when did joe cocker tour new zealand

Return of the Mad Dog: Joe Cocker in concert, New Zealand tour 1977., 1977-06-19/1977-06-24

Scope and contents note.

Poster advertising a 1977 New Zealand tour by British blues/rock musician Joe Cocker. Includes a black & white image of Joe Cocker singing. Also includes the texts: 'With a nine piece band featuring Bobby Keys (Toured with Rolling Stones & Mad Dogs) Hear the Cocker classics live! Delta Lady, Space Captain, Bird On A Wire, Put Out The Light, You Are So Beautiful, With A Little Help From My Friends, Feelin' Alright. Special guest: Lea Maalfred. Hamilton - Founders Theatre - Sunday 19th June, Auckland - Town Hall - Monday 20th June, Wellington - Show Buildings - Tuesday 21st June, Christchurch - Town Hall - Thursday 23rd June, Dunedin - Town Hall - Friday 24th June. Bookings at all usual outlets. All concerts 8.30 p.m. Also includes the logos of Qantas and Festival Records.

• Creation: 1977-06-19/1977-06-24

Conditions governing access

Paper copies of the NZSAC posters may be consulted for research without restriction.

This material has been copied by the Library of Victoria University of Wellington under Section 55(a)of the Copyright Act 1994. You may make a digital or print copy for your personal research and study use. You may not make copies of an image or part of an image for other persons, or distribute an image or part of an image to other persons by any means whatsoever including mounting the image on a server, without the written permission of Victoria University of Wellington and the copyright owner. You may not modify an image or incorporate an image or part of an image in another work without the written permission of Victoria University of Wellington and the copyright owner. You must include this copyright statement in any copy that you make. The Library has endeavoured to locate and contact other copyright owners for this poster, but our efforts have not been successful. Please contact [email protected] if you have any further information concerning copyright ownership.

From the Series: 60 linear_centimeters (Six map drawers containing oversize folders ) : 600 posters.

Language of Materials

Additional description, container summary.

860 x 620 mm

Genre / Form

• Concert posters
• Auckland (N.Z.)
• Christchurch (N.Z.)
• Dunedin (N.Z.)
• Hamilton (N.Z.)
• Wellington (N.Z.)
• Rock concerts -- New Zealand
• Rock musicians -- England
• Rock musicians -- New Zealand

Physical Storage Information

• poster: 424 (Mixed Materials)

Repository Details

Part of the Tapuaka Heritage & Archive Collections - JC Beaglehole Reading Room, Victoria University of Wellington Library Repository

Collection organization

Return of the Mad Dog: Joe Cocker in concert, New Zealand tour 1977., 1977-06-19/1977-06-24, NZSA90424, poster: 424. New Zealand Students' Arts Council archives 1941-1992, nzsac. Tapuaka Heritage & Archive Collections - JC Beaglehole Reading Room, Victoria University of Wellington Library.

Cite Item Description

Return of the Mad Dog: Joe Cocker in concert, New Zealand tour 1977., 1977-06-19/1977-06-24, NZSA90424, poster: 424. New Zealand Students' Arts Council archives 1941-1992, nzsac. Tapuaka Heritage & Archive Collections - JC Beaglehole Reading Room, Victoria University of Wellington Library. https://archives.victoria.ac.nz/repositories/2/archival_objects/6730 Accessed April 12, 2024.

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Return of the Mad Dog: Joe Cocker in concert, New Zealand tour 1977.

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Joe Cocker’s ‘Mad Dogs & Englishmen’: Inside the Triumph and Trauma of a Legendary Tour

The singer’s gruelling 1970 tour left many participants with lasting scars. now, a new film commemorates the run in all its complexity.

"The film is ultimately a story about the great generational bridge and healer that is music," says Jesse Lauter, director of a new film about Joe Cocker's storied 1970 tour Mad Dogs & Englishmen.

Jim McCrary*

When singer Rita Coolidge attended the premiere of Mad Dogs & Englishmen , the 1971 doc that chronicled the Joe Cocker –fronted tour of the same name, the experience was far from celebratory. “I started shaking and crying and it all came back to me,” she says. “I got up and left and got in my little VW and drove home. My friends were so worried about me that they followed me. I don’t know if I’m over it yet.”

Although it’s become something of a footnote in pop history, the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour was historic: It captured British soul singer Cocker at the peak of his career, and its joyful blend of gospel, soul, blues, and every other type of Americana powered the double album that documented the 1970 run into the Top 10 (with Cocker’s remake of the Box Tops’ “The Letter” also a hit). It also made a star out of bandleader Leon Russell, who exuded bad-boy cool on screen. But the run of shows was also fraught: An already frazzled Cocker was frustrated that Russell was in command, drugging and partying were daily occurrences, and out of the blue, drummer Jim Gordon, then Coolidge’s boyfriend, punched her so hard that she slammed against a wall.

The saga of that tour — and a tribute concert that reunited many of its participants — is newly told in Learning to Live Together : The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen,  a doc that will premiere at the Woodstock Film Festival later this month before arriving for a limited theatrical run in October via Abramorama. Directed by Jesse Lauter, the film time-shifts between the 1970 tour (with clips from the first Mad Dogs movie), footage from the commemorative gig at the Lockn’ Festival in 2015, and interviews with the surviving players of the original shows. Also offering insights are Steve Earle and manager Jon Landau, who each caught a Mad Dogs show back in the day, and longtime Rolling Stone  writer David Fricke.

But given the often dramatic and sometimes disturbing back story of the tour, what started as a straightforward film about that moment in time and the 2015 reunion became more than that. “While they were filming, they realized there was more meat on the bone than we thought,” says Derek Trucks, whose Tedeschi Trucks Band, co-fronted by his wife Susan Tedeschi, served as the backing band at the tribute gig. Of the sometimes unsettling moments that the movie explores, Trucks says, “It’s a tough place to go, but if you avoid that stuff, it starts to feel disingenuous at times.”

The Mad Dogs tour was chaotic both on paper and in practice. Cocker, already coping with an overwhelming wave of post-Woodstock fame, was told by immigration authorities that he had to tour right away or lose his working papers. Coolidge says the actual reason was the dark underbelly of the sometimes mobbed-up music business. “It wasn’t so much about not working in the States but, ‘If you don’t do this tour, you’ll get your legs broken,’ ” she says. “That was common knowledge in the group — that threats had been made that if Joe didn’t do the tour, he would be hurt.”

