(4) Joe Cocker, “With a Little Help from My Friends”
got by
(6) Concrete Blonde, “Everybody Knows”
184-179
and will play in the final four

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Pacific time on 3/25/22.

SOMEBODY TO LOVE: KATIE MOULTON ON JOE COCKER’S “WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS”

What would you do if I sang out of tune?

Just imagine how tired he is—let us consider, first, the blessed exhaustion of Ringo Starr. Let us examine the mellow glory of that goodheart with the hangdog eyes. The weariness—not of the boss, the rallyer, the conductor or composer—but of the Steady One. The one who shows up, probably even on time, who sits mostly silent through the squabbles and trips and big bangs of the Beatle-verse. You could be forgiven for thinking he’s not paying attention; sometimes he is definitely not—he’s napping inside a high paisley collar. But as soon as the petty business and fucking-about is concluded, Ringo’s eyes open, and his wrists and ankles kick in right on time. Not flashy, but with a distinctive feel, a push-and-pull. The beat that reminds the others of their united frenzy in Hamburg, the days when they could still be a crack live act. The just-right flourish that assures the others they’re not doing the same old Beatles thing again. He can take a note. He’s been listening, but he doesn’t try to take the reins. He makes it go.
And then—what now?—they want him to sing. Ringo’s the one who rarely steps out for a tea or tantrum, who doesn’t have to record his parts in isolation. It’s true that in 1968, during the long White Album sessions, he’ll quit for three weeks, but for now it’s late March 1967, and Ringo just wants to go to bed.

Would you stand up and walk out on me?

This is the story of the first recording of “With a Little Help from My Friends”: For the final song added to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Paul McCartney and John Lennon had been crafting a song for Ringo as “Billy Shears,” the lead vocalist of the alter-ego band. Ringo had his own fans, and Lennon/McCartney tried to write one song per album for him to sing. Until this point, these Ringo songs had been almost farcical covers, like “Act Naturally,” or whimsical kid-friendly singalongs like “Yellow Submarine.” According to McCartney, “You had to write in a key for Ringo and you had to be a little tongue in cheek.” In a studio session that began at 7 p.m., the band did ten takes of the “With a Little Help” rhythm track before they had a keeper. Nearing dawn, the session presumably wrapped and a long photoshoot day looming, Ringo trudged toward the door. McCartney called out, “Where are you going, Ring?” Then Lennon and George Harrison joined in to cajole him into recording the vocals then and there. All four Beatles stood close together around the microphone, coaching and encouraging Ringo’s performance of the carefully designed five-note melody line. It took a few tries to make the octave-spanning leap to hit and hold that final off-kilter high note, but they got it. At 5:45 a.m., Ringo got to go home.
The next day, the Beatles shot the famous cover for Sgt. Pepper, then returned to the studio at 11 p.m. to record overdubs. Tambourine, guitars. Harrison, Lennon, and McCartney sang in unison the questions of the call-and-response lyrics and added sporadic harmonies. Then McCartney stayed to create the striking, meticulous bass parts, which Rick Rubin would later describe as “lead bass,” a funky through-line that adds a shadow to the straightforward tune. “With a Little Help” may have been truly a group effort; Lennon may have added the wit; and McCartney may have gotten the final say, but it’s Ringo who has used it to close most shows with Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band for the last thirty years—the theme song of a real-life bandleader in the end.

What do I do when my love is away?

When Sgt. Pepper dropped in May 1967, the album immediately belonged to everyone. Within days of its release, Jimi Hendrix opened his London show with a searing and playful distortion of the title track—with McCartney in the crowd. The album’s second song, “With a Little Help,” with its simple style, major key, community-oriented lyrics, and Ringo’s down-to-earth baritone, could be heard as a gesture of inclusivity.
But the album has mostly been perceived as a declaration of artistic separateness—an answer to Pet Sounds, a psychedelic hodgepodge of childhood influences and contemporary values, mixing vaudeville, music hall, Indian classical, tape manipulation, and avant-garde with a warm and innovative touch. It was understood as momentous in The Moment. Folks were hungry to mark the time as a turning point, to dose deeply in the Summer of Love, to see their hopes reflected and projected by pop heroes. Like the counterculture that embraced it, Sgt. Pepper was a concept album that circled back to itself. The truth is, you can never call a thing what it is while you’re still living inside it.

