(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 5 April 2026 8:00, UK
One of the greatest appeals of rock and roll for Billy Joel was that you didn’t need to have the greatest voice to succeed.
The jury’s still out on whether Bob Dylan even had a singing voice to begin with, but when you listen to any of his protest songs from back in the day, you can feel the real emotion and passion throughout every single word that came out of his mouth. It didn’t matter if you were Pavarotti, so long as you had conviction, and Joel felt that some of the best musicians he ever saw were the ones who put their entire body into it.
If you look at the other piano players that came before him, Joel was already studying under some of the best. Ray Charles was showing everyone how it was done when singing all of his fantastic songs, and even though ‘The Piano Man’ was never going to reach the same level that Little Richard did when he sang ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ or anything, the British Invasion gave him the shock of a lifetime when he heard what Joe Cocker was doing whenever he stepped in front of the microphone.
Then again, Cocker was only one of many people bringing a new sense of flair to blues rock. Steve Winwood was already showing everyone how a British kid could sound, and if Joel considered Winwood to be the British version of Ray Charles, Cocker had all the style and swagger of an old bluesman, only this time with a lot more gusto behind his delivery whenever he sang.
No one in their right mind would have thought to cover The Beatles’ ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ like a waltz, but when you look at his crazy dance moves whenever he sang, it wasn’t meant to be swaggering or anything. He simply was moving the way his body reacted to the music, so when Joel saw that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame had kept sidelining Cocker from the ballot, he knew that he needed to let them know that they were missing a piece of the genre’s history.
There are many bands that come and go that aren’t exactly worthy of that honour, but Joel felt that leaving out Cocker was a huge oversight, writing to the establishment, “It has been one of my finest hopes to see Joe Cocker inducted into it as well. When I first heard him in 1969, I was very inspired by his raw and soulful vocal style. That became a watershed year in my life. I attended the first Woodstock festival, bought the first Led Zeppelin album, and heard Joe Cocker sing ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’. In my opinion, no one else since has come even close to him as one of the great primal rock and roll vocalists of all time.”
And if you listen to the way that Joel sings, you can hear some of that kind of swaggering delivery come out every now and again. He was never going to reach the same level as Cocker, but since he had that fake-it-til-you-make-it mentality, a lot of those first gigs were about him imitating a lot of his favourite artists, whether it was Cocker or trying and failing to be the next Robert Plant when working with Attila.
He could only be honest when he wrote his songs, but even when singing some of his biggest hits, he did have a few times where that Cocker inspiration would come out. Even though ‘Big Shot’ does have a lot of Mick Jaggar-style vocal leaps, some of the best moments where he channelled Cocker were when he would dig deep down into that bluesy register on some of his straight-ahead rock and roll records like Glass Houses.
Was he ever going to be that kind of singer? Absolutely not, but he wasn’t pretending to be, either. He had the opportunity to work in a lot of different musical areas, and working out some of Cocker’s greatest songs only served to give him a few more cool points for people that knew him as the adult contemporary giant.
