The 25 Best Live Rock Recordings - No. 3: Live At Woodstock --OR-- Mad Dogs & Englishmen
No. 3 - Joe Cocker - Live At Woodstock (A&M, 2009) --OR-- Joe Cocker - Mad Dogs & Englishmen (A&M Records, 1970)
Sometimes it takes technology to catch up with the past presenting a better picture than before. Compact discs and streaming enable more music to be released under a given title. Joe Cocker’s Woodstock appearance is as much part of the story of Mad Dogs & Englishmen (A&M Records, 1970) as Leon Russell being the musical director of Cocker’s music revenue and all that came after for both artists. These recordings exist on the continuum of the ascension of the greatest white rhythm & blues singer into global awareness.
Sneaking up on the golden anniversary of The Woodstock Music and Art Fair were the releases of several complete performances by artists appearing at the festival. Where Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack (Cotillion, 1970) and its contemporary supplement, Woodstock Two (Cotillion, 1971) were brief snapshots of the festival, these complete performances provided depth for the artists’ historic repertoires. These releases included Jimi Hendrix: Woodstock (MCA, 1994), The Band – Woodstock The Full 1969 Festival Performance (Leftfield Media, 2018, unofficial release), Creedence Clearwater Revival – Live At Woodstock (Fantasy Records, 2019), and the Sony’s Woodstock Experience series which, in 2009, released the complete performances by Santana, Johnny Winter, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, and Sly & The Family Stone.
Joe Cocker: Live At Woodstock was released by the singer’s label A&M Records in 2009. Cocker’s performance at the festival took an otherwise obscure English singer and jettisoned him into superstardom—Cocker’s performance of the Beatles’ throwaway from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol, 1967), “With A Little Help From My Friends,” is the only concert peer of Jimi Hendrix’s “The Star Spangled Banner” for the festival de facto theme song. It was an integral performance for an entire generation.
Cocker’s back story was this: he performed under the stage name Vance Arnold playing bars in his native Sheffield in the early 1960s. In 1966, Cocker teamed up with keyboardist Chris Stainton forming the Grease Band which came to the attention of producer Denny Cordell (Procol Harum, The Moody Blues) resulting in With A Little Help From My Friends (A&M Records, 1969), immediately followed six months later by Joe Cocker! (A&M Records, 1969). These releases revealed Cocker as the definitive interpreter of the Beatles, covering “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window,” “Something,” and the aforementioned “Friends.”
Cocker came onstage at 2:00 PM, Sunday, August 17, 1969. The sky had been threatening rain but held off until Cocker completed his 13-song, 1-hour, and 25-minute set. Opening ahead of Cocker was the Grease Band playing Ray Charles’ “Rockhouse” and Traffic’s “Who Knows What Tomorrow May Bring” without Cocker. The singer came on stage and steered the band through Bob Dylan‘s “Dear Landlord” and the recital’s only original, “Something’s Coming On,” co-composed by Cocker and Chris Stainton. Honeybus‘s “Do I Still Figure In Your Life?” was next, after which Cocker nailed Dave Mason’s “Feelin’ Alright,” a feature of the singer’s repertoire from then on. Following Bob Dylan’s “Just Like A Woman” came Cocker’s incendiary treatment of The Coasters‘ “Let’s Go Get Stoned.”
The singer then returned to the Ray Charles songbook for a barn-burning performance of “I Don’t Need No Doctor” the lengthiest song in the set. After the last Dylan cover of the set, “I Shall Be Released”, Cocker began to wind up the show to its historic climax with robust performances of “Hitchcock Highway,” “Something To Say,” and the defining song of Woodstock and its generation, the Beatle’s “With A Little Help From My Friends.” Transformative and renewing, this performance outlives most of its peers. Joe Cocker had arrived and turned the refugees from the “Summer of Love” on their collective ears. As if in catharsis, the sky opened and Woodstock’s famous thunderstorm wailed.
But mad dogs and Englishmen / Go out in the midday sun.
—Noël Coward
Mad Dogs & Englishmen is a tale of two principals: Joe Cocker and Leon Russell. This essential cultural event would not have happened without one or the other. The two knew one another before the tour but became symbiotic with one another as the idea of the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour developed.
The tour was a late-in-the-day, hastily organized appendage to a longer tour Cocker was due to complete early in the year in support of his With A Little Help From My Friends and Joe Cocker! albums. Since late 1969, Cocker and his Grease Band, anchored by Chris Stainton, had been engaged in grueling promotional roadwork for the albums. At the end of the tour, Cocker and the Grease band parted on friendly terms, each to pursue other creative avenues.
