Tomorrow is the 4th of July, when Americans celebrate their independence from the UK by paying ridiculous costs for healthcare, grilling like manly men, setting off fireworks in dry areas where they probably shouldn’t, and generally being our giant, gregarious selves. And most folks, including me, have the day off. Woo!
So since today is a Thursday pretending to be a Friday, Friday Videos are pretending too. This video comes from Barb Ferrer, who says, “Don’t be drinking anything” when you watch it.
The captions were greatly appreciated!
Yeah, I’ve always wanted to know the words to that song. *is still giggling*
Oh, that is freakin’ laugh-out-loud HILARIOUS! I’ve always loved Joe Cocker (even have his first two albums on vinyl), but I’ve never understood what he was singing until now.
Damn, I wish I had that kind of ‘puter savvy. Some of those vids are just so damned clever and well done.
Oh, I think I hurt myself. My husband, who is not easily amused, was rolling. He’s going to send this to all his Freds.
What about that turbine?
Maybe some Wonderloaf would help me understand.
That is some wicked air guitar.
I cracked up at “Me again.”
Thanks for the warning!!! I didn’t take a sip of tea while watching that and it’s safe and I’ve no liquid coming out my nose.
That was a real hoot!!
I’m unable to look at the video from the computer where I am currently working so will have to enjoy it later. But, just wanted to wish all of you a wonderful Independence Day!!!
Oh Liver!
Tears were rolling I was laughing so hard. My dogs came over to see if I was having a seizure or something.
Wet myself at “Ow.”
His Wonderbread must have been magically delicious!
Last Friday I had to give away my Joe Cocker tickets in order to attend a friends wedding. My sister went to the concert and said he was clear and sober and awesome, which is great, but I bet it was a hoot to see him in his cups, making up lyrics and falling off the stage.
Yep—that’s when I pretty much slid off my chair and sat there, giggling helplessly.
My husband’s contribution was “Someone needs to tell Joe he doesn’t have a guitar.”
But really, where would be the fun in that? 😉
Oh dear, this is proof, if any were needed, that I am on a different wavelength from the rest of you. 🙁
Yes, the annotations were cleverly done and mildly amusing, but to me, the performance and the sound were so mesmerising that I began to find the ‘sub-titles’ a distracting irritation very quickly. Even though I am stone-cold sober.
Thanks for posting the clip: I enjoyed it immensely – albeit in a completely different way from everyone else!
🙂
It’s too bad Ellen wasn’t at Woodstock…she could have saved herself the whole Anne fiasco.
That is the first time I’ve ever seen a lead singer air guitar his own song. Wow!
To put it in context for you AgTigress, this is a very well known clip from a very famous movie made of Woodstock. Joe Cocker’s performance was indeed mesmerizing and his rendition incredible, but he was absolutely high as a kite (I don’t know that anyone who attended Woodstock wasn’t) and it’s been a bit of a gentle joke for years that a) he gets a bit spastic when he sings and b) the music is incredible yet nobody actually knows what he’s SINGING.
So for those of us here, it’s a familiar piece and the supposition of the wording is howlingly funny.
Somehow I’ve never seen this before. I wonder what he was on while he was singing?
I wonder if he has grandchildren now? How the heck do you explain this clip to your grandkids? “Well, it was the 60s , and Grandpa was high as a kite?”
Thank Goddess the most embarrassing moments of MY life aren’t on YouTube! At least not to my knowledge.
Nah, it was Woodstock. You never apologize for Woodstock! Anyone who was actually there is incredibly proud of it. One of my friends is briefly shown in the movie as one of the naked mud wrestling women, and yep, she’s still proud to say she was there. It was a pivotal moment in American cultural history.
Who knows what Cocker was on and you can only speculate, but the flavor of the times was LSD. Drugs were part of the cultural revolution. My older brother got hooked on LSD about that time, but did manage to get back off it fairly shortly after he started. It really was an innocent time in many ways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock_Festival
It’s okay, Robin, I do know the context, and I have seen, over the years, many sequences from the film, though I have never seen it in its entirety, and don’t remember seeing this clip before. I also remember seeing rather a lot of coverage about Woodstock in the media at the time… 😉
The spirit of Woodstock lives on to some degree in the annual Glastonbury Festivals – even to the mud. Only thing is, the musicians are no longer as amazing.
As to incomprehensible lyrics, there are two issues with this: one is that sung words are often very hard to understand, and the number of standard mondegreens based on popular song lyrics is large. I can remember being baffled by some American song lyrics in the 50s and 60s because of my unfamiliarity with both accent and vocabulary. It got harder with reggae in the 70s, where one had to do some serious work on Jamaican patois and Rastafarian rules of speech before one could understand a thing.
As for this particular one: we all knew the lyrics of this song in 1969!! I still know them all the way through, and I was never even a passionate Beatles fan (I have always been more a Stones girl). The original Beatles version was so well-known that the good Mr. Cocker, bless his heart, could slur and mangle as much as he liked, and I bet you everyone there at the time understood him.
🙂
I expect so. He is 64, after all. He has an OBE after his name (a high honour, for those of you unfamiliar with such things – nowhere near a knighthood, as in Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Mick Jagger, but still something to be reckoned with).
Cocker was certainly the greatest rocker who started off as a gas-fitter from Sheffield… I think I shall go and see if there is a clip of him singing Delta Lady now.
Sorry, I just thought of something else: people have commented on the ‘air guitar’ movements. Joe Cocker always moved like this on stage, at least in all the film I have seen of him, whether drunk/stoned or not, at Woodstock or elsewhere. Maybe he was always drunk/stoned when singing, but the waving hands were as characteristic as Mick’s high-stepping strut, the great Bob Marley’s death-grip on the microphone, his swinging toss of his lion’s mane of dreadlocks and his little skipping dance-movements, or, to go back much earlier, Buddy Holly’s strange, staccato head-movements. The point is that good performers enter another state of consciousness, and their body-movements are instinctive.
Music of this kind induces a trance state in both performers and engaged listeners, and the link with intoxication goes back into antiquity – indeed, into prehistory. It is an ancient tradition, the ecstasy state brought on by rhythm, dance and mind-altering substances. The god Bacchus and his thiasos are still with us, because they are an eternal and integral part of the human condition. When a performance of this kind is observed from a position of sobriety, detachment and lack of engagement, it can seem funny, silly or even distasteful. When the observer becomes involved, it is none of those things. Sexual intercourse is an obvious parallel. The reason I mentioned being carried away by the music in spite of being stone-cold sober at the time is that I am still easily able to cross the threshhold with that particular kind of music even when unaided by mind-altering substances. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.
Now all of you, go and watch a YouTube clip of Joe Cocker singing Delta Lady. The best is the early one, in black and white, but they’re all great. You will all laugh at his sideburns in one of them. Shame on you! You won’t understand many words, either; even I understand them only because, for my sins, I already know them – and believe me, references in a lyric to a woman’s ‘soft and fertile delta’ needed to be a bit mumbled at the time…
😀 😀
I miss the TV series “Wonder Years.” This is their Official Soundtrack