The truth about selling out
They were the biggest rock band in the US. Then Richard Nixon got involved. By Grayson Haver Currin.
What The Hell Happened To Blood, Sweat & Tears?
★★★★
Dir: John Scheinfeld
JESSE JAMES FILMS/CREWNECK PRODUCTIONS. C/ST
DID NIXON’S State Department cause Blood, Sweat & Tears to bleed out prematurely? That’s the implicit premise of What The Hell Happened To Blood, Sweat & Tears?, John Scheinfeld’s fascinating investigation about the sudden implosion of what was, at least momentarily, the United States’ most popular rock band. For half a century, their seven-show trek as rock’n’roll diplomats through three Eastern Bloc strongholds during the summer of 1970 was seen as a spectacular sell-out blunder, the nonet’s mighty horns and singer David Clayton-Thomas’s ceaseless swagger brandished as a megaphone of the state.
But their continued existence, Scheinfeld’s Cold War excavation suggests, was simply a
“The war of un-hip attrition cost them dearly.”
chip in a game of international brinkmanship.
By 1970, Blood, Sweat & Tears had become a cannonball amid the American charts, their delightfully chimerical self-titled second album becoming a sensation due to its string of indelible singles. And When I Die, You’ve Made Me So Very Happy, Spinning Wheel: they weren’t guileless idealists, but their apolitical aplomb offered something of a reprieve from Nixon’s wars, either frigid or ferocious, and the doomed arts they inspired. When they returned to the United States after their state-sponsored, three-week, fee-waived run into Romania, Poland and Yugoslavia, they told fans disenchanted with democracy that communism was, well, as frightening as they had heard. The audiences instantly turned. They were now a countercultural punchline – “Blood, Sweat and Bullshit!” as Abbie Hoffman punned in a picket outside a subsequent Madison Square Garden gig. The band steadily disintegrated, the war of un-hip attrition costing them both their members and their masses.
But a few years ago, dr ummer Bobby Colomby told Scheinfeld the band’s side of this long-infamous rock fail. The director tracked down administration records (including a KissingerNixon exchange suggesting the band as propaganda pawns) about the trip and a shelved State Department documentary, a feel-good chronicle meant to make the United States appear like altruistic cultural ambassadors. When Clayton-Thomas, a Canadian, was threatened with deportation, the band’s manager and the State Department str uck a deal to make Blood, Sweat & Tears the first (mostly) American rock band behind the Iron Curtain. There were misgivings, especially from the band’s resident radical, guitarist Steve Katz, but they were overridden – by naiveté, ambition, duty? Whatever the reason, it was a pyrrhic scenario for Blood, Sweat & Tears: extol the Eastern Bloc and further enrage the government, or excoriate it and alienate the movement back home.
What The Hell Happened To Blood, Sweat & Tears? is an absorbing spy film made with smuggled footage, an incisive history lesson about international relations, and an intriguing hypothetical alternative to how the ’70s may have otherwise sounded. But above all, it works as a cautionary tale for now about the risks we take to endure and the rushes we make in judgement, without all the facts. Blood, Sweat & Tears were not committed propagandists; that they appeared to be was, of course, a career-crippling coup by actual propagandists.