Photo: Getty / Fairfax Media Archives
EVERYBODY NEEDS
BALL BEARINGS:
Nicky Hopkins and
Joe Cocker on Tour
This is a chapter from Alissa Ordabai's upcoming book on Nicky Hopkins, a full-length study of the pianist’s life, music, and the era that shaped him.
At the plush nose of the aircraft, in the first luxury row of the first class, two of England’s grander music exports are roaring with delight, a boom box planted between them. Out of it, filling the cabin, comes a comedy skit in which every private anatomical part is obscenely catalogued in the flat dead tone of a civil service clerk. The two deluxe specimens of the British culture crumple over it, barking themselves breathless, all the bohemian front blown off, until they are just two wet-eyed creatures delighted that civilization has a filthy name for every hole. This was the scene which told you everything about what 1977 was like for Nicky Hopkins and his bandmate for that summer Joe Cocker. What Nicky has stopped holding on to, what he allowed in, and also — what counterculture had morphed into by that year.
“Joe Cocker, the British rock star, was ordered from an Air New Zealand DC-10 after the ‘disturbance’ on the aircraft between Los Angeles and Honolulu today,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Saturday, June 18, 1977. “Cocker was on his way with a group of musicians for a concert at Auckland Town Hall on Monday night. The concert is billed as The Return of The Mad Dog.”
Bobby Keys, who was on the flight inaugurating Cocker’s 1977 international tour, and who was kicked off it together with Cocker and Hopkins, had earlier been designated by the band’s manager Michael Lang (of Woodstock fame) as the “responsible person” among the “unholy trinity,” as Keys put it, of himself, Hopkins, and Cocker. Which meant Bobby was responsible for Bobby plus two men no more likely to obey Bobby than Bobby was to obey himself. It was a manager’s reasoning — so complete in its lunacy, that the flight only carried it to its logical conclusion. Relayed in Keys’s 2012 memoir Every Night is a Saturday Night was the exact degree to which other first-class passengers (“all these purple-haired New Zealanders returning from their trip to the States”) were offended by the language of the Derek and Clive tape Nicky and Joe were playing: “Really offended.”
And they had every right to be. Derek and Clive were the obscene underside of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore — the two Oxbridge-educated pillars of British Comedy with capital “C”. Their Grammy and the Bafta were already banked by 1977, with Moore’s Golden Globes and CBE waiting farther down the honours line. But on those tapes — more punk than punk rock would ever dare to become — they were subverting every single foundation Britain stood on since Rome made it administrative. By late 1973 Cook and Moore got so disillusioned with the entire business of show that they invented Derek and Clive on a deliberate “don’t give a fuck” whim — conceived for the only audience they could still respect: themselves.
The Derek and Clive tapes have been circulating among rock musicians for years before the Cocker / Hopkins debacle, well before their first commercial appearance in 1976. Keys called them “rank stuff,” which was accurate, but incomplete: this was filth raised into absurdity — marrying the droning tone of English pub bores with obscenity of body part details, organs, and graphic descriptions — to the point where an ordinary man’s dignity had nothing to rest on except for tolerating the intolerable. Cook and Moore had opened a zone of consciousness for which Western culture had neither name nor coordinates. You genuinely found yourself in a land not yet trodden by any human mind — fake education seminars, public radio didactic droning, and dialogues of two working-class blokes discussing their daily work — except that every lesson and shop-floor particular concerned the human body and was delivered in vocabulary beyond taboo.
Hopkins and Cocker rejected the cabin staff’s pleas to tone down the tape, had the boom box confiscated, but — stunningly — continued to have the exact same fun. Because the intervention removed only the apparatus: both men had committed the complete repertoire to memory — “every disgusting skit on the tape,” in Keys’s account — and, with the programme now incarnate in its two delighted transmitters, simply continued “reelin’ ’em off, man.”
Still, this was not an attempt to get publicity: it was not the Rolling Stones in Rhode Island in 1972, punching a photographer selected by chance because the tour needed more column inches. Nor was it a case of rock stars emptying their aggression into fellow passengers (the line which would later include Izzy Stradlin in 1989 and Liam Gallagher in 1998), or the arrogant levitation on the high of money and fame, as exhibited by the Who aboard an Australia-bound flight in 1968 and later by Mötley Crüe — who were running riot on a Japanese bullet train in 1987. Nicky and Joe were not combative — they were imprisoned by their own amusement. To stop would have meant breaking character, and the joke had become too complete for that, so the airborne seminar continued — sex-ed pseudo-facts delivered to a captive audience, with medical authority and classroom confidence.
And the lineage went back a long way: the Beatles singing “I wanna hold your c*nt” (as testified by John Entwistle) while the crowd screamed so loudly no word, clean or dirty, could have reached it. The Bach family, those servants of church music, toppling their family gatherings into improvised indecent songs. Mozart’s letters to his cousin Marianne and sister Nannerl — full of jokes about anuses, farting, bums, and excrement. The reason being the oldest truth of artistry: the psyche must touch earth after touching heaven. Without that descent, the holy grows airless, and no living creature can endure it for long.
Cocker, one of the voices by which the era could afterwards remember itself, the singer who believed, without irony or self-protection, that the act of performing was worth total surrender — knew that such inner exposure was physically dangerous, because it left no armor. Hopkins, who believed no less absolutely that performed music must resolve into meaning beyond the mundane — also knew that such work needed a counterweight. Working at the highest level of inner elevation and in extreme vulnerability needed the carnal and the ridiculous, otherwise you were left without shelter. Going back to the body was going back to the world without metaphysics, otherwise the metaphysical would simply break them. Hence Derek and Clive who provided the return. The same necessity which moved Michelangelo between sculpting Pieta and drawing ridiculous obscene sketches.
And 1977 must remain inside the frame — the year when the rules handed down by fathers became, at last, absurd. Follow the rules and life will keep faith with you. Apply yourself and money will steady the ground beneath you. Offer kindness and kindness would return. Both had tested those promises in earnest — Cocker first as a gas fitter in Sheffield and then as one of rock’s most unguardedly sincere singers. Hopkins — as the most hard-working and creatively giving session musician rock music had known. And the fact that the modern setup did not come through for either of them was just two biographies among millions, showing that by 1977 obedience had lost its purchasing power. The promise was failing in Britain, in the States, and in every country on earth that called itself free.
Derek and Clive were punk in the pre-musical and more comprehensive sense: anarchy transmitted indiscriminately to everyone. And punk got through Hopkins not through the primitive music (he hated it, calling it “annoying and stupid crap”) but a transgression more absolute than anything the music ever carried.
Back on the plane, after having failed to summon Keys to calm his bandmates down, the airline resorted to one of the velvet-glove tricks they used back in the 20th century and have lost the nerve for now — they told everyone the plane was making an innocent layover so that everyone could have fresh air and enjoy the scenery, and landed it in Pago Pago, American Samoa, where the cops were waiting below. The beautiful part is that Hopkins and Cocker did enjoy the scenery — Keys remembers them stepping out beneath that huge Pacific sun and gazing around in pastoral wonder: “Look, coconut trees!” as though the DC-10 had delivered them to Eden.
