Super Hits

Performer: Joe Cocker
Distributor: Sony Music Distribution (

Notes: Personnel includes: Joe Cocker (vocals). Producers: Don Was, Chris Lord Alge, Roger Davies. Compilation producer: Bruce Dickinson. Recorded between 1993 and 1996. A nicely chosen collection of Joe Cocker's '90s work. Despite its several producers, SUPER HITS is also a surprisingly cohesive album; if you didn't know any better, you might conclude that all these songs were recorded during the same sessions. Though Cocker's milieu is of the mid-tempo variety, the songs are a varied lot, and the gravel-voiced singer is at his lung-ripping best. He's equally at home with the tortured erotic ironies of Randy Newman's "You Can Leave Your Hat On," and the gentle romantic pleading of John Sebastian's "Darling Be Home Soon." There's also a beautifully understated remake of one of Cocker's signature tunes, "You Are So Beautiful," which producer Don Was sagely recasts as a sort of folk ballad.

The purveyor of the most blood-curdling scream in pop music history (on his epochal cover of the Beatles "A Little Help From My Friends"), the deeply soulful Joe Cocker is also one of rock's most gifted interpretive singers, with a live show that is the stuff of legend. Cocker's stage trademark is a heaving, herky-jerky style, one cribbed from Ray Charles's passionate motions at the piano. After a breakthrough performance at Woodstock, he enjoyed a wave of success in the 1970s, peaking with the aching ballad (and eventual wedding standard) "You Are So Beautiful." After a brief hiatus, Cocker reemerged, duetting with Jennifer Warnes on "Up Where We Belong," the theme from AN OFFICER & A GENTLEMAN, one of the biggest hits of 1982.

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