The very next day the band left on a tour around New England. I removed the bandages every night and performed with my hair combed down over my mutilated ear, stoned out of my mind on painkillers and booze, but every show was a knockout. Then on the last night of the tour I walked into the dressing room to find Katz complaining that he couldn’t go on. He wasn’t feeling well and thought he was “coming down with something.” I was disgusted. I had gone out there and performed night after night with a chunk bitten out of my ear, in horrendous pain, and had never let the band down once, and now he “wasn’t feeling well.” He wasn’t going to get any sympathy from me. I snapped at him, “Suck it up, asshole, it’s showtime,” and slammed out of the room. Not the smartest thing to say to the guy who was essentially my boss, but I’d had enough of Katz and his condescending attitude. Steve went on and did the show but obviously we would never be friends.
A few weeks later the band booked its first tour of the west coast. We were still relatively unknown outside the New York area and the promoters needed to drum up some press. It was no secret by now that I had spent time in prison and, rather than cover it up, some genius at the record company decided to cash in on my bad-boy reputation and arranged for the band to do a free concert for the inmates at the California state penitentiary at Chino. Steve Katz loved this idea. I think it really appealed to his image of himself as a radical activist bringing his political views to the downtrodden victims of an unjust system. Columbia’s publicists latched on to the fact that I had done time and used it to generate publicity, later booking us into joints like New York’s infamous Rikers Island. I was never completely comfortable with this and eventually I put a stop to it. But here we were booked into Chino, and at the time I had no problem with it. In fact, I was kind of excited to see the inside of a joint again—especially since now I could walk out whenever I wanted to. So one afternoon they bused us up from Los Angeles to play the show at Chino.
We stepped off the bus right into the yard at the joint. There were maybe a hundred inmates in the yard when we arrived. The event was heavily guarded, with rifle towers and razor wire everywhere. These were seriously dangerous guys with venomous eyes, pumped-up biceps and gang tattoos. They were all trying to look as bad as possible. That’s just how it is in the joint—you’d better look bad or someone will make you his bitch. I wasn’t intimidated at all. Hell, I’d seen all this before. I jumped off the bus and walked right out into the middle of the yard, slapping high-fives and chatting easily with the toughest of the inmates. They recognized immediately that I wasn’t some condescending social-worker type sent there to help the poor downtrodden victims of the system. They hate that. The men in the joint have a sixth sense for weakness, and they knew by my jailhouse tattoos and by the way I carried myself that at one time I had been one of them and we were brothers. They gathered around me, high-fiving and embracing, everybody talking at once. Contact with the street was a luxury, and the guys couldn’t wait to tell their stories, to spend a few minutes with someone from the outside world.
At one point I looked back across the yard. The other guys were off the bus and were uneasily shaking hands and talking to the inmates, but they weren’t straying too far from the security of the bus. And who could blame them? For someone who’s never been in one of these joints, it’s a scary experience. Through the tinted windows of the bus I saw the white, drawn face of Steve Katz. He wasn’t getting off the bus without an escort. I was out there all by myself, in the middle of the yard, surrounded by black militants, swastika-tattooed white Aryan Brotherhood types and Latino gangbangers. I burst out laughing. “Well, mister radical activist,” I thought, “mister champion of the downtrodden. Here they are, come and say hello.” Steve stayed on the bus until showtime and then had an escort to and from the stage. Even during the show he looked scared to death. On the ride back to LA, most of the guys were subdued. It had been a heavy experience. Katz couldn’t stop talking. “God, did you see that? David just walked right out there. Christ, I wasn’t going out there. Did you guys see that?” For the first time there was a grudging admiration in his voice. For the first time he had an inkling of what my life had been and he was genuinely shaken by it. Welcome to my world, Steve. This isn’t some abstract editorial in the Village Voice. This is the real thing.
Nobody Calls Me Prophet
Nobody calls me prophet, nobody hears me call
Nobody calls me mister, I’m nobody’s child at all
Nobody calls me brother, nobody calls me son
And nobody calls me prophet till my prophesies are done
Never been known to swear upon the gospel
But I’ve sure been known to swear by what I’ve seen
Never been known to know where I am goin’
But I sure been known to know where I have been
Sure been known to know where I have been
Somebody’s life is wasted, somebody’s war is won
Somebody’s back is breakin’, somebody’s favor’s done
Somebody calls me brother, somebody calls me son
But there ain’t nobody calls me prophet till my prophesies are done
Lyrics by David Clayton-Thomas. Copyright © Lady Casey Music, 1972.
10
THE ORIGINAL BS&T
The power structure in Blood Sweat & Tears very much dictated how decisions were made. Bobby Colomby and Steve Katz were the sole owners of the BS&T name, and Katz’s brother was our manager. In theory everyone in the band had an equal voice in the decision-making process, but in reality the business of the band was controlled by Colomby and Katz and everyone else was basically an employee. Relationships can be contentious enough in a four-piece rock band where every member is essential to the sound of the group. The Beatles without John or Paul or the Stones without Mick or Keith is unthinkable, but BS&T was a nine-piece band, and the individual members were less important to the overall sound. Still, in the original lineup there were certain members who were so talented that they were absolutely essential to the success of the early band.
