band, his body gesticulating in time with the rhythm section’s pulse. The blood-pumping screams used to punctuate the arrangements — Ray Charles meets Tom Waits — brought the crowd to its feet, and Cocker seemed humbled by the affection.
Cocker is mainly an interpreter of songs, and as such, is emblematic of a different era. Fittingly, since he is renowned for his take on the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends,” that song was joined by two other Fab Four tracks Tuesday — “Come Together,” which killed, and “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.”
Though the saucy blues vamp, “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” had the female portion of the crowd swinging their hips in the aisles, it’s most interesting that the least-amazing compositions ended up being the evening’s highlights. “Up Where We Belong,” the power-ballad recorded for the film “An Officer and a Gentleman,” flirts dangerously with that tendency toward the overblown and bombastic that is part and parcel of ’80s rock. It would be a trifle in lesser hands, but when Cocker sings it — on Tuesday, with the help of powerhouse covocalist Nichelle Tillman — it becomes positively transcendent.
Similarly, when Cocker grabbed the potentially maudlin “You Are So Beautiful” by the lapels, he didn’t let go until he had transformed the piano-vocal spotlight into a gut-wrenching testament to unconditional love. There didn’t appear to be a dry eye in the house by song’s end.
Cocker returned to the stage, following his roughly 70-minute initial set, for a pair of encores, the first culminating in his swing-based interpretation of “Cry Me a River,” and the second comprised—rather fittingly, for anyone who might be wondering when Cocker might call it a day — of John Fogerty’s “Long as I Can See the Light.”
Concert Review
Joe Cocker
Tuesday night in the University at Buffalo Center for the Arts, Amherst.
jmiers@buffnews.com
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