I've been meaning to tell you for a while about a UK documentarian named John Edginton who doesn't have the rights to share the documentaries he's made (mostly for the BBC), but managed to retain the rights to the raw interviews, which he's been posting on his YT channel for the past year or two.
They're not proper interviews in the sense that Edginton himself is neither mic'd nor on camera. He's the guy asking the questions, and in the final presentation, all we'll see is a few clips interspersed with the usual stuff you see in music documentaries. It's VERY raw -- you'll hear doorbells and phones ring, and there's some repetition and a few dead ends...but overall, it's absolutely gripping!
He does some true crime, which I hate from the bottom of my heart but if you love it, you can find it here. What I DO love about John's stuff is that he's done some documentaries on Pink Floyd and Genesis in particular that have yielded an absolute treasure trove -- hours and hours of unedited interviews with all four members of that heart of Pink Floyd talking about, well, everything, starting with Syd Barrett, who was the focus of his own documentary. That means that there are also conversations with Syd's roommates, early managers, early famous fans (including journo Nick Kent), and much more.
As we get into later Pink Floyd, the interviews include Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis, who's one of the funniest guys I've ever seen on tape, talking about the covers of Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here in particular. Needless to say, Edginton also interviews the man on fire on the cover of WYWH! Seriously, it's ALL here.
The Genesis stuff goes even deeper. Multiple hours with not only the 5 fellows in the core prog era (Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, and Steve Hackett, who's also the best interview of the bunch, I think), but also long conversations with touring drummer Chester Thompson (also from Weather Report) and touring guitarist Daryl Stuermer (who was playing with Jean-Luc Ponty when Genesis found him -- tells you a lot that their touring band members come from the jazz fusion world!). Nerds (like me) will also flip for an hour with founding guitarist Anthony Phillips, who's also a terrific storyteller.
As with Pink Floyd, Edginton was clearly working a number of angles at once. The story of Genesis in general, a separate film on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album and tour, and some later stuff that included the solo careers of the three members who remained to the end (Rutherford, Banks, and of course Collins, whose solo career was a massive success of an entirely different nature than the band who still managed to sell out stadiums.)
There really is days and days of stuff here for fans of these two bands alone...but even without the true crime stuff, there's lots more music stuff!
What prompted me to finally getting around to posting about these is an unedited conversation with Rita Coolidge talking about the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour, which came up on a thread featuring @Yukio's spectacular tutorial for The Monkees' "I'm A Believer". I'm still not sure how we wound up talking about Joe Cocker, but I swear it seemed almost on topic. LOL Check out the thread for yourself, starting, again, with his terrific arrangement and tutorial of an all-timer.
Okay, back to Joe Cocker. Even casual listeners of classic radio will have encountered Jhis live version of "The Letter", which was a massive hit in 1970 going into '71, and well beyond! I still come across it now and again, aside from being a massive Joe Cocker fan who owns multiple copies of Mad Dogs in multiple formats, going back to the original releases at the time.
My knowledge of the tour itself was pretty limited at the time, as I think was the case for most of us...even though the movie reveals quite a lot. It's just hard to see what the STORY is, because the music and the personalities were so huge.
In the course of my life in film and video production, I got to know one of the cinematographers of the 1971 tour film. Although very much a mainstream cinema and TV guy, he's done a lot of music along the way, including operating camera for a little Rolling Stones pitcher called Gimme Shelter, the 1977 Grateful Dead tour film, and a couple of Miles Davis docs. He later became the head of the cinematography program at the American Film Institute (AFI)...
...and while we never got as far into Mad Dogs as I wanted, he definitely gave me some insight into how outlandishly chaotic it was -- not just for the performers and the audience, but for the filmmakers.
Rita talks about this at length, but the context is that Joe was coming off a blazing performance on Woodstock to a highly acclaimed UK tour, and had come to LA to rest and get his strength back...where he was told that he had less than a week before the US tour HAD TO start. HAD TO.
