On the Road

By JAY COCKS

Joe 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 fun to see as it must have been to live through.

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 pianos in listening distance.

Joe 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.

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