A cash bribe to the local constabulary dispensed by Keys, an extortionate hotel room fee, and cop hire as “security” — followed by the eventual arrival of Lang finally appearing “with a sack of money” (Keys’s recollection) and his payment of the landing fee and “damages” finally set the journey on the right keel. The tour opened in Hamilton, New Zealand at the 1,200-seater Founders Theatre, where local music journo Gary Steel called the performance “edge-of-your-seat, highly emotional experience” while also noting Cocker staggering and nearly having to be held upright — allegedly, due to intoxication. But then again, theatrical stagger was part of Cocker’s act from the word go — the spectacle could not settle the question chemistry.
Regardless, intoxication was something Cocker himself had never denied about that tour. “I was an alcoholic,” he says in Keys’s book. Albeit, as live tapes show, not of the deep self-abuse kind which was consuming his peers, and which resulted in cancelled shows (of which Grace Slick, Black Sabbath, Free, or Elvis Presley are just some of the examples), abandoned sets (the Who, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and — shock, horror — the Everly Brothers), or passing out during a show (Bonham). And since Led Zeppelin have entered the reckoning, Rolling Stone reported in February of that same year that the band, while rehearsing in London for their forthcoming American tour, had asked the record company to “send over all their old albums because they couldn’t remember their songs.” The conclusion doesn’t require assistance: In the lives of major rock acts of the decade, things were getting considerably blacker than anything Cocker had been through. Keith Richards, for one, had no earthly idea when he would be allowed back on stage at all — a heroin possession legal case took him out of action for 20 months, while the rest of existence was coming apart in larger, uglier pieces.
The next stop, however, had a more serious writer in store for Cocker. In an intro to his Rip It Up magazine feature following the June 20 show at Auckland Town Hall, Alastair Dougal spoke of “Joe’s gifts” and “ability to throw himself into a song not just vocally but mentally and physically.” “When Joe gets it right, he doesn’t just sing a song — he lives it, and that makes him the consistently compelling performer he is.” In that interview Cocker also opened up about where fate had taken him with pianists. He complained about his previous piano player and arranger Richard Tee, whom he called “high-handed” and contrasted him with Hopkins: “I remember in the States we were doing this song, ‘The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress,’ and I mis-cued on the intro. I did the same last night, but Nicky Hopkins realized and changed the chords to suit me. But when I did it with Richard, he wouldn’t budge. I kept glaring at him and he wouldn’t move.” Not only did Nicky not humiliate Joe, he also, according to Cocker, promised to teach him the rudiments of piano.
When asked about “boozing,” Cocker downplayed it — “I’ve not been drinking that madly. Just a day off every now and then when I get swamped.” Dougal’s portrait of him on that tour supplied the rest: “No front, outward-going working-class manner, friendly and ingenious. Vulnerability and certain gullibility.” An unarmoured man — open to company, open to injury, and not quite equipped to distinguish one from the other. Hopkins would have known him on sight: Another man walking around without enough skin.
***
Cocker’s drunkenness on that tour cast a long and foolish shadow, which fell across Hopkins too, who, despite the fashionable self-mythologizing as an “addict” in the early Eighties (when it was debonair to arrange one’s past into the morality play of fall-addiction-cleansing) did not miss shows or sessions through drink or drugs. Once that confessional fashion exhausted itself, he looked back with a cooler eye, telling the Los Angeles Times in 1993 that as a player he had kept himself together. “There were one or two times I didn’t,” he added, though what those times were has never been made clear — no show log records him ruining a concert, and no session history has yet produced the day on which he could not do the work. And he, of course, famously chuckled to Peter Rodman in his 1994 interview, saying, “Who wasn’t” when asked if he’d ever been a bad boy. Which was not the answer of a man building a gallows for his younger self. Bobby Keys in his book supplied the smaller and more bodily truth: in his account, Nicky was “highly allergic to alcohol” and “blacking out” after two drinks.
Cocker, by contrast, did not want to be the only drunk in the band, and spoke of Hopkins consuming triple White Russians by the dozen, as well as “heavy downers” for “stomach ulcers.” All the while, contemporary reviews were less accommodating to this redistribution: it was Cocker whom journalists saw wobbling onstage, while Hopkins appeared in their narratives as the corrective — the man who saved the proceedings.
What Cocker, in ignorance, calls “downers for stomach ulcers” were, in fact, Nicky’s painkillers for abdominal pain caused by Crohn’s disease. In 1977, “downer” usually meant a barbiturate, but a lay observer could easily apply it to codeine phosphate — then prescribed for Crohn’s pain — because it caused slowing. As an opioid it was a depressant of the central nervous system, and a witness could easily reach for the word he knew. Alcohol intensifies codeine’s depressant action, so much use of it would take anyone to dangerous levels (judgment blurred, timing gone wrong) — the levels which do not match Hopkins’s piano performances.
And in 1977 alcohol was not the central danger to Nicky. The deeper issue was chronic illness, the imperfect pain medicines, fatigue, uncertain money, bands which formed and vanished, and recognition that never matched his gift. There was no settled household to receive what remained — only packed and repacked suitcases, carried through other people’s spaces without the comfort of belonging anywhere. Most of all, he did not have the financial safety to allow himself prolonged dissolution. To disappear into drink or drugs required the deep pockets he didn’t have — his solvency depended upon his arriving at the studio and the concert hall capable of giving the music what it demanded.
But the reputational bleed-through was real. Journalists, promoters, immigration officials saw lead singer’s rumpled figure and assumed the entire entourage was a mess. Hopkins, visually fragile, seemed the easiest confirmation of the story — large eyes, thinness, quiet manner. Even if he was playing with near-supernatural command of the piano.
Roy Colbert’s account of meeting Cocker and Hopkins in 1977 provides the case study. Writing in 2010, thirty-three years after the event, in the Otago Daily Times Opinion (don’t ask) Colbert recalled encountering the pair at Dunedin Airport on 24 June, newly arrived from Christchurch and due to play the Dunedin Town Hall that evening. He constructed the memory around the interview that refused to become copy, and around the old, still-audible grievance of the journalist denied his product: Cocker, instead of furnishing usable answers, pelted him with Derek and Clive quotations, while Hopkins, Colbert maintained, could scarcely cross the tarmac. Thus their behavior had cost him “two great interviews” for his music column. All in all, this was a minor rock journalism grotesque: the descriptions of intoxication so hyperbolic that they clash with Colbert’s own punchline — that by showtime Cocker was “magnificent” and that Hopkins played “beautifully.”
One cannot, of course, play beautifully when truly drunk. You can bash power chords drunk, but you can’t execute Hopkins-level intricacy. Colbert’s was rugby-culture observation classifying a thin, eccentric touring musician. But Nicky trembling spoke of the lifelong autoimmune illness — and misclassifying this was done repeatedly throughout his career. The serious distinction is not “Did he drink?” In the Seventies rock, this is almost a meaningless question. The question is, “Was he impaired in the work?” And the answer to that is audible in the live performances: No. He was a high-level professional musician playing with exceptional touch, wit, and command.
