Welcome to Boogie House! In this new meeting, Micro Sillon, Walter De Paduwa (alias Dr Boogie) reveals to us every Sunday one of the albums taken from his large collection of Classic Rock and explains why he owns this album.
Today I’m going to tell you about a very famous album by Joe Cocker, accompanied by this amazing crew called Mad Dogs & Englishmen.
I guess you have seen the film Woodstock once and remember the amazing performance by Joe Cocker with his Grease Band who landed by helicopter at just the right time, just before the historic storm that devastated the site. And this performance by Joe Cocker, especially with “With A Little Help from my Friends”, was noticed by Leon Russel, an Oklahoma native who lived in Los Angeles. He had his studio of him and decided to go on tour with Joe Cocker.
He put this Mad Dogs & Englishmen crew together sloppily. They lined up more than 30 or 35 concerts in a very short time, which means that Joe Cocker came out of this tour completely exhausted and sank into a nervous breakdown, quite a serious addiction to drugs and alcohol. He had to go get treatment.
Then he came back with an album in Jamaica and painfully enough before becoming a world star again.
In summary, this Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour benefited mainly from Leon Russel who was an outstanding conductor, but who knew damn well what he was doing. We still listen to this magnificent record with the same passion today. It hasn’t aged at all, as they say.
I invite you to listen to this record from beginning to end or watch it on DVD for this great man and this historic tour.
