Original subtitles

What do you like about Joe, do you have any extra tickets? You'd like to go,

too. Let me go in and see what I can do.

I'm in it. Who's Ruth?

Me, Laura, and Barbara.

Is that a ticket?

Everybody join hands with a long circle real quick.

Grab one hand of the sound man there. Somebody else grab him. Touch

the cameraman.

Touch the light, man.

Let's have complete silence for the tape. It'll never happen in the film.

You better shut the door.

That's the truth. The sound's coming from stage. It's going to be hard.

What are we talking about?

We can feel the energy in the room.

That's not bad for the Friday. Yes, it is. Say it again. Not bad for Good

Friday.

I mean, right there.

I will follow.

Close.

Give me Peggy for an airplane.

Oh, I ain't got time to take no fat thing.

Oh, my long knees are gone.

I'm coming home.

Baby, rob me of my day.

Don't care. Mad Dog from Englishman.

Well, the first word that comes to my mind.

is Circus.

But, you know, before Circus, am I allowed to swear?

It was a great fucking band.

This was a band full of A-list studio guys.

We had a star in Joe Cocker.

You have Leon, who's one of the most in-demand band leaders and producers and

artists. And then you had other stars like Claudia and Rita.

You know, it's the cosmic American music scene. You throw a big hunk of best of

the drug culture or before it turns really bleak, and that's a potent

cocktail. It was really an event, a tour, and ultimately a film that

summarized what was possible coming out of the 60s.

New community, new lessons in American soul, blues, R&B.

I've watched that movie 50 times all the way through my life.

It is one of the best documents about how tour feels.

They really reimagined a lot of really great tunes. A lot of times it became

kind of the version.

It launched several careers.

This incredibly talented pool of people stumbled on in the course of this tour.

Other people went and did on purpose later.

The time and the place and what they created,

it was very idealistic.

They made great music. They made lasting music.

I think it's important that people remember that.

It was like a shooting star.

If you saw it, great.

If you didn't, it's gone.

Well, the concept of Lock-In Festival is to get a band and then pair you with

somebody.

They asked us who we would want to play with, and we threw out a short list, but

Joe Cocker would be awesome.

Well, we had been talking to Joe about him coming out and playing some of these

tunes with our band, and then he got sick and passed. That's when we started

thinking about maybe doing the Mad Dogs tribute.

And as soon as you said that you would do it, then the floodgates opened.

Everybody started coming out of the woodwork.

It's just amazing that everybody really wanted to do this.

Chris Stanton.

You old old kid, how are you doing? I haven't seen you in 100 years.

I know, 45.

It's like a high school reunion made up for all those that I didn't go to.

Exactly.

We had Rita Coolidge reach out and Claudia Lanier came out. You had the

Moore brothers, Matthew Moore and Daniel Moore, you know, new generation with the

old generation coming together.

Yes, there it is. Good to see you.

Talking black people.

We had Pamela Poland and Bobby Jones in the choir, Bobby Torres on percussion,

Chuck Blackwell on drums, then Chris Dayton on keys.

The first thing was we tried to find somebody to sing all the...

Joe tunes, it's just an impossible task.

He's too singular, and he's too big of a presence to do that with. So we had

Doyle Bramhall, of course Dave Mason, who wrote Feeling Alright.

I mean, obviously somebody like Chris Robinson, you see him and hear him, and

you're like, yeah, he's listened to Joe Cocker before.

You know, that tour, it was really important to a lot of people, and maybe

it didn't get its due when it happened the first time, but it would be nice to

see some of that recognition from the audience.

I love you all. It's just so incredible.

I never dreamt in my wildest dreams that we would all be able to come back

together, some of us, come back together and do this again.

There was never a tour like this tour before when people came together.

Literally, you know, at the last minute, somebody called it an emergency tour, an

emergency band.

This tour changed all of our lives.

We will never recover.

It never left us. And it has never left us. It's never left us. We're not over

this thing.

In 1969, Joe Cocker, you're hearing a guy who is

clearly English, but has taken so much of American R&B and

pushed it through this working class Sheffield, England

mentality and spirit.

And he's singing the blues like he really knows it. Something's coming on.

He blew it up at Woodstock.

Now he's a rock star.

And his band splits on him.

Mad Dog in Englishman was basically an accident.

For some reason, we found out those...

In Los Angeles, at a loose end.