Does it worry you to be alone?

Before and during the Beatles era, there was a different public and artistic relationship to popular music; these songs were part of a shared lexicon, and peers frequently performed and re-recorded the hits. Interpretation and acknowledgement of lineage were common practices across folk, traditional, jazz, and pop standards, but less common in the rise of rock. From our twenty-first-century vantage, we’re so busy praising Beatles’ melodies that we forget that they were always riffing other people’s songs on the long and winding roads to their originals. We’ve accepted the Beatles as pop-music auteurs, and generations of songwriters have interpreted their later discography as a mandate to privilege originals and to take your work—and your pleasure—seriously.

How do I feel by the end of the day?

Friends, thank you for your patience! We’ve arrived now at Joe Cocker: the singer of the song in question, the Sheffield shouter, the performer who was often called the Greatest Rock Interpreter of all time.
But in 1968, the 24-year-old singer from northern England was unknown when he released, only a year after Sgt. Pepper, a cover of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends”—and hit instant success. The song went to the top of the British charts and became the title track of Cocker’s breakthrough album in 1969. (The Beatles never released it as a single.) This version—I hope you’re listening to it now—is a radical rearrangement of the original, made possible with a little help from Cocker’s friends: Jimmy Page (somewhere between the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin) on lead guitar, Procol Harum drummer B.J. Wilson, Tommy Eyre on organ, Chris Stainton on bass, and American soul singers Madeline Bell, Rosetta Hightower and Patrice Holloway lifting up the call-and-response. The arrangement shifts from the Beatles’ plunking 4/4 tempo into a 6/8 waltzing dirge. The song begins with a freak-out: an organ bubbling out of the black swamp of the cosmos, a rapid drum build that erupts into Page’s scorching guitar vamp. All goes quiet.
Then Cocker’s voice steps into the clearing. His voice is deep and dynamic. If it is gravelly, it is like a stone pitched into the dark to measure distance. If it rasps, it is the cracking of a canopy of branches. The voice growls and bellows, yes. But the voice also whispers, considers and colors each syllable, vibrates low and lays itself bare. It is all ache, ecstatic in its desperation. It shakes and blows. It emerges from Cocker’s mouth and leaves him blistered and shredded. Yet the performance seems effortless; the voice can’t seem to help it.
At some point in the performance, you realize that Cocker isn’t playing any instruments. But it feels like he is. Because Cocker emotes as he sings, and he seems to sing with his whole body. He shakes, grimaces, flails to the ends of his fingers.
“What happens when you give Ray Charles LSD?” said Glenn Gass, professor at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. “[Cocker] does what a lot of us do at four in the morning when there’s a song we love: these spasms of emotion, playing air guitar. He took that age-old problem of ‘What do you do if you’re a frontman, and you don’t have a guitar?’ Elvis and Mick Jagger solved it their way, and Cocker just became the music.”
Cocker’s live version is the version. And there are many incredible, extended live performances preserved on video—from trippy black-and-white clips on British and German TV to the iconic rendition on stage at Woodstock. “With a Little Help” is the final song of the Grease Band’s set, and Cocker lets it rip from the first note—playing air guitar, and air drums, and air organ with rigid, intricately moving fingers. He sways and bangs his head and throws his arms around. He’s begging not to be left alone, making any deal he can against a foregone conclusion, and the breakdown is a triumph.

Are you sad because you’re on your own?