In a horn band the arrangers are extremely important. It was their genius that was largely responsible for the unique sound of Blood Sweat & Tears. We had two very different and very gifted arrangers, Dick Halligan and Fred Lipsius. I liked and respected them both but for quite different reasons. Dick was a tall, scholarly, pipe-smoking academic. A multi-instrumentalist, he played most of the brass instruments, particularly trombone, and was a fine keyboard player. The Hammond B-3 work on the early records was Halligan’s. Dick wrote the classic arrangement for “God Bless the Child.” I loved his completely original approach to songs that had been previously recorded, like James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” Steve Winwood’s “Smiling Phases” and Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die.” Jagger and Richards’s rock anthem “Sympathy for the Devil” became a classical tour de force in Halligan’s hands. Hindemith, Prokofiev, tritones, unorthodox voicings never before heard in rock were all part of the powerful musical arsenal of Dick Halligan. When a tune was presented to Dick, he pretty much worked alone. Once the key and the groove were established, he would disappear for a few days and the arrangement would come back completed—always perfect, always totally appropriate, but with very little input from the writer. I would hand Dick a cassette tape of a new song with a vocal accompanied by my guitar, and that was the end of our collaboration; the rest was all Dick Halligan. I didn’t mind this arrangement. He was brilliant, and he made my songs better—that’s all that counted. I had so much respect for Dick that I would give him this latitude. My personal relationship with Halligan was very much like our musical relationship. He was a shy, somewhat aloof man, hard to really get close to, but I liked and respected him.
The arranger I worked best with on my original compositions was Fred Lipsius. Most of my original material went to Freddie, who played alto sax and piano in the original band. He was a gentle, sensitive soul with an air of childlike wonder about him. Enormously gifted with an extens
ive musical education from Berklee in Boston, Freddie was nonetheless wide open to new ideas and musical experiences. He seemed to appreciate instinctively that what rock & roll musicians like me had to say musically wasn’t being taught at Berklee but that even if we weren’t conservatory-trained, there was worth and value to our ideas. This is a rare thing. Some conservatory guys can be a little snobbish about their musical education, and many dismiss self-taught musicians as crude, untrained and beneath their lofty musical standards. Coming into this band of highly educated musicians was a daunting and sometimes humbling experience. I was a saloon-trained rock singer, and musically I was in way over my head.
Collaborating with Fred Lipsius was like taking a course at Berklee. He was a natural teacher. No question was too dumb to be patiently explained. He was fascinated by the freshness of the ideas we relatively unschooled musicians came up with. When I worked with Freddie it was a back-and-forth collaborative process, with him sometimes calling me in the middle of the night bubbling with enthusiasm about an idea he had for one of my tunes. Where Halligan would pretty much ignore the guitar tracks on my demos and write his own interpretation of the song, Freddie would find a guitar line and expand upon it, often building an entire score from a single lick. A perfect example is “Spinning Wheel.” I had cut a demo of that song in Canada long before I went to New York, and listening to the tape today I can really appreciate the genius of Fred Lipsius. Those signature horn lines were all contained in the guitar parts on the original demo. Not that Freddie copied them, he just realized that they were an integral part of the composition. He extracted them and expanded upon them and made the song infinitely better. He would often corner me in the dressing room before a show, his eyes burning with a fierce creative intensity, and shove a guitar into my hands. “Play me that lick again,” he would say. “I want to see what notes you’re using.” Then he would watch my hands as I played the guitar part while he scribbled furiously on his score pad. “Damn!” he’d yell to the entire room. “You see that? A Berklee cat would never use those notes. He was taught how to play properly.”
That was Freddie, filled with wonder at the way we self-taught musicians found ways to express ourselves. He was totally devoid of musical prejudice. He loved the creative anarchy of rock & roll. He went right to the heart and soul of the song. While Halligan was consistent and reliable, Lipsius was erratic and unpredictable and sometimes took weeks agonizing over a single idea. I appreciated the talents of both Dick and Freddie, and having two very different arrangers working on tunes gave a certain freshness and diversity to the band’s music. When it came to working on my own original tunes, however, I must confess I much preferred working with Freddie. It was in some ways a painful process, kind of like collaborating with Vincent Van Gogh, but when the process was over the results were well worth the agony of the creation.
Then there was Lew Soloff, the quirky, eccentric little trumpet player who I used to room with on the road. I once called him, in my best Monty Python voice, “A horrible little man,” a remark that Lew delights in reminding me of to this day. That was my relationship with Lew. I liked him and he knew it. We traded insults and practical jokes, hung out together and were friends. Onstage that “horrible little man” became a monster. He was and still is one hell of a trumpet player, with a fierce attack, a big bold tone and a huge musical vocabulary. Lew possessed that rarest of gifts in a trumpet player: he was a wicked high-note specialist who could also solo eloquently. There was a note written in the Fred Lipsius arrangement of “Spinning Wheel,” a nearly impossible high double G at the end of the trumpet solo. That one note personifies Lew Soloff. Only a handful of trumpet players in the world could hit that note following that long, demanding solo. Lew took it personally. Glaring fiercely into my eyes over the bell of his horn each night, he would suck in a deep breath and nail it. It didn’t matter if he was sick or tired or his lip was sore, Lew Soloff came to play every night. God, I respected that, and I loved him for it.