Colbert’s piece belongs to the familiar “Mad Dog” press tradition. Between 1976 and 1979 Cocker occupied an unusually exposed position: a working-class artist without the protective irony of the art-school class. He had no shield — no New Journalism halo, no conceptual wrapper to instruct the reader that the spectacle meant more than it seemed to mean. Cocker wasn’t part of the powerful “scene” with media-allied chronicles. He wasn’t LA, New York, London art-school, Chelsea drug demimonde. He came from Sheffield — a city with no literary-critical infrastructure, no glamour, no scene. Scenes produced journalists. And journalists produced saints and freaks by exactly the same method. Cocker had no scene, hence no protection, hence no boutique mythology, which was a vacuum ideal for caricaturing. People who genuinely behaved catastrophically — Moon, Lennon, Bonham, Page, Richards — became legends and Cocker was flattened in to a parody of his stage movements, even when he was performing better than his peers. Jimmy Page was “elegantly wasted,” Iggy Pop stabbing himself on stage — talked about as “performance art,” Lennon throwing his fists around in drunken rages was “tortured artist.” And underneath all that guff about who was “elegant” and what was “embarrassing,” sat the oldest social reflex in the room — class. Critics were deciding whose excess looked expensive.
Another thing was that Cocker frightened certain type of listeners — emotionally, vocally. His singing offered none of the small assurances by which taste protects itself. It came from gospel and blues with its covering torn away, with nothing comfortable for middle-class white journalists of the Seventies and the Eighties. People fear what they can’t control or understand, so they pathologized it. The easy verdict was that a man must sing like that because something in him is unhinged. Whereas, in fact, he sang like that because he was one of the most gifted interpreters of song in British history. But try explaining this to a critic who’d rather admire the clever gears clicking inside a song than stand in front of it while it howls back.
Still, reviewers who listened to the actual music were plentiful on that tour too. One was the Australian Margaret Geddes — later the author, among other things, of books on history, including WWII — who wrote in The Age on 19 July about the previous day’s Melbourne press conference, where journalists had arrived with their conclusion formed: Cocker was “mad dog first and musician second.” Cocker himself refused this fiction for them: “I do find the image tiresome, always being made out to be a raving looney.” Geddes disposed of the premise immediately. He was no raving looney, “or even much of a mad dog” — he was, on the contrary, “remarkably on top of things.” The live review published on 20 July supplied proof. It ran beside a review of Nureyev dancing in Perth — the arrangement of the page giving Cocker comparable cultural stature — and praised the show’s “skill, intensity” and “sheer raw energy.” “Joe thundered through his second Melbourne concert last night and left a full house whooping for more.” Its final description of him — “one of the greatest survivors of rock’n’roll” — was the measurement.
Australian television was similarly eager to secure its portion of the tour: Cocker was a big deal in 1977, as were Hopkins and Keys. On 3 July, ABC-TV’s Countdown filmed Joe and his band on Great Keppel Island, where journalist Ian “Molly” Meldrum interviewed him and Nicky, both in exuberant spirits. Hopkins — once called “Nicky Woof-Woof Hopkins” by Mick Jagger — woofed copiously (Mad Dogs and Englishmen again asserting its claims), while Joe supplied seagull cries in response to Molly’s questions which tangled, wandered and nearly surrendered their coherence.
But if the interview made you laugh, the footage which followed in the programme made the laughter suddenly seem a long way off. In the live version of “You Are So Beautiful” filmed by Countdown, Hopkins appears with the force of a revelation.
No other surviving film footage we have of Hopkins shows him in such sovereign possession of himself, so completely released into physical life. Gone are the stiff, tense shoulders and the inward gaze of the man who doesn’t trust the room of the Stones sessions in the Godard film. Gone is the habit of sitting with his back to the band, as he had during the Jeff Beck, Rolling Stones and Garcia tours, when he was making a small island of privacy at the center of the music. The Australian camera records another man. Hopkins turns openly towards Cocker and the musicians, smiling privately at his own pleasure and outwardly at theirs, distributing gracious nods around the stage, every gesture spacious and unforced. What emerges is more than confidence — it is the elegance of a man taking pleasure in his own presence, with no division left between the body, the inward life and the music passing among them.
One Brazilian concert-goer remembered Hopkins on that tour “conducting” the band, “pulling all the songs” into shape. The concept, of course, was not new, the most recent example (albeit from classical music) being Murray Perahia, who began conducting from the piano in 1974, at an all-Mozart concert with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Perahia explained that he had to reconcile the orchestra with his interpretation of the music and that the orchestra should be listening directly to the pianist’s phrasing. Hopkins had no orchestra on that tour, but a ten-piece band presented the same challenge, so his reason was the same.
And this freedom, visible onstage, began with Cocker, whose band it was and who was hugely conductive to such ease. He never performed the role of boss or supervisor, and cared about music as the only reason for asking musicians and an audience to gather together. Hopkins had encountered this quality before the tour, in 1974, when he recorded “You Are So Beautiful” for Cocker’s I Can Stand a Little Rain album. His piano part there remains among the most admired things he ever played. It does not ascend into the strange metaphysical country her reached on Let It Rock with Jerry Garcia, but its province is more human — tender and created around Cocker at his most defenceless. Beneath that heartbroken delivery, Hopkins places something that seems almost as fragile as Cocker’s voice, but still supports him with absolute resolve. He carries Cocker further into the feeling while keeping him from being overcome by it — a rare pianist was able to do that for a vocalist.
The photographs taken on Great Keppel Island give another explanation for Nicky’s radiance: the hospitality had charms more tangible than scenery. In one image he has an arm around the island hostess — a reed-slender woman in a tiny bikini, her face turned away from the camera — and wears an expression of such cheeky mischief that even Cocker, watching the pair, appears entertained. And hostessing at Queensland’s island resorts in the late 1970s possessed glamour: the women met the arriving boats, circulated among the guests, arranged excursions, and encouraged them to mix socially. The profession required pleasantness and the ability to make another person feel interesting — qualities largely absent from Nicky’s own home gave them an additional force.
Nicky’s wife Lynda did not accompany him through Australia, joining him later in South America. In the interval the men went on as men do when the private arrangements of their lives have begun to loosen. Looking back on it from 1994, Nicky told Peter Rodman, with his usual diplomacy, that he and Cocker were each dealing with their “own things.” It was a small phrase with a great deal shut inside it, and the partying occupied the space around it. For Cocker, those things likely included Eileen Webster. Their affair had begun in 1963, had broken and renewed itself over the years, and by 1977 was nearly spent — in 1978 they parted for good. Nicky’s marriage had also gone far beyond its first glad season — so far that its beginnings may sometimes have seemed like events remembered from another man’s life. Bobby Keys, the third of the company, had lately arrived at the same empty place. “By 1976 I was single again,” he wrote in his book.
Relationship issues were carried with silence others understood well enough not to name, but this was also a mark of the times — a wider fracture in society at the time. Where the older order guaranteed at least surface spousal loyalty, the counterculture has effectively wiped out that layer of societal glue. Freedom meant a woman didn’t owe something to a man just because a women’s magazine told her she should. In the 1970s the fracture became visible from top to bottom: John split from Yoko, Mick from Bianca, George from Pattie, Keith from Anita, Elvis from Priscilla. And speaking of Elvis, he died while the band was on tour — an eerie sign that the old time had ended, a great piece of everyone’s common world having been taken away. And a surer one than all the punks arriving in their loud multitudes.