We were supposed to do another tour.

And the manager, DeAnthony, said, you know, you've got to get yourself a band

together and do the tour.

So, Leon Russell.

He said, oh, I can deal with this.

Same genre of American soul.

same management, Denny Cordell, the connections are all there.

Denny and Joe showed up on my front porch, and he said, Joe's got 50 shows

booked, and he fired his band in England.

Musicians Union said that they would never let him work in America again if

he didn't play.

Can you help us?

And I said, well, man, I don't know anything if it's not musicians that are

out of work.

I didn't know who Leon was, but a record came out called Delaney and Bunny, the

original and genuine, and I thought, who is that piano player on there?

And then I found later that it was Leon Russell.

He played on a lot of things, because he was part of what they call the wrecking

crew. It was a big bunch of musicians in L.A., and they did practically every hit

record that came out in the 60s.

Basically, Leon Russell called everybody in his Rolodex. He just gathers all of

these people together from experiences that they have all previously shared.

Bobby Keys on saxophone, Rita Coolidge is there.

When I got the call, I knew it was for Joe, and I had met Joe at Leon's house

when he was recording. Of course, I knew Leon. I knew so many other people who

were jumping on board, and the phones were ringing, you know, and we're all

talking to each other. Are you going on tour?

You know, Carl Radel and Jim Gordon, Jim Keltner.

He knew all of the musicians and knew them to be not only the great players,

but they were just the cool people.

We had just come off of a tour, and I would say almost all of Delaney Body's

band ended up in Mad Dogs in England.

Delaney and Bonnie, they were a great white soul duo. They were a rare and

wonderful thing.

As soon as they started bringing in musicians, some of the stars get

interested. You know, Eric Clapton plays with them.

George Harrison decides, hey, you know, this is a band I would rather play with

than the Beatles. And they made an incredible live album.

Delaney and Bonnie and friends on tour with Eric Clapton.

Man, I played that thing to death.

Our brand new record was just recorded with Eric Watson singing.

This one aside, this new single is called I Don't Know What.

You say you want everything.

When we played music with Delaney and Bonnie, it was very much a family and it

was very cohesive.

We came from the same love of southern music, which kind of had gospel roots

and kind of what I call roots music.

They all connected musically in a very profound way.

You know, a lot of those people went off to work with Eric Clapton.

They all became Derek and the Dominoes.

But first they had to go on tour as mad dogs in England.

And this is all very incestuous.

But it's the kind of incest that kind of makes sense.

It really took place in about three days.

First day, there was about 20 there. Second day, there was about 50 there.

The third day, there was about 100 there. I was making potato salad and

galvanized trash cans and shit.

I thought that I wanted everybody to eat the same thing.

There was this guy named Graham Parsons.

He says, well, you know, I've got some friends just across the hall at the

soundstage. They're getting ready to go on tour.

A friend of mine said, hey, I've got some friends rehearsing on the A&M

soundstage tonight.

Let's go listen. It'll be fun.

Leon came up to me and he said, I used to come and see you perform at the

Troubadour. You've got to come on tour with us.

I said, I can't go unless my dog can go.

And he's like, no problem.

It was

crazy. There was dogs and kids and however many was in the choir, two

drummers, two keyboards.

Well, it turns out that big bands are easier to prepare in a short time than

small bands.

You know, if you want to do a quartet, it's difficult to find people like the

Beatles.

They used to have these things in Los Angeles called love-ins.

You know, you'd be four blocks away, and hear all this drumming and stuff going

on. It sounded pretty good. The closer you get to it, you can see it was

thousands of people beating on beer cans and garbage cans and all that stuff,

averaged out into quite a good little groove.

So that's where I learned about that.

It was Leon, basically.

He hears everything.

And he did all the arrangements, the horns and the choir and everything.

It was

sometimes like, who's the boss here?

Because Joe is definitely the band leader, so it's a bit tough.

But it did work

I

remember

meeting at the lot, you know, we all showed up with our bags

And I was amazed at how many people there were.

Looking around, I'm going, some of these people are not in the band.

Everybody just climbed on board.

I mean,

there were many bands. We just didn't get along.

But that wasn't this week.

I think in general, we all really cared about each other. We

promised

ourselves we were going

to catch up when we got here.

I'm trying to think what the last session was that I did with her.

I think it may have been, Stephen Stills, love the one you're with.

So we haven't really spoken since then.

