It was a Greenwich Village band. Its roots were the Village Vanguard and the Bitter End. Its music came right off the streets of New York, an edgy blend of rock and salsa, the blues and jazz. The sound of the band was the sound of the city—the roar of the subways, the discordant blast of the taxi horns, the frenetic energy of the city sidewalks. This wasn’t an LA band with surfer roots and a laid-back attitude. This was big-city music, hard-charging and fierce. When BS&T hit the stage, it was about as subtle as a punch in the solar plexus. All music was political in the sixties, and the politics of Blood Sweat & Tears was the politics of the Village, radical, outspoken and angry. It was the Village Voice and Screw magazine. It was demonstrations in Washington Square Park, kids getting their heads busted at Columbia University. It was Bleecker Street with its coffee houses and pizza joints. It was the East Village with its jazz clubs and junkies. It was New York City in the sixties, and you had to be there to understand what that meant. We were there, right in the thick of it.
We Were the Children
Went to the river and I came back dry
Went to the mountain and I climbed so high
Came to the city and I don’t know why
Talked to the children, I just had to cry
The children dyin’ and it makes no sense
A wicked bitches’ brew of violence
Brother to brother, son to son
Sister to sister, I’m callin’ out to everyone
We were the children who would save the world
Now we’re livin’ in a world gone crazy
We were the children who could stop the war
Now that war is ragin’ round us every day
I lost my brother to a drive-by gun
He saw it comin’ and he tried to run
Another mother lost another son
Just another number when the day is done
Another brother and it makes no sense
A wicked bitches’ brew of violence
Lyrics by David Clayton-Thomas. Copyright © Clayton-Thomas Music Publishing Inc., 1972.
11
WOODSTOCK AND MILES
Nineteen sixty-nine was pretty much a blur, a sensory overload with the media all over us. Overnight we were stars. We came right out of Greenwich Village onto the international stage, and we were the darlings of the New York press. I was on the cover of the Village Voice and every concert was reviewed by the New York newspapers and trade magazines. It seemed like one night we were playing a little club in the Village and the next night we were headlining shows at the Fillmore East, with Jethro Tull, the Allman Brothers and Creedence Clearwater Revival opening for us. We had the number-one album in the world and the big-money offers were rolling in.
Three hit singles came from that first album, generating enormous airplay worldwide. In 1969 you couldn’t turn on a radio without hearing a BS&T song. The first was “You Made Me So Very Happy,” a remake of a Brenda Holloway Motown tune with a beautiful Dick Halligan arrangement. That was followed by my original tune “Spinning Wheel,” BS&T’s biggest-selling single ever, then “And When I Die,” a Laura Nyro song. All three songs were in the top ten at the same time. In addition, “God Bless the Child” had become an anthem for the activist movement protesting the Vietnam War.
Young people in the sixties were becoming increasingly aware of the waste and futility of the war, and the band was deeply involved in the peace movement. Greenwich Village was the epicentre of the anti-war movement and we came right off the streets of the Village, so our music was adopted as a symbol of their frustration. Word was on the street in New York that something big was going to happen. We didn’t know when or where, but somewhere in the New York area was a good bet. New York City was the headquarters for the music industry and music was the voice of the peace movement.
I’m often asked about my memories of Woodstock. History has painted the festival in bright colours, like a Peter Max poster—three days of love, flowers and peace. History has also conveniently marginalized the anger that drove 600,000 young people to march on a little town in upstate New York. It was primarily young people who were being brought home in body bags from “’Nam,” and the flower-power generation had had enough.
The biggest acts in the music business were booked to play Woodstock, but we had no idea just how big the event would be until we flew into LaGuardia Airport that Sunday morning and found ourselves stranded, unable to get upstate to the concert and unable to get home to Manhattan. The New York State Thruway was jammed to a standstill from Albany to Kennedy Airport. Many of the guys had wives, girlfriends and families stuck somewhere out on the Thruway on their way to meet us at the concert. This raised the anxiety level even higher. It was doubtful that we would make it to Woodstock at all that night. On Saturday afternoon the governor of New York declared the festival a disaster area and mobilized the National Guard. The promoters immediately commandeered a couple of National Guard helicopters. They feared, and rightly so, that if the artists didn’t show up, the anger that ran just under the surface of this movement would explode and New York State would have to deal with a half-million pissed-off young people.
We had been on tour all summer so big concerts were nothing unusual for BS&T, but now the full impact of this momentous event began to register. Finally, after we’d been at LaGuardia for nearly eight hours, a bus with a police escort, complete with sirens and flashing lights, took us to a motel forty miles from the site. From there, a National Guard helicopter flew us to the concert.
It was a frantic scene of mud, drugs and chaos. We played to the largest crowd of the festival sometime after midnight on Sunday night. It was estimated at close to 600,000 people. We were dropped backstage an hour before our set. LSD, pot and hash were everywhere. I remember seeing Steve Stills and Levon Helm briefly backstage, but we were being hustled around by stage crews who were desperately trying to keep the show on time. An exercise in futility—they were already running hours behind schedule. The fences had been trampled by the thousands of fans who thought it should be a free concert, and backstage security had broken down completely. I drank some orange juice backstage, and I’m certain it was laced with something. By the time we stepped onstage that Sunday night and I looked out over that sea of people, I was on another planet. But who cared? Everyone else was too.
The managers were in screaming matches with the film directors about cameras onstage. No one was paying for their tickets. That meant there was no money to pay the bands and no guarantee that they would be paid if a movie came out of this. The promoter, Michael Lang, was holed up in a trailer trying to mollify a dozen angry managers. There had been out-of-pocket expenses to get their acts to the festival and the managers wanted their money. Under normal circumstances they would not put a band onstage until they were paid, but this was not an option at Woodstock. How do you tell a half-million people that their favourite act won’t be appearing? There was always the fear that this thing could turn ugly. A few local cops and a handful of state troopers couldn’t possibly control a gathering of this size, and no one wanted to see armed National Guardsmen turned loose on the crowd. The music was the only thing keeping a lid on the place, so the show had to go on.
The only leverage the managers had was to forbid filming until they were paid. Albert Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan, The Band and Janis Joplin, was throwing cameramen off the stage. The Band was on right before us. We hadn’t seen each other since our Yonge Street days and now here we were, with two of the hottest bands in the world, at the largest concert in history. They were amazing, but Grossman pulled the plug on the camera crew. They were never recorded … Smart move, Albert. Bennett Glotzer and Dennis Katz, who managed BS&T, came storming out of the trailer and ordered the cameras turned off after our second tune. Another brilliant managerial decision. They cut us out of our moment in history because they wanted to be paid. Hey, they’re businessmen—you can’t take history to the bank. No money, no filming. The artists were very aware of the
historic nature of this moment, but the business negotiations were out of our hands. We had 600,000 people to entertain.
We played an hour-long set at around 1:30 in the morning. It was a great show and the people showed their love for this New York City band. Blood Sweat & Tears was the sound of the city with its Broadway horns and jazz roots, and this was largely a