It was scarcely surprising, then, that on 8 July 1977, during an interview at Sydney Airport for Seven Network’s Nightmoves, Cocker teased Keys on camera about what he called, without euphemism, “too much sex.” Keys receiving the charge with a smirk, reducing it to an “overdose of oysters,” with Hopkins abruptly — and rather awkwardly — beginning to remove his jacket: a bodily attempt, presumably, to absent himself from the conversation’s new direction. When Nicky did contribute, he steered back towards professional ground. Given the size of the band, he said, he had expected “a lot of egos flying around,” but to his pleasant surprise, there had been none.
Which is no wonder, because the band Cocker (or, rather, his manager Michael Lang) chose for the tour was unknown, though Keys remembered its very young musicians as “really good” — the American Standard Band, out of Boston and friendly with Lang.
At that time the American Standard Band was Cliff Goodwin on guitar, Deric Dyer on saxophone, Howard Hersh on bass, John Rile on drums, and Kevin Falvey on trumpet, bass and vocals. Goodwin remembered having the band at sixteen. It scattered after high school and gathered again in 1974. And it was of those ubiquitous American phenomena which held for decades in the United States and to this day holds if one looks closely — a local band with world-class aptitude which simply failed to pull the right kleros — what the ancient Greeks called a ticket in the lottery of lives.
Their self-titled album appeared in 1979 — full of memorable songwriting and smooth instrumental delivery. And it had all the hallmarks of the fib the industry was feeding musicians at the time — make the music restrained and graceful and polished, and the world will make a place for you. Chicago, Manfred Mann, and plenty of others made money through that “polished-sound and elegant songcraft” route, but by 1979 the narrow market for elegance was full — the public had begun asking for fire, and the album went unnoticed, while the band’s second album was recorded but never released after changes in Island’s distribution arrangements. Dyer later dated the effective collapse of the recording group to 1979. The Music Museum of New England reports that sporadic appearances continued until a final breakup around 1982. Elegance and “taste” came naturally to Goodwin, as the Argentine reviews said again and again, but the band’s first album arrived after those virtues had ceased to buy a player much of anything.
The rehearsals for the Australian and New Zealand dates were held in Provincetown, on Cape Cod. And once it was time to hit the road, the American Standard Band travelled separately. “I don’t know if it was a matter of money or if their manager just didn’t want to expose them to the potential hazards that three buzzards like us posed,” Keys writes in his book. At first he wondered how three “giants of the industry” — Cocker, Hopkins and himself — had come to be joined to “a bunch of kids out of a nightclub,” but the wonder soon wore off, and in time he liked the band and counted them as friends. The young men never quite surrendered their awe of him, however, — their drummer, John Riley, went on calling him “Mister” through every protest.
Two women joined the Australian and New Zealand leg as backing vocalists. Carol Holmes, née Stallings, was also a violinist, and by then her career had taken her from the Tandels, a San Francisco girl group of the mid-Sixties, to Leon’s Creation (later called simply Creation), the Bay Area soul-funk band often compared to Sly and the Family Stone. Before the tour, Holmes appeared on three tracks from Cocker’s Jamaica Say You Will album — “(That’s What I Like) In My Woman,” “Where Am I Now” and “It’s All Over But the Shoutin’”. Nicky played only on “Where Am I Now,” and Bobby Keys only on “It’s All Over But the Shoutin’”.
The other backing voice belonged to Margaret McKinney, an Australian who had appeared in the Australian run of Hair before it ended in 1973. Afterward she and Chuck McKinney founded Melbourne’s Hot City Bump Band, the country’s earliest group devoted wholly to soul and funk, and shared the lead vocals between them. From the late Seventies onward she ranked among Sydney’s busiest studio and touring vocalists. The musicianship on that tour ran deep at every position, and rock music at the time had no higher standard to offer.
All in all, Cocker and his outfit played just under 40 shows in Australia and New Zealand in June / July 1977, including a four-day residency at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne and two shows at Sydney’s 5,300-capacity Hordern Pavilion (the second was added because the first one sold out). Cocker’s crew filmed at least one of the Palais performances with two video cameras, although the footage was never released. Perhaps one day his estate will do for Hopkins’s memory what Garcia’s estate has done, and let the world hear the material from the vaults.
But a more complex reception awaited the band in Latin America. They rehearsed again — this time in New York — before the Latin American shows, setting in order everything that could be set in order, while the countries ahead remained beyond preparation. Argentina came first on August 9, when they landed in Rion and entered a nation under dictatorship. Brazil lived under one too. And Mexico, which followed, offered little relief as an authoritarian one-party state.
Why Latin America? In an interview published in the August 20 issue of Manchete, Cocker gave his answer in seven plain words: “The future of the world is here.”
Strangely, for all the political havoc in Latin America, Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager, had already placed his faith in the same future. Visiting Brazil in June 1975 he told Jornal de Música e Som of his frustration at having failed to bring the band to the continent: “If you want to be big, you can’t just think in terms of America and Europe. You have to think about the whole world — be popular on every continent. So, there is a race among the big bands to see who can reach a new market first.”
Under authoritarian rule, music from the free world could be many things at once: liberation, an escape hatch, and the stuff of state propaganda, held up as proof that freedom produced nothing but degenerates and social collapse. Usually — all three. Western rock carried danger openly: hair grown because you damn well felt like growing it, clothes nobody had stamped “approved,” sex without ideological paperwork, laughter aimed upward. A whole culture created by people who had neglected to ask for endorsement from the people whose profession was granting it. Its stars had authority which had come from no office, and no office could take it away. A concert also converted that authority into a physical crowd — thousands of people standing together and discovering that they constituted a public the state had not assembled.
***
Technical calamity and promoter incompetence dogged Cocker through Argentina and Brazil. The band had brought neither sound system nor lighting rig of its own, and so each date depended upon promises made locally. And when the musicians arrived, the promise and the place were rarely the same thing. “Is this the theater? If so, where are the dressing rooms?” Cocker complained to the Brazilian magazine Música that August. Whether the gulf came from incompetence or deliberate obstruction, no one could say. Peter Grant, at least, knew the rule: “You need people with a certain amount of influence to pave the way,” because “the powers that be in Latin America generally don’t dig rock’n’roll.” Michael Lang either had never learned that rule or believed it was one more barrier he could clear.
Still, the three-day run at Luna Park stadium in Buenos Aires drew an ecstatic review from Expreso Imaginario, the voice of one corner of the local bohemian intelligentsia that still contrived to breathe under dictatorship. The praise came abundantly — “genuinely passionate,” “impeccable technical skill” — and Cocker was described as “impeccably dressed, serious and focused” and “at the peak of his powers.” Hopkins, too, was credited with “excellent” solos. When the roadies began taking down the stage, the audience stayed on its feet and chanted “we are not leaving” until the band was compelled to return for an encore. The writer’s judgment was plain: “A freedom you can’t help but envy when you compare it to the local musicians.” And the same account stressed the discipline beneath that freedom: “Not a single solo that wasn’t strictly planned, no jams, no out-of-place flourishes,” and songs “carefully weighted to entertain and gradually raise the audience’s energy.” And through all that planning the heat kept rising, until even Roger Hopkins (the sound engineer and no relation to Nicky) danced at the console while his hands twiddled the knobs.