Friends, the times when I have felt most connected to other people, but especially to a room full of people, is deep inside a singalong.
It’s true I may have first heard Cocker’s “With a Little Help,” as so many of my generation did, accompanying the opening credits of the TV series The Wonder Years. But more than the grainy faux-home-reel footage, meant to inspire late-80s nostalgia for a suburban dream of what America was like in 1968, when I think “Wonder Years,” I think of the voiceover. I think of Daniel Stern, whose sweet nasal strains I love tremendously. When I think of Daniel Stern, I think of his first film role in 1979, as Cyril in the great movie Breaking Away, all lanky six feet, four inches stretched out against a limestone slab of a decommissioned quarry outside Bloomington, Indiana. Which sends me right back to Bloomington, where I lived some personally momentous wonder years, and where I was surrounded by friends who were always singing.
Karaoke was more than a pastime, a dare—it was a practice. Wednesday nights crammed into the Root Cellar, Thursdays at the Back Door. Nights when the bars weren’t hosting karaoke, we made our own. House parties revolved around a TV screen and a portable karaoke machine with two microphones. When the catalog ran out, we pulled up lyrics and backing tracks on YouTube. Sometimes we sang from the center, moving the coffee table to hit our knees at the climax; sometimes we sang horizontal, deep in the crease of the couch and a night that would last as long as we stayed where we were.
     I know karaoke is polarizing, but I love it. If you step onto that humble stage, grip the mic tightly or tenderly, I will fall in love with you for the duration of your performance. It’s an act of radical vulnerability to stand up alone in a room of strangers and friends and sing—not because you’re musically gifted but because this is what you’ve all agreed to do together. To share what you love not by explaining it, but by carrying it through your body. And in every shared love, there’s shared risk.
I am not a strong singer, but I am a solid mimic. I am not an extrovert. I can hold a spotlight, even around a dinner table, for about three minutes before I get uncomfortable. In my karaoke days, I learned that the best approach was to work against my natural inclinations. Karaoke success lies in the singer’s level of commitment to the performance. That’s why you have to go alone, leaving even your non-singing self back at the table. The fastest way to get committed was to choose a song I knew in my spine—not a song I could comfortably take on, but a song that would take over me.
To paraphrase Mary Oliver, and yes, I believe she was writing about karaoke: The point is not to be good. The point is to go all the way.

Do you need anybody?

We started this thing with the original “With a Little Help from My Friends” because that song is the secret knowledge that Cocker’s cover spins around. Because covers are about convoluted and overlapping lineage, about how songs are passed throat to throat.
The ideal cover does not improve, does not dominate, and does not supplant the original. It may sound like an oxymoron, but the function and success of a cover song is how it uncovers. How it reveals the hidden capacity of a song in a manner that the writer or first performer could neither deliver nor predict. 
Yes, the boldness of Cocker’s rendition is enhanced by the similarities he shared with the Beatles. He was a contemporary—only a couple of years younger than McCartney, a fellow northerner, a young white Brit profoundly influenced by Black American artists and traditions. But the power of this version is in its divergences transposed on our knowledge of the original—the listener’s ability to recognize them as changes even as they are shocked by the new. There’s this first irony: A simple melody written for the Beatles’ most modest singer is transfigured by the possessor of a world-class, powerful, versatile vocal instrument. Secondly, there’s a refutation of irony: McCartney said that songs they wrote for Ringo had to be “tongue-in-cheek,” but Cocker blasts through pretense with a howling, post-verbal earnestness. Where Sgt. Pepper was defined by the Beatles’ technical innovations and studio fussiness, Cocker’s “With a Little Help” is a raw jam, a moment-to-moment vocal reaction to the sound and fury. Less a performance, more a channeling. Cocker’s song is defined by its all-out aliveness.

[screams]

Let this be the part where we howl. Let this essay cradle a call and response. Let it illuminate the spot in the yellow wood where we could have gone in one direction but instead climbed a tree. Let it air-guitar so hard you feel the breeze from these windmills. Let it tap out this tense dance between the individual and the collaboration, the ego and the collective. Let it show its ragged seams. Let it tear out the stitches with its teeth. When we ask questions, let us take this spasm for the only answer that feels right. 

Could it be anybody?

