Saturday Night Fish Fry (after hours)

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My favorite version of the two 1970 vinyl releases by Joe Cocker:



Strangely, whenever I hear Cocker's performance of The Letter on my local FM feed of a generic corporate oldies "station," they do not play the one that actually charted on Top 40 AM radio. Instead they play the album cut, taped live on Cocker's 1970 Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, which wasn't part of our collective high-school rock and roll experience. Speaking for myself, one of the relatively few who coughed up the ruinous price of, what? $4.75 ? for the double LP, it was a little depressing to hear the live performance. The horn solos were poorly crafted and sounded distant, and the whole shape of the mix felt wrong in comparison with the single, probably because of the difficulties mic'ing practically 3 dozen musicians out in the field. The performance here, though, was a studio rehearsal recording that was rushed out by A&M records to promote the tour while it was still in progress. The horns have real presence in the studio mix, especially the straightforward, rocking trumpet and tenor solos.

So why does the "mothership" corporate oldies network, which seems to occupy 97.9 on the FM dial no matter what city you drive through, play the album version instead of the hit single? My guess is that it has something to do with bundles of "intellectual property" that they license from the corporate copyright holders and force-feed to listeners until they sicken of it. And so, in the bargain, they colonize our pop music memories just like the East India Company colonized south Asia 400 years ago. Countless original performances and mixes become unknown to younger generations of listeners. Yet there's a backhanded benefit to this trend: lots of goodies that have been stashed in the closets of collectors eventually emerge on places like YouTube, unruined by corporate stress rotation.

The Letter, Joe Cocker with Leon Russell and The Shelter People (1970, 45 rpm single A&M 1174), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Fun fact: Cocker is 40 years older, to the day, than Beer-D. Please make a note of it.