With only a week to prepare, Russell was hired to pull together a 10-piece band — and a 10-person group of backup singers called the Space Choir — and rehearse for the 48-show run. Cocker, Russell told RS in 2015 , “was pretty wrecked when we started out. I said, ‘Does it sound good to you?’ and he said, ‘It never sounds right to me.’ I didn’t know how to take that. So I said, ‘Shit, I’ll just do whatever I want.’ ” The tour manager, Sherman “Smitty” Jones, was a former pimp, and Cocker was seen tossing down any and every pill given to him on the way to the stage. “It was party-party-party,” says Coolidge, who says she abstained from most of that. “They were having orgies every night. I would hear about them the next day.”

By the end of the shows, Cocker was fried and broke. “Joe was just worn out and so beat up and penniless,” Coolidge says. “The heart went out of him for a while. He just disappeared inside himself.”

The Tedeschi Trucks Band, which had modeled itself after the size and horn-rooted arrangements of that ensemble, had long wanted Cocker to join them onstage and perform cuts from throughout Cocker’s career. All involved had finally settled on doing such a show at Lockn’ in 2014 — part of the festival’s tradition of presenting a special, one-time get-together each year. Cocker bowed out at the last minute, but a few months later everyone knew why; he had been battling lung cancer and died that December. Tedeschi and Trucks decided to proceed with the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tribute plan anyway, to honor both the album and Cocker.

When the notoriously reclusive Russell agreed to come aboard, having previously joined the Tedeschi Trucks Band onstage, others expressed interest. “I was concerned that there wouldn’t be enough of us left alive to make it worth the while,” Coolidge laughs. She also adds, more seriously, “I also knew Leon was having some pretty serious health problems. I was concerned about him being put in a position that would tax his frailties.”

But by showtime, the lineup included former Mad Dogs like Coolidge; singers Claudia Lennear, Pamela Polland, and brothers Daniel and Matthew Moore; keyboardist Chris Stainton; and percussionists Chuck Blackwell and Bobby Torres. (Gordon, currently in prison for killing his mother, was not invited, and the tour’s other drummer, Jim Keltner, respectfully bowed out in light of his disinterest in traveling.) As Tedeschi Trucks booking agent and movie co-producer Wayne Forte says, the criteria for inviting players was “healthy, alive, and not in jail.”

The nearly four-hour Lockn’ show went off with few hitches; Warren Haynes, the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson, and Widespread Panic’s John Bell filled in for Cocker at various points (Dave Mason also sang lead on his “Feelin’ Alright”). At the last minute, Russell agreed to reprise “The Ballad of Mad Dogs & Englishmen,” the solo Russell studio recording heard in the original doc. Despite his health issues, which led to his death in 2016 after a heart attack, Russell held up for the entire show and, despite his surface crustiness, marveled at the stability of the Tedeschi Trucks lineup compared to the original Mad Dogs crew. “Leon was shocked by how long we’ve been together,” says Tedeschi. “He said, ‘How do you keep nine or 12 people together this long?’ They did it for a year and they had to all take time off.”

During interviews for the documentary, some of the tour’s tangled personal relationships emerged. “There were so many different undercurrents of emotions we weren’t aware of,” says Trucks, “but we could feel it.” Numerous hookups are hinted at. Coolidge, who was in a relationship with Russell before the tour, says the two had overcome their past difficulties. “In the years right after the tour, I’d see him and he would pretend I wasn’t there — he would look right past me,” she says. “He finally relaxed, one or two of his marriages later. Things got resolved over the years.”

When Cocker crashed hard after the tour, some of the criticisms were leveled at Russell, who more or less ran the shows. In Learning to Live Together , Russell, who could be guarded, addresses the backlash he experienced, saying he wished Cocker had come to his defense. “I could definitely sense resentments for it, like he almost couldn’t win in that situation,” says Lauter. “Doing this show was almost like his way of healing his relationship with Joe. That’s why I titled the movie Learning to Live Together . Everyone had musical and romantic and business relationships, and you pick up on how everyone was trying to figure it all out back then.”

Adds Lauter, “When it comes down to it, the film is ultimately a story about the great generational bridge and healer that is music. We knew it the moment the band started playing ‘The Letter,’ the first song at the first rehearsal, and you could hear Claudia’s backing vocal cut through the Space Choir. All the resentments, past drama and trauma were out the window.”

The movie’s dramatic highpoint arrives when Coolidge recalls the moment Gordon punched her in a hotel, after he’d invited her to step outside a room where a party was going on. “I know people are tired of talking about the #MeToo movement,” Coolidge says, “but it was very real, even back then, and it’s important to talk about that stuff. As a child I was never hit by an adult, or by anybody. Jim was four times my size and I was 100 pounds; he could have pinched me and it would have been enough. I had a huge shiner and I had to go onstage with it. Everybody knew it. I needed them to be part of my protection since I couldn’t do it myself.”

Forte says there was talk of how much of the backstage drama, including Coolidge’s unsettling story, to include. “There was a lot of conversation going back and forth: Is all that going to be a potential downer?” he says. “You don’t want to have people walk out of the movie depressed. But I, for one, felt it’s part of the story. It needed to be in there.” Adds Tedeschi, “It’s real life. Things happen and people like to know about someone who has gone through those things and made it through the dark side. It’s not all bad and dark.”

Transforming footage old and new into a feature film proved to be a daunting task, which accounts for the six-year delay between concert and movie. Unable to find a big-money investor, the producers raised more than $700,000 from various parties, then spent two years clearing the rights to songs by Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and others whose tunes were performed on the Mad Dogs & Englishmen album. Lauter had hoped to include some of the rumored hundreds of hours of outtakes from the original doc (which Russell, in the movie, wryly calls “300 hours’ worth of really X-rated stuff”), but those were never unearthed. (Whether those reels were misplaced or perished in the 2005 fire at Universal Music’s storage facility remains unclear.) Learning to Live Together only includes portions of the Lockn’ show, but Trucks says a live album of the complete show will be released at some point.