Coming into this group, Susan and Derek, obviously, are fans of

mad dogs and englishman tour and not only is she's like my favorite singer

she and bonnie bramlett i mean she's right up there with bonnie in my book

she's just amazing and they're just so sweet and the band is so unbelievably

tight it's like being right back on mad dogs and englishman stage with the horn

section and all the singers it's like better though

I got to say, when Derek first told me he and Susan were putting this big band

together in one of our interviews, I was really intrigued.

I'm David Frick, and it is my pleasure and privilege to welcome...

Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, the founders of the Tedeschi Trucks Band.

Every time I see the Tedeschi Trucks Band, I'm always marveling at how much

room there is in the music for so many people and so many different voices.

Derek was already playing in a fairly sizable ensemble of his own, the Derek

Trucks Band and, of course, the Allman Brothers.

Two lead guitars, two drummers, percussion.

A lot of texture, a lot of possibility in there.

The Allman Brothers, that's huge for both of you. Derek is family.

Yeah. You know, your uncle is which truck?

You know, Susan, you sang with them. You've been part of that family. And I

guess you toured with them for a while before you... Actually, that's how Derek

and I met. My band was opening in the summer of 1999.

Derek and Susan are taking American music in all of its facets and all of

its glories, putting it together and presenting it in a united context of

family with a whole...

new generation of friends who share their roots and share the same love for

these songs.

This is a big band with purpose, a big band with its own

kind of fluid solidarity.

And it's also, I think, uniquely American.

Cocker, Mad Dog's material.

The same mentality.

Bringing people together who have mutual interests,

contrasting voices, and finding a way to thread them together into something

that is bigger than the individual parts, as big as that is.

This is going to be fun. Like Six Flags.

There's this great quote, talking about music is like dancing about

architecture.

So it's very hard to describe what that experience was.

But when the first song started, and it was the whole band, and we were singing,

and it was good, and we were good, and we were doing our part.

And it blended well.

I don't think there are any words to describe that.

While we have a human to breathe.

Then I know that it's time you moved on.

center. I felt all those years of myself. I felt the me then self of 45

years ago and the me now self and all of the music that's happened between that

has allowed me to be the singer that I still am.

It was familiar.

It was amazingly familiar considering how long it's been.

I just felt like, oh yeah, I can do this.

And I looked over at Claudia, and it was like, oh, yeah, she can do this.

It was

pure nostalgia

for me.

Tedeschi Drops, they're really a great band.

I am just so honored to have been part of their idea of what Mad Dog

was all about.

We're going to introduce you to Claudia Lanier now.

Most of us in the original Mad Dog tour were sidemen.

We backed up someone else.

My first singing job on stage was with Ike Turner.

I auditioned for Ike Turner, and the next night I was on a plane to Houston,

Texas.

So I had to learn all the routines, all the oohs and the ahhs.

I bumped into a few people on stage that first night, but after that, I... Kind

of got it.

Mad Dog

was totally different.

Nobody sat around mowing, getting chafed elbows, trying to figure out, what are

we going to do?

How are we going to do? It wasn't like that.

Somebody just kicked it off, just kicked off the song.

And everybody found their note, everybody found their part.

The guitar players and bass players found their riffs.

The drum fills were there.

And we'd all just fallen together.

that you're sorry. And you prove that you do.

Come on, you five-year-old.

Five-year-old.

because he was otherworldly.

He had these clear, clear blue eyes and the sweetest heart of anybody I

think I ever knew.

And, you know, I used to get to play the gramophone.

And what I used to do was sing in front of the mirror with a tennis racket, you

know. How old were you when you were little? About 12.

I used to go to his house and he would play me Ray Charles and read the

Franklin. Every soul record you've ever heard, it was an instruction for me.

If you think all great soul singers come from the Mississippi Delta, think again,

because here's the pride of Sheffield, England, Joe Cocker and the Grease Band.

I couldn't believe how good his voice was. It's a fantastic voice. It's the

best singer I've ever worked with.

We did years of sort of slugging around doing gigs all over the place.

I was going to RCA School of Electronics when I once saw Joe, and he had no conga

players.

I asked if I could sit in.

She said, sure.

Packed up mommy drums and dropped out of school.

And then we went.

across the United States and wound up playing Woodstock.

I was Puerto Rican in New York.

My belief was I was inferior.

