The Audacity of Blood, Sweat & Tears

A celebration of the group's second album

This edition’s essay is another in which I write about an album that I deeply love. The eponymous second album by Blood, Sweat & Tears is not one that is universally hailed. The marking of Al Kooper’s departure (he is co-credited on three of the album’s arrangements) and David Clayton-Thomas’s arrival seemed to end the grand experiment of one of the first groups to fuse rock with jazz and to feature horns. It is undeniable that the group soon petered out but Blood, Sweat & Tears, to me, is far better than its detractors claim. With three hit singles and many moments of jazz improvisation, the recording is thrilling and exciting, another of the documents of a deeply creative era in popular music.

What do you think? Am I mostly right here, wildly off the mark or somewhere in the middle? I’d love to get your thoughts, and hope you also enjoy the essay!

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The Audacity of Blood, Sweat & Tears
By: Robert C. Gilbert

The second album by Blood, Sweat & Tears has been recently on my mind. There’s two reasons why. The first is related to a passion project that I happily spent much of my spring engaged in (read it here). The second is related to the news that David Clayton-Thomas, the group’s lead singer during its brief but substantive moment in the sun, had passed away in late June.

Notoriety attaches itself to the album, mostly for it winning the 1969 Grammy for Album of the Year, beating out, among others, the Beatles’ Abbey Road, tainting it, I suppose, with original sin. Another is that Blood, Sweat & Tears’ sophomore recording narrowed how the group expressed its mélange of not only jazz and rock but also blues, classical, gospel, folk, pop and soul on its first LP, Child is Father to the Man.

Think of the fugue in the middle of their interpretation of Randy Newman’s ‘Just One Smile’ or how the horns usher in the rush of ‘House in the Country’ like the wind-mill effect from Richard Strauss’ Don Quixote or the backwards guitar on ‘My Days Are Numbered.’

The latter two were written by Al Kooper, the group’s first guiding force and with guitarist Steve Katz, with whom Kooper was bandmates in the Blues Project, another group fueled by cross-pollination, bassist Jim Fielder and drummer Bobby Colomby, formed the core of Blood, Sweat & Tears. Then came the horn section: Jerry Weiss, Randy Brecker, Fred Lipsius and Dick Halligan.

Child Is Father to the Man is one of the albums of the late sixties that resulted when the focus in record making shifted from limitations to possibilities. It is uncompromising in its vision and did relatively well on the charts but not too well. The group’s follow-up topped the Billboard charts three times during 1969, including when they took the stage at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. And perhaps that commercial success was the greatest sin that marked Kooper’s exit and Clayton-Thomas’ entrance as the moment the group’s fall was inevitable.

Kooper has never been an exceptionally gifted as a singer technically but he has an authenticity that marks his vocals as soliloquies of the everyman. Consider how he prods Lipsius during his blistering alto saxophone solo on ‘Somethin’ Goin’ On’ with “I want you to blow for all the people who have to face an empty bed now.” He sounds like the kind of person where that is an everyday fear.

But the limitations of Kooper as a vocalist is clear when hearing the group tackle his arrangement of ‘You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,’ a moderate Motown hit for Brenda Holloway in 1967, on a bootleg recording from February 1968 at the Psychedelic Supermarket in Boston, two months prior to the departure from the group.

His chart is powerful, slower in tempo than Holloway’s recording and punctuated by the group’s horn section and Kooper’s organ, and accentuates the rush to the chorus. Kooper strains, though, to reach the soul power that he had in his fingers and in his pen.

It is a valuable document to have in retrospect as the version the group laid down on record was one of three smashes from Blood, Sweat & Tears, the title given to their second release, which came out at the end of 1968.

That Katz and Colomby were determined to find a dynamic lead singer to replace Kooper is clear when pondering a roll call of most of the vocalists they considered: Scott Morgan of the Rationals, Stephen Stills of the just-disbanded Buffalo Springfield and Laura Nyro. All distinct, mesmerizing singers and in the cases of Stills and Nyro, just as accomplished as musicians and songwriters. Also considered was a Canadian by way of England.

That it’s strange to hear Kooper sing the lead on ‘You’ve Made Me So Very Happy’ is because it’s impossible to hear anyone but David Clayton-Thomas sing it. That’s not simply because of how often and how long it’s been a staple of oldies stations, FM stations, satellite radio stations and on turntables. It’s because of how it became a glorious vehicle for Clayton-Thomas’ range. Yes, there is that gruff thrust of “’cause you came and you took control / you touched my very soul” but there’s also the light, tender glide of the song’s moving opening line: “I’ve lost at love before / got mad and closed the door / but you said ‘try, just once more’” that gets the listener’s attention.

It’s hearing a gift under control—one of the ways that ‘You’ve Made Me So Very Happy’ is a recording that balances power and poignancy with such aplomb. There’s also the interlude which moves from a dialogue between Katz and Fielder, and Halligan on organ to a declaration by the brass section, now comprised of Lipsius with new group members Lew Soloff, Jerry Hyman and Chuck Winfield who replaced Brecker and Weiss. There’s also Soloff’s muted trumpet obligatos behind Clayton-Thomas not to mention the gorgeous coda that wasn’t present when Kooper was still in the group.

Kooper’s touch on the group’s second album extended to adding Traffic’s ‘Smiling Phases’ to the Blood, Sweat & Tears book with an arrangement that closely mirrored the original recording as well as ‘More and More,’ written by Vee Pee Smith and Don Juan, but it’s Clayton-Thomas’ show, mostly.

He was a virtual unknown in New York when he took the stage at the Café Au Go Go in June 1968 for his first gig with his new group but was part of the city’s vibrant music scene since arriving in the Big Apple in early 1967, travelling along with John Lee Hooker.