I'll let Rita fill you in, but his protests that he didn't have a band ready were met with, "Leon will take care of it." Leon Russell casts a long shadow across the early 70s that deserves its own lengthy essay, but yeah, for Mad Dogs, he put together a band of DOZENS of musicians and singers in two days, giving them three days to rehearse and a day to pack. Rita mentions that nobody on the tour was older than 26 or 27, so three days of 18 hours of singing while the arrangements were still being worked out was...sorta doable I guess. LOL
When Jerry Moss (the M of A&M Records) came to the second day of rehearsals, he said, "The world has never seen a tour like this. We have to film it!" -- so he hustled a film crew together, which roughly doubled the size of the entourage....and which meant that the part of the crew that saw the MOST rehearsal saw ONE DAY, but the rest of the crew had NO IDEA what they were even looking at, much less trying to shoot. It's amazing that we got anything watchable out of this, but man, is it a corker!
Definitely steals a few moves from Thelma Schoonmacher's edit of Woodstock (her assistant Marty Scorcese went on to some fame as a director, and used Thelma as his lead editor starting with Raging Bull), notably the split screens to try to contain the chaos.
There's unfortunately not a lot of high-quality footage of this floating around, but for goodness sake, TURN THIS UP to get an idea! Forty-ish musicians and singers make quite a racket. LOL Pay particular attention to Joe of course, but also Chris Stainton on piano, Leon Russell on lead guitar and musical direction (you can definitely see him lead the band with his guitar!), and, well, all of it. LOL
Go ahead, wake up the kids!
The key words for us watching this now might be "spectacle" or "exuberance" (it really is a joy to behold)....but for Joe in particular, and for Rita as well, the key words are "exhausted/exhausting" and "sad/sorrow." I'll let Rita tell you the best stuff, but a few things really jumped out at me:
I was going to talk some more about Leon, which I'll save for another day, except to observe that his nickname "The Master of Space and Time" came from this tour, and his supernatural ability to keep this many people sort of on the rails.
A couple of follow-up videos.
There's enough to get anyone started.
They're not proper interviews in the sense that Edginton himself is neither mic'd nor on camera. He's the guy asking the questions, and in the final presentation, all we'll see is a few clips interspersed with the usual stuff you see in music documentaries. It's VERY raw -- you'll hear doorbells and phones ring, and there's some repetition and a few dead ends...but overall, it's absolutely gripping!
He does some true crime, which I hate from the bottom of my heart but if you love it, you can find it here. What I DO love about John's stuff is that he's done some documentaries on Pink Floyd and Genesis in particular that have yielded an absolute treasure trove -- hours and hours of unedited interviews with all four members of that heart of Pink Floyd talking about, well, everything, starting with Syd Barrett, who was the focus of his own documentary. That means that there are also conversations with Syd's roommates, early managers, early famous fans (including journo Nick Kent), and much more.
As we get into later Pink Floyd, the interviews include Storm Thorgerson of Hipgnosis, who's one of the funniest guys I've ever seen on tape, talking about the covers of Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here in particular. Needless to say, Edginton also interviews the man on fire on the cover of WYWH! Seriously, it's ALL here.
The Genesis stuff goes even deeper. Multiple hours with not only the 5 fellows in the core prog era (Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, and Steve Hackett, who's also the best interview of the bunch, I think), but also long conversations with touring drummer Chester Thompson (also from Weather Report) and touring guitarist Daryl Stuermer (who was playing with Jean-Luc Ponty when Genesis found him -- tells you a lot that their touring band members come from the jazz fusion world!). Nerds (like me) will also flip for an hour with founding guitarist Anthony Phillips, who's also a terrific storyteller.
As with Pink Floyd, Edginton was clearly working a number of angles at once. The story of Genesis in general, a separate film on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album and tour, and some later stuff that included the solo careers of the three members who remained to the end (Rutherford, Banks, and of course Collins, whose solo career was a massive success of an entirely different nature than the band who still managed to sell out stadiums.)
There really is days and days of stuff here for fans of these two bands alone...but even without the true crime stuff, there's lots more music stuff!
What prompted me to finally getting around to posting about these is an unedited conversation with Rita Coolidge talking about the Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour, which came up on a thread featuring @Yukio's spectacular tutorial for The Monkees' "I'm A Believer". I'm still not sure how we wound up talking about Joe Cocker, but I swear it seemed almost on topic. LOL Check out the thread for yourself, starting, again, with his terrific arrangement and tutorial of an all-timer.
Okay, back to Joe Cocker. Even casual listeners of classic radio will have encountered Jhis live version of "The Letter", which was a massive hit in 1970 going into '71, and well beyond! I still come across it now and again, aside from being a massive Joe Cocker fan who owns multiple copies of Mad Dogs in multiple formats, going back to the original releases at the time.
My knowledge of the tour itself was pretty limited at the time, as I think was the case for most of us...even though the movie reveals quite a lot. It's just hard to see what the STORY is, because the music and the personalities were so huge.
In the course of my life in film and video production, I got to know one of the cinematographers of the 1971 tour film. Although very much a mainstream cinema and TV guy, he's done a lot of music along the way, including operating camera for a little Rolling Stones pitcher called Gimme Shelter, the 1977 Grateful Dead tour film, and a couple of Miles Davis docs. He later became the head of the cinematography program at the American Film Institute (AFI)...
...and while we never got as far into Mad Dogs as I wanted, he definitely gave me some insight into how outlandishly chaotic it was -- not just for the performers and the audience, but for the filmmakers.
Rita talks about this at length, but the context is that Joe was coming off a blazing performance on Woodstock to a highly acclaimed UK tour, and had come to LA to rest and get his strength back...where he was told that he had less than a week before the US tour HAD TO start. HAD TO.
I'll let Rita fill you in, but his protests that he didn't have a band ready were met with, "Leon will take care of it." Leon Russell casts a long shadow across the early 70s that deserves its own lengthy essay, but yeah, for Mad Dogs, he put together a band of DOZENS of musicians and singers in two days, giving them three days to rehearse and a day to pack. Rita mentions that nobody on the tour was older than 26 or 27, so three days of 18 hours of singing while the arrangements were still being worked out was...sorta doable I guess. LOL
When Jerry Moss (the M of A&M Records) came to the second day of rehearsals, he said, "The world has never seen a tour like this. We have to film it!" -- so he hustled a film crew together, which roughly doubled the size of the entourage....and which meant that the part of the crew that saw the MOST rehearsal saw ONE DAY, but the rest of the crew had NO IDEA what they were even looking at, much less trying to shoot. It's amazing that we got anything watchable out of this, but man, is it a corker!
Definitely steals a few moves from Thelma Schoonmacher's edit of Woodstock (her assistant Marty Scorcese went on to some fame as a director, and used Thelma as his lead editor starting with Raging Bull), notably the split screens to try to contain the chaos.
There's unfortunately not a lot of high-quality footage of this floating around, but for goodness sake, TURN THIS UP to get an idea! Forty-ish musicians and singers make quite a racket. LOL Pay particular attention to Joe of course, but also Chris Stainton on piano, Leon Russell on lead guitar and musical direction (you can definitely see him lead the band with his guitar!), and, well, all of it. LOL
Go ahead, wake up the kids!
The key words for us watching this now might be "spectacle" or "exuberance" (it really is a joy to behold)....but for Joe in particular, and for Rita as well, the key words are "exhausted/exhausting" and "sad/sorrow." I'll let Rita tell you the best stuff, but a few things really jumped out at me:
- Joe wound up broke and homeless by the end of the tour. He alternated between sleeping on Jerry Moss's kitchen floor and Rita Coolidge's couch while he got strong enough to think about getting home.
- Did I mention broke? He figured he might be able to write a song or two to finance his trip back, but he couldn't afford a guitar. Moss had to get him the money for one (and I'll bet you a nickel billed Joe for it later).
- He didn't sing in public for years after Mad Dogs, and I'll let Rita tell you about his comeback, which she features in, and is a genuinely sweet story.
I was going to talk some more about Leon, which I'll save for another day, except to observe that his nickname "The Master of Space and Time" came from this tour, and his supernatural ability to keep this many people sort of on the rails.
A couple of follow-up videos.
- Super producer Glyn Johns (whom you met in the Get Back documentary, if not known earlier for his work with, well, everyone -- Beatles, Stones, Who, Faces, Eagles, Clash, Dylan, etc etc etc) tells the tale of turning a giant pile of disorganized tapes into a pretty darn cohesive album....but it ends up being a pretty sad story too.
- Billy Joel confesses that he was signed to a record contract based on his Joe Cocker impression!!! He'd told Joe this story, so I'll let him tell you too.
- Randy Newman breaks down the differences between what HE did (and intended) with his own version of "You Can Leave Your Hat On" , and how Joe handled it (as with With A Little Help, Joe's really is a fundamentally different song), then walks us through the two very different versions of "Sail Away" too. Needless to say, he's a fan, and his insights are pretty striking.
There's enough to get anyone started.
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