Coolidge, at press time, had not yet seen the film. But it seems unlikely that her traumatic experience at that premiere, 50 years ago, will repeat itself. “We’re a lot older, so there were no triggers,” the now–76-year-old singer says. “I didn’t feel like I was really back there. Hopefully you gain some wisdom and grace with age. Looking at it from this part of my life, I really valued the experience. I remembered the good parts and have no regrets.”

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Joe Cocker is one of the greatest music legends of all time. He’s been rocking since the early 60’s. He sang at Woodstock; I would give anything to go back in time to be there. Even though I didn’t experience him at Woodstock, I was privileged enough to see him perform live.

Joe Cocker has this incredible voice that is truly music to your soul. I think my heart melts a little every time I hear him sing. He is one the artists I listen to when I am in a bad mood. Joe Cocker is sure fire way to uplift your spirits. Seeing him perform live will have a warm place in my heart forever. He has so much raw emotion when he sings; you can hear it and literally see it in his eyes.

This incredible artist has so many hit songs such as “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, “When the Night Comes”, “With a Little Help from My Friends”, and “Up Where We Belong”. This is only the tip of the iceberg. I was lucky enough to sing along with Joe Cocker and the rest of the audience as he belted out these amazing hits. This musician has had such a positive impact on my life, and I feel truly honored that I was able to see him perform live.

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Concert Review: Joe Cocker, George Thorogood and the Destroyers <i>Dunedin Town Hall</i>

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Who: Joe Cocker, George Thorogood and the Destroyers Where: Dunedin Town Hall When: Friday, January 21 Reviewed by: Dene Mackenzie Cocker Happy? Yes they were. There cannot be anyone who does raw emotion like the lad from Sheffield - Joe Cocker. On his 14th or 15th visit to New Zealand (one disappeared somewhere, he said) Cocker showed the drive and energy that has kept him in the forefront of the music world. The phrasing in some songs may have been different from the past, but that simply added to the journey. When he sung of his neck being dirty and gritty, you wanted to have a shower. In Come Together , we could all feel his disease. This was a masterful performance which, although slow to start, should keep Cocker fans happy for another few years. No one should have been left wondering last night in the packed Dunedin Town Hall whether or not Cocker left any of his performance in the warm-up room. He gave it all. Cocker walked on stage dressed in a suit, looking more like a businessman than a rocker. The jacket came off after the first song, the sweat started to pour, the air guitar, and sometimes air piano, started and the music hit another gear. The older songs proved to be top billing with the audience, some of whom were Cocker sceptics at the start. It was billed as a "dream pairing" of Cocker and George Thorogood and the Destroyers but it was an odd coupling. More than half of the audience seemed to know the words of every Thorogood song and were slow to warm to Cocker. But Cocker took it all in his stride and converted them all, with a little help from his friends - The Letter , Leave Your Hat On , Unchain My Heart and You Are So Beautiful . Few songs from his new Hard Knocks album were performed. Thorogood and the Destroyers played at a blistering pace for 60 minutes with Bad to the Bone getting prolonged applause. Who Do You Love had some in the audience dancing within minutes of the show starting. It was three hours of great music. Joe Cocker, George Thorogood and the Destroyers on tour Nelson, Trafalgar Centre, Sunday January 23 Wellington, TSB Bank Arena, Tuesday January 25 Auckland, Vector Arena, Thursday January 27 New Plymouth, Bowl of Brooklands, Friday January 28 - Otago Daily Times

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Mad Dogs & Englishmen: The debauched tour that sent Joe Cocker over the edge

The Beatles queued up to give Joe Cocker their songs, but drink, drugs and wild times on the infamous Mad Dogs & Englishmen touring circus almost finished him off

The Hotel de Rome, in the former East Berlin, is situated in the plushest part of Germany’s most sophisticated city. Once headquarters for the Dresdner Bank and high-ranking Nazi Party staff, it bears shrapnel scars from Allied bombing. 

The building opens onto Bebelplatz, where the SA, SS and Hitler Youth burned ‘un-German’ books during the ‘Säuberung’ in May 1933. It’s only a stroll to Checkpoint Charlie, passing plenty of brutalist architecture and the Jewish Holocaust memorial. 

What was once fascist is now all about fashion, as supermodels sashay through the hotel’s foyer during Berlin Fashion Week. The movie Run Lola Run was shot in and around the hotel, where the motto is: ‘What’s old stays old. What’s new is new.’ 

The Hotel de Rome is also Joe Cocker ’s chosen port of call, indicating that the 68-year-old once known as the Sheffield Soul Shouter is no longer on his uppers. Virtually bankrupt in the mid-70s, he is now almost establishment: he’s got an OBE, he’s sung for the Queen, his interview suite is laid out with expensive chocolates and current craze macaroons. Luxury you can afford, Joe? 

“Ha! Yes. Very good. The title of my only album for Warners, 1978. They sued me because it sold 300,000 copies! I’ve just got the rights back to that and my Sheffield Steel record, which is quite handy. I can’t get hold of my first three A&M albums, though, the ones that made the real money.” 

These days Joe, who is stocky and exceptionally pleasant, lives on his Mad Dog ranch in Colorado, where he used to graze Watusi cattle but now sticks to growing tomatoes. Gratifyingly, he’s still got his Yorkshire accent, and he still follows Sheffield United, The Blades. 

“Aye, the old Northern bit. I suppose my journey from 16-year-old gas fitter to today is a bit staggering. On my last trip to Australia, some old cat said: ‘You’ve led a life.’ Not a good one, mind. Not even a bad one. Just a life. Looking back, if I hadn’t made it I doubt I’d have stayed as a gas fitter. I’d still be singing in pubs and wondering what might have been.” 

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Having left school at 15, Cocker served his music apprenticeship in local blues bands before a Decca scout whisked him to London in 1964 to record a cover of The Beatles ’ I’ll Cry Instead for a single. Decca paid him precisely 10 shillings (50 pence in today’s currency) for his efforts, which featured the guitar talents of Big Jim Sullivan and Little Jimmy Page . But the single was a big flop, and Joe went home somewhat deflated. 