And being that Joe accepted me so readily, it gave me more independence,

gave me more confidence, you know.

I learned a lot from him.

Changed my attitude totally, you know. Changed everything about me.

Joke was

probably the most spiritual person I think I've ever met.

The movement, his choice of songs, his execution, his love of...

R&B music or black music. It was truth for him.

A lot of people thought he was literally epileptic.

The music just shot through him like a lightning bolt.

And he couldn't be still.

To me, like, to pre-plan anything is part of your own ego.

So fuck all that, you know.

You've got to forget everything and just surrender to what's going on, you know.

If you turned to me and said, Joe, come to the shit house and put your head down

the bowl, like, if you could say with enough conviction to me, I probably

would do it, you know.

But I pray you wouldn't say it to me.

be like acrobats and you can stand there and watch them perform these incredible

things and they're beautiful and they're ornate and baroque sometimes and

powerful but i like the singers that are right there in the ground in front of

you just you know working it that's what you need i got this for you you know

everything that comes out of them is for you it's not a performance that's driven

from adulation joe was given something else

As I was older and got to play with him, I learned a lot about focus and a lot

about commitment.

I didn't have to ask him, all I did was have to watch.

That's Chris Robinson.

I don't care what you say.

About the time when Mad Dogs was about to happen, I was just getting into rock

and roll stuff.

As a youngster, I was a jazz person.

So that was a period for me of kind of discovery, musical discovery.

I came into business recording.

I had no experience as a traveling musician.

Playing with Leon, that's where my foundation came from.

He just gave me license to do my thing.

Leon,

in those days, was a powerhouse.

So he whipped this band into an odd R&B solo review.

He was basically producing the show as it went along.

But he was taking his cue from Joe.

When you hear some of these songs, the way Leon arranged them in...

The way the background parts came up, and there were so many drummers, and

there was just so much going on. And Leon, he knew exactly what was going on

all over that stage.

And at the same time, just stepping right up front, you know, guitar,

keyboards, whatever.

They supplemented what each other needed.

The relationship they set up trickled down to the victim.

Well, I was 15.

The closest show was Salt Lake.

I guess I listened to it with my music piece band. And then it was, I think, to

date, the largest rock band I've ever seen.

I think the

relationship between, like, R&B in the 40s and 50s and modern rock and roll

wasn't really obvious to me until I saw this.

That's how rock and roll plays in a big band format. I don't think anybody had

done it.

Rock and roll is supposed to be a raw thing.

But that they could take these huge arrangements and still hold on to that

soul and that grease and that dirt.

And this was the biggest thing I'd ever seen on a stage.

It was like seeing an orchestra, but it was rock and roll.

In 1970, I was the youngest record producer writing for Rolling Stones.

There's one small photo in the vinyl pull-down.

Somebody in the first row looks lost in the music.

I believe that's me.

It was just a tear your head off blast.

They began with an energy level that most performers would look up to.

Red Bull would make the finale, the beginning, and go into parts unknown.

The visual aspect of it, and then doing the forensics afterward, I went away a

Leon Russell fan.

You know, sought out at the time, just from that point on.

Buddy O'Leary and Rita Coolidge and Donna.

Every imaginal type of the ideal hippie girl was on stage in that show. It was

pretty amazing.

I found out who Bobby Pease was.

Gordon and Keltner, the first time I ever heard those names and understood

exactly what they did was Mad Dog's management.

Yeah, that tandem with Carl Radel, that's hard to beat.

When you think about rock drumming and bass playing, that's kind of where you

start.

Well, Tim Gordon had already been one of my idols.

I'll never forget the sound he got out of the drums. He was so powerful.

Well, Tim and I were a couple.

He was doing all the top sessions in this country.

He would go to New York and do a session.

fly back to l.a he was like a bull he had perfect time and so

i relied on him a lot you don't need double drunk but

obviously if you're going to double drum you should be fortunate enough to have

somebody like jimmy gordon playing with you

thank you so much

that window of youth that we all were in, we could do no wrong.

And it just so happened that the music was really, really good.

Yeah, it was a family.

A dysfunctional family.

Show business.

Jesus Christ.

Maybe we weren't dysfunctional.

We were too young to be dysfunctional.

I don't think anybody was in their 30s yet.

Leon was the biggest hippie of all of us.

So I think the Mad Dog idea.

of a lot of people really appealed to him.

And he just molded it and made it work.