Yet another youth magazine, Pelo, which advertised itself to young Argentinians as a rock periodical, printed the most grotesque review Cocker ever received in his life — a dictatorship’s cultural reflex in miniature. Issue 88 opened with an obituary of Elvis in which the King was called “aggressive” and his stage act reduced to “contortions.” From there it called Cocker an idiot to his face and pronounced Hopkins “an image of insolence and frivolity.” One is left to decide which absurdity has the finer edge: the “una señora decente” tone, as though rebuking a nineteenth-century seamstress for having misplaced her “pudor,” or the fact that Expreso Imaginario, at exactly the same moment described Hopkins as “sincere, kind, easy to talk to, always in good spirits” and “without the slightest hint of arrogance or superstar posturing.” Only a week later, the Brazilian press encountered the same Hopkins and found him “very pleasant” and easy to interview.
But then Pelo was speaking in lingua franca of all closed societies when they addressed rock music — with the same dry official whine. Scrape away the Spanish and you got the same language Soviet officialdom poured over Western modernity. Only the defendants changed — Picasso, Pollock, Warhol, Rothko and, inevitably, rock music — but the prosecution never did. The charge sheet yellowed, but the words remained the same: “idiocy,” “degeneracy,” and “examples of deformities and pathological perversions” is how in 1951 the Soviet Academy of Sciences diagnosed Cubism, Surrealism, as well as abstract art, and the popular press picked up that vocabulary to beat rock culture with it until the country itself split open and burst under the pressure of its own compulsory lies.
Pelo called Cocker’s Argentine visit “a disgraceful spectacle,” and arranged the entire article as a letter of denunciation to the authorities. Organizers, promoters, assistants, record promoters, lighting technicians, set designers — even the translator at the press conference, where Cocker had allegedly “hurled insults” — were named and reported in the feature for offences ranging from the mercenary vulgarity of expecting payment to the negligent translation of insults that may never have occurred. At this point the piece achieved absurdism capable of looking Derek and Clive in the eye. Dan Cole, manager of the American Standard Band, was found guilty of being affable “even if he might be thinking the exact opposite.” Courtesy became incriminating as a thought crime detected by telepathy.
And then, in the midst of its character-assassination brief, Pelo inexplicably admitted the defence’s principal exhibit in a question put to the American Standard Band: “A lot of people were impressed by the band’s professionalism.”
To an innocent eye, all this was a farce. But once you looked at the other articles in the issue, the magazine disclosed its function. Dozens of Western acts were subjected to the same vocabulary. David Coverdale exhibited “hysterical vocal inflections”; Jon Lord committed “glaringly obvious keyboard inaccuracies”; Ian Gillan pursued “cliched funk” while “relying on tedious and flat frenetic shrieks.” David Crosby revealed “no interesting melodic discoveries” and offered “few high points worth salvaging.” Emerson, Lake and Palmer, readers were told, “impose upon people a product that many may neither want nor even enjoy,” before being convicted of “petty individual egotisms.” Denny Laine’s McCartney-produced Buddy Holly album was reported to constitute “an insult to Holly’s memory.” And it continued: Western music inspected and found aesthetically and morally defective. By the end you were left wondering who, in Buenos Aires in 1977, had really been “hurling insults,” and to what purpose.
A brief comparison with Soviet Russia’s Rovesnik — which likewise presented itself as a magazine of youth culture and music — supplied everything one needed to know about the secret fraternity of the authoritarian mind. In contemporaneous issues, Rovesnik described the Kiss Army (the band’s fan club) as “a band of cowards, scumbags and killers,” while Led Zeppelin were arraigned for their “cynical interest for all kinds of pathologies, sicknesses, and violence.” After his 1976 Moscow concert, Elton John became a “self-important snob,” and his “manners and gestures” were pronounced “incomprehensible.” The regimes were geographically separate; their vocabulary issued from a similar mind.
The only difference being that the Argentinian regime in 1977 did not see itself as the enemy of the West, as Russia did. It presented itself defending “Western Christian civilization.” So the target was not the West wholesale but the Western counterculture: rock, rebellion, Woodstock, collective youth energy. But beneath the rival insignia, the junta and the Politburo shared the same fear — rock gave the young street toughness, but also philosophical expressiveness. Both deadly to any oppressive regime. Or any regime that fears release and assertion of existence.
But as the memory of what the Seventies have actually been like in unfree countries went gauzy and then blank, certain reputations marched out of the wash white. The guy who had called Led Zeppelin pathological in 1976 to please the Soviet authorities, spent the decades after the USSR’s collapse parading as a veteran of liberty. Osvaldo Ripoll, the “Director” (translation for Westerners: editorial boss) of Pelo, later wrote himself into the role of the regime’s victim. But his history reveals a more representative species of journalist, formed by the contradictions through which writers and publishers stay afloat in locked societies.
During the 1960s, he worked in sports at Correo de la Tarde, a newspaper rooted in the naval-Aramburu coup milieu, and at La Razón, the conservative mass daily which normalised military intervention. And before he began publishing Pelo in 1970 (three years after the military coup), his formative employment was at Primera Plana, a magazine associated with Juan Carlos Onganía (military dictator and President of Argentina from 1966 to 1970) and Onganía’s military “Azul” faction which helped prepare the ideological climate for, and explicitly supported, the 1966 coup.
That was Ripoll’s connection to Argentina’s military-aligned ideological-media class. This doesn’t prove that Ripoll wrote coup propaganda: he described himself as a junior researcher at Primera Plana who, essentially, gathered information about young people — made reports and surveys about them: what they listened to, how they dressed and where they went. What he also described was his brief detention — after the Argentine edition of MAD, which he likewise edited, published a cartoon judged religiously dangerous (again, according to Ripoll) and the flight abroad that followed. Here, however, memory altered its itinerary. Ripoll variously claimed to have spent two years in France; one year in France and another in Mexico; and, elsewhere, an exile divided among New York, France and Brazil.
Whatever anti-establishment plumage Ripoll may have arranged around himself, it did not entail institutional exile under military rule. Pinap, the pre-Pelo magazine that employed him, and B.A. Rock, the festival organized after Pelo began publication, operated through municipal venues or municipal sponsorship under the military government. And this is how one complies with regime’s stance on rock.
The August 1977 issue of Pelo is especially revealing because it catches the nominal counterculture press performing the preemptive work of authority. By fastening the categories of excess and immorality to rock, this kind of journalism helped ensure that Argentina would never undergo its own 1968: the standing together of students, slum boys, autodidacts, young mechanics, poets, tradesmen, and teachers’ sons united in a sweating, shouting experience. And Pelo was therefore constructing a moral and professional case: greedy entrepreneurs sold Argentina an improper spectacle and hid behind the glamour, while dressing up its anti-rock propaganda as rock journalism.
The story meets its inverted mirror here. Derek and Clive seized the dead voices of bureaucracy and pedagogy and filled them with obscenity. Pelo carried out the reverse operation — it used denunciatory official language to classify free artistic behavior as obscene, and frivolous. Hopkins and Cocker parodied authority. In Argentina, authority – without satirical intention — produced its own grotesque parody of criticism.
