Susan Tedeschi Says Tedeschi Trucks Band Owes Much to Joe Cocker’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’

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There is, of course, an obvious comparison for the newly formed Tedeschi Trucks Band — yeah, we made it too — in the 1970s-era husband-and-wife projects led by Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett. Susan Tedeschi, however, says their group’s main inspiration goes further back.

All the way back to the traveling caravan of grease-popping soul and eye-popping excess that was Joe Cocker’s legendary 1970 jaunt with Leon Russell, Rita Coolidge, members of Derek and the Dominos, Jim Keltner, Bobby Keys and others — mythical, then as now, for its army of great players.



“We’re more like the ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen,’ but they had more like 30 people traveling with them,” Tedeschi tells Jim Caligiuri of The Austin (Texas) Chronicle. “We have the two drummers and the horns and the musical genius on keyboards. There’s a lot of similarities … They were all very incestuous with players and Leon Russell.”

In keeping, this meeting of the minds between Tedeschi and spouse Derek Trucks (of the Allman Brothers Band) is a sprawling 11-member soul orchestra that primarily features members from their respective solo groups. Yet, and Tedeschi is quick to point this out, the Tedeschi Trucks Band doesn’t simply rehash what came before.

“We wrote a ton of songs for this group and we do those while including some that haven’t been recorded yet,” she says. “Some will be on the live record that’s coming later this year. We’ve been doing covers, like Stevie Wonder, Bobby Bland, and Sly & the Family Stone. We will move some of our old songs into it, but we wanted people to realize that this is a new established band. It’s not like a side project. We want people to come in and really love this group. We also wanted the people in the band to feel like they’re here from the beginning. It’s not old repertoire stuff that we’re pulling out.”

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