Woo! Hey!

Yeah.

Well, is Emily here?

Okay. Come on, Sean.

Say bye-bye.

Say bye-bye.

Leon not only gave us permission, but he actually egged us on to be our

wild selves.

to dress wild, act wild.

Leon, to me, I had known him as being kind of this quiet guy in the studio,

and he comes across the parking lot with this top hat on and this whole

Captain America outfit.

He would say that that was rock and roll. I loved the way he dressed. He did

it the way he wanted to do it.

He was the ringmaster.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to sing you a song that I wrote long ago

and far away.

The name of it is Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen, I thought, well, that's cute, you know.

It's got all these American guys who were the Mad Dogs, and it's got Joe and

myself who are the Englishmen, I guess.

I thought that probably worked.

I believe it was Denny's.

And he just loved the idea that it would be this swarthy group, the English and

the American.

And we were all free to do whatever the heck we wanted to do.

When we watched that film, there was something about it. Just the rock and

roll circus aspect.

Yeah, I sit there and said, now this is what we need to do. We need to get a

film crew, but don't get an entertainment film crew. Get a news

crew.

You did it. You threw a bunch of crazy bastards in a bus and sent them on the

road.

There were a whole lot of people that sang and played, and then there were a

whole lot of people that didn't sing or play, but that were an important part of

the family.

I think they were on the stage.

Mr. Cocker, Joe, it's time, buddy.

There was a very colorful person in the cast named Sherman.

He was a pimp in New York City.

Well, here's good luck, boys and landlord.

Best regards to you. He recited poetry all the time.

What's the matter, friend? Is it teardrop in your eye? He was a great

influence.

I met Gail, and we got together.

And we've been together ever since.

My daughter was conceived on the tour.

Do you remember that conversation we had about the Rosicrucian cosmos?

When you leap into that void, super subconscious, from your seed atom, which

is that part of you which is most divine, comes soaring up through.

I watched the movie and I still don't know what the hell I did.

Well, the whole Mad Dogs tour for me was...

Unfortunately, they sort of marred of it. There's too many drugs, I think.

There's a lot of blanks, let me tell you.

Do you remember the Tulpa picnic?

Oh, yeah.

What happened there?

Everything.

There's someone's bike in front.

I don't know about that. I mean, most people had their own bikes.

I wish they'd let me edit that.

300 hours of really X-rated stuff. The Leon Russell director cut. I want to see

that one.

I have to beat Joe Cocker now.

Someone lock the door.

Boy,

you sure took me for one big ride.

Even now I think, what a ride.

When I think of you, I start myself to cry.

Just can't waste my time.

Nothing keeps dry.

What to do?

Yes.

Whenever there's collaborations, especially this day and age, it's pretty

cheap because no one gives themselves to the band.

I think what's so important about what that band did, everybody threw into this

thing this concept of, you know what, let's make something that lasts. Let's

do this because it's fun.

Let's do this because the music is going to benefit.

That's certainly the concept with our band. It's like we didn't...

We didn't sign everybody up just to try to do one tour and see if we could pad

our pockets.

You know, it's like, let's see how far we can take this. Like, let's dig in.

Taking our van on the road is similar to Mad Dog's because they have so many

people involved.

And people know when we're coming to town because they see two buses and they

see all these crazy people coming out and we kind of take over every town that

we go to.

It's really a unique experience to have a band that's 12-piece working together

as one mind.

To work with a big, large band, that's an undertaking.

The thing that hit me about it the most was you have to really want to do

something like this to do it. It just doesn't happen.

You live together.

You are in the trenches together.

Real musical and personal trust is built from seeing people when the shit hits

the fan.

We're still trying to figure out, you know, what it's going to take to keep it

together for a long time.

But it's a healthy group.

Watching the Mad Dogs and Englishmen documentary certainly played into it.

We tried to expand on that idea, this sense of extended family and traveling

circus. But watching that, like, oh, there's an actual circus, a rock and

roll circus.

Leon is a sweetheart.

I think he appreciated the work that the band obviously put in, and we came into

the project pretty prepared for it. Actually, the choir can sing all of that

if you want.

All the southern children like to rock and roll.

It was his baby the first time around, and I didn't know how much leeway he

would give us or how much he would want control of it, but he was so open with

it.

Then his ideas, you know, we love the ideas that he threw in, the changes he

wanted to make, and that's part of a collaboration. You want everybody

chiming in, especially the maestro.

