I’d heard Leon Russell’s music forever — but didn’t know him from Adam.
I actually know Elton John—but his music escapes me.
With the exception of “Your Song” and maybe “Benny and the Jets” (the same name as a boxing club in Van Nuys), I’d be hard pressed to name more of John’s oeuvre. Oh, maybe “Candle in the Wind”—but that’s not much from a four-decade career.
Nevertheless, he seems to be the soundtrack of our generation (if only someone would put a fork through Abba!). I didn’t decide that, however.
Leon Russell did.
In order to understand, one most go back, way, way back—“into the Wayback machine, Mr. Peabody”—to those halcyon days of yesteryear, the early ‘70s.
Now, you must understand, Woodstock, both the festival and the movie, had already come and gone. On the other hand, many good things had come out of it: Santana, The Who and, perhaps most importantly, Joe Cocker, a bluesy drunken lout from Sheffield, England, who ended up captivating the crowd with everything from the Boxtops ‘60s hit “The Letter” to the Beatles’ “She Came in the Bathroom Window.”
At the time, of course, no one knew what they were watching … except one, Leon Russell.
When Cocker came off the road later that year, exhausted, he suddenly found that his manager had booked another tour for the next year, 1970. Desperate and at wits end, someone convinced Cocker to turn to legendary L.A. session man Leon Russell to put together not just a concert tour but a whole show for him.
Now Russell was not just a top session man—he had played on many of the biggest hits of the ‘60s, with artists ranging from the neo-pop of Herb Alpert to the cutting edge of The Byrds. He’d also had his first songwriting hit with “Delta Lady” on Cocker’s big U.S. album.
So it was a natural in Cocker’s exhausted state to give up his beloved English Grease Band and turn his musical future over to Russell, who made the most of it for both Cocker and himself.
The resulting live album, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” the detritus of the tour he organized, became a huge hit and not only spurred Cocker’s career but Russell’s as the long-haired, be-whiskered piano-playing maestro of the mezzanine.
Having seen the show as a kid by, along with my friends Frank Colin, Bill Levy and others, sneaking into the old Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, by -- you guessed it and I'm not kidding -- a bathroom window, the Mad Dogs show was one of the first rock shows anyone had seen that, well, let the audience in on the joke.
Please understand, until this point rock-and-roll had been under the hands of the old-fashioned showmen who’d learned their trade in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Everything had to be smoothly pulled off, with no evidence of the furious peddling going on backstage to keep the show moving. Even
