More Joe Cocker

• This vintage copy boasts KILLER Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound on side four and seriously good Double Plus (A++) sound on the other THREE sides, and plays about as quietly as any early pressing ever will
• The sound is rich and tubey, with driving energy and the top end and clarity that was simply missing from far too many of the copies we had to work through in order to find this one
• 4 1/2 stars: “Unlike a lot of other ‘coffee table’-type rock releases of the era, such as Woodstock and The Concert for Bangladesh, people actually listened to Mad Dogs & Englishmen – most of its content was exciting, and its sound, a veritable definition of big-band rock with three dozen players working behind the singer, was unique.”

What this album most reminds me of is Ray Charles doing a choice set of modern pop classics and mixing it up by off-handedly throwing in a few of his own hits. “Honky Tonk Woman,” “Feelin’ Alright,” “Give Peace a Chance,” “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window,” “The Letter,” “Delta Lady.” See how they all fit together? That’s how the pros do it. (The main pro, in this case, is Leon Russell, the mastermind of the whole operation.)

One thing we learned from our shootout was how important TRANSPARENCY is to the enjoyment of this music. Of course, this has to be a multi-miked, multi-tracked, overdubbed pop record — they don’t make them any other way — but it doesn’t have to FEEL like one.

When you get a good copy it feels like all these guys and gals are live on stage. They may have their own mics, and are certainly being placed artificially in the soundfield to suit the needs of the track (singers here, drummer there), but the transparency of the better pressings makes them sound like they are all on the same stage singing and playing together. You hear their grunts and laughter way back in the mix, just as if you were at the concert.

All tracks were engineered by the legendary Eddie Kramer, then selected and mixed by the equally legendary Glyn Johns.

What The Best Sides Of Mad Dogs and Englishmen Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1970
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange — with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional studio space

No doubt there’s more but we hope that should do for now. Playing these records are the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions are the only way to find pressing that sounds as good as these two do.

What To Listen For

The weaker copies have a tendency to sound smeary and congested. Listen for good transients and not too much compression. Many are also somewhat opaque as well as dull up top; try to find the ones with some degree of transparency and as much top-end extension as you can (the percussion will be helped most of all by the extended top).

And of course you need to find a copy that rocks, as this is definitely a Rock Concert.

If you get the wrong stampers on this record you will discover, as we did, that it’s clearly been mastered from a badly transferred dub tape. The “cassette-like” sound quality will not be hard to recognize. If you have stumbled onto one of those pressings, give up on it and try your luck elsewhere, making sure to note the bad stampers. That’s how we do it; there is, in fact, no other way. Trial and error is the name of the record hunting game.

What We’re Listening For On Mad Dogs and Englishmen

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren’t “back there” somewhere, lost in the mix. They’re front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt would put them.
• The Big Sound comes next — wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information — fast, clear, sharp attacks, not the smear and thickness so common to these LPs.
• Tight punchy bass — which ties in with good transient information, also the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency — the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the instruments.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing — an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of other pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don’t have the vintage analog magic of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that’s certainly your prerogative, but we can’t imagine losing what’s good about this music — the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight — just to hear it with less background noise.

One Tough Album (To Find and To Play)

Not only is it hard to find great copies of this album, it ain’t easy to play ’em either. You’re going to need a hi-res, super low distortion front end with careful adjustment of your arm in every area — VTA, tracking weight, azimuth and anti-skate — in order to play this album properly. If you’ve got the goods you’re gonna love the way this copy sounds. Play it with a budget cart / table / arm and you’re likely to hear a great deal less magic than we did.

A Rock Masterpiece

We consider this Joe Cocker album his Masterpiece (along with his sophomore release, Joe Cocker!). Others that belong in that category can be found here.

TRACK LISTING

Side One

Introduction 
Honky Tonk Woman
Introduction 
Sticks and Stones 
Cry Me a River 
Bird on a Wire 

Side Two

Feelin’ Alright 
Superstar 
Introduction 
Let’s Go Get Stoned

Side Three

Blue Medley: I’ll Drown in My Own Tears/When Something Is Wrong
Introduction
Girl from the North Country
Give Peace a Chance

Side Four

Introduction
She Came in Through the Bathroom Window
Space Captain
The Letter
Delta Lady

AMG 4 1/2 Star Rave Review

Mad Dogs & Englishmen was just about the most elaborate album that A&M Records had ever released, back in 1971, a double LP in a three-panel, fold-out, gatefold sleeve, with almost 80 minutes of music inside and a ton of photos, graphics, and annotation wrapping around it.

A live recording done in tandem with a killer documentary film of the same U.S. tour, it was recorded at the Fillmore East, where the movie was a cross-country affair, and the two were, thus, completely separate entities — also, as people couldn’t “buy” the film in those days, the double LP has lingered longer in the memory, by virtue of its being on shelves, and also being taken off those shelves to be played.

Unlike a lot of other “coffee table”-type rock releases of the era, such as Woodstock and The Concert for Bangladesh, people actually listened to Mad Dogs & Englishmen — most of its content was exciting, and its sound, a veritable definition of big-band rock with three dozen players working behind the singer, was unique.

1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die

Joe Cocker has said that when this project began in 1970, he didn’t know most of the musicians assembled by songwriter/arranger Leon Russell for what turned out to be his most important U.S. tour. It’s easy to believe that, because there were some thirty-six people involved on stage — horn players, strings, backing singers, and an extra-large rhythm section with multiple drummers and keyboard players. Their nightly exploits were documented by a film crew that traveled coast-to-coast, and recorded by Cocker’s label, A&M Records, at several stops. (This double album was recorded at New York’s Fillmore East.)

If such an endeavor around a not-yet-huge artist seems wildly extravagant, chalk it up to the times: This was how they rolled in the early ’70s. And Cocker, another of the artists whose profile jumped after appearing at Woodstock in August 1969, looked like a safe bet. Russell, then a Svengali to several artists, believed that the grind-it-out British belter with the Ray Charles obsession could be huge if presented in the right context. So he wrote screaming arrangements of songs Cocker had been singing for years, and positioned the singer at the center of a constantly moving (and frequently gaudy) revue.

Bigger isn’t usually better in rock. But Mad Dogs works, in part because the ensemble pushes Cocker in ways few rock singers are ever pushed. He sings Traffic’s “Feelin’ Alright” as a series of boxing maneuvers, slipping his ad-libs into the (few) open spaces. He feeds off the campy vaudeville backing for the Beatles’ “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window.” And though he enjoys the power of Russell’s ensemble on the full-throttle rock numbers, Cocker is most persuasive when the heat isn’t full force: This steady-rolling version of “Cry Me a River” deserves a spot in the hall of fame, as does the sultry version of Russell’s “Delta Lady” that closes the program.

– Tom Moon, 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die, 2008.