“Decca were very professional. That’s why they dropped me,” he laughs. He left the Gas Board and went to work as a packer for WH Smith. He still sang, and he also drummed, which is how he developed his famous ‘disorientated hand jive’ tic.

“I never knew what to do with me hands,” Joe says. “Most people feel rhythm in their feet, but that was how I expressed myself. It looks daft, but I can’t help it.” 

Salvation arrived via a meeting with fellow Sheffield lad Chris Stainton, and together they formed the fledgling Grease Band, whose demos landed on producer Denny Cordell’s desk. Fresh from success with The Moody Blues , The Move and Georgie Fame, the ebullient Cordell became the Grease Band’s mentor. 

“Which was good news, because Sheffield wasn’t Liverpool or London. There was no rock scene. Our luck changed when we did a song called Marjorine , a very clever Chris demo which set the ball rolling.” 

The Grease Band signed to Regal Zonophone in the UK, and built themselves a live reputation by word of mouth. 

“Aye, we were a great band,” Cocker says. “We hit the ‘second wave’, after the ‘screamagers’ but before Led Zeppelin . I asked Jimmy Page if he’d join us in 1968 but he said: “Y’know Joe, I think I’ve got something a little heavier to do.” Oh, okay.”

Joe moved to a tiny flat off Sloane Square in London with his first wife, Eileen. He discovered hashish. “My consciousness was raised. Denny was a smoker, and he introduced me to LSD. We went to America in ’68 – that was an eye-opener. Each day was an adventure. I was so naïve. I got into a cab in New York once and the driver gave me a pill and I suddenly entered a Technicolor world. I’d had acid and listened to Hendrix, but never been outdoors on it. 

"I liked the drugs, because they enhanced my enjoyment of music. Before that I’d only had a mono music system. Even my copy of Sgt. Pepper’s was mono. Suddenly this new world raced up on me. Maybe a bit too quick for a young guy – I’d just been a greaser with sideburns and tight trousers. It was a bloody big culture shock, and it went against my natural grain. When I was a kid in 1961, my dad stuck a newspaper in front of my nose with a story about Ray Charles being busted for heroin. ‘That bloke you like so much, Joe. Look at the state of him.’”

Very much a pint man, Cocker swapped Stones Bitter for a different type of stoner. That mono copy of Sgt. Pepper’s did the trick, however. Singing along to the album, he found himself drawn to vamping over With A Little Help My Friends . He made his own recording of the song in January ’68 with Page on guitar, Stainton on bass and Procol Harum ’s BJ Wilson on drums, with dynamic vocal assistance from Rosetta Hightower. On Cocker’s version, Ringo Starr’s childlike singsong tempo was changed radically. Released as a single, it soared to No.1.

“The day it happened, I got a telegram,” says Cocker. ‘THANKS YOU ARE FAR TOO MUCH, JOHN AND PAUL.’ Then Apple Records placed an ad in the music press, congratulating me. What a plug!”

Anointed by the ultimate rock divinity, Cocker became a sensation, destroying British audiences and tearing America apart, even though his first album, named after the hit, sat in the can for a year before it was released. A superstar with one smash under his belt, Cocker entered a world where Beatles acetates were dropped off at Cordell’s office by limousine, long before the public would hear them. 

In the summer of ’69 he was summoned to Paul McCartney’s house. “I was told: ‘Get here at 3pm on the dot.’ But I got there at 3.05. McCartney’s housekeeper, an old cockney woman, came to the door and said: ‘’E’s gone art. ’E was waitin’ for some man, but ’e’s never showed up. Go away.’” 

Joe was more punctual a few weeks later when he was invited to the Apple building on Savile Row. “They stuck me in a room for an hour with nothing to look at but carpet. Eventually Paul turned up. He played me the medley from Abbey Road: Golden Slumbers and Carry That Weight . I was all ears until he said: ‘You can’t have ’em. You can have this, though.’ He played me She Came In Through The Bathroom Window .

"I was floating on the ceiling when George Harrison walked in shortly after. He played me Old Brown Shoe . By now I was getting a bit fussy, so I said: ‘I can’t see myself singing that.’ George played me three other songs and seemed a bit miffed. ‘The Beatles will never use these. I’ve got this one called Something . I wrote it for Jackie Lomax, and I wanted Ray Charles to sing it. You might as well have it.’ He actually played and sang it for me. I was gobsmacked.”

Even though he couldn’t release these beauties until his second album, 1969’s Joe Cocker! , both tracks were aired extensively on pirate radio. “It was a big deal for me. I remember George being so mad that John and Paul wouldn’t bother with his stuff. He thought it was touch and go that Something would get onto Abbey Road. ‘I doubt they’ll use it,’ he said.” 

Those three Fab gifts served Cocker well. Just before his life-changing performance at the Woodstock festival , he played the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles. During his show-stopping rendition of With A Little Help From My Friends , a nubile admirer was hoisted on to her companion’s shoulders. She then proceeded to unzip Cocker’s jeans and give him a blow job in front of the entire audience. According to the Rolling Stone reviewer John Mendelsohn, ‘He gave the scream of his career as she worked the Cocker cock with considerable fervour.’

Joe recalls: “ Jimi Hendrix was in the audience that night, sitting in a dark booth with a lot of groupies. I was just doing my thing when this lady… er, appeared. After the show I met Hendrix, and he was laughing his head off because he’d put her up to it.” He tried not to sing out of key. 

Cocker arrived at Woodstock in a private chopper; the Grease Band slummed it in a military helicopter. They’d dropped acid and were feeling decidedly ill. Flying over the site, Chris Stainton opened the ’copter’s door and threw up over the crowd below. For Cocker, his arrival “was a real wow. I’d played to festival crowds of 50,000 that summer [notably Denver Pop], but all I could see were these white dots stretching to the horizon. I said to the pilot: ‘What the fuck’s that down there?’ He replied: ‘That’s people. And that’s where you’re playing, son.’” 

Cocker thought his Woodstock performance was “okay. Not the greatest. Santana did the best set. My abiding memory is how good the stage was. Usually they were wonky and dangerous, but this was a good professional job. “Were we epic? I dunno. We got some nice footage for memories,” he says, referring to Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 concert movie, Woodstock . “I was wearing a tie-dyed shirt, and when I took it off after, the colours had stained my chest in the exact same pattern.” 