But to hear Joe Cocker, you have to hear Ray Charles. From the very start, Cocker’s singing style was compared to Charles, the pioneer of soul, the American singer, songwriter, and pianist known as “the Genius.” The music critic Henry Pleasants described Charles as a “master of sounds”: “His records disclose an extraordinary assortment of slurs, glides, turns, shrieks, wails, breaks, shouts, screams and hollers, all wonderfully controlled, disciplined by inspired musicianship, and harnessed to ingenious subtleties of harmony, dynamics and rhythm.” Here’s the part that sounds like Charles’ far-flung follower, Cocker:

It is either the singing of a man whose vocabulary is inadequate to express what is in his heart and mind or of one whose feelings are too intense for satisfactory verbal or conventionally melodic articulation. He can't tell it to you. He can't even sing it to you. He has to cry out to you, or shout to you, in tones eloquent of despair—or exaltation. The voice alone, with little assistance from the text or the notated music, conveys the message.

Cocker learned these approaches, learned what might be expressively possible, by listening to Charles. He learned so well that he never stopped being compared to Charles—or rather, never stopped being contrasted with Charles. Because the difference did matter to critics, to listeners—that Cocker was white and young from England, and that Charles was Black (and still young) from the American South. The dissonance was important to the narrative of Cocker as a performer—and perhaps also important to the pleasure in the listening, an added marvel of his talent—particularly, probably, for white rock audiences.
You can’t write about white rock ‘n’ roll stars without talking about the Black artists they emulated and Black traditions they drew from, or about the dynamics that reward cultural co-option. Of course, before they were auteurs, the Beatles cut their teeth playing Chuck Berry tunes and fanboying over Little Richard. They never stopped being excited about rock ‘n’ roll’s progenitors, rumbling through old favorites continuously during writing sessions and rehearsals, a safe and joyful zone they could still enter together. Even at the precipice of their power, when the band invited Billy Preston, their friend from Hamburg, into the Let It Be sessions, they discuss with excitement Preston’s work playing in Ray Charles’s band. Before Cocker sang a McCartney song in the style of Ray Charles, McCartney himself was trying to sing like Ray Charles.
This is to say that the question of appropriation was present in the earliest days of Cocker’s career. The dissonance of Cocker’s figure was important, but so was the agreed-upon perception—to these same presumably white audiences—that his interpretive style was cool, by which we mean acceptable.
You can read early critics contorting themselves to address it. In 1969, Rolling Stone wrote, “Cocker has assimilated the Charles influence to the point where his feeling for what he is singing cannot really be questioned.” In 1970, the New York Times determined, “In Cocker’s case, the obvious relationship his music bears to Charles’s is not offensive.” Critics seemed to be discerning whether his chosen mode was exploitative parody or tribute or honest expression. If Cocker hewed too closely to his influence, how honest could the expression be? It’s an old question, older than Elvis—Can I, a white man, embody the blues? Have I earned the right?—and it’s resulted in horrifying acts of erasure. (Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time.)
These days, we think a lot about how influence can veer into appropriation. But I don’t think Cocker was singing the blues. On the first album, he took the contemporary pop songs of Bob Dylan, Traffic, and the Beatles, as well as a Tin Pan Alley number, and delivered them in an emotive, bluesy style. (One exception is “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” which was first recorded, memorably, by Nina Simone in 1964. In fact, on Simone’s album, To Love Somebody, released the same week as Cocker’s in August 1969, she also covers Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” In that battle of the covers, she won in a landslide.) The only tradition he is laying claim to is mass-market global pop. If we look at his catalog, his two other biggest hits—“You Are So Beautiful” (a slower re-working of Billy Preston’s funky ode to his mother) and “Up Where We Belong” (an inspirational ballad and the theme of 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman)—are pure schmaltz. Like Adele, our current best-selling voice, Cocker’s true allegiance was to sentimental feeling, and he applied his instrument the only way he could.

Would you believe in a love at first sight?

