RUSH: Richard, Austin, Texas, I’m glad you called, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Well, thank you, Rush, and good day and Merry Christmas.
RUSH: Thank you. Same to you, sir.
CALLER: I just wanted to reflect back on your broadcast yesterday, you identified to the audience that Joe Cocker had passed.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And so that led me to go out to YouTube and see what was being, you know, I guess memorialized. And I guess something that kind of struck me as kind of a heartfelt kind of situation from it is that Billy Joel had a concert in September and knew that Joe was having problems. He identified that Joe hadn’t been inducted to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame along with, you know, the medical situation that he was in. And then he immediately went into a heartfelt rendition of With A Little Help From My Friends. And anyway, I just wanted to bring that up. I thought it was a great interlude from the broadcast yesterday, keep things on the lighter side but still memorialize someone that was pretty good in the music industry.
RUSH: You like Joe Cocker, then, eh?
CALLER: Oh, you bet.
RUSH: And what was your favorite Joe Cocker song? By the way, do you know his real name?
CALLER: I was looking that up and I saw it. I saw he had a couple of aliases when he was kind of starting up, but then I kind of lost track what his original name was.
RUSH: I don’t have it off the top of my head here, but I know Joe Cocker is a stage name.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: But what is your favorite Joe Cocker tune?
CALLER: Delta Lady. I thought that was — he had a lot of background vocals and something I thought was kind of from him specifically, so that was kind of nice, but I do like his remakes of other people’s songs ’cause he really transitions and transforms them into, you know, his own identity.
RUSH: Oh, totally, totally different interpretations of the songs he covered. With A Little Help From My Friends, it was a Beatles tune, but you wouldn’t know it the way Cocker did it. But my favorite Joe Cocker song, as I mentioned yesterday, is High Time We Went. And I’ve looked at all the news stories today, not all of them, but I’ve seen quite a few stories on Joe Cocker’s death and passing, and each of these stories has had Joe Cocker’s five best hits, or Joe Cocker’s 10 best, and not one of ’em lists High Time We Went. (interruption) What do you mean? Have you heard of it? I don’t know. It was popular. It was top 10 in Pittsburgh in — here, let’s play a little. It’s not going to sound nearly as good. I mean, you need to really hear this through the compeller with a lot of compression, but you’ll get the idea here.
(playing of song)
Can anybody understand what he’s saying here?
(Continued playing of song)
Oh, listen to the piano on this tune, I forget to tell you.
(continued playing of song)
Okay, a little bridge here, Joe Cocker, High Time We Went. No, keep it up, keep it up, 1971 or so, and they go crazy here with the piano.
(continued playing of song)
Keep it up, keep it up. One big piano riff coming in, wrap it up.
(continued playing of song)
And so it goes for four minutes and 10 seconds. Joe Cocker, High Time We Went.
And we will be right back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Joe Cocker, just to close the loop here, his real name was John Robert Cocker. Cocker was not a stage name. Joe was the stage name, and he was named Joe off a childhood game he played when he was growing up called Cowboy Joe, and he was proficient at the game, so he got the name Joe, and his name was already Cocker.
His first stage name was Vance Arnold, and his band was Vance Arnold and the Avengers. But the name Vance Arnold was a combination of Vince Everett — that was Elvis Presley’s character in Jailhouse Rock. And Cocker thought it was Vance, not Vince, so that’s where the Vance comes from. And he loved Eddy Arnold, country singer Eddy Arnold, so he combined Vance and Arnold to get his stage name.
But Joe Cocker, “Why would you name yourself Cocker?” It was his real name; he had no choice. John Robert Cocker. Anyway, passed away yesterday at age 70.
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