Joe Cocker
Joe Cocker!

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

This is a surprisingly good recording. Cocker and his band -- with more than a little help from Leon Russell -- run through a collection of songs from writers as diverse as Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and The Beatles, and when you hear it on a Hot Stamper copy it’s hard to deny the appeal of this timeless music.

This album is a ton of fun, with Cocker and his band putting their spin on some of the best songs of the era. You need energy, space and plenty of Tubey Magic if this music is going to sound the way it was meant to sound, and on those counts our Hot Stamper pressings are guaranteed to deliver.

This vintage A&M pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn't showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to "see" the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It's what vintage all analog recordings are known for -- this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it -- not often, and certainly not always -- but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

What The Best Sides Of Joe Cocker! Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1969
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

So Many Good Songs

The consistently high quality of the material is another reason this album has to be considered a Must Own. Did Cocker ever release an album with more good songs than these?

On side one alone you’ll find "Dear Landlord," "Bird on the Wire," "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window," and "Hitchcock Railway."

On side two: "Something," "Delta Lady," "Hello, Little Friend," and "Darling Be Home Soon."

I put this album up against the best Cocker has ever made. He released both of his first two albums in 1969, strikingly reminiscent of another band we revere, Led Zeppelin. (Small world: Jimmy Page plays on Cocker’s first release.)

What We're Listening For On Joe Cocker!

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, lost in the mix. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass -- which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

A Must Own Pop Record

We consider this Joe Cocker album his masterpiece. This recording should be part of any serious Popular Music Collection.

Others that belong in that category can be found here.

Side One

• Dear Landlord
• Bird on the Wire
• Lawdy Miss Clawdy
• She Came in Through the Bathroom Window
• Hitchcock Railway

Side Two

• That’s Your Business
• Something
• Delta Lady
• Hello, Little Friend
• Darling Be Home Soon

AMG 4 Star Review

Cocker mixed elements of late-60s English blues revival recordings (John Mayall, et al.) with the more contemporary sounds of soul and pop; a sound fused in no small part by producer and arranger Leon Russell, whose gumbo mix figures prominently on this eponymous release and the infamous Mad Dogs & Englishmen live set.

Russell’s sophisticated swamp blues aesthetic is felt directly with versions of his gospel ballad “Hello, Little Friend” and Beatles-inspired bit of New Orleans pop — and one of Cocker’s biggest hits — “Delta Lady.”

Following up on the huge success of an earlier cover of “With a Little Help From My Friends,” Cocker mines more Beatles gold with very respectable renditions of “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window” and “Something.”

And rounding out this impressive set are equally astute takes on Dylan’s “Dear Landlord,” Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire,” and John Sebastian’s “Darling Be Home Soon.” Throughout, Cocker gets superb support from his regular backing group of the time, the Grease Band.

A fine introduction to the singer’s classic, late-60s and early-70s period.