Cocker arrived in Los Angeles on March 11th, 1970 for well-needed rest after the stressful and decadently excessive tour. While in LA, Cocker intended to spend his time hanging out and assembling a new band. As legend has it, however, on March 12th, Cocker's manager Dee Anthony revealed other plans. Anthony announced that he had booked a seven-week (48 nights in 52 cities) tour to commence in eight days. Anthony further explained that should Cocker not agree to the tour, the Musicians' Union, immigration authorities, and concert promoters involved would be disinclined to allow him back into the States to tour in the future.
Cocker was caught flat-footed, exhausted, and perhaps a bit burned out. He and producer Denny Cordell approached musician-composer-producer Leon Russell for help with Russell meeting the challenge by assembling a band comprised of Grease Band members and a group of talented studio wonks known to Russell through his already lengthy music career. In the bargain, Russell became the tour's musical director, arranger, lead guitarist, pianist, and overall Svengali. After several 10-plus hour rehearsals with his new band (whose numbers were to increase over the life of the tour), Cocker and company hit the studio, recording and releasing the single "The Letter"/"Space Captain,” and then took to the road, kicking off in Detroit, Michigan and finally ending up in San Bernardino, California two months later.
On March 27 and 28, the tour arrived at New York City’s fabled Fillmore East for four shows. These shows were filmed and recorded, becoming the movie and soundtrack documenting the concerts. The soundtrack includes songs from his first two recordings supplemented by several stock standards including, “Honky Tonk Women” and a blues medley consisting of Ray Charles’ “Drown In My Own Tears,” Sam and Dave’s “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby,” and Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.”
This set list was loosely performed but never sloppy music. Because of the newness of the band and the short, concentrated rehearsal schedules, the Mad Dogs and Englishmen possessed a certain fresh and spontaneous character. Leon Russell looms as large as Cocker by playing his fat flinty brand of lead guitar and his Oklahoma dust bowl variety of gospel grand piano (the real thing, not one of those synthesized excuses used today). Bobby Keys (whose later tenor solo on the Rolling Stones' "Brown Sugar" would make him a rock deity) and Jim Price sound like a full horn section. Drummers Jim Keltner and Jim Gordon set the standard for other dual trap set bands such as the Allman Brothers Band and the Doobie Brothers.
But, for all of the greatness and talent of this band, it was THAT voice. That instrument intended to sing these songs at this time. In his mid-twenties at the time, Cocker had a voice as big, deep, and soulful as Guinness Stout and as sweet as fine Port.
Cocker excelled on the head-nod-inducing "Feelin' Alright" and "The Letter." These songs have an insistent drive that causes the listener to bob his/her head to the beat, threatening to induce whiplash or a nosebleed. The blues and slower tunes, such as "Let's Go Get Stoned" and Leonard Cohen’s "Bird on a Wire" and “Space Captain” find Cocker at his most agonizingly sincere. "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window" and "Delta Lady" rock earthquake hard.
Where Cocker was the voice, Leon Russell was the vision. His piano style was so unique that, like Neil Young's voice and guitar, the listener could identify them from a mile away. A show highlight occurred when the two talents combined as a duet on Bob Dylan's "Girl from the North Country." Cocker's mossy brogue meshes provocatively with Russell's Dust Bowl twang perfectly framing Dylan's love ode. It is a little piece of perfection.
Fortunately, the Mad Dogs and Englishmen did not survive for other recordings and tours. This was a one-shot deal to capture history and nail it down. Had Mad Dogs and Englishmen continued their music would have suffered from the demand to better what they had collectively done in the face of greater pressure and substances to ease it. This way, one may listen to this music 60 years later and still hear and feel that warm rush when hearing in a mock French accent expound, “Zee Mad Dogs and Zee Ingleshmen and Jhṓ Cock-cair.” It is a thrill renewed.
During his early success, Joe Cocker was criticized by the media and artists alike for producing mostly covers of other artists’ songs while passing off the musical and stylistic ideas of other artists—particularly black artists—as his own. The same might be said of Vanilla Fudge who made a cottage industry of the practice beginning with their psychedelic cover of the Supremes’ 1966 hit, “You Keep Me Hanging On” (Motown), released on their eponymous debut recording (Atco, 1967) accompanied by the Beatles’ “Ticket To Ride” and “Eleanor Rigby,” Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready,” and the Zombies’ “She’s Not There.” Vanilla Fudge received no such pushback.
