The undoing of Blood, Sweat & Tears and the sax player who saw it all from the horn section
“I wasn’t political when I was in Blood, Sweat & Tears,” recalls saxophonist Fred Lipsius. Yet Lipsius and his bandmates found themselves in a geopolitical maelstrom when the hitmaking horn band went behind the Iron Curtain for a 1970 tour of Soviet Bloc Eastern European countries. The band became the target of conservative critics who objected to the State Department sponsoring a tour by antiwar musicians, and their perceived ties with the Nixon administration got them pummeled in the influential rock press.
That ill-fated excursion is recounted in a new documentary, “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?,” which will be screened at the Cabot in Beverly April 26, with later dates in Marblehead and Newport, R.I.
Lipsius, who lives in Newton, was a Berklee dropout working the bar mitzvah circuit in the Catskills when a waitress friend overheard Blues Project members Al Kooper and Steve Katz discussing how they needed a saxophonist for a new band. Lipsius had previously jammed with drummer Bobby Colomby, and he joined the nascent outfit before it had even plucked its name from a line in a Winston Churchill speech. Blood, Sweat & Tears’ debut was a critical success but a commercial dud, and soon Kooper was out and burly Canadian singer David Clayton-Thomas was in. (Decades later both Kooper and Lipsius would find themselves teaching at Berklee and living in the Boston area.)
A second, self-titled BS&T album was a smash, yielding hits like “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die,” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” thanks in large part to Lipsius’s melodic arrangements.
“It changed my life,” says Lipsius, who remembers being embarrassed when he was transported home to his working-class section of the Bronx in a limousine that “didn’t match the neighborhood.” But he was proud of how the band melded rock with serious jazz playing. “Before BS&T, if there was a saxophone in a rock song, they were probably growling,” he laughs.
Even before the Eastern Europe tour, Blood, Sweat & Tears had an uncomfortable relationship with the counterculturalists who dominated the rock press in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Becoming the first rock band to play Las Vegas, BS&T’s shows at Caesar’s Palace broke Frank Sinatra’s attendance record but earned the band accusations of selling out. (Lipsius fondly remembers how Quincy Jones and Sammy Davis Jr. enjoyed his arrangements.)
The band played Woodstock but was left out of the movie because their manager had demanded the cameras be turned off shortly after the set started. “It was really just another gig for us,” says Lipsius. “There were problems with the sound, and even though there were a lot of people there, they were so far away it was hard to relate to them.”
Clayton-Thomas had gone from juvenile delinquency to rock stardom, but his past created problems when his Green Card needed to be renewed. A secret arrangement was made allowing the singer to remain in the United States if the band played the State Department-sponsored tour. In the film, guitarist Katz says he warned his less politically engaged bandmates of the risk of being associated with the Nixon administration during the Vietnam era. But, faced with the prospect of losing their lead singer, the band agreed to do the shows.
Jazz and classical artists had been doing State Department tours for years, with Dave Brubeck writing a musical about such endeavors called “The Real Ambassadors.” But Blood, Sweat & Tears was venturing into uncharted territory for a rock band, and a full camera crew came along to record the tour. At one show in Yugoslavia the band bombed, with “people just sitting there like zombies,” says Lipsius. The opposite problem happened in Romania, where excited crowds “seemed to be experiencing freedom in the hearts for the first time,” he says. That audience was met with brutality from police controlled by bloody dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
The film crew had to smuggle their footage out — only to see it disappear when the State Department decided to bury it rather than, the film speculates, risk antagonizing the Eastern European countries it was trying to curry favor with. “Sixty-five hours of footage lost. Can you imagine the heartache?” says Lipsius. An hour, cut for a TV special that never aired, managed to survive, excerpts of which are featured in the new film.
When the band returned to the States, Katz’s warning proved true. Abbie Hoffman and his fellow Yippies protested a BS&T concert at Madison Square Garden, and while Lipsius was soloing someone threw dung at Colomby, the drummer. But Lipsius says it was internal band conflicts, not the blowback from the tour, that led to his departure in 1971. “Even though I was making $100,000 a year, it was time to leave. I made the right choice for me.” Much of the band would soon quit as well and Blood, Sweat & Tears would never regain its commercial strength, although a version with no original members still works the oldies circuit.
Lipsius turned down an offer to play with Janis Joplin and mostly went back to jazz, teaching at Berklee for 35 years until his recent retirement. At 79, he has a new album, “Facets of Love,” and is playing at screenings of the film with a trio that includes bassist Bob Nieske and guitarist Gerry Beaudoin.
The film, he says, reveals things “that even the band members didn’t know about that tour.”
“What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?” screens April 26 at The Cabot in Beverly, May 18 at Warwick Cinemas in Marblehead, and June 18 at The JPT Film + Event Center in Newport, R.I. Fred Lipsius will perform and answer questions at the Marblehead and Newport screenings.