Episode Overview
It was a real honor when Big Rick—host of Rock Talk Studio podcast—put Play All Night on his annual best-of list. We’ve been fellow travelers in the rock & roll media world ever since. Rick reviews rock and roll books and documentaries every week on Rock Talk Studio, which means he reads about thirty books a year and watches somewhere around fifteen docs. That’s history graduate school by any other name. I figured it was time to return the favor. Rick and I both came to Leon Russell late and hard—and we talk Leon, Tedeschi Trucks Band, and the Mad Dogs and Englishmen films, books, and the albums.
Our Crossroads
Rick and I share a love of rock & roll books and movies and the joy of talking about them with someone who cares as much as you do. Follow the tendrils. Let one record/book/film lead you to the next. Loving music means wanting to understand where it came from. We both believe that if a piece of art doesn’t hit for you, that’s on you. And we both know that the best rock writing does what the best rock music does—it fills in the gaps and shows you something you couldn’t see before.
The Conversation
We start with the Tedeschi Trucks Band 2015 LOCKN’ set and the re-release of the Mad Dogs universe—how we each came to Leon Russell, why Bill Janovitz’s biography is essential, and the fact that TTB is the last band on earth playing the Mad Dogs’ canon.
Leon Russell stole the entire Delaney and Bonnie band to build Mad Dogs and Englishmen and the tendrils from that moment run everywhere—Derek and the Dominos, Rita Coolidge, even Tom Petty, whose story connects directly to Leon through Shelter Records and Denny Cordell.1
The two films anchor most of what follows: Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1971) and Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen (2021). Rick breaks down what he loves about Mad Dogs and Englishmen as a piece of filmmaking—the looseness, the sheer number of people on that stage, the Sly Stone-meets-James Brown vibe of it—and I point him toward some details worth watching for on the rewatch, particularly the way the women of that tour are present and visible in a way the era rarely allowed.
Learning to Live Together gets its own extended treatment. Jesse Lauter’s decision to let the women carry the story. The room when everyone first walks in after fifty years. Leon doing the “Ballad of Mad Dogs and Englishmen” unrehearsed, sparked from a conversation Derek Trucks had with Chris Robinson just before taking the stage. And what it looks like when a man at the end of his life feels the music move through him one more time. Derek and Susan as protectors of the sound. The fragility and the joy of it all in the same frame.
We talk about the art of rereading and rewatching—why going back through the Janovitz book a second time is what let me catch Leon’s backstage reaction when Rita Coolidge sings “Bird on a Wire,” a detail that tells you everything about a grudge that never fully healed. Rick shares what slows him down: he falls into the music every time, disappears into the catalog of whoever he’s reading about, and has to find his way back. The Rita Coolidge and Jim Gordon story gets its due. What happened on that tour would end things immediately today. They protected Rita after that. Gordon’s trajectory from there is one of rock and roll’s most tragic stories, documented in Joel Selvin’s Drums and Demons.
We closed on what makes a great rock and roll book or documentary: the behind-the-curtain creative moment, the spark you didn’t know existed.
Rick put it simply—rock and roll is a giant puzzle, there are a gazillion pieces, a lot of them have been put together, but there’s still a lot missing.
That’s why he keeps going. It’s why I do too.
Resources
Bob Beatty
Play All Night: Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East https://www.amazon.com/dp/0813069505
“When it’s gone, it’s gone”: Teresa Knox, the Church Studio, and our responsibility to history https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/crossroads-tulsa
The joy of musical discovery https://www.longlivetheabb.com/p/the-joy-of-musical-discovery
Rock Talk Studio podcast https://rocktalkstudio.buzzsprout.com/
Mike Campbell, Heartbreaker: A Memoir
Peter Ames Carlin, Tonight in Jungle Land: Bruce Springsteen’s America and the Making of Born to Run
Bill Janovitz, Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History
Learning to Live Together (documentary, 2021)
Mad Dogs and Englishmen (documentary, 1971)
Joel Selvin, Drums and Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon
Unofficial Tedeschi Trucks Podcast with Adam Choit—Episode 171 (Jesse Lauter interview)