What Cocker was doing was no different than what Frank Sinatra had been doing since the 1930s—interpreting other artist’s music, particularly composers and lyricists. Sinatra was considered a “song stylist” and Cocker was, in no way, different. What Cocker grew into was an artist who became the definitive interpreter of other established artists’ compositions, like Johnny Winter with the Rolling Stones (“Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” Let It Bleed,” and “Silver Train”) and Jimi Hendrix with Bob Dylan (“All Along The Watchtower” and “Like A Rolling Stone”).
No artist claimed the material of another with greater robustness and love than Cocker did with the Beatles’ “With A Little Help From My Friends.” He took a Ringo Starr vocal throwaway remaking it in his industrial Sheffield image. He instilled drama and pathos into the Beatles’ little pop ditty, transforming it into a masterpiece. He did the same with “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” while coming up short of this with “Something” and “Let It Be,” though both performances have their charm. No matter, there were many other composers whom he would grace with his interpretations. These include definitive readings of Randy Newman (“Sail Away,” “Guilty,” and “You Can Leave Your Hat On”), Dave Mason (“Feelin’ Alright”), Jackson Browne (“Jamaica Say You Will”), and Leonard Cohen (“Bird On A Wire” 25 years before Jeff Buckley and "Hallelujah").
Cocker was also a superb interpreter of Leon Russell. He could not be considered definitive because Russell’s deeply etched Oklahoma twang was as compelling as Cocker’s Sheffield patois. That said, Cocker got and gave Russell miles of exposure with “Delta Lady,” “Hello, Little Friend,” and “A Song For You.” Later in his career, Cocker recorded the low-hanging fruit that seemed made for a Cocker interpretation: Jim Price’s “I Can Stand A Little Rain,” Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and “Inner City Blues,” and Gary Wright’s “My Love Is Alive.” As fine as they were, Cocker, by this time, was well past those early ‘70s glory days. But those days were enough to establish Cocker as an integral part of popular music. Still, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in its corrosive cynicism as a commercial whore house continues to overlook Cocker’s more than deserved induction. Joe Cocker deserves better than that.
The first record album (long player or LP, that is—what old people put on turntables and played) that I bought with my money was Joe Cocker: With A Little Help From My Friends (A&M, 1969). I purchased this lovely for $2.69 at Osco Drug in The University Mall in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was early 1970. I was 12 years old. I had been hanging out with my cousin that summer. He was five years older than me and had more money and greater access to music. With him, I heard Green River (Fantasy, 1969), American Woman (RCA, 1970), Led Zeppelin II (Atlantic, 1969), Sticky Fingers (Rolling Stones, 1971), Stand! (Epic, 1969) , and yes, With a Little Help from My Friends, when they were fresh out of the shrink-wrap. I recall this fondly and with a lot of excitement. The first live recording I purchased was the two-LP set, Joe Cocker: Mad Dogs and Englishmen (A&M, 1970). I was shocked and stunned by the sound of that big, unruly, shaggy dog of a band. I know how Cameron Crowe felt first hearing the Allman Brothers.
Joe Cocker was the finest white rhythm and blues singer of my lifetime. Widely parodied and generally made fun of because of his spastic stage presence, Cocker introduced legions of white, middle-class teenagers to the music of Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, and Otis Redding. He represented the late British Invasion responsible for spoonfeeding America its cultural treasure, ignored because of racism and institutional prejudice. He and the United Kingdom did the New World a favor by driving a stake into the pernicious heart of Pat Boone’s lily-white WASPY America.
The closest one can come to summing up Mad Dogs and Englishmen is Bill Janowitz musing in his biography of Leon Russell, Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time's Journey Through Rock & Roll History (Hachette Books, 2023) of the atmosphere surrounding the revue’s coda to the performance,
“…Leon as the bandleader counts off multiple reprises of the definitive version of ‘Delta Lady,’ one of the standouts on a consistently excellent album.
When Leon starts the song up again, pounding out the song’s three-chord coda on the piano, the crowd goes nuts. It’s a gospel trick.
The ecstatic Pentecostal frenzy that Leon conjured was just part of the act, like the Holy Trinity shirt. ‘I believe that organized Christianity has done more harm than any other single force I can think of in the world,’ he said in 1971. In response, Ben Fong-Torres asked him, ‘What’s the alternative for that kind of organization and that kind of religion?’
‘Rock and roll,’ Leon answered.”