Having registered in the memory banks of 650,000 people at Woodstock and followed that with a triumphant show at the Isle of Wight, Cocker kept on touring into early 1970, flogging his sweat-drenched act into the ground before collapsing with exhaustion in Los Angeles.

With both his albums sitting pretty in the charts and his face on the cover of the first post-Woodstock edition of Rolling Stone , he felt a rest was on the cards. It wasn’t. Manager Dee Anthony called him up and told Joe he was booked to go straight back on the road; promoters are all in place. And no arguments, or you’ll be sued. And it starts in eight days’ time: a seven-week tour, 48 nights, 52 cities. Thank you.

With the Grease Band back in London, Cocker panicked. Cordell suggested he call up Leon Russell , who had co-produced his recent album and provided the fine Delta Lady . Russell got out his phone book. Within days he’d assembled a 25-piece band, including three drummers, a horn section and a 10-strong choir of wailing ladies, featuring Rita Coolidge and Claudia Lennear. 

With a support cast of management, techs and band dogs, the Mad Dogs And Englishmen – so christened by Cordell – were ready to rehearse at Russell’s house. However, Cocker did not realise that his contract required him to bankroll the venture. There was a film crew coming along too, and Joe was to pay for that as well. Didn’t he read the small print? 

The director of the subsequent Mad Dogs documentary, Pierre Adidge, recalled: “It was no ordinary tour. They brought together the finest musicians in Hollywood, who all went because they wanted to go, because they wanted to be a part of this whole giant effort. They wanted to be together through their music.” Budget? Worry about that later. 

Throughout the Mad Dogs episode, Cocker got more and more wasted.

“At first it was a family thing,” he recalls. “We were all shacking up in cheap motels; we had a cheap bus and a cheap plane. I wanted a much smaller group, but Leon was very persuasive. I got the blame for breaking up Bonnie And Delaney, because we took half their band. I didn’t even know who they were, but that got nasty. Yet it was irresistible. At Leon’s pad the scene was wall-to-wall women running around naked. Seemed like we were going to have some amazing times. They’d float in and out. Leon had his Tulsa connection, so he had a web of women on call. There were an awful lot of groupies,” he chuckles.

When the euphoria wore off, Cocker began to have doubts about Russell’s motives. “He became difficult. He got a bit strange. I felt lumbered because the other guys were getting completely wrecked. I was too, but I was doing all the promotion. Leon said: ‘Oh, you get the pleasure of doing all that.’ And I got involved in some crazy love affairs. Rita and Leon had a thing going on, and then she was sleeping with a couple of the drummers. Then I had a dalliance with her,” Cocker smiles.

“This was just before she hooked up with Kris Kristofferson. It was mad.”

Coolidge, the subject of Russell’s song Delta Lady , was rock chick of the moment. Ostensibly, she was still an item with a besotted Stephen Stills , although Graham Nash was often in her boudoir. Stills christened her The Raven; his magnificent debut solo album that year was an open letter to her. Love The One You’re With, Cherokee, Black Queen : they were all about lovely Rita. Laughing from the sidelines, David Crosby wrote another Coolidge anthem, Cowboy Movie , which referred to her as ‘The Indian girl… the heartbreaker.’

Mad Dogs drummer Jim Gordon was fanatically jealous of Coolidge’s liaisons. One night he flew into a rage and punched her in the face. Although she said it was out of character, Coolidge was distraught. The Mad Dogs were also getting twitchy. Gordon had started “hearing voices”, and would sometimes stop proceedings by telling the others: “You’re the devil… you’re messing with my time.”

Tensions were running high in the Mad Dogs camp. Cocker noticed how Russell, despite his own talent, had become envious and grouchy, and began to muscle his way up the pecking order. The man who’d started out like his brother suddenly “took over the whole show, became like a slave master,” recalls Cocker, who let it slide and went into his shell. He knew Leon was in constant pain and limping from a recent motorcycle accident. 

Even so, he started to get cheesed off with Russell’s insistence on pre-show communal meals, communal sex and gang-style sermons, in which the Mad Dogs held hands and praised the Lord, before proceeding to get utterly wankered. “It was a bit embarrassing.” 

The tour itself was an unwieldy shambles. Cocker often didn’t know the lyrics and clammed up, until Russell told him: “Doesn’t matter, man. Just sing what you like.” So he did. 

Many of the band members were serious heroin users. Not just heroin, either: cocaine, pills, acid and booze were everywhere. The hard-core would gather together, all beards and top hats and ‘How y’all doin’?’, and do speedballs – deadly mixtures of smack, amphetamines, downers and coke. Then they’d drink Kentucky dry. Needless to say quite a few them are now dead – or in psychiatric hospitals.

“Whenever I see Jim Keltner, like I did in LA recently,” Cocker says, “he always says: ‘Man, that was some big, long, crazy party. How the fuck did we ever get home?’ It was a bit too crazy. I was saddest about some of the ladies who died, like big Emily Smith. Anyway, once it was over, Leon and the rest all left, probably the next day, and moved on to the Rolling Stone s and Derek And The Dominos , and they kept on partying.” 

Party they certainly did. Teaming up with Eric Clapton and bass player Carl Radle, drummer Gordon found kindred spirits in Derek And The Dominos, and was willing to match them on nights of heroin, liquor, coke, Mandrax and junk food. They were undoubtedly great musicians – Clapton described them as “absolutely brilliant, the most powerful rhythm section I have ever played with. Jimmy Gordon is the greatest rock’n’roll drummer I have ever played with. I think it’s true, beyond anybody.” 

Later, in 1983, Gordon murdered his own mother during a psychotic episode. But that’s another story.

Despite the monumental excesses of the staggering Mad Dogs’ cast of Okies, Texans, good ol’ Tennessee mountain boys and equally flakey southern girls, engineer Glyn Johns rescued some tapes from their shows at the Fillmore East for a sprawling but hugely successful double live album, 1970’s Mad Dogs And Englishmen , the sleeve notes of which promised that “all elements of the truth are here”. 

