RIP Joe Cocker

We realize it’s only Monday, but we’re hoping this proves to be the saddest news you have to hear this week, because for music fans, this is some highly heartbreaking information: Joe Cocker, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest interpreters has died at the age of 70 after losing his battle with lung cancer.

If Cocker is remembered for one song above all others, it’s his 1968 take on The Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends,” which he transformed from a pleasant little Ringo-sung number into a full-blown soulful epic, earning a #1 UK single in the process. It took until his 1982 duet with Jennifer Warnes, “Up Where We Belong,” before he achieved the same feat in the US, but by that point he’d also earned three top-10 hits in the States as well: “The Letter,” “You Are So Beautiful,” and “It’s a Sin (When You Love Somebody).” Mind you, he’d also had his decidedly spastic stage presence parodied by John Belushi on Saturday Night Live by that point, too, which meant that just about everyone with a modicum of hipness knew who Cocker was and, having seen him sing side by side with Belushi, knew that he had a brilliant sense of humor.

In tribute to the late, great Joe Cocker and his ability to take just about anyone’s song and make it his own, we’ve put together a playlist which opens and closes with some of Cocker’s finest moments while using those songs as bookends for some of the original versions, including tracks by INXS, R.E.M., Prince, Jackson Browne, Jimmy Webb, and, yes, more than a few songs by Randy Newman. Indeed, in a perfect world, we’d like to think that St. Peter had enough of a sense of humor to serenade Mr. Cocker with one of Randy’s songs just before he passed through the Pearly Gates.

(That said, we’d also like to think that Cocker’s response would’ve been to smirk and rumble, “Do I look like Kim bloody Basinger to you?”)

Farewell, Mr. Cocker. You gave it your all ‘til the very end, and your efforts won’t soon be forgotten.