Is it enough to be the singer of other people’s songs, in a voice you half-borrowed?
“As soon as I heard Ray Charles, I stopped listening to anybody else,” Cocker says in a 1987 TV interview.
In the clip, miraculously, Ray Charles is sitting in the chair next to him, laughing.
     In 1960, Charles had his first number-one hit with “Georgia on My Mind.” The song was penned thirty years earlier by two young white men in Bloomington, Indiana: Hoagy Carmichael, the pianist/composer who would write many standards of the so-called Great American Songbook, and Stuart Gorrell, who became a banker after graduation and never wrote another lyric in his life. Charles didn’t write it, no, but that song, once he had hold of it, truly belonged to him.
In that ’87 interview, Charles doesn’t brush aside the comparisons—or what one artist owes to another.
“There’s a difference,” Charles says, “when someone tries to emulate you and it’s a poor copy. It’s another thing when you hear the person and his soul…Like a good writer who reads Hemingway; he doesn’t try to be Hemingway, he takes from him the good thing that he can use for himself. [Cocker] has taken some of the things that he’s heard from me over the years and put himself into it and made it fresh.”
Somehow, over the decades, the two musicians—dynamos of voice and interpretation—got to know each other, shared stages, tracing and resting on the webs that connected them. “When we sing together,” Charles once said, “it’s almost like we’re an extension of each other.”
I don’t know if Charles’s endorsement is a convenient reason to accept Cocker’s music and performance without further interrogation. There are questions we have to live with a while, that keep opening up inside us. But I think Cocker honored his influences and approached his interpretations with reverence and, critically, an awareness of what he was and was not.

What do you see when you turn out the light?

I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine

That’s the center of the original song, the only lyrics that Lennon took credit for, the year he died. And those are the lines that Cocker fucks with the most. He sings it differently nearly every time:

I can’t tell you, but it sure feels like mine

I can’t see nothin’, nothin’, but it suuuuuuure feels right

I don’t see too much…but it suuure, it sure feels like mine

Recently, regarding the book of McCartney’s lyrics he edited, the poet Paul Muldoon said something like: poetry strives for a kind of perfection, it has to bring its own music—but lyrics leave a lot of space. This question, “What do you see when you turn out the light,” is the only lyric here where a yes or no won’t do, and where the stakes are high and lonesome, the only hint of unraveling darkness in the original. In those lines, and the way the drum hits the snare so hard at the end of the phrase, the swell of the backup chorus rushing to bolster the singer, Cocker uncovers desolation and consolation entwined.
Cocker’s producer Denny Cordell once described the singer like this: “Joe is a strange guy; he has no ambitions at all. He just likes to rock ‘n’ roll, and he has no dreams about how he could do it, because he could rock ‘n’ roll any way he wants to.”
I disagree; I think you have to have ambition to make your debut singing a song by the biggest band of all time in a style learned from one of the greatest singers of all time. But Cocker confounds because he never aspired to be the rock auteur; he was always, truly the Rock Interpreter. He asked questions of a piece of music, even if that question was, What is here for me to find? The world would be worse if he had never sung “With a Little Help from My Friends,” if he’d never wrestled its tensions to the surface. 
So here are some more questions, these calls we’ve been sidestepping:
What is the point of all our close looking and hard listening?
What will it take for you to stay with us to the end, or until we go to sleep, or until we shuffle off this small stage?

Don’t you know I’m gonna make it with my friends?

Friends, you too must believe in the power of interpretation—to be here at the end with me. But ultimately, the Interpreter must remain a little on the outside. We know this. For all our analysis and our craft, we are separated from that first creative impulse. But we, the singers of others’ songs, the writers writing to other people’s music, we gotta believe that something meaningful can be made in this in-between. In our flailing hands, in a gesture made visceral, in praising the vast web of songs passed throat to throat. We have to believe it’s worthy, sometimes, to muster our small skill and limited air supply, and let what moves us move us.

Katie Moulton's rock-obsessed memoir Dead Dad Club is forthcoming from Audible in 2022. Her writing about music & culture has appeared in The Believer, Oxford American, No Depression, Consequence, Sewanee Review, The Rumpus, Village Voice, and other places. After seeing Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band in elementary school, Katie developed a deeper appreciation for the drummer, though he remains her least favorite Beatle.