They certainly were in the movie: Cocker was interviewed backstage after one of the Dogs’ eight nights at the Fillmore West, and while various musicians are seen imbibing narcotics – what Russell referred to as “everyone bringing their own diversions with them, so they won’t really be away from their normal lives” – Cocker seems isolated and scared. Singing, he says, is “a release” from all the anger and frustration welling up inside him. “If I didn’t have singing I probably would have murdered somebody.” But still he’s an ordinary Joe – thankful for what he’s got, and mindful about where he came from. 

Cocker was wiped out physically, and soon financially, as the Mad Dogs And Englishmen royalties were clawed back to pay for the tour’s considerable expenses. He settled in Los Angeles during summer of 1970, and began to hit the bottle. “I’d never really done much hard liquor before, because I was a pints man. I used to drink tons of beer – 10 pints a night, easy.” Now, without his fellow Mad Dogs, the Englishman let himself get rabid. “I overdid it for a year,” he said at the time. “You can forget about your music and start worrying about different things for so long. I just stepped out of it for too long. I think I almost forgot what rock’n’roll was all about.” 

Joe seemed to have been bled dry by a business that he didn’t really understand. He also lacked the cynicism to cope with the down-side, once the hangers-on had left town. He didn’t eat, because he thought you had to stay thin to pull the chicks, but his personal life was in such disarray that that was hardly on the agenda. 

The reviews for the Mad Dogs album weren’t great either. All that press, all that promotion, and then Rolling Stone slaughtered the vinyl. Even Robert Christgau, the eminent critic who had championed Joe’s cause, seemed to be damning him with faint praise when he pointed out that Cocker “is gruff and vulgar, perhaps a touch too self-involved, but his steady strength rectifies his excesses. He is the best of the male rock interpreters, as good in his way as Janis Joplin is in hers.” 

Except that Joplin was dead. And as Cocker frequently told people: “I fully expect to be the next casualty myself. Why not? Everyone else thinks I will be.

Racked and ruined, Cocker returned to Sheffield. On arrival, his family was so aghast at his condition they hospitalised him. He chilled for a while: rode his motorbike along Snake Pass. He even considered taking his HGV licence so he could drive a lorry for a living. Armed with his next album advance, he went back to London and rented a flat in Shepherd’s Bush. Bad move. 

“I started taking heroin seriously, even though I’d thought it was the big taboo. I flirted with addiction, but I couldn’t handle it on that level. It was too powerful and intense. I never used the works, I snorted heroin. It made me feel fearless. I’d be driving from London to Sheffield with mates and be speeding like a lunatic down the motorway. They’d be terrified, shouting at me to slow down. I didn’t bat an eyelid.” 

Things got sordid after he fell prey to local West London dealers who descended on his pad. He walked the streets carrying ounces of cocaine on their behalf, and was constantly worried about his next bag of smack. The dealers were vultures; Cocker would part with thousands of pounds for dope worth far less. “They had me by the balls.” 

Returning to recording his third studio album with Denny Cordell, Cocker found that much of his fame had evaporated. Unfortunately the bills were coming in for the Mad Dogs tour and movie. He was in hideous debt.

So he went back on the road in 1972. In Australia he was busted for weed and offering to take on 10 members of the Adelaide constabulary. He followed that by getting arrested again in Melbourne for causing a brawl at the Commodore Château Hotel, and spent a night in the clink. 

“They put me in a cell with a bank robber, and an Aborigine who was alleged to have murdered someone. The bank robber seemed like a nice bloke. Said he had all my albums.” 

The authorities gave Cocker four hours to leave the country. 

He started telling those who’d listen that he was writing The Joe Cocker Book Of Drugs . But he wasn’t laughing. “I was drinking vast amounts, and it never seemed to touch the sides. Eventually I started going through alcoholic agonies. I was sick on stage, and the days afterwards were terrible. Drink became like heroin. It took the kind of toll where I was obsessed to make sure that I had enough left to get me through the day. And thanks to the mini-bar, I did. It wasn’t a good idea to drink before show time, but I made up for it afterwards.”

His biggest engagement in England that year was headlining the Crystal Palace Garden Party 3, in June 1972. Even though he kicked up the dust, Joe apologised for cutting his set short, explaining to the crowd that he had to get back to West London for ‘an appointment’. 

His third studio album, Something To Say (titled Joe Cocker in America) was dutiful stuff. He hated it. He told one interviewer: “I don’t know why I’m here, really. I’ve got nothing to say about this album. I’ve got nothing to say about anything, really.” 

He was seriously miffed that A&M had started promoting him as ‘Cocker Rock’. Life magazine’s assertion that he had “The voice of all those blind criers and crazy beggars and maimed men who summon up a strength we’ll never know – to bawl out their souls in the streets,” sounded a more accurate description, if too close for comfort. 

Cocker now became a prima donna diva, always on the comeback. During his cocaine years, he managed another hit when You Are So Beautiful reached No.5 on the US Billboard chart. But he could still blow it big-time. Performing in Los Angeles in 1974, he threw up again on stage and suffered the performer’s ultimate nightmare. 

“Somebody should have kept an eye on me,” Cocker said. “But some dealer found me backstage and filled me up with cocaine. I hadn’t performed live in a couple of years. I drank a whole bottle of brandy, and then went out and got through two songs, and then I sat down on stage with a total mental block. 

“Everyone just sort of closed the curtains and said goodnight. That was supposed to be my big return. It was a bit sad.” 

In the ensuing years Cocker was always active, although his albums became more mainstream as he slowed down and aged. Following a disastrous management period with Michael Lang, one of the co-founders of the Woodstock festival, handling his affairs, Joe received more scrupulous advice and was subsequently resurrected. He remarried, and enjoyed a worldwide hit single with his duet with Jennifer Warnes, the preposterously gloopy Up Where We Belong . 

Thanks to the song’s inclusion on the soundtrack of the Richard Gere-starring film An Officer And A Gentleman and an accompanying Academy Award, Joe was establishment now. He got the Don Was production makeover for his 1996 album Organic . He played for President Bush’s daughter, and sang at the Queen’s 2002 Party At The Palace. According to his manager, he gave up drinking and smoking 10 years ago. “So he’s healthier. Back then he wasn’t well. It was often touch and go getting him to his concerts. If he hadn’t stopped he wouldn’t be here now.” 

