Word: cocker
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...trend has reversed with the emergence of several young singers who do not attempt to write the bulk of their own songs. Faced with the dearth of behind-the-scenes composers, they have had to rely on familiar, previously recorded material. A few, such as Rod Stewart and Joe Cocker, have distinguished their renditions through unique vocal styles and new arrangements, while some, like Janis Joplin, create remakes that are invariably inferior to the originals...
...Cocker/Mad Dogs and Englishmen is a road movie like Hope and Crosby, or for that matter, Hopper and Fonda, never dreamed of. Last year Cocker, his compatriot Leon Russell and a few dozen musicians, singers, wives and assorted girl friends set out under the collective name Mad Dogs and Englishmen to make music all around the country. They played some 65 gigs in 57 days while a camera crew recorded the whole scene, onstage and backstage. The result is a 114-minute carnival of high spirits and solid rock 'n' roll that is almost as much...
...Cocker and his friends careened from New York City to Plattsburg to Dallas to Santa Monica, laying down the kind of hard-driving music whose thumping, unrelenting rhythm is almost impossible to resist. The film's four-track stereo sound makes the theater throb, and the camera captures Cocker's famous, frenzied delivery-holy man seized by a vision, sweating, growling, rolling his eyes and moving in great bursts of spastic energy. By contrast Russell surveys the scene with an almost glacial cool as he strums an electric guitar or pounds what remains one of the cleverest rock...
...Cocker will inevitably be compared to Woodstock, and it will suffer by the comparison; it lacks the dynamism and sense of history of the original. But if Joe Cocker cannot compete with the best, it has enough talent and energy, and an abundance of sensational sounds, for its audience to sit back and, like the old song says, let the good times roll...
...music itself is not very good. There were thirty-five acts at Woodstock, and there are only thirteen in this film. The choices made here remain inexplicable, hence you should go prepared to be bored. A few of the heavies: Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Santana, Sebastian, Joe Cocker, Ten Years After, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, each set more intolerably mediocre than the last and if you start with Baez doing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," you can imagine where that takes you. Where are the Airplane, or the Dead, or even the Band...