I'll tell you what freaked me out.

His connection with Susan was great right out of the gate.

I think the love of gospel music and there's a lot of other things that they

connected on early on that you can just tell that they both light up.

Yeah. Where'd you hear that at?

Where'd you hear that? I sang it with Shirley Caesar when I was in college.

You sang it with who?

Shirley Caesar. Shirley Caesar? Are you kidding? What are you talking about?

It was great. It was a great tune.

Shirley

was

in charge of that song, man. She had our whole choir. We had 60 people on her

whim, like up, down, clapping, whatever we had to do. It was incredible.

That guy that carried on the road when we did that, he had one of those old

-fashioned brooms, and his entire job, the two songs, he'd come out and sweep

across the stage.

And that's all he ever did.

He looked back and I had to make money.

We found some amazing footage of Sister Rosetta Thorne with a white FG with

three pickups. Doing the windmill.

Pete Townshend looks better.

I bet he did.

Something about gospel music, I don't know what it is,

but whenever I hear songs, I just kind of know them. I feel like maybe I knew

them in another life or something.

It was great hearing you do the Golden Gate Quartet stuff the other day. Oh,

Jezebel. I love that, man. I love those recordings.

You know, gospel is divided into white gospel and black gospel.

Leon has a way of fusing those two concepts so

that it's still gospel and it's still church, but he makes the

black and white come more together.

He integrates. He doesn't segregate his music.

I'm going to take you there.

I'm going to take you there.

I'm going to take you there. I'm going to take you there.

I'm going to take you. I'm going to take you. I'm going to take you. I'm going to

take you. I'm going to take you there.

Before you go down to one, two, three, four.

I'm not sure you can define Leon Russell.

I think he created a very unique to him genre of American soul.

And

yet

he's able to communicate in a very profound way with...

So many different kinds of musicians.

He was making country records in the 70s.

He could work with the Stones. He could work with Bob Dylan.

When I was a kid, he was the master of space and time.

So I thought if it was written on the album cover, it must be real.

he developed not just the sound, but an aesthetic, which

could then become many different sounds.

In doing that, he was able to build the Mad Dogs tour

as a family affair.

We'll be right

back.

Do you like trying it again with just you and Claudia? Because that felt

pretty natural.

Sure. Yeah, let's try that one time.

Yeah, just Leon and Claudia together in the North Country.

So how are we going to do it, Claudia?

Are you going to sing second and fourth or what?

What would you prefer? Would you like me to start it or would you like to start

it? It doesn't matter to me.

I'll start.

Okay. We'll see what happens.

All right.

Okay. That's my favorite thing.

It's my favorite.

Huh?

Is this your favorite song?

No, it's my favorite thing, See What Happened. Oh, yes, it is.

Well, when we travel to the North Country Fair

When they tell me I'm a part of life

Remember me to the one who lives

there

She want one, a true lover of mine.

If you go when the snowflakes fall,

where the rivers freeze and the summer

ends, please see for me.

She wears a coat so warm.

To keep her from the howling wind.

To see if her hair hangs on.

If it rolls.

See for me if her hair hangin' long.

Cause that's the way I remember her fair.

Well, if you're travelin' to the North Country fair,

Remember me.

No, it is confusing.

Well, I'm confused all the time.

What are we doing now, Mr. Trucks?

Really,

you know, if you get down to it, you can go out there and work for seven hours.

You should be able to.

It's like expanding, expanding, expanding.

Joe Cocker was built of iron.

They could drink and do everything you could possibly do to harm your body and

still perform.

He gave it all.

Show after show after show. And that inspired the rest of us to do the same.

There were some times like, you know, 13 one-nighters in a row, and we were

pretty fried.

And we still just, whatever we had to give, we gave.

We were never saved.

We couldn't wait to get back home and get back to our lives and to be out of

the madness.

We also knew that this was not ever going to happen again.

The fact that what was never meant to last

really gave it a sense of urgency.

Like a singer, you go out and interpret songs. You're not playing a role in a

circus. But that's kind of what happened.

At some point, Joe felt the tour had gotten out of his control.

That, yes, he was the star, but it was Leon Russell's band.

Joe never talked to me, never said anything bad, negative about anybody.

I could just see in his face, I could see it in his eyes, that he was...

struggling and that he was not very happy.