SRH (SERIOUSLY REVOLUTIONARY HANDBILL!): KARLEIGH FRISBIE BROGAN ON CONCRETE BLONDE’S COVER OF LEONARD COHEN’S “EVERYBODY KNOWS” 

Erica and I pretend-smoked beneath the UA 5 theater’s marquee. It was a warm night, typical for September, but I wore the noisy, stiff leather jacket anyway. It was glossy black and smelled faintly of cigs and Exclamation—left behind at my dad’s apartment by one of his dates. It made me feel badass, like I was the Samantha Mathis character. The “eat-me beat-me lady.” Erica called it my Michael Jackson jacket, which annoyed me because it was way more goth than King of Pop. We wore the matching dog tag necklaces we got at Contempo, almost-black lipstick, and lots of crushed velvet and stretchy lace. We were fourteen-almost-fifteen, new best friends in a new decade. The year before: Germans cheered atop a graffitied wall, Dana Carvey became president, ducks and sea otters got smothered in oil, and I crouched with my family under the kitchen table as our house rattled and swayed in the Loma Prieta earthquake.
The movie we were about to see was Allan Moyle’s 1990 teen drama, Pump Up the Volume. It would be my second time, Erica’s fourth. We were totally obsessed, went to see it tons that fall, even followed it to the cheapo theater one town over. Erica snuck a bulky tape recorder that required a week’s allowance-worth of D batteries in under her coat and recorded the entire thing so we could listen to it as we fell asleep at night, memorizing Hard Harry’s pervy catchphrases. Also on cassette: the soundtrack I took with me everywhere. I bought it at Wherehouse Records with the ten-dollar bill I got in a trick-or-treat card from Grams. The nubs on its case were already busted off, its magnetic tape stretched thin from so much play. Though its cover art was budget—featuring a grainy still of Christian Slater’s Mark Hunter in purple monochrome—its content was invaluable, an abridged primer on cool. But thirty-some-odd years later I realize it wasn’t the Pixies or Sonic Youth tracks, wasn’t Bad Brains doing MC5, the early Soundgarden, or the solo Peter Murphy, nor was it the Eazy-E g-funk protégés Above the Law sampling James Brown by way of Vicki Anderson’s Black feminist anthem “The Message from the Soul Sisters.” No. It was Concrete Blonde’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows” that altered me.
The first time I heard it, I was confused. Pissed, even. I’d expected the version I knew from the film—the preset drum-machine beat, the creepy synthesized strings, the seemingly out-of-place Spanish guitar and, mostly, Cohen’s startling voice, so deep and sure, chilled with a smiling cynicism. This one had a different tune, tempo, and singer. Instead of giving me goosebumps it gave me anxiety.
At the time, I was only sort-of familiar with Concrete Blonde. Their hit, “Joey,” was gateway, broke me from bubblegum. It was Johnette Napolitano’s husky rasp, her matte black hair, bangs that voided her eyes and made her mouth big. It was that she didn’t have her own drugstore perfume, didn’t perform in front of Miller’s Outpost. The video played at least twice a day after school, and I watched, rapt. For all the song’s impact, however, it had been the only one of theirs I knew. Maybe I was a few grades too young. They were the kind of band that kids my age with older sisters were into. The same girls who listened to Sinéad O’Connor and R.E.M. when I was still Debbie Gibson and Tiffany all the way.
Concrete Blonde’s sound was a little Anne Rice-novel goth, a little LA sleaze rock, a little Brigade-era Heart. The production value was clean and commercial, even on their decidedly more punk tracks. It was precisely because of their blend of pop accessibility and underground cachet that they were commissioned to cover Cohen’s song for Pump Up the Volume. Moyle wanted the original but New Line Cinema’s Bob Shaye thought it too gloomy and old-man. In the end, both got their way: The Cohen original plays in diegesis throughout the film, Hard Harry’s theme song with which he opens his nightly broadcast; the chorus of Concrete Blonde’s cover is used at the film’s climax—a mere 26 seconds toward the end of the film. It’s a variation on a theme, the octave-up belt from a big-lunged contralto as the hero and his love interest drive off, clumsily, into the night.
In this version, guitars shimmer, emitting the fading warmth of a sunset—a desert sunset, specifically, the kind that yields to windy, bitter, starlit cold. Though the beat is slower—exactly the pace of walking across campus to fifth-period French, head down, hair in eyes—Napolitano burns through the verses more quickly, as if to avoid sitting with their implications. Unlike the detached, disheartened, and droll vocals of Cohen, Napolitano’s are impassioned and mournful. There’s just the slightest hint of tremble in her voice—from exhaustion, it seems. Or fear. Or maybe the vice with which to cope.  
