Joe Cocker – You Can Leave Your Hat On

Randy Newman wrote “You Can Leave Your Hat On” as a joke — Joe Cocker turned it into one of the most famous records of the 1980s

Randy Newman never took You Can Leave Your Hat On entirely seriously. He wrote it for his 1972 album Sail Away as something close to a joke — a wry, willfully absurd little character sketch — and later admitted the song sat too low for his own voice, that he could never quite rock it the way it wanted to be rocked. It took another singer, fourteen years later, to find what was hiding inside it. Joe Cocker did exactly that, and turned a throwaway into one of the defining records of his late career.

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Cocker cut it for his 1986 album Cocker, the same record he made while grieving his mother, Madge, who died during the sessions and to whom the album is dedicated. Where Newman had delivered the song in a dry, vaudeville lilt, Cocker attacked it — all gravel and swagger, a blues-rock roar that gave the lyric a heat the original only hinted at. It became the album’s best-known track, reaching No. 35 on the US Mainstream Rock chart and going all the way to No. 1 in Italy.

Its fame was sealed by a film. That same year, Adrian Lyne’s 9½ Weeks used Cocker’s recording in its most talked-about scene, and the song became inseparable from the movie — a piece of 1980s cultural shorthand whether or not people had seen the film itself. It was an unlikely destiny for a Randy Newman satire from 1972, and it turned Cocker’s version into the one almost everyone now knows.

Live with an orchestra, 1992

The performance on this page strips the song back to what Cocker did best: sing. Filmed at Night of the Proms in the Netherlands on October 16, 1992 — the touring series that pairs rock and pop artists with a full orchestra and choir — it puts Cocker in front of a wall of live musicians and lets his voice do the work. By then he was a quarter-century into a career built almost entirely on interpreting other people’s songs, from the Beatles to Randy Newman, and making each one sound like it had been waiting for him. Here, backed by an orchestra, he takes a song its own writer once dismissed as a gag and delivers it like it’s the most serious thing in the world.