How Joe Cocker got busted for dope in Adelaide
IT was a complaint from a sleepless, disgruntled senior Canberra bureaucrat that apparently led to Joe Cocker’s notorious October 1972 bust in Adelaide for marijuana — and deportation from Australia.
IT was a complaint from a disgruntled senior Canberra bureaucrat who was trying to sleep that apparently led to Joe Cocker’s notorious October 1972 bust in Adelaide for marijuana possession and subsequent deportation from Australia.
Legend has it that Sir Alan Carmody, then secretary of the Department of Customs and Excise, had an early plane to catch and rang reception at the former Parkroyal Motel to complain about the ribald party noise and herbal odour coming from several adjoining rooms, to no avail.
The drug squad arrived about 15 minutes later, and Cocker was taken with six others to police headquarters, where they were charged and each fined $200.
Immigration Minister Dr Jim Forbes, who held the South Australian seat of Barker, ordered Cocker out of the country within 48 hours — but not before the singer completed two drunken concerts in Melbourne, where he became involved in a violent brawl with police and security staff at his hotel.
In his book Let The Good Times Roll, bodyguard Bob Jones called Cocker’s arrest a “political bust” and said “he only had enough to roll about two joints”.
Cocker, however, appeared to bear no grudge over the fiasco and even laughed about South Australia’s progressive decriminalisation of the drug on his subsequent visits.
“Talk about a turnaround,” Cocker said here in 2002.
In fact, Cocker developed an unusual love affair with Adelaide — or at least with one of its trademark dishes.
According to the late former Adelaide concert promoter Trevor Hunt, Cocker had a pie floater — a meat pie served in a bowl of pea soup and topped with tomato sauce — from the Victoria Square pie cart every time he visited Adelaide.
Cocker’s good mate, Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, once said the singer “always has shepherd’s pie delivered to his dressing room at gigs … Everywhere the world over except here in Adelaide. Then he has a pie floater sent in from this very kiosk.”
Cocker even tried in vain to track satisfy his cravings for the Adelaide delicacy in other cities.
“Melbourne is not good for pie floaters,’’ he said in 2002. “I walked up and down the main streets looking for something that resembled one but couldn’t find anything.”
After his February 2 concert at Adelaide’s Festival Theatre in 1998, Cocker left his usual nightly order of shepherd’s pie for the road crew and, instead, got himself a couple of pie floaters — although he’d forgot to bring his own HP sauce from England and had to settle for the local tomato variety.
Unfortunately he then had to cancel the next two nights’ performances — his first cancellations in 15 years — due to viral laryngitis.
Before his 2005 tour, Cocker told the Sunday Mail he had been teetotal for four years now and had stopped smoking 15 years earlier.
“It’s funny, but I can’t really handle it when young kids smoke at my gigs now,” he said.
“I used to booze on the road all the time, but I can’t deal with all that, either, as I get older. That’s how bad my hangovers were.”