"Smokin' Jokin', Doing Coke With Leon

I saw Joe Cocker this weekend, along with the Steve Miller Band. Both were great and my wife mentioned how much better Cocker seems to be physically, with, you know, his muscular dystrophy and all. She asked me to look it up when we got home and when I did I have to admit, fuck, I always thought Joe had muscular dystrophy myself. Of course, Joe has no physical problem at all, that's just the way he moves on stage.

I think I got the idea Cocker had MD from the National Lampoon Lemmings album, which was the first place I ever heard John Belushi do his Joe Cocker impression. John made it famous on Saturday Night Live, where he flopped around on the stage like a fish out of water pouring beer all over his body and generally looking like a fool, but also singing a fairly good Joe Cocker. As Ccocker himself remembers...

During the time of "You Are So Beautiful," I was working at Village Recorders, in Los Angeles, and someone comes into the studio and says, "Joe, we've got this video to show you that you're not going to like." I don't know how long Saturday Night Live had been on the air, because I never watched much TV, but when I saw this video of John Belushi doing me being spastic and pouring beer, I became hysterical.

Everyone else said, "Joe, you're not supposed to find this amusing. You're supposed to find this gross and inoffensive."

I said, "Oh, come on. You can't not laugh at this." I didn't even know who Belushi was.

Moving my hand around is subconscious with me. A lot of the time I'm more or less conducting the band, just keeping a feel. I don't know why I do it. It's just one of those things.

I clearly remember the night this aired. I was living in my first rented house and my friend Baron Mrkva was over and we were pretty high. We were sitting on this couch in the TV room and when Belushi started flopping on the floor we both lost it, laughing so hard we fell literally off the couch onto the floor and rolled around holding our stomachs, which were aching from how hard we were laughing.

I can't embed a video of that performance, but the one below is the earlier one from Lemmings. Lemmings was a National Lampoon stage show, a take on Woodstock, the Woodchuck Festival of Peace, Love and Death, where hippies got together for a weekend of music, drugs, sex and suicide. The main actors/writers/performers were a bunch of unknows: John Belushi, Chevy Chase and Christopher Guest.

Listen to Lonely at the Bottom where Belushi sings, "We were makin' musical history. Now I'm workin' for muscular dystrophy."