Joe Cocker - A Luxury You Can Afford

Now, some of you die hard collectors might find it painful when i do this. Tough. You can keep your mint in-box cabbage patch dolls, or your complete set of micro machines. One of the greatest joys in the life of any bottle like myself is opening a never been touched cut record from the glory days of the 99-cent target bin. Luckily, that is a luxury i can afford.

And what an appropriate coincidence, it's Joe Cocker's 7th album from 1978, his only release from Asylum. Well now that the cardboard cut under my thumbnail is bleeding appropriately, and i've just lowered it's apparent value from $30 to $6, let's give it a spin.

Oh man, that's good. It's British Big Band Blues (duh), the kind you might associate with your parents' 20 year high school reunion (unless you're younger than me, then that won't make any sense at all).

If you only know the couple super famous Joe Cocker tracks you're really missing out. I've always thought of him as a good version of Eric Clapton singing. This album has his take on Procol Harum's hit Whiter Shade of Pale, among other great tracks.

British Blues, like every other genre they were enamored with, lived a life of it's own. Seriously, Black Sabbath essentially created heavy metal from it, Mayall and Clapton gave it a seriously broody personality, but Joe Cocker somehow gave it this sophisticated night show vibe. He's not pessimistic or condescending, he's not cheesy or mopey, he's not really drowning his sorrows, he's got this lovable loser crooner thing that really appeals to me. He's raspy when he should be, but not to the point that he sounds beaten. It's actually much slower than you might expect, but i can hear that almost like patiently waiting for the upturn, like there's an underlying optimism that things will get better. Maybe that's just me? It's not an early looking for fame kind of album, it's for the already all in fans of Joe Cocker.

Now for the downside, this thing is too long. Not musically, physically. This thing has never been played, but that last track and a half are absolute garbage. The first four tracks are absolutely gorgeous, so it's hard to say the pressing itself is bad. I've heard good records that deep toward the center, so i'd say the lacquers were crap right from the start. A half-assed rush job with no volume compensation wouldn't surprise me at all. No one cared about this record, Cocker was already as big a superstar as he was ever going to be (we're a decade past A Little Help From My Friends and 4 years past You Are So Beautiful after all), and in the middle of label hopping through a string of live albums. Every bit of that is pure shame, in my opinion.

Joe Cocker is just the bee's knees, and you should really give this one a listen. It's on youtube, so truth in advertising, it's A Luxury You Can Afford (link in the comments). Cheers, my friends. May your reopening of 'merica be less unpleasant than the one i've been driving to work in this whole time.

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