Joe Cocker - With a Little Help From My Friends (1969)

It takes a lot of guts to cover the second track of the Beatles' most culturally significant LP and make your cover the title track of your debut album.  But if you're Joe Cocker, then you have the guts to do anything - such as deliver "With a Little Help From My Friends" (originally done by the Beatles on Sgt. Pepper) with a gentle growl of a voice steeped in the tradition of American soul music with some of the best session players in Britain rocking out behind you.  By the time you're done, you've turned a Lennon-McCartney number the Beatles' official biographer observed the creation of into . . . your song.

Joe Cocker is the most gifted singer in British rock.  He's adapted his powerful voice to the most tender ballads and the most raucous rock and roll with aplomb, emulating Ray Charles but conveying a song with a style all his own.  His first album, With a Little Help From My Friends, show his abilities on a varied collection of songs ranging from some deeply introspective Bob Dylan tunes to the twenties standard "Bye Bye Blackbird" to a few originals . . . all delivered in an intense, soulful groove.  As the LP's title suggests, though, Cocker doesn't pull it off alone here.  Jimmy Page - yes, that Jimmy Page - lends his guitar wizardry to some cutting blues solos that has none of the ponderous thunder of what he would later produce in Led Zeppelin, along with some graceful understatement to a soul arrangement of Dylan's "Just Like a Woman."  Steve Winwood's mournful organ, meanwhile, turns "I Shall Be Released" into a hymn.  And the spirited backing Cocker gets on his cover of Traffic's "Feelin' Alright" and his and partner Chris Stainton's own "Change In Louise" allows him to adopt more of a straight rock persona.

Cocker and producer Denny Cordell brought a harmonious vibe to the music, adapting a style that could only be called the "Cocker way."  No one had ever heard "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" performed in a way that was neither jazz (as Nina Simone recorded it) nor rock (as the Animals covered it), and certainly not in the dexterous manner Cocker sings it here. The other cuts on this record sound just as fresh and original while the arrangements pay tribute to the American R&B that Cocker obviously loves.  Indeed, With a Little Help From My Friends sounds as if the songs covered here, like the three Cocker-Stainton originals, had been written specifically for this record.  In a sense, they were. Their writers just didn't know it.