I think he felt like he had lost the kind of control, you know,

and when in fact I think that he had given that over before we ever left,

that he was not running this show, that Leon kind of was.

I remember Danny Cordell, when we were rehearsing, he said, You know you're

going to be accused of career profiteering in this deal.

I said, well, you know, I'm a professional band leader. I was hired to

make the band, lead the band.

I know somewhere near the end of the tour, we were close to L.A. We were

playing a show in San Bernardino.

So everybody kind of took off and went to L.A. and went home and then came back

and did the show. And as I recollect, that show was awful.

it's kind of broke the cohesiveness the bond so to speak in a

period of time where we were always together and always eating together and

doing these things together the music was incredible i thought

you look back at that tour

and all the joy everything that went on there is one incident

that

It's kind of hard to believe, and it's still really very disturbing.

There were

times, you know, later on in the tour, after I'd

gone through some problems with Jim Gordon, and I would sit down, sit with

Joe on the plane at night, and...

I'd say, Joe, I can't, you know, I'm going to have to go home. I can't do

this. And he'd say, you can't leave. You're the only friend I've got.

He just made sure that there was always somebody with me because I really,

really wanted to go home.

I can't help but remember what happened, you

know, and how tragic it was.

Jim was like the golden boy.

He was very polite. He was sweet. He was generous and always smiling.

I'd never seen anything that was alarming about his personality.

We'd go back and, you know, smoke some weed and watch Johnny Carson and just be

real mellow.

We're in Carl's room, and he said, just come outside in the hall with me.

I want to tell you something. I want to talk to you.

The next thing I knew, he had not hit me so hard that I came off the floor and

hit the wall and slid down cold and never knew why.

You know, Jim was not a bad guy. He was just a sick guy.

But I think that was the first that I saw of it and the last that I really

needed to see it.

I feel like I, you know, that I

managed to come out alive. I escaped something very scary and didn't see it,

never saw it coming.

Leon, what key did Joe do this in?

Huh?

Do it in E.

Yeah.

I wouldn't want to change a thing.

Like a bird on a wild, like

a drum in midnight quiet, I have

tried in my own way to be free.

Like a word.

Like a knight from an old-fashioned book,

I have saved all of my dreams

just for you.

Like a baby stillborn Like a

baby with his home I have

told everyone Who reached out for

me And I

swear by

song and by all all I've done wrong

I will make it I'm gonna make it

all up to you

Thank you, Leon.

I loved you.

I just can't get the mic back in the hole.

well this gives us some kind of air of importance of police escort oh

my

god

i think it's going fantastically well last night's rehearsal was

so good i thought it was performance worthy And the fact that we get at least

one more rehearsal, I think it's going to really help to tighten us up and

we're going to be all the better.

A lot of times, there's a lot of

last minute, what's going to happen? Are we prepped? Do we need to talk through

anything?

There were definitely times where I was just unsure of how all the pieces would

fit together.

I don't know. I never... You scared?

There's a lot of singers, there's a lot of guests that were not in the original

Mad Dog.

A lot of it's just juggling personalities and all of that.

What always, I think, makes great rock and roll is the contribution of

everyone's music.

Chris's and Joe's take on northern soul and a sense in England and like how

they're listening to R&B and soul and blues and rock and roll.

In the same way that Leon and Carl Radel and Chuck and people from Oklahoma, they

have their own take, which might even have more weird gospel and country

influences.

Rock and roll is the bastard child of all of us.

It's all free.

Musicians are always looking for that.

I think because I'm older now and I really have

had time to live with this music and to live with...

the unique qualities of that tour.

And to be able to embrace it now with so many years behind me, I

see it so differently now.

I remember so clearly going to the premiere of that film, and I remember

what I wore.

Half hour into the movie, I looked at my girlfriends and said, I can't watch it,

I've got to go home.

And I got up and went home.

It was really like reliving the tour all over again.

When I walked in the theater, there was just 3,000 people milling around.

When I came out, I had 3,000 pairs of eyes looking at me.

That quick.

I mean,

it really was a performance in so many ways, and more than we ever imagined.

It was really one of the great empathic accidents in rock.

You know, they lifted Joe up, but he's up there in front, and he's actually,

you know, lighting them up.

He's the torch paper for them.

That was the first time that people had heard of me.

I'd been around for a long time, playing on other people's records and stuff.

After it was over, I went on the road with my album.

