Sept. 27, 1974 review: Joe Cocker in the Niagara Falls Convention Center

 


First we witnessed Eric Clapton’s notoriously drunken set in Rich Stadium in the summer of 1974, then along came this sodden performance.

Sept. 27, 1974

No Mad Dog, Cocker’s

Just an Ordinary Joe 

          Joe Cocker mutters something about his hour being up and, just as the idea sticks, he signs off with the rollicking hit that cushioned his fall from stardom to stumblebum, “High Time We Went.”

          But the lights don’t go up and the diehards among the 2,000 in the Niagara Falls Convention Center Thursday night stomp their feet and strike their matches. It works.

          Appropriately enough, he calls for “I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends,” a showstopper in his high-flying Mad Dogs & Englishmen days and still a showstopper, the one flash of bare-wire excitement in his whole set.

          For Cocker, the comeback trail is still in the lowlands. His legendary lung-busting voice flickers in and out, steadied by two Black ladies singing backup. Instead of twitching about the stage, he lumbers, making occasional old-time grabs for his hair, which is too short now to tear.

* * *

HE BRINGS out his new material as if it were charity bin furniture, exhibiting each piece more or less out of duty than love, except for Randy Newman’s “Guilty” (“It takes a whole lot of medicine, mama, for me to pretend I’m someone else”).

          Nor is the band any better. Routine funk substitutes for arrangements on everything but the old Mad Dogs stuff. You wish they’d run off a string of them, like firecrackers, instead of isolated pops: “Space Captain,” “Hitchcock Railway.” Because Cocker can do more than get by. When he tries.

          The folks who preceded Cocker, they tried. Buffalo guitarist Phil Dillon, summoned at the last minute to fill in for ailing Little Feat, worked bravely. And once the sound problems were solved, nothing could stop Focus.

* * *

MAKING THE first stop on their new American tour, the four Dutchmen debuted an artfully-conceived hour built on their latest album, “Hamburger Concerto.”

          Thiis Van Leer provided turgid organ and mind-popping yodels, Jan Akkerman embellished it with elegantly understated guitar. And they neatly tied it all up with a coda that replayed the opening theme.

          Their presence tended to get a little static, but not enough really to wish for the theatrics of their stylistic cousins – Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The Concerto’s a hamburger. Focus doesn’t need knives in their keyboards to cut it.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Boozing was the bane of Joe Cocker’s existence at this point, despite the success of his “I Can Stand a Little Rain” album, released a month before this concert, and his hit rendition of the Billy Preston song, “You Are So Beautiful.” Rolling Stone magazine reported that he threw up on stage during two shows on the West Coast in October. He didn’t sober up for a couple more years, after he signed a management deal with Woodstock producer Michael Lang, who insisted that he quit drinking.

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