His latest album, Fire It Up , may be his last, he says. “It costs a fortune [to make an album], and that’s my two-album deal with Columbia up anyway. I’ve got a good feeling about it, but the last one [2010’s Hard Knocks ] bombed in the UK. Maybe they don’t like me any more. I’m not sure about the future. I wonder: do I have to make records? I still like playing live. My agent wants me to play that festival, the Isle of Man.” 

Isle of Wight, even? “

Oh, God. Yeah.” he laughs. “I’m so shagged out.” 

But Joe Cocker will get by, with a little help from his friends.

Fire It Up was indeed Cocker's final album, and he passed away from lung cancer in 2014. A documentary inspired by the Mad Dogs tour, Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen, was released in 2021. It was centred around the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s reunion of the Mad Dogs. Linda Wolf photographed both tours, and her pictures are available in the book Tribute: Cocker Power. 

Max Bell worked for the  NME  during the golden 70s era before running up and down London’s Fleet Street for  The Times  and all the other hot-metal dailies. A long stint at the  Standard  and mags like  The Face  and  GQ  kept him honest. Later, Record Collector  and  Classic Rock  called.

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Mad Dogs and Englishmen: the chaotic, violent, drug-addled Joe Cocker US tour of 1970

As a new film celebrates the legendary post-woodstock tour, and its tribute concert, jim farber talks to original performer rita coolidge and director jesse lauter about ego clashes, bust-ups, jealousy and why cocker went off the rails, article bookmarked.

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M ore than 50 years have passed since the tour known as “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” tore its way through America, leaving a legacy that’s at once starry and troubled, vaunted and pained. “That tour just wore me out,” says Rita Coolidge, whose appearance on it led to a highly successful solo career. “I don’t think anybody could have survived another trip out like that. They would have been dropping like flies.”

At the same time, Coolidge says, “many days I wake up thinking about that music and how amazing it all was.”

Small wonder the “Mad Dogs” tour – fronted by Joe Cocker and backed by a cast of nearly 50 singers, players and hangers-on, including classic rock linchpins Leon Russell , Bobby Keys and Jim Keltner – became enshrined as one of the most exciting live events of all time. It’s legendary enough to have inspired a 2015 tribute concert, led by current US stars Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, which boasted many of the surviving artists from 1970, including Coolidge and singer Claudia Lennear, pianist Chris Stainton and creative czar Russell, who made his last major appearance at that show, before his death in 2016. Now, five years later, director Jesse Lauter is releasing a new film, Learning to Live Together , which weaves together footage from the original show with musings and music from the tribute concert. “I tried to make clear the beautiful link between the old show and the new one,” says Lauter. “I also wanted to show how the original show changed the course of rock’n’roll history.”

It had an equally transformative effect on the lives of many who took part in it – though not always for the better. On the one hand, “Mad Dogs” made Russell a household name, boosted Keys into a regular sideman position with The Rolling Stones and turned Keltner into one of the world’s most in-demand drummers. It also yielded a double live album that shot to No 2 on the charts, boosted by two major hits, “The Letter” and “Cry Me a River”. On the other hand, “Mad Dogs” killed friendships, ruined romantic relationships and left Cocker, its star, penniless, drug-addled and creatively at sea. More, there was violence backstage, as well as threats of it that date back to the tour’s birth.

From the start, “Mad Dogs” was chaotic and fraught. In March of 1970, Cocker was riding high after his soul-shaking performance at Woodstock the summer before. To take advantage of the momentum, his management demanded that he throw a tour together at lightning speed – not an easy feat since he had just fired most of his backing group, The Grease Band. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the kind of demand you could ignore. Cocker’s manager, the late Dee Anthony, has often been depicted as having been mob-connected, a view supported by the recent memoir by another of his former clients, Peter Frampton. “We would make jokes about that and push our noses to the side like you do when you talk about the Mafia,” Coolidge says with a laugh.

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With the implicit threat of “tour or else”, Cocker turned to Russell – a well-connected multi-instrumentalist who had produced his most recent studio album – to find great musicians pronto. To do so, he plundered a band led by Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, swiping from them Keys, Keltner, Coolidge and the duo who would later form the rhythm section for Derek and the Dominoes, Carl Radle and Jim Gordon. Though Delaney and Bonnie’s original group never became big sellers, they played a crucial role in music history. In 1969, they were the only white band on the storied Stax Records label. Their album on that imprint proved so powerful, it inspired no less a line-up than Clapton, George Harrison and Dave Mason to join them for a historic 1969 tour of the UK, which yielded an ecstatic live album, On Tour with Eric Clapton . In addition, Russell’s piano work for the duo proved pivotal to a then unknown Elton John. “Elton once told me that if it weren’t Delaney and Bonnie and Leon he never would have done what he did,” Coolidge recalls.

Miraculously, Russell whipped together the Mad Dogs band in just eight days, stuffing it with as many people as possible. In the film, Russell says his inspiration for the mass casting was the hippie love-ins that featured scores of musicians and chanters who created a cacophony that somehow ended up sounding sweet. The quest for such a sound had a thrilling effect, enhanced by two powerful drummers, a Latin percussion section, a pumping horn trio and a “Space Choir” of singers who echoed the sound of a gospel chorus. Still, the pile-on had a down side. Some in the Space Choir couldn’t even sing. “As choir leader, sometimes it was hard for me to get some of the people who were not singers off the microphone,” Coolidge says.

As a result, the live album from the tour required major remixing and vocal enhancements. Regardless, the result brought something new to music by marrying big band R&B of the 1940s with Sixties rock’n’roll. “They were probably the first of the rock’n’roll big bands,” Lauter says. “That set off a whole trend.”

You heard it on Clapton’s self-titled solo debut in 1970, which also featured much of the Delaney and Bonnie band, as well as the giant group George Harrison assembled for 1971’s “Concert for Bangladesh”, which employed some of the same musicians as “Mad Dogs”, and Dylan’s sprawling “Rolling Thunder” tour in 1975. Russell actually name-checked Dylan on the Mad Dogs album as an audience member before he and Cocker performed his yearning ballad “Girl from the North Country”.