I started getting

a lot of bad press.

People were saying that I took advantage of him and I spent too much of his

money.

And I thought, well...

Any minute he's going to come forward and say that's not true.

However, that never happened.

I don't think Joe really performed for a long time. And one of the first times he

was on stage was after I had recorded my first album because I signed my record

deal at the end of... Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour with A&M.

I had done my album, my first album, and was touring in England and went to

Sheffield and of course I called Joe and he came to the show and he was on stage

and I asked him to come out and sing with me and he came out and we sang.

And Sheffield went crazy because Joe hadn't been singing.

He just didn't have the heart.

And he came out and was singing fabulous we had a great time and Roger McGuinn

was I was opening for the birds and Roger McGuinn was on the side of the

stage going get him off get him off because he knew that Joe he was that's a

hard act to follow especially in Sheffield

There seem to be some careers that launched out of your career to deal

with, like the catalyst for all that, right?

Well, yeah, I went along with the idea of it.

But, um, it meant something, you know.

I used to scout with each other, she didn't.

Now, I'm just glad to get in a small group.

I had this great home player, you know.

So, yeah, pick them slowly, slowly.

It was that moment, that strange, weird, chaotic legacy that

defined a lot of them.

You know, they are often referred to, formerly with the Mad Dogs and

Englishmen tour.

It's kind of a badge of honor. It's the kind of thing you get after you come

back from battle. They pin the little star on you, you know.

You were in Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

But that experience informed a lot of the music that...

those artists continued to make.

I think it was the best rhythm section I ever played with in my life. And it's

really unfortunate that we couldn't have done more.

You know, you're so young.

There's so much to do with your life. There's so many changes that are going

to come along. And it's good that, you know, you can go off and play with John

Lennon and Bob Dylan.

It's sad that something has to fall away.

I think the fact that we were not a band. We were just people all going in

different directions. And when we came together with Leon's vision and

with Joe in center stage to make literally rock and roll history.

Pretty amazing.

Everybody, everybody just be silent for a minute.

Well,

The deal is that you're giving me the benefit of the doubt that I know what

I'm doing and that we knew what we were doing, and that's not always the case.

I mean, we do what we do, and we are who we are, but I'm not sure we know it at

the time.

I think that's why it's important to look at the past.

It's hard to see it in real time. Sometimes 20 or 30 years have to go by

before you can see what it is.

I've definitely missed Joe, and I missed working with a band this

accomplished.

It kind of gave most of us veterans a second chance.

I just never would have dreamed that somebody nearly a half century later

would come up with this bright idea to put it back together.

And I'm so glad they did.

I'm so glad they did.

All right, everybody, 10 minutes to show time.

So bathroom, water, anything you need, and then let's get over to stage right

over here on the stage left side.

I think it's a great lesson in, you know, how to actually live together. I

mean, you think of the Lyric and Space Captain, you know, learning to live

together. Like, that's what that tour was.

It was a human and musical experience and an experiment.

And it left a...

It left a beautiful mark.

I feel close by.

And now I'm coming here to lie.

Come to life.

Come to life.

Let's learn how to live together.

Learn how to live together.

Learn how to live together.

See you later.

You're with me

I don't know.

plane and runway strike.

Flashy pimps and family fight.

Spider dog and bloodshot eyes.

Our space captain laughs and cries.

Understand.

The scheme of things.

And just in time the scene has changed.

Thus is he.

Bring the beat.

Sharon McBride and Shakespeare.

Movie maker.

Boobie shaker.

Sexy airplane ticket taker.

Union member.

Leo Fender. Pride and joy.

Electric toy.

Teacher and learner.

An infant's burner.

A religious leader.

A chronic bleeder.

It's a hippie commune. Bonfire.

A life and time.

The war death dealer.

Rock, pop, corn, spice.

I don't feel it.

Oaky, limey, and curtain climber.

Future stones and dominoes.

Know which way the wind blows.

Stolen coal and no one knows.

The shadow do.

It's still.

A shady crew.

Because I love her and she loves you.

Just myself and 40 friends in the name of Parker Power.

Out here on the road again

with mad dogs and eagles.

me.

If I sang out of tune, where would you stand up and walk out on

me?

Lift me your ears and I'll sing you a song.

And I will try not to sing out of key before I get back.

where my love is away

how

do i feel at the end of the

day

No one more important to me, baby.