But on the facts, Pelo was not altogether wrong. The three Buenos Aires shows suffered real failures of organization: the list of the required equipment had been sent ahead, and the local promoters had not followed it. Putting on a rock show is a trade learned by doing, and Latin America had been given almost no chance to do it. Between Chubby Checker’s visit in October 1962 and Santana’s in October 1973, Argentina received no major rock star and no rock band of international consequence. But even Santana, although an American act institutionally, was culturally of Latin American formation whose music deliberately crossed the US - Latin boundary. On that stricter definition, the sequence is astonishing: two names with fifteen years between them — Chubby Checker in 1962 and then Joe Cocker in 1977.
But unlike Pelo, Expreso Imaginario made of the makeshift sound and lighting rig a story of cooperation, because the local musicians came carrying what they had. Ricardo Soulé lent his own equipment. Los Bárbaros cancelled their recording sessions and brought theirs. Many others contributed what they could. “And even though the equipment was that used by the local bands, the sound at Luna Park was of a quality comparable only to Santana’s — and this was achieved through everyone’s effort.”
And no wonder they did, because to the musicians Cocker and Hopkins were cultural touchstones. Cocker — the living memory of Woodstock, Hopkins — the legend of the mythic golden era of British rock, the untouchable studio class, and carrier of music of another moral world, one that had not yet been silenced. Both were emissaries of authenticity, witnesses that the true thing still existed. Charly García, himself an Argentinian musician of great talent, met Hopkins after one of the Luna Park concerts and placed one of his own records in Nicky’s hands. The astonishment of that meeting never left him, and in later years he made beautiful piano interpretations of Hopkins’ music. To someone like García Hopkins was the real aristocracy of rock, because García did not fetishize rock guitarists or macho frontmen. He was drawn to musical complexity and expressive vulnerability — exactly what Hopkins embodied.
In Argentina in 1977, Cocker and Hopkins were no ordinary visitors — both musically and symbolically. Those who did not get to meet Nicky on that tour, and others who had seen him only briefly, later made a guest of him in story — imagination brought him into their houses, set out “wine and guitars,” and kept the unreachable man there until morning. Members of Cocker’s local crew denied these legends, and the known circumstances support their account. Cocker himself recalls in Keys’s book that the band stayed in their hotel rooms after the Latin American concerts. When they did venture out in Buenos Aires, a request for two bodyguards produced nearly twenty, and in all the years that followed, no one from that touring party mentioned jamming with local musicians.
Expreso Imaginario was so taken with the visit that its Cocker issue reached beyond the headliner to interview the American Standard Band and the two backing singers for this leg, Deborah Darby (known onstage as Chicas) and Myrna. Most notably, it sat down with Michael Lang, the Brooklyn-born manager and co-producer of Woodstock, who offered this judgment on what had become of the movement: “At the time of Woodstock, everyone, all over the world, felt that music could open the doors to a new way of living. … Then, little by little, this human phenomenon dissolved due to commercialization and routine.” He remembered, too, travelling to Mexico in the early Seventies with writer Ken Kesey, anti-war activist Abbie Hoffman, journalist Paul Krassner, Hugh Romney of the vast Hog Farm commune, and “three hundred other people,” all gathered to consider what might still be done with the counterculture. “And we ended up going in three hundred different directions,” he concluded, laughing.
And Buenos Aires found Hopkins at his least guarded when he spoke truth to power about how the entire show biz machine around him worked, and especially the Rolling Stones operation. In conversation with Fernand Basabru of Expreso Imaginario, he gave the bluntest account any musician from rock’s first rank had ever offered of Brian Jones’s stature and the changing balance between him and Jagger: “He was the core of the band: the frontman. Then Mick, because he was the focal point live, started to grow and challenge the leadership within the group.” He then named what that shift had done to the music: “That’s when things started to get very monotonous. … I think after Brian’s death they lost their musical direction, if they had any.”
Nor did he spare himself. No More Changes, his 1975 solo album, received the one-word extinction: “Terrible.” Screaming Lord Sutch’s band, in which he had played as a young man, earned a more damnation: “A terrible, bad band.” His other dislikes were stated with the same finality: Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers and the Stones’ freshly released Black and Blue (despite having played on both), London itself in the Sixties, punk rock, and the Grateful Dead, dismissed with harsh finality: “Never liked that band.”
What he loved, though, he named with equal plainness: the welcome Argentina gave Cocker, touring with the Stones (as opposed to recording with them, which he found “boring”), jazz-rock, the Who’s “My Generation” (which, he said, everybody identified with at the time), Cyril Davies, Herbie Hancock, and Bill Evans. One choice stood apart for its unexpectedness: “Diamond Dust,” from Jeff Beck’s Blow by Blow, arranged by George Martin.
Much of Nicky’s openness was owed to Basabru, who knew both how to ask and how to listen. He was a music journalist, editor, radio programmer, as well as a record producer, with a special knowledge of progressive and symphonic rock, jazz-rock, and fusion. Over the years his interviewees had included Robert Fripp, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, John McLaughlin, Pat Metheny, Jaco Pastorius, and Chick Corea. Those were his interests. And Nicky was impressed by the depth of Basabru’s knowledge of his own career – from his Cyril Davies days to his solo work.
But Brazil had an even more sophisticated interlocutor in store for Nicky — Gabriel O’Meara, an American journalist then living in the country, a songwriter and producer, and the grandson of Walter O’Meara, one of the music industry’s most eminent lawyers. Hopkins gave this reporter judgments harder and plainer than any he had offered before: calling Jeff Beck bluntly “a tremendous bastard,” confessing that even looking at “that album with the apple on the cover”— Beck-Ola — was enough to make him sick, attributing Billy Preston taking his place on the Stones tours to the fact that Preston was prepared to work for less money, and with a sigh admitting that things have panned out so that he and Billy Preston were now de facto rivals.
O’Meara visited Nicky and Lynda in their São Paulo hotel room and described them with the accuracy of a man who missed very little. He was told that Lynda was 28, though she was 29, and that she’s been married to Nicky for 10 years when, in fact, there had been only seven. Even then O’Meara thought she looked “much older” than either age, and saw in her face something of the same hard aging he had seen in Cocker. Moving about the room on her knees, Lynda explained that she had been drinking the previous day, had fallen in the bathroom, and had fractured her coccyx. She was still, nevertheless, trying to prepare a fruit salad for Nicky. And even in pain and on her knees, she tried to command the interview, thrusting in opinions no one had asked for, cutting across Nicky before he could answer, inserting crude jokes, and accepting O’Meara’s invitations before Nicky could give his own reply. And there was another hurt in her, one that had nothing to do with the fall — she resented the attention Nicky was receiving at the Brazilian shows. The crowds had chanted his name, and it troubled her particularly that “some women” had joined the chanting. After the crowds had elevated Nicky, she found the words to bring him down: “How do these people know who you are if photos of you hardly ever appear?” O’Meara registered jealousy and reported it as such.
That small scene had the entire marriage jammed inside it, ticking. When the world did not make enough of him, Lynda resented Nicky for being passed by. When it turned and looked at him, she resented the looking. She wanted the money, the honored name, and the place near the lights — all the prizes they tell you success is made of. But every step alarmed her, because it moved him toward people she didn’t know and beyond the circle she could guard. Ambition shoved her forward, fear dragged her back, and she never found a place where the two stopped tearing at her. During the years when Nicky was playing some of the freest and finest music he had in him, that private tug-of-war may have worn him down more than anybody saw. She wanted the world to turn toward him, but feared that once it did, he might turn away from her. Perhaps she had known the ending after all: he did leave her in time, but the world did not steal him — he went on his own.