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To up the theatricality, Russell encouraged the musicians to dress and act as outrageously as possible, creating a circus-like atmosphere for which he played ringmaster, outfitted with a Captain America suit and a top hat. Unfortunately, such a defining role for Russell wound up alienating the event’s ostensible star. “It got to the point where Joe didn’t feel like it was his tour,” Coolidge says. “He felt like he was not in control and, consequently, he would just take any drug that anybody handed him and then he really wasn’t in control.”

To a listener, however, Cocker’s wrenching soul cry and the band’s manic back-up seem like they were born for each other. Together, they created a gripping amalgam of rock, soul, gospel and blues. “It was classic, cosmic American music,” says Lauter. More, their repertoire, which featured songs penned by everyone from The Band to Isaac Hayes to The Beatles, contained what Lauter calls “the most sacred music in rock’n’roll history”.

Coolidge got her own showcase on the tour by fronting the soul ballad “Superstar“. Though the song is credited to Russell and Bonnie Bramlett, Coolidge says she had instigated the writing. “Somehow when it came out, my name wasn’t on it,” she says. “I know Bonnie would never hurt me but I think Leon had hard feelings and just said ‘screw her’.”

Coolidge, with whom Russell was romantically involved and for whom he wrote the ravishing ballad “Song for You”, left him before the tour to take up with drummer Jim Gordon. “Leon adored Jim so he took it all out on me,” Coolidge says. “I left him and he wasn’t used to that.”

Unfortunately, her alliance with Gordon led to something far darker. One night while on tour, without warning, the drummer called her into the hallway and proceeded to “beat the shit out of me”, Coolidge says. “He was out of his cracker box.”

Years later, the drummer wound up killing his mother. Only afterwards was he diagnosed with acute schizophrenia. “When he was arrested, he said that he had also planned to kill his ex-wife but he was too tired from killing his mother,” Coolidge recalls with a dark laugh. “He wouldn’t have been done killing. I think if he were out now, he still wouldn’t be done.”

After Coolidge was attacked, she wanted to leave the tour but Cocker convinced her to soldier on. “I stayed for my love of him,” Coolidge says. By the tour’s end – after a punishing 48 dates in just over two months – everyone was either worn-out or strung-out. The massive cost of the show, which included flying the cast around in a private jet, left the star himself without a dime. “I probably made more money from that tour than Joe did,” says Coolidge. Afterwards, “he was living at (producer) Denny Cordell’s house and sleeping on some kind of mat by the front door. He didn’t have money to buy a guitar. But for him it wasn’t about the money. It was more about him feeling that he had been betrayed and that everyone profited from it more than him.”

In the film, Russell talks about being warned that he would be accused of “career profiteering” and of spending all of Cocker’s money on the pricey backing musicians. But, says Lauter, “Leon wasn’t scheming to profit off Joe. Leon told me, ‘Look, I’m just the band leader.’ He had this idea for the big band and at the beginning Joe was gung-ho about it. The tour was put together very quickly so maybe it takes you several weeks to realise, ‘Oh crap, what did I get myself into?’”

Still, the scale of the project turned out to be a key part of its legacy. Five decades later, it inspired Trucks and Tedeschi to form a big band of their own, The Tedeschi-Trucks Band. “The Mad Dogs band was pivotal to us,” Trucks says. “They were like the white Sly and the Family Stone.”

Consequently, in 2014, when the organisers of the jam band-oriented US Lockn’ Festival approached The Tedeschi-Trucks Band about forging a collaborative live project, they first thought to contact Cocker. Unfortunately, he was sick at that time. (Cocker died of lung cancer at the end of 2014). For a substitute, Trucks turned to Russell to explore a Mad Dogs salute. “At first, I thought maybe this wouldn’t be something he would want to jump back into,” Trucks says. “But he was so excited. I think it was a way for him to put that thing to bed, or to confront it, or to have the reunion he never got to have.”

With Russell on board, many of the surviving members of the original show happily signed on. They even managed to rope in Dave Mason, formerly of Traffic, who didn’t appear the first time but who wrote a key song that was performed there, “Feelin’ Alright”. Even so, Trucks knew that trying to reinvent a classic show had risks. “Forty or 50 years down the road, there’s no way it’s going to be the same thing,” he says. “But it became its own thing.”

The insertion of Trucks’s style into the Mad Dogs’ mix wound up forming a modern connection between that band and its original sonic relatives, including Delaney and Bonnie, Derek and the Dominoes and The Allman Brothers (with whom Trucks played for years). “One of the reasons I felt it was OK to take on this project was because of all those historic connections,” Trucks says.

In the film, the older musicians express deep appreciation for getting the chance to recreate music that had changed their lives. For Coolidge, the new show actually trumped the old one. “This time it was grown-ups instead of kids,” she says. “That makes a difference.”

“The original show probably had to be insane to become what it was,” Trucks says, with a laugh. “But there’s an upside to being able to look back now and say, ‘this aspect of the tour was magic, but this aspect was never going to end well.’ This time, we just took the magic.”

‘Learning to Live Together’ will have its UK premiere at the Raindance Festival on 31 October. It opens in the US on 22 October.

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Good Company Entertainment Presents:

The joe cocker express, get onboard the joe cocker express, chugging along the hitchcock railway from sheffield to woodstock and beyond.

Step into the world of music legend Joe Cocker with The Joe Cocker Express ! Join us for an unforgettable night of music and nostalgia as we pay tribute to the iconic artist. Our show promises to transport you back in time with spot-on renditions of Cocker's greatest hits.

Fronted by Australia's very own Chev Wilson whose timbre and uncanny likeness to young Joe breathes new life into classics like " Leave Your Hat On ", "You Are So Beautiful", "Up Where We Belong", " Hitchcock Railway ", "Delta Lady", "Unchain My Heart", "The Letter", " With A Little Help From My Friends " and so many more!

Joe Cocker was a powerhouse in the music industry, leaving an indelible mark with his soulful voice and passionate performances. He was not just a singer; he was a true artist who poured his heart and soul into every note. With a career spanning decades, Cocker's influence on rock and blues is immeasurable.

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10 Downs Street, Redcliffe QLD 4020

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Airlie beach hotel, shoalhaven entertainment centre, illawarra performing arts centre, rock the boat 2024.

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