Blood, Sweat & Tears

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For the famous speech by Winston Churchill, see Blood, toil, tears, and sweat.


Blood, Sweat & Tears was an American music group, formed in New York City in 1967, which fused jazz and rock or pop music into a hybrid of what came to be known as "jazz-rock". They are among the first of this genre of music. Unlike "jazz fusion" or simply "fusion" (which tended toward virtuostic displays of electronic experimentation and amodal music), Blood, Sweat & Tears' sound was a merging of the varied stylings of rock, pop and R&B/soul music with big band or combo jazz.

Contents

[edit] Al Kooper era

Al Kooper, Jim Fielder, Fred Lipsius, Randy Brecker, Jerry Weiss, Dick Halligan, Steve Katz and Bobby Colomby formed the original incarnation of the band, which was purportedly a name chosen by Al Kooper after seeing a 1963 album of this name by Johnny Cash. Kooper was bandleader, having insisted on that position based on his experiences with The Blues Project, his previous band, which had been organized as an egalitarian collective and fallen apart (the Blues Project had also featured Katz).

The group debuted at Cafe Au Go Go in New York City in 1967, opening for Moby Grape; the band was a hit with the audience, who liked the innovative fusion of jazz with psychedelic rock and pop. After signing to Columbia Records, the group released one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the 1960s, Child is Father to the Man. Without any pop-oriented hit singles, though, the album's sales were sluggish. While sales slowly picked up, personality conflicts started tearing apart the band. Colomby and Katz wanted to move Kooper to the organ exclusively and hire a vocalist for the group. With the debut album slowly achieving critical mass, Kooper left the group to become a record producer for Columbia. Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss also quit, joining Horace Silver's band and Ambergris, respectively.

[edit] David Clayton-Thomas era

Colomby and Katz started recruiting singers, considering the still unknown Stephen Stills and Laura Nyro before settling on David Clayton-Thomas, a Canadian singer. Chuck Winfield, Lew Soloff and Jerry Hyman joined soon after to bring the band up to nine total members. Blood, Sweat & Tears, the group's second, self-titled album, was produced by James William Guercio and released in 1969. The album was much more pop-oriented, featuring decidedly fewer compositions from within the band. It quickly hit the top of the charts and won Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards. It spawned three major hit singles: a cover of Brenda Holloway's "You've Made Me So Very Happy", Clayton-Thomas' "Spinning Wheel", and a version of Nyro's "And When I Die".

Because of the presence of horns and the lack of Al Kooper, Blood, Sweat & Tears had trouble holding onto any sort of countercultural hipness at a time when this was very important. This was compounded by a United States Department of State-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe. Any voluntary association with the government was extremely unpopular at the time, and the band was ridiculed for it. In retrospect, it is now known that the State Department subtly requested the tour in exchange for more amicability on the issue of Clayton-Thomas' visa.

After returning back to the U.S., the group released Blood, Sweat & Tears 3; though it was a popular success, spawning hit singles with a cover of Carole King's "Hi-De-Ho" and "Lucretia MacEvil", another Clayton-Thomas composition, it was a critical failure. While this was partially due to the fact that the album was a less-successful attempt to re-create the success of the previous album, leaning almost exclusively (again) on cover material, sometimes to disastrous results, a lot of journalists also felt the need to slag the band over the State-Department tour (in fact, many reviews would focus solely upon that, without even bothering to talk about the album). Compounding the image problems was a decision to play at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, a notoriously unhip place in an unhip city. In 1970, the band provided music for the soundtrack of the film comedy "The Owl and the Pussycat".

Following all of this turmoil, the group re-convened with jazz writer Don Heckman serving as their producer and with Dave Bargeron replacing Jerry Hyman, recording material that would comprise their fourth album, Blood, Sweat & Tears 4. For the first time since Child Is Father to the Man, almost all of the material came from within the group, and the group even included a cover of Al Kooper's "Holy John (John The Baptist)" (the only tune not associated with the group was a cover of The Isley Brothers' "Take Me In Your Arms"). Though the album did make the top ten and go gold, it generally marked the end of the group's commercial heyday.

[edit] Further personnel changes

Personality difficulties had split the group in rock and jazz factions, with Clayton-Thomas in the middle; he chose to quit to pursue a solo career. He was replaced by Bobby Doyle, then Jerry Fisher. Fred Lipsius quit and was replaced by jazz legend Joe Henderson, before Lou Marini settled into the lineup. Dick Halligan was replaced by another jazz legend, Larry Willis, while Swedish guitarist Georg Wadenius joined as a second guitarist. Amidst the personnel changes, a Greatest Hits album was released, which hit the top 20 and eventually went gold. It would be their last gold album.

The new group eventually released New Blood, which found the group moving into more overtly jazzy music than on their earlier albums. The album did make the top 40 (their last to do so) and spawn a single that just missed the top 40 ("So Long Dixie", chart peak: 44), but it suffered from disappointing sales. Steve Katz quit the group following this album. Their next albums, No Sweat and Mirror Image, sold progressively fewer copies than their previous albums (the latter album, in an attempt to shift the group's sound, saw the addition of vocalist Jerry LaCroix, horn player Bill Tillman, and the adoption of a sound pitched somewhere between Philly Soul and the mid-1970s albums by Herbie Hancock).

Personnel changes continued at a breakneck pace, culminating in the return of David Clayton-Thomas and the release of an attempted comeback album called New City. Though this album did chart higher than anything since New Blood and managed to spawn a minor entry on the singles chart with a cover of the Beatles song "Got To Get You Into My Life", it still didn't sell very well. They released one final album through Columbia Records, the poor-selling More Than Ever, before they were finally dropped. The last original band member, Bobby Colomby, left in 1976, though when the band signed a new deal with ABC Records, he served as executive producer. Their sole album for that label, Brand New Day, was their first album to completely miss the charts. Following a disastrous European tour in 1978 to support the album, the group disbanded.

[edit] Reformations

However, David Clayton-Thomas decided to re-form the group in 1980, with a band of Canadian musicians. They signed to Avenue Records subsidiary LAX, and with legendary producer Jerry Goldstein, recorded the album Nuclear Blues. Despite the title, the album was a last-ditch attempt to reinvent the group, showing the group adopting a funk sound. The album was a complete commercial failure, and is regarded by many fans as being the worst album that the group ever released (though this is considerably debated by others), and uncharacteristic of both the group and Goldstein's best work. Following a brief tour, the group disbanded again.

Clayton-Thomas attempted to re-start his solo career after the album, since he didn't own the rights to the Blood, Sweat & Tears name, but during a few dismal months on the road, he would find that promoters would book his group and instead use the famous name on the marquee anyway. Due to this, he negotiated a yearly licensing deal with Bobby Colomby for rights to tour using the name. For almost 20 years afterwards, he toured the oldies circuit in this manner.

In 2004, Clayton-Thomas announced his intentions to formally pursue his solo career again, and most assumed that the group was finished.

[edit] Current status

It was discovered in 2005, however, that Colombia had licensed the rights to the group name to Chuck Negron, the former vocalist for Three Dog Night, and as of 2006, a group is currently touring under the heading Blood, Sweat & Tears Featuring Chuck Negron.

All of their albums, except for Brand New Day, are currently available on CD. The first four albums were reissued by Sony Records in remastered editions (usually with bonus material), except for their third album, which has been reissued by Mobile Fidelity. Their later Columbia albums have been reissued by Wounded Bird Records, and Rhino Records has reissued Nuclear Blues.

[edit] External links

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