Lynda, however, had to go back to the States because the doctor Nicky summoned to their hotel room told her she was in no condition to remain on the road, so the tour continued without her. Nicky did not complain. Photographs from the tour show him in quite dazzling female company, his tender hand on rather perfect bikini-wearing frames and smiling into the camera with a sly spark that certainly does not mean nothing.
The Brazilian shows, meanwhile, suffered from the same promoter incompetence as the Argentinian ones, although Nicky bore the country no grudge, telling O’Meara that he would want to return and explore it properly. Six concerts were played, and all six are remembered with wild enthusiasm to this day in writer Márcio de Aquino’s online blog. Many had never known how badly the tour was being handled behind the scenes. They knew only what came from the stage: “Unforgettable”; “One of the best rock shows I’ve ever attended”; “Cocker was impeccable — not a single note out of tune.”
About the Porto Alegre show, the first of the Brazilian run, held on August 16, one man wrote that he had hitchhiked 256 kilometres to get there. The Ginásio Gigantinho, which could hold 15,000 people, was crowded, and everyone was “fascinated to see the guy who rocked Woodstock.” The long road and the crowded hall came together for that witness in one word: Unforgettable.
Cocker had arrived two days before, on August 14, and had gone straight from the airport to the stadium to watch Grêmio play Internacional. Manchete reported on August 20 that he had changed his travel plans to come a day early “to see some good Brazilian football.” He came hungry for Brazil and cried out on landing, “The future of the world lies here!” But that was before his dealings with the people who arranged his tour, so some of Cocker’s first joy was worn away by the end of the week.
About one of the two Maracanãzinho shows in Rio de Janeiro, people remembered abundance: nearly three hours of music, the concert being “anthological,” and Cocker — “magnificent.” Grandeur, however, did not require a full house. Lucas Krempel, formerly a reporter for A Tribuna, recalled on its Blog n’Roll platform in 2020 that one Rio concert drew only 4,000 people into an arena built to hold 30,000. Veja, reporting while the disorder was still fresh, said that one of the shows began at eleven instead of nine, and described local technicians bickering with their American counterparts, sound engineers “trying to get the sorry excuse for local equipment working,” and generally bemoaned the “disorganization which plagues the Brazilian music business.”
Backstage, Nicky drank Brazilian champagne from the bottle, Keys sat “quietly tuning his instrument,” and Cocker kept to himself. It would have been a picture of professional gravity, marred only by Nicky’s position on glassware. Then the band went on. Reporter Chico Nelson put the set at eighty minutes and wrote that it “filled the arena with chilling lightning and thunder.” The light was “virtually non-existent,” and only 4,000 watts passed through a twenty-four-track console, but the musicianship, obviously, supplied its own electricity. In Nelson’s reckoning, the “fury” of Cocker’s performance made the amateur machinery around it cease to matter.
At one of the two São Paulo concerts, in the roofed sports arena Ginásio da Portuguesa, Nicky wore a Groucho Marx T-shirt. Groucho had just died. It was a little thing, and for some reason the shirt stayed in their minds with the music. The larger fact was the crowd — Krempel reported 12,000 people on each of the two nights. Música believed even that number might have been larger had the promoters put Hopkins’s and Keys’s names beside Cocker’s: “Many people who did not know this very important detail didn’t go, thinking of finding a tired Joe Cocker, marked by the time and the road.” That fear belonged to those who stayed home because Cocker, by the magazine’s own account, had been “wonderful.” His voice was “powerful,” his momentum “magical,” and his courage “active.” Time and the road had not used him up.
The final show came on August 22 in Santos, at the Clube de Regatas, a place that has since disappeared. The press counted between 1,500 and 2,000 people and called the attendance “well below expectations.” Still, those who came brought life enough with them, and journalist José Fidalgo described an atmosphere of “incredibly high spirit.”
Hit Pop, the tabloid insert carried by Pop magazine, put Joe’s entire grievance into one headline: “Promoters ruined my Brazilian tour.” Inside, Cocker said that he had refused three offers to play in Brazil before accepting the fourth, only to find the technical arrangements “terrible” and the promotion “ridiculous.” The reporter had seen what he meant on the eleventh floor of São Paulo’s Hotel Jaraguá, where Michael Lang stood at the telephone trying to find flights to Mexico because the Brazilian producers had forgotten to book the tickets.
Nobody will ever know for sure what put the “ridiculous” into that promotion. The Brazilian regime wanted the West in showroom condition: foreign companies, imported goods, the international standing which came from seeming at home in modern Western culture. It wanted the records and the cameras and the foreign names, because these were signs of a prosperous and open country. But rock carried another cargo — it gave people a way to behave which the state did not control, and it gave them a moral language by which the state could be judged. That language went against both the official order and the old conservative nationalism. A foreign record turning in a private room was one listener and a door that could be closed. A concert was another matter — doors gone, and a crowd which could become uncontrollable. Thus the policy: admit the artists selectively, watch them, fence them in. It was sanitation, surveillance, containment — not acceptance. And when, on another tour through another Latin American country, certain gentlemen introduced themselves to Keys as the U.S. government and warned him not to go hunting for anything illicit, they knew exactly what kind of ground he was walking on.
***
The Latin American leg drew rave reviews throughout, with the exception of Pelo’s hatchet job and its much later Mexican cousin: the strange Cocker obituary published by the Mexican edition of Forbes in 2015, shortly after his death and nearly four decades after the concert it purported to remember. According to this posthumous story, Cocker performed three numbers at Mexico City’s Toreo de Cuatro Caminos on 27 August 1977 before being carried from the stage, leaving Hopkins to rescue the evening. But the show survives on tape, and on that tape Cocker sings in his soulfully throughout, while Hopkins plays raucous piano across the entire set. The Forbes piece was followed by a torrent of anger on social media from people who had actually attended in 1977 and remembered a complete — and beautifully played — concert. “The person who wrote this is a liar,” one attendee fumed on Facebook. “The truth is that the concert was scheduled for Saturday and it rained a lot, so it was suspended and rescheduled for the following day, Sunday. … Yes, it was delayed, and yes, Joe got wasted, but the concert was carried out completely and was well-played, because Joe Cocker was accompanied by an excellent band.”
And if a fuming fan doesn’t convince the skeptics, the YouTube recording comes with its own eyewitness marginalia: comments from people who attended and remember the concert as phenomenal. Perhaps the journalist decided that his readers required a vivid anecdote, and that Cocker’s appearance would lend the invention retrospective plausibility. The piece, incidentally, was Cocker’s obituary.
But the actual musical record from August 27 in Mexico City is a type of ecstatic exactitude only a hyper-focused musician can reach. The Mexican audience knew Nicky by name and chanted it. They knew exactly who he was because they spent years pouring obsessively over album credits, following the little avenues of small print towards the unseen musicians who had made the records live. To them to hold a record in their hands was a different experience that to the Americans. Every credit, every letter was studied. Music was poured over intensely — every note. Every note had meaning. Everything had meaning. And Hopkins responded to this recognition with a ferociously wild piano, which was also brushing up against something deeper: this wildness you hear is the only moment we have on tape where Hopkins allows the whole hidden force of himself to break into the music.
