My first car was a 1966 Cortina (how I wish I still had it) and I’d rigged up one of those portable cassette decks on a makeshift console over the gear-box hump and my techo brother had diverted some taxpayer-funded speakers and bits for an amplifier and bolted them under the dash.

It was just so cool, and I’d drive up and down Langtree Avenue in Mildura like a kid who’d won Tattslotto twice in a fortnight.

Joe Cocker lived in that car. Or so it seemed. In beautiful, distorted mono.

I’d watched the Woodstock movie and thought he was the centrepiece of that entire explosion of mayhem and creativity, and his Mad Dogs and Englishmen cassette was played to final destruction in the Cortina.

But if you’d asked me then if I ever expected to read “Joe Cocker dead at age 70” I’d have backed the entire Cortina against it.

We weren’t wild kids in those days. Not really. Not by some modern examples of the breed. At least we didn’t have the bass up so loud that we bled from the ears like modern Doof-Doof fans.

I doubt my taxpayer-funded speakers would have survived going past two on a modern car sound system.

But his gravel voice must have reverberated across the dark waters of the Murray River during the nights when we’d go down to the river to watch the Submarine Races or look for “luminous” swans. (You had to be there.)

We all knew we’d get by with a little help from our friends, even Macca who remodelled his fine face one night by dropping his motorcycle on the way to Apex Park by the river.

And many of us had girlfriends whom we hoped would write us a nice letter like the one Joe sang about. That would cause us to cry a river.

Many of us (yep, including me) had our “daggy dancing gene” set to Joe Cocker’s spasmed default, wrists cocked back, one hand like a claw up and the other down. It was the way he played air guitar and it was very easy to copy.

So easy that it set muscle memory in play and on the very rare occasion that I’m encouraged to dance, usually after a fair go at the laughing liquid, I can still sense him.

But Joe at 70?

It did not seem possible.

Those of us who loved him followed his music, his performances, and perhaps one or two, but not many, followed his lifestyle of heavy drinking, heroin and a life filled with chaos and confusion.

Thirty would have been pushing it a bit. Forty seemed a bridge too far. But 70? In the end one of his greatest life achievements was a long-ish life.

In case you think I’m overstating his importance, allow me to pass on just one thing: the titles on his Mad Dogs and Englishmen album in 1969.

Side one: Feeling Alright, Bye Bye Blackbird, Change in Louise, Marjorine, Just Like a Woman.

Side Two: Do I Still Figure In Your Life, Sandpaper Cadillac, Don’t Let me Be Misunderstood, With a Little Help From My Friends, I Shall Be Released.

Enough said?