He made a splash in Toronto in 1965 and 1966 with recordings that rode along the strength of his voice such as ‘Walk That Walk’ with the Shays and the pyrotechnical ‘Brain Washed’ with the Bossmen which had the word damn bleeped out.

That Clayton-Thomas heralded a new energy to the sound of Blood, Sweat & Tears is clear as he sings the opening line of ‘Smiling Phases’: “do yourself a favour, wake up to your mind.” It is preceded by an arrangement of Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopédie No. 1’ from his Trois Gymnopédies called ‘Variations of a Theme by Erik Satie.’

There are two brief movements. The first features Halligan, who wrote the chart, playing the indelible line on flute against Katz’s acoustic-guitar arpeggios and the second has the horns, heavily phased, playing it marital style with Colomby.

It is a mostly tranquil way to start the album that can be seen as pretentious although Child is Father to the Man started similarly; in that album’s case, with a brief overture. Both are an acknowledgement that what is to be heard is not so much an album as a work—the long-playing album is just the medium in which it is being presented.

It also makes that first moment when Clayton-Thomas is heard that much more immediate. Like a jolt of electricity or the first peak of the sun on a cloudy day. Kooper’s arrangement had been refined. In place of a psychedelic, horn-fueled interlude, there is a series of motifs—on the album, Lipsius and Halligan are co-credited with Kooper on the chart—most of them with a jazz flavour and featuring Lipsius on piano and Halligan on organ which resolve into a feature for the horn section, first dialoguing with Fielder, showing off his fleetness on bass and then ending with a chorale that brings back Clayton-Thomas.

So, within the album’s first eight minutes or so, classical and jazz music has been prominent. It continues on Katz’s ‘Sometimes in Winter,’ a shimmering musical postcard on which Colomby’s brush work feels like boots imprinting upon newly fallen snow, Soloff and Winfield’s muted trumpet lines falling like soft flakes from the sky and Katz, his only feature on the album as a vocalist, warmly and directly singing of the ache of lost love during the shortest days of the year. Halligan solos on flute in jazz time and it ends weaving around Soloff, Winfield and Hyman.

‘Sometimes in Winter’’s loveliness is addictive, or at least it has been for me ever since I first heard it in the early nineties, seduced by its fragrant colours and its explicit embrace of jazz which I was just beginning to be fascinated by. That was what was so exciting about Blood, Sweat & Tears. Hearing those moments of jazz amid rock music were formative, like the switch in the middle of Clayton-Thomas’ ‘Spinning Wheel’ to Soloff, the member of the group with the highest jazz cred, improvising and cracking a smile as Colomby gets a sizzle on the hi-hat. To hear them after all these years—jazz is now long part of the music that I deeply love—is to be reminded of the power and audacity of discovery.

Not every moment on Blood, Sweat & Tears is as sublime. Clayton-Thomas was prone to vocal machismo and at times, it is just too much, like on ‘More and More’ and at the end of ‘Smiling Phases.’

The 11-minutes ‘Blues—Part II’ is adventurous with the horn section suddenly breaking into the riff of Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love.’ It is also groovy with Fielder’s maniacal sense of swing on the bass. But it’s also a bit aimless, feeling as much a time filler as it is a demonstration of the leeway record companies gave in the late sixties to let musicians create without too many constraints. But, indulgence could beget indulgence as it does here but it’s still fascinating to hear.

‘Blues—Part II’ is far better realized on the recording from the group’s ill-fated USO tour in 1970 chronicled on What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? Here, it has a seemingly organic shift from ‘Somethin’ Goin’ On’ to a languid showcase for Katz, Soloff, Fielder, Colomby and Lipsius that then returns to ‘Somethin’ Goin’ On.’ Sadly, it fades out prematurely at the 15-and-a-half minute mark.

It’s still exhilarating to hear and reinforces that Blood, Sweat & Tears documents a vibrant moment in music. I hear it and recall that as the album was riding high on the charts, Colomby was one of the drummers on John Cale and Terry Riley’s strange, experimental Church of Anthrax and that Soloff went from the control room to the studio floor to provide the long, last trumpet note on Nyro’s ‘Save the Country’ for her New York Tendaberry and that the group minus Clayton-Thomas and Katz backed Susan Carter on her Wonderful Deeds and Adventures—a possible answer to the question of what the group may have sounded like if Nyro had decided to join.

I feel that kind of rush too as Katz straps on his harmonica for the start of ‘And When I Die,’ Halligan’s recasting of one of Nyro’s most beloved songs in Aaron Copland’s Americana of Appalachian Spring or Rodeo. The many shifts in tempo and rhythm also strike me as an attempt to re-cast the song in the manner of Nyro’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, albeit far more conventionally then her. There’s also a subtle lyric change in which “there’ll be one child born / and a world to carry on” becomes “there’ll be one child born / in a world to carry on.” Best to ignore that and just revel in how everything gels together beautifully. The crisp horn lines. Colomby and Fielder stopping on a dime. Clayton-Thomas giving a clinic in vocal technique: squeezing notes, letting others linger, adding his trademark growl in service of the lyrics and other times, letting the purity of his tone carry the load.

To me, it’s the emotional centre of the album. Some may call it too showy or glitzy or wonder if I am letting my deep love for Laura Nyro’s music to blind me here but as always, one must pay attention to the feeling when music travels through the ears and then touches the heart, and when I hear Blood, Sweat & Tears, I feel a well spring of emotion that starts from the moment Katz’s guitar starts the album to the door slam that ends it. I happily surrender to its audacious magic.