Jim Fielder was one of my favourite guys in the early band. A tall, lean, laconic Texan with a slow Southern drawl, his country-boy personality concealed a keen intellect and an enormous musical talent. He came to New York as a graduate of North Texas State University in the late sixties to play with Frank Zappa’s radical experimental band the Mothers of Invention. I saw Jim in those days on Bleecker Street at the Garrick Theater with Zappa’s band. That rhythm section, with Aynsley Dunbar on drums, Frank Zappa on guitar and Jim Fielder on bass, absolutely blew my mind. They affected a lot of people that way. This was some of the most radical music I’d ever heard. The tunes were bizarre and yet always musical. The band was unpredictable but amazingly tight and precise, and I thought Jim Fielder was the most original bass player I’d ever heard.
Working with him onstage was a joy. He was solid as a rock, had great time, was always consistent and at the same time was furiously creative. In the studio you could always count on Jim to insert just the right bass lick at the right time to make the song work. Offstage I bonded with him immediately and probably spent more time with him than with anyone else in the band. We were both basically country boys in the big city, Jim from Texas, and me from Canada. The rest of the band were native New Yorkers and had their own very New York point of view. Their humour was quick and cynical, their backgrounds full of stories about Yankee games, stickball and neighbourhood rivalries that Jim and I didn’t really relate to. When I finally left New York and moved to Marin County, Jim wasn’t far behind me. After five years in the big city, Texas Jimmy Fielder was still a country boy at heart.
Trumpeter Chuck Winfield was a fine player, but we were never that close personally. He played second trumpet in the original band, but any competent horn player could have played in his place. Soloff was the star of the trumpet section. Winfield hung with Steve Katz and they had little in common with me.
I had hoped, coming into the band, that I would be playing with Randy Brecker, a giant of a trumpet player who had been in the original lineup, but that was not to be. Upset by all the infighting between Kooper and Katz, easygoing Randy bailed out just before I got there and started his own band, Dreams. We became good friends in later years and I confessed to Randy that I had hoped he would be in the band. He told me that if he’d known I was coming, he probably would’ve been.
The original trombone player was Jerry Hyman, a sweet guy but not a great player. He worked in a bookstore in the Village and used to play with BS&T a couple of nights a week just for fun. When the band exploded onto the international scene, Jerry tendered his resignation. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind. Jerry is now a successful chiropractor with a practice in Los Angeles. Musicians can be ruthless, and just like in any team sport, if a guy ain’t cutting it, the other guys might not say anything but the whole team moves to the opposite end of the locker room. Jerry made the right call, and I respect him for being a man and not just hanging on for the money once the band hit it big. He walked away with his dignity intact. Jerry was replaced by trombone virtuoso Dave Bargeron, a great musician with tons of experience. Bargeron came in and gave the band an enormous lift. A powerful section player and a show-stopping soloist, he was just what the band needed.
My favourite Dave Bargeron story took place at Lincoln Center. The band was scheduled to play the hallowed Metropolitan Opera House, something no rock band had ever done. It was a controversial booking. There were many who felt that rock at the Met was a sacrilege. I had heard a rumour that Leonard Bernstein might attend the concert. I mentioned in an interview with the New York Times what an honour it would be to have Bernstein in the audience. The day of the show, there it was in the Times: “Singer David Clayton-Thomas says Leonard Bernstein will be at BS&T concert.” Steve Katz went ballistic. “How could you embarrass us like that?” he cried. “No way Bernstein will be there.” The night of the concert, many in the audience were still skeptical about BS&T playing the Met, and you could feel the tension in the air. Dave Bargeron had a trom
bone solo early in the show, stage front and centre, and sitting in the front row was none other than Leonard Bernstein himself. The young trombone player stepped up to the microphone, gave his slide a dramatic flourish, then did something I’m sure he had never done before in his life. He lost his grip on the slide and it clanged to the floor, right in front of Leonard Bernstein. There was a moment of stunned silence in the audience while Dave died a thousand deaths. As Dave bent over to retrieve his slide, Bernstein stood and gave him a solitary standing ovation. Then the entire theatre, as one, came to its feet and cheered and applauded. Bargeron proceeded to play a barnburner of a trombone solo. There had been a somewhat stuffy atmosphere in the hall until that moment, but Dave Bargeron broke the ice and we went on to play one of our most memorable concerts ever.
That was the original band—an unorthodox mixture of rock, jazz and classically trained musicians that could only have existed in this radical time in history. It was an offbeat mix of musical personalities ranging from hardcore blues artists like myself to conservatory master’s graduates like Dick Halligan and Berklee-educated jazz musicians like Fred Lipsius. We probably never should have been in the same band, but we were and somehow it worked. Much of the credit for putting this unique cast of characters together must go to Bobby Colomby. We envisioned a band that defied musical categories, and he had the musical chops to hold it together and the business smarts to make it all work.
Blood, Sweat and Tears Page 9