The lyrics were written by Cohen and his back-up singer-cum-artistic collaborator, Sharon Robinson. The message: everything’s fucked. The song’s a dark and defeatist commentary on the status quo, referencing class struggle, racism, corruption, infidelity, and plague. “The poor stay poor and the rich get rich, that’s how it goes,” is how it goes.
At 15, I didn’t get all the innuendos. I frequently misheard them, collapsing their meanings. It’s dice that are loaded, not days—though mine most certainly were, with homework and chores and the preps giving me dirty looks. I knew the song was bleak, but I couldn’t yet map it onto the safe, suburban, wall-to-wall carpeted world I was familiar with. Teachers sucked and so did parents (except for Erica’s). Cops were pigs who’d put me in jail for the pinch of schwag in my backpack. Politicians wore powdered wigs and had wooden teeth. That’s really all I knew.
The song, either version, worked perfectly with the movie’s plot. Super quick: it’s about a quiet teenage loner, the aforementioned Mark Hunter, who, by night, adopts the alter-ego of Happy Harry Hard-on (a.k.a. Hard Harry)—a disgruntled, sardonic insurrectionist, a horny, onanist Ann Landers, and a deejay of very cool music—and airs a pirate radio station from the basement of his parents’ home. His message, like the song itself, is that everything’s fucked. “Everything’s polluted,” he says, ripping off the polite-maniacal delivery of Jack Nicholson, “the environment, the government, the schools, you name it.” His censure of authority, establishment, guidance counselors, even his dad are general and sweeping—bumper sticker imperatives that foment unrest and excitement in every puby adolescent in his fictional Arizona burb, uniting jocks and stoners and punks and princesses alike. Teens revolt, school admin and city-council-meeting moms quake in their footwear, feds get involved, corruption is exposed, sexy scene, chase scene, call to action, end.
The movie’s driving concern is freedom of speech. Happy Harry Hard-on’s shorthand for the First Amendment is “talk hard,” and his devotees spray paint it all over campus. At the end of the film, right after Hard Harry is hauled away by police and just before the credits roll, we hear a sound collage of young voices announcing their call letters and dial designations into the ether. It’s the promise of a polyvocal, youth-driven future.
I didn’t look too hard at the character of Mark/ Harry back then. I thought he was hot with his widow’s peak, his bowling shirt, and his cigarette. His oh-so-deep-sounding monologue that ribboned through the film’s hour and forty-five. I failed to see his (possibly unintended) hypocrisies. Unable to connect with people in real life, Mark dons a persona and uses technology to reach out to a worshipping audience. But, just like his penchant to compulsively jack off (also just an act), his radio show is, to him anyway, masturbatory. He has convinced himself that he’s only screaming into the void, eschewing the vulnerability and accountability that come with actual human relationships. When he sees evidence that swaths of people have been impacted by his words, he’s made uncomfortable. At one point, after he implores his listeners to “go crazy,” and they, indeed, do, he regrets his words, acting as if he never meant them. “This is out of control,” he says, cowering behind a pillar. “This whole thing is making me ill.”
It’s ironic—or genius—that Mark/Harry, though furious with the status quo and successful in upsetting it to some degree, when confronted with his influence, wishes, if only momentarily, to maintain said status quo. To be yet another verse in his beloved song. He had underestimated the power of his voice, the disruption and unfamiliarity it was capable of ushering in, this voice that no longer needed him at all. 
His cat-got tongue, his swimmy tum, not evidence of poseurdom but of, by my read, fear. It’s possible he knew his identity would soon be revealed and, socially awkward shadow dweller that he was, was afraid to be seen. I’m reminded of a 1977 Audre Lorde essay: She explains our reasons for staying silent when we need to speak out are varied—fearing everything from pillory to glory. “But most of all, I think,” she says, “we fear the visibility.”
