‘Mad Dogs & Englishmen’ at Petaluma’s Mystic Theatre

It is often suggested that, when it comes to the historical significance of certain landmark rock ‘n roll events, the Woodstock Music & Art Fair - that now iconic New York music festival held in August of 1969 - is the pinnacle, marking the triumphant coming-of-age of “the ‘60s.” It has also been proposed that the infamous Altamont Free Festival, held just four months later in December of 1969, at Altamont Speedway in California - now infamous for its numerous violent episodes including one murder – essentially marked the ‘60s sad but irreversible death.

If so, then the argument could be made that Joe Cocker’s legendary “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” tour, which unfolded in the spring of 1970 over seven weeks, was the 1960s’ funeral, a happy-but-sad, rowdy and raucous, rock ‘n roll wake, an accidental celebration and acknowledgement of all that was good and bad about the 1960s.

“I agree, totally, it definitely has the feel of a big, wild wake,” says Sebastian Saint James, lead singer of the Highway Poets. He is a key player in Sonoma County’s whimsically titled Space Orchestra, formed last year by an assortment of local musicians to recreate, song by song, on stage, the unique experience of listening to the “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” live concert album, released in late 1970, and now a beloved snapshot of a bittersweet, self-destructive but also fiercely defiant moment in time. “And Joe Cocker himself was the fire at the center of that,” Saint James notes. “He was at the rock bottom of his own personal addictions during that tour, was constantly feuding with Leon Russell, who was kind of the ringleader of the tour, and he was still amazing every night when he went out on stage. Musically, “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” is spectacular. It’s volcanic. Cocker was so raw and real, at a place where he couldn’t fake anything, so he didn’t even try. I think ‘Mad Dogs’ is one of the greatest concert albums ever made, and I still can’t believe I get to go on stage and be a part of bringing that back to life a little.”

The project is the brainchild of drummer Rhyne Erde, of One Grass, Two Grass and Electric Tumbleweed. It was his idea to somehow amass the proper number of musicians to match the size and sound of Cocker’s notably enormous “Mad Dogs” band, which included a choir, two drummers, keyboards, guitars and whoever happened to show up that night. Last year, the newly formed Space Orchestra presented “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” for the first time, at the Big Easy in Petaluma, and after following up with another performance in Sebastopol, will bring the show back to Petaluma on May, 17, at the Mystic Theatre. The event, with opening act The Soul Section, is a benefit for the Petaluma Music Festival, which is itself a benefit for music programs in Petaluma schools.

“We didn’t know what to expect, that first time at the Big Easy, in terms of who might show up to hear it,” admits Pamela Joyce, of Foxes in the Henhouse, and an original member of the Space Orchestra. “But there were lines out the door and down the alley,” she says. “Clearly, Rhyne had hit on something that people really wanted to experience.”

“I first heard the band when I was a kid,” explains Erde, asked to describe what it was about “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” that has so captured his imagination. “My parents listened to great music – the Allman brothers, Grateful Dead, The Band, Beatles, Rolling Stones, Joe Cocker and many more.”

That included Joe Cocker, the unlikely musical agitator from Sheffield, England, whose love of American soul music propelled him into (and frequently out of) the rock ‘n roll mainstream. He first leaped to fame at Woodstock with his gritty, growling cover of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends.”

“A couple of years ago,” says Erde, “I asked my buddy Sean England, one of the other drummers in the Space Orchestra, for some music listening suggestions. He told me to revisit the ‘Mad Dogs & Englishmen’ album, which I hadn’t heard in years. It blew me away … and I had it on heavy rotation for a while.”

That’s when the idea of the Space Orchestra began to materialize.

“[The ‘Mad Dogs’ ensemble] was such a huge all-star band, and I thought it would be so cool to put together a tribute project with local musicians,” he says. “So I thought about what musicians would fit and started contacting them one by one, and everyone said yes.”

Saint James, who would eventually be asked to take on Cocker’s vocals for the project, remembers how he came to involved in “Mad Dogs.”

“Rhyne played drum with the Highway Poets for a while,” he says, “and we were on tour, and there was nothing to do but listen to records, and we’d been listening to the live “Mad Dogs” album for like, three days straight. And at one point Rhyne said, ‘You know, I think that if we recreated the album live on stage. People might come see that.’ And I said, ‘If that ever happens, I want to be a part of it.’ And now, here we are.”

In many ways, The Space Orchestra is Sonoma County echo of what Cocker and Russell accomplished, in that it incorporates so many local musicians who are already well known, many as front persons in their own bands. The Mystic show, for example, with include Stefanie Keys-Pisarcsyk (formerly of Big Brother & the Holding Company, now of The Stefanie Keys Band), Katie Freeman and Chris Chappell (of the Incubators), guitarist Skyler Stover (of Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids, and others), keyboardist Ben Jacobs, percussionist Mingo Junior, and a whole lot of others.

“’Mad Dogs and Englishmen,’ the original album, has a very distinct wall-of-sound feel to it,” notes Joyce, who gets to recreate the moment on the record when Rita Coolidge takes the mike to sing the mighty “Superstar,” by Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett. “Because the music was performed by a big ensemble, and because of the circumstances under which it was recorded, it was just a huge cosmic convergence of madness and wildness and spontaneity. I read a quote-thing about it that said, ‘Mad Dogs is a sexy, funky, rocking version of Southern fried soul stained through British sensibilities. The performances are loose and fun, drunken and transcendent - the soul of rock & roll.’ In my opinion, what Rhyne has pulled together - in taking this hot mess of music and putting it on stage in a new way - is just amazing and beautiful.”

“The whole impetus behind the original “Mad Dogs’ tour,” notes Chappell, who sings as part of the Space Choir, “was that Leon Russell wanted to do a tour, but he needed Joe. Because he wasn’t going to get the resources to do it on his own, and Joe wanted to stay home and make a record, but he was contractually obligated to go on tour, so he needed Leon. The whole beauty of it, in terms of the music they ended up playing, was how they went out and chose the right songs to cover. They did end up writing a few for the tour, but mostly, it’s all covers, and the diversity of the repertoire is just stunning.”

“It’s very important to me,” says Saint James, responding to a question about taking on Cocker’s one-of-a-kind vocals, “that I not end up doing John Belushi doing Joe Cocker. This is not a joke to us. I’m not really even ‘doing’ Joe Cocker. But I do feel a responsibility to be as true to the spirit of Joe Coker as I can. I’ve realized that all of those physical things he does, he kind of had to do that - contorting his body and just reaching down to his soul and pulling out the sounds, and shaking them out into thte open – he had to do just to be able to sing with as much passion and intensity as he did. So I end up doing some physical things, not because I’m trying to do an impression of Joe Cocker, but because there’s simply no other way to sing some of those songs without doing some of that.”

It doesn’t sound easy.

But then, as Erde notes, nothing about this project has been easy.

Which is why it’s ultimately been so rewarding.

“I think the hardest part of recreating the album,” concludes Erde, “is just staying true to the original music, but also incorporating a bit of our own musical interpretation.

“Actually,” he adds, “the hardest part is getting 15 people together at one time.”

That’s a point that Joe Cocker would very likely agree with.