“I’d like to make a record”: Eddie Van Halen always wanted to work with Joe Cocker
Working with any kind of frontman is always the biggest challenge in any rock and roll act. It might be great to have someone who hogs the spotlight and takes the brunt of the hits while everyone else stays in the background, it’s hard not to become resentful when the singer starts to feel like they own the group because they are the one singing everything. While there shouldn’t really be that problem in a band that’s named after the guitarist and drummer, Eddie Van Halen felt that he always wanted the chance to hear some other voices singing over his riffs.
But it’s safe to say that Eddie lucked out when picking singers in his band half the time. Even though he got “stuck” with David Lee Roth in the early days because they were renting his sound system for gigs, having him out front gave them the greatest emcee a band could ask for, as well as a camera darling when they decided to transition to the world of MTV in the early 1980s.
Even when they started working on their next era with Sammy Hagar, ‘The Red Rocker’ was perfect for the group for completely different reasons. Roth’s whole schtick had become stale, and having someone with a huge range who could still relate to everyone, like a member of the audience, was exactly what they needed when crafting their more adventurous material on records like 5150 and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge.
But out of all the styles that Van Halen adopted during their lifetime, Eddie always came back to listening to the same hard rock bands he always did. He knew that no one had played guitar better than Eric Clapton did when he was in Cream, and when listening to the latter half of the British invasion, he felt that no one could have matched the vocal power that he heard out of Joe Cocker.
Then again, Cocker was always going to be an acquired taste based on his performance style. His stage presence may have been a bit strange for someone who had never seen him before, but that eccentricity was half the reason why his songs worked, usually featuring him doing some strange interpretive dance to go along with whatever they song needed at any point.
By the time Eddie had talked about making some of his own smashes like ‘Right Now’, he still felt that Cocker would have been the perfect vocalist to work with outside of Hagar, saying, “If there was any other vocalist I’d like to make a record with, it would be Joe. That song has that classic ‘Feelin’ Alright’ groove.”
Although the title drop of the song does have the same cadence as Cocker did on ‘Feelin’ Alright’, there’s no one else who could have sung the tune like Hagar did. Cocker may have had a more boisterous presence whenever he got behind the microphone, but ‘The Red Rocker’ always had a certain way of taking what Eddie had done and sending it into the stratosphere whenever he hit one of his high notes.
A Cocker/Van Halen album may not have been in the cards for Eddie during his lifetime, but it doesn’t seem to matter that much. He was still a legend no matter who was singing, and even if he couldn’t match his heroes, it’s sometimes better to make something that sounds more like yourself than outright copying what had come before.