When I watched the movie those fall nights long ago, amidst the smell of fake butter and real leather I, too, wanted to rise up and vandalize school property, blow up my kitchen, kick over a garbage can, talk hard. I was fed up! With what, I’m not entirely sure. But it wasn’t hormones. Or a fad. How I hated those explain-aways. I was a teenager who, like all teenagers, was experiencing the cold-water shock of having my boat, the one I had been in since birth, the one I trusted to keep me safe, tip over again and again. This was called learning. I was not yet at the place where the grown-ups were, back inside it, afraid to rock it, as the expression goes. I had integrated the woes of the world osmotically, inherited their memories genetically, could not articulate what they were exactly, but felt them banging inside of me. This was before I was taught to forget my anger, before I learned to sit still in my boat. Itchy and optimistic, Erica and I decided to start an underground paper. We named it SRH, our high school’s monogram and a nod to HHH—Hubert Humphrey High, the fictional school that loaned Happy Harry Hard-on his initials. I won’t disclose what we made SRH stand for because it’s way too cringey. I’ll admit we consulted a thesaurus.
Our paper was a tabloid-sized sheet, double-sided, handwritten, printed at Kinko’s with the money I had collected for cheer squad candy bar sales. Screw cheer. The paper criticized society, pointed out injustices, mocked the popular kids, gossiped about teachers, and dog-whistled references to cool music and drugs. We hoped to witness students passing around our anonymous broadside, mouths agape. To hear warnings over the morning bulletin that its authors, if found, would face suspension, expulsion even. To start some kind of revolution. I remember arriving on campus before zero period to distribute the paper. We left copies on desks, shoved them into locker vents, piled them atop The Santa Rosan. Then waited. In Mr. Hegerhorst’s geometry class, kids brushed them onto the floor with nary a glance. After school, a few blew around in the quad, covered in footprints. A stack of them looked up at me from a garbage can. It wasn’t until the next day I finally saw someone reading it. A quiet loner whose name I didn’t know. A Mark Hunter. I smiled. Just one person was all I needed to see.
Truth was, that no one gave two figs about our paper only supported the song’s sentiment. See? I thought then. Shit’s fucked. And the song isn’t just saying that shit’s fucked. It’s saying that shit’s fucked despite how it appears or what we tell ourselves. What looks fair is rigged. What seems stable is precarious. What claims to be progress is, often, just maintenance. Emancipation, Brown v. Board, the civil rights act—but still, as the song goes: “Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows.”
I’d pop my tape into my turquoise boombox, scrub it back to the beginning, and plop onto my top-bunk bed in the room I shared with two sisters, a damp room with pink walls covered in heavy-metal posters and black mold. That first crack of the snare and glimmer of the guitar became the sound of my ache. I let Johnette’s voice superimpose my own, let it speak for me in ways I didn’t yet have the courage to. The Cohen version would never have worked for me. Both songs may have been saying the same exact thing but their emotional content differed. One was nihilistic, closed off, and Kelvin-cold, the other doleful yet resilient and expansive. One made me denounce God and the other made yearn for him. One made me want to give up while the other made me want to give.
I recently watched a live recording of Johnette performing “Everybody Knows” for MTV’s 120 Minutes in 1997. She’s accompanied by a single acoustic guitar. Floats in a long, pale dress. Her eyes switch from spooked to somber and back again. Her voice is somehow both wispy and rich, tough and frail. She’s old by music industry standards—just turned forty—but still displays the bruises of youth. Still moans like it’s her first hurt.
And here I am now, almost seven years older than she is in the recording. I, too, feel new in many ways. I am learning that silence is complicity. Is violence. Is not a virtue. Not golden. I am learning that I can learn from young people, from whence their rebellion and activism meets. I am learning not to sit still in my boat no matter how tired I am. No matter how nice or how crappy my boat is. It seems we’re at a time when things couldn’t possibly be more fucked. I won’t even list examples of the fuckery because it just makes me, and you, even more tired. Because everybody knows already.

Karleigh Frisbie Brogan is a writer from Sonoma County, California who currently resides in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has been published in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Huffington Post, Entropy, Nailed, Lana Turner, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Kithe and the wine person at your favorite store. Find her writing at karleighfrisbiebrogan.com and on Twitter @FrisbieKarleigh.