Joe Cocker‘s older brother Victor had something of a front row seat for his sibling’s first steps toward the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame while they were growing up in Sheffield, England.
“We had a little skiffle group — this was when Joe was only around 12 or 13 and I was a teenager,” the elder Cocker, who still resides in England, tells Billboard. “He used to love and come and listen, and once or twice he sang. It just made him so excited, really, the idea of performing. He had a very natural talent. He always had a powerful voice, and a really soulful voice.”
That voice — and Cocker’s accomplishments over a 46-year recording career prior to his death in 2014 at the age of 70 — will be honored on Nov. 8 when he’s inducted into the Rock Hall some 32 years after he first became eligible.
Best known for Billboard Hot 100 hits such as “Delta Lady,” covers of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends” and “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window,” “You Are So Beautiful” and the chart-topping “Up Where We Belong,” a Grammy Award-winning duet with Jennifer Warnes from An Officer and a Gentleman, Cocker will be one of seven performers voted into the shrine, joining Chubby Checker, Bad Company, Cyndi Lauper, Outkast, Soundgarden and the White Stripes. Cocker, a first-time nominee whose induction received public support from Paul McCartney and Billy Joel, also finished fifth on the fan ballot with more than 232,000 votes.
“I was really surprised,” says Cocker’s widow Pam. “I voted every day and watched his standing on the fan vote. ‘Long overdue’ — those were my daughter’s first words when we heard the news.”
Vic Cocker, meanwhile, is “quite thrilled” by the induction news. “It’s an important piece of recognition for Joe, I think. I think he would have been really delighted about it, so I’m really pleased. And of course he grew up in that age where the first generation of members of the Hall of Fame were his heroes; he was part of the second wave, so to be recognized there with his heroes and those of the second wave — like the Beatles, who he knew, and so on — would’ve delighted him.”
Pam Cocker adds that while her husband “wasn’t obsessed with the fact he wasn’t in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he did want it. But he didn’t prioritize it. He was always surprised at what other people were not in it more than himself.”
Because he was at university and then married, Vic Cocker watched his brother’s ascent from a distance. “When he found Ray Charles, of course, that was a big thing for him,” the elder Cocker remembers. “Then (keyboardist) Chris Stainton came along and they had (the 1968 single ‘Marjorine’) and then ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ was the big change. I used to get so wound up when I’d go to see him; I just wanted him to succeed, really. It was such a thrill seeing him go and get better and better and more and more famous.”
He adds that the Cockers’ mother, Madge, was particularly engaged in his brother’s career, while their more stoic father was a bit more reserved about it. “He very much thought (Cocker) was crackers sometimes,” Vic recalls with a laugh. “He never went to a performance, whereas my mum used to go and see Joe sing.” Harold Cocker did help his younger son deal with Inland Revenue tax issues in the U.K., however, while Vic recalls finding a six-figure check for royalties from 1970’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen album that his brother never deposited.
“I think he’d decided he was going to split with A&M (Records) and he didn’t want to be obligated to them or something,” Vic Cocker says. “When I gave it to him many years later he goes, ‘God, what was I thinking?!’”
The family was also surprised by the spasmodic physical performing style that became a Cocker trademark — which many first witnessed in the 1970 Woodstock documentary. “That was something that developed…and became a little more extreme, yeah,” his brother says. “Nobody ever really commented on it. What he did was up to him, really.” He was nevertheless “upset” by Joe’s drug addictions, however, though he gives him credit for ultimately cleaning himself up.
“He did most of that himself,” Vic says. “He just had a quiet time at home. I remember he went to Scotland and did some fishing. I challenged him as to whether he was on heroin, because I’d heard rumors he was, and he told me he wasn’t and showed me his arms were clean. Afterward he admitted he was taking it another way…but he got himself off that on his own. He had a fantastic constitution, which in some ways was his savior but it was also his downfall in that he could abuse it.”
In addition to the Rock Hall induction, Cocker received an honorary doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University in 1995, and during 2017 he was named to the Order of the British Empire (OE). His last album, Fire It Up, came out during 2012.
All of the Cockers are planning to attend the induction ceremony in November and are anticipating, in Pam’s words, “a brilliant evening.” Vic expects that gratitude will be expressed to the musical peers who helped push Cocker to this point.
“I thought it was exceptional for them to put that amount of time into recognizing Joe and supporting him,” he says. “There were quite a lot of the sort of British rock n’ roll establishment who liked Joe. They’d seen him perform and were always impressed by him, I think. They recognized what he had.”