Usually, even at its most fiery, Hopkins’ playing retained the blueprint beneath the blaze: internal symmetry, impeccable left-hand grounding, treble notes flashing in upper-register commentary. But on the 27 August tape that order catches fire without coming apart. It’s controlled frenzy, muscular attack, aggressive rhythmic thrust, and thought breaking its boundaries while technique never does. It is the sound of a musician taking flame from the country around him — a censored country kept hungry for rock so long that the hunger passes through the crowd, enters the piano and comes tearing out through Hopkins’s fingers.
Cocker’s shouting, meanwhile, is the necessary frame — singer and pianist are hauling each other toward a zone neither could enter alone. Cocker is yelling because Hopkins is pushing him into the white-hot end of the voice. That voice comes back and knocks another brake out of Hopkins’ hands — answers with a freedom made possible by the very sound he has provoked. And the crowd knows, before it can explain why, that the moment will never happen in the same way again. This is the kind of moment musicians describe as “the trapdoor opening.”
The noise rising from the audience was recognition in its most immediate form. Latin American audiences can follow a performer farther into emotional overdrive than most American or British ones. They meet improvisation head-on and already have cultural vocabulary for catharsis. So when Hopkins hit that level of intensity, they heard a ritual crossing its invisible boundary — something “sacred-mad” entering the performance, the music escaping the decorum of its English origins. The crowd responds like people whose number has suddenly been called — because the music has arrived right now, in the flesh. They recognize possession secured by technical mastery. You are hearing a culturally literate audience witnessing a moment that British and American crowds would struggle to process correctly — Hopkins in ecstatic extremis.
***
There were two roads by which rock entered Latin American life. One ran through high schools, universities, bookshops, film clubs, small magazines and cafes where young people talked about music until the chairs were lifted around them. The records passed from hand to hand and carried a larger, less repressed world. Dylan’s words went into notebooks, the designs of Pink Floyd and Genesis were followed to their ends. Bowie showed that a life assigned by family and church might yet be made over. Cocker carried feeling into cultural capital. They learned the musicians’ names and the engineers’ names and the names of the far cities where the records had been made, and this knowledge entered their clothes, their friendships, and the manner in which they faced respectable life. Hair, jacket, record bag, and manner of standing carried opinions that could not yet be printed.
For the working class, rock was coded as street power and identity loud enough to drown the foreman’s whistle. Here Santana, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, the early Stones and Cocker entered through the chest before they entered through the mind. A boy who owned almost nothing could still be rich in remembered names, disputed pressings, records borrowed and borrowed again, and the ability to hear who played the piano. They read every letter because scarcity teaches you that nothing arriving from the larger musical world should be wasted. The space stayed narrow, but London, New York, Kingston, and Detroit revolved together on the turntable. Monday still came, the rent still wanted paying, but rock told them that their lives were real and that their presence counted. After the shift, hands beat time on the table, which may have been the only review that mattered.
The state didn’t fear either road as much as it feared the place where they met — where students learned street toughness and poor young men found words for feelings, standing together in a crowd. For the length of a concert there was a place the state had not made and could not command. Rock was therefore the ground upon which revolution might learn to walk.
That’s why, after Festival de Avándaro in 1971, often called Mexico's "Woodstock" — where 300,000 young people gathered near Valle de Bravo for music among their own kind, and each one, looking across the crowd, learned how many the others were — the state took fright and effectively banned large-scale rock concerts. And whenever you clamp down on something (especially something that is booming just across the border) you breed intense interest. The young lifted the needle and set it down again. They knew Hopkins from Imagine, from Exile on Main St., from Who’s Next, from dozens of the great records that carried the voice of the decade.
And being in isolation form the corporate machinery of rock, they had the necessary distance from it to clearly see who really counted. No publicist told them which name had more weight than the other, and no manager circled the “important” face in red. Music minus PR is what filtered out the noise and made Hopkins a hero to Mexican crowds. No one told the Mexican listeners that he mattered — they had heard it. They had tested it note by note, record by record, until it became knowledge. And when at last he stood before them, they called his name, for they had known him a long time.
And no, the Latin American crowds were not inventing a free Nicky Hopkins because they needed one. He was a free man enclosed within the immaculate British manners instilled by his Welsh middle-class father. Those manners were a social form, yet many Americans who knew him mistook them for timidity, just as middle-class Americans still mistake politeness for surrender whenever they encounter a Brit. Underneath, Hopkins was stubborn and fearless, and when affronted he released both qualities without pausing to measure the opposition — the size, rank or criminal history of whoever happened to be standing there. On that tour the opposition could be a six-foot ex-con fresh out of prison — an episode Hopkins later described to Peter Rodman in 1994, adding that Bobby Keys had “saved his life.” Or it could be the New Mexico border officials who, according to Keys, received Nicky’s complete and unabridged opinion of them. This was the British contradiction walking around in one narrow body: the country which perfected gentlemen also bred prizefighters and Derek and Clive, and Hopkins had the whole argument compressed inside him: tenderness and wit beside fearlessness and refusal. Good manners right up to the precise second when good manners ceased to be deserved.
You can see that edge flash in that Seven Network’s Sydney Airport interview, when Cocker sends a remark his way and Hopkins turns with a grin which has a knife in it — half-fun, half-menace, exactly the kind of male laughter which says, “I like you, but make the wrong move and I’ll bury you where you stand.” The danger is quick, exact, and pitched at a dosage Cocker understands. This is the Nicky of exquisite piano filigrees, but also the compact hard case whom only a fool would mess with. Derek, of Derek and Clive, supplies the metaphysical footnote: “Everybody needs ball bearings.”
The author extends sincere thanks to Mário Pazcheco of the Do Proprio Bolso archive (www.dopropriobolso.com.br) for generously sharing materials which illuminate Nicky Hopkins' experiences and encounters in Brazil and Argentina.
Links:
Joe Cocker and Nicky Hopkins performing "You Are So Beautiful" live on July 3, 1977 on Keppel Island, filmed by ABC-TV’s Countdown programme, remastered: https://youtu.be/ein-_oCeWeU?si=td8W_Bc23vN6vxip.
Joe Cocker, Nicky Hopkins and the American Standard Band performing "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" live at the Toreo de Cuatro Caminos, Mexico, on August 27, 1977: https://youtu.be/bjn7u51IGxE?si=xbuXzdQox7b9HeP1
Joe Cocker, Nicky Hopkins, Bobby Keys, and the American Standard band live performance at the Toreo de Cuatro Caminos, Mexico, on August 27, 1977: https://youtu.be/_eUxD32H0FM?si=IyUeWTLz8WbOvyO9
Joe Cocker, Nicky Hopkins, and Bobby Keys interviewed on July 8, 1977 at Sydney Airport by Seven Network’s Nightmoves programme: https://youtu.be/OFtCAbQ7avE?si=zcPTKYR6Plthc9hE
Joe Cocker, Nicky Hopkins, and Bobby Keys interviewed by Ian Meldrum on July 3, 1977 on Keppel Island for ABC-TV’s Countdown programme: https://youtu.be/onKWCAqUm_s?si=Ka7yWq4pbr0yNGlZ