Tedeschi Trucks Band and Leon Russell

Mad Dogs & Englishmen Revisited Live at Lockin’

Fantasy Records

Mad Dogs & Englishmen, the 1970 tour and resultant live album starring Joe Cocker leading a large, hastily assembled group of gifted and amped up players and singers, cannot be topped. Every aspect of that extravaganza, which features reinventions of then-contemporary songs by the Band, the Beatles, the Lovin’ Spoonful, Ray Charles, Traffic, and others in a wild spectacle of voices and melodies, still resonates as powerfully as ever.

The point behind Mad Dogs & Englishmen Revisited was not to better the original, but to honor it. The 12-piece Tedeschi Trucks Band invited 16 guest singers and players—nine of them Mad Dogs alumni—to present a spirited, potent, and highly enjoyable experience. Together, they capture the spirit of 1970 through old-fashioned feeling and massive talent. In fact, TTB, led by guitarist Derek Trucks and his wife, the singer and guitarist Susan Tedeschi, modeled their band on Cocker’s Mad Dogs and its precursors, Delaney & Bonnie Bramlett and Friends. The band has since expanded its oeuvre, adding jazz, funk, world music styles, and more, to the established mix of blues, rock ‘n’ roll, soul, rhythm & blues, and gospel.

Staged at the 2015 Lockn’ Festival in Virginia, Revisited includes most of the now-classic songs that appeared on the original Mad Dogs album plus others that were added to a subsequent Deluxe Edition. It certainly is fitting homage that the album is co-billed with Leon Russell, as the late, influential musician was the musical director of Cocker’s troupe and appears at Revisited in one of his final, grand bows. Joe Cocker’s absence may be profound, but Russell and the rest of the collective surely make up for it. Russell singing his own “Dixie Lullaby” with such unbridled force ranks as one of this album’s highlights. But there are plenty of others.

Derek Trucks’ exceptional guitar playing demands attention. When he steps into a solo, it seems as if a lightning bolt just struck the song. Listen as he rips just a few brief notes in Ray Charles’ “Sticks and Stones” after showcasing original Mad Dogs pianist Chris Stainton and the cadre of horn players. By those notes, Trucks kicks everyone back into the fray of the song in striking fashion. With Dave Mason on Mason’s old Traffic masterpiece, “Feelin’ Alright,” Trucks duels with Tedeschi in a fiery exchange of emotion, while Mason is masterfully in command of the moment, singing his song with happy, gritty passion.

On Paul McCartney’s immortal, true-life story, “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” Trucks’ Allman Brothers partner Warren Haynes sings, subtly evoking Cocker through his bluesy growl while the band and singers rise in gospel-like festivity behind him. Anders Osborne joins Haynes and Trucks in delivering a little slice of guitar heaven in the song.

But it is Tedeschi’s vocal prowess that captivates the most. She belts out Alex Chilton’s Box Tops classic “The Letter” to begin the concert as if she wrote the song and wants to shout it out to the world how great it is. Then she gets inside every elegant note of John Sebastian’s “Lovin’ Spoonful hit, “Darling Be Home Soon,” and carries a listener along with her on that journey of love and devotion. The band commences to delight by way of two different types of bracing rhythm and blues heat.

Trimming and re-sequencing the Lockn’ concert from its 17 songs to the 14 presented here makes for a 70-minute album rich in impact. A celebratory traipse through Ray Charles’ “Let’s Go Get Stoned” featuring Tedeschi and TTB singers Mike Mattison and Mark Rivers along with the Black Crowes’ Chris Robinson sounds all at once like a rough night in a juke and church the next morning. But at the end, Tedeschi seems riveted to the juke by her wailing.

Mad Dog alumnus Claudia Lennear’s stirring rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” causes chills, and at the conclusion, Russell sits alone at his piano singing his own “The Ballad of Mad Dogs and Englishmen.” What a moving coda. As they did with Layla Revisited Live at Lockn’ four years later, Tedeschi Trucks Band has honored a landmark album properly and with good reason. These iconic songs should always be front and center, and in the process of making sure of that, the band wrote its name all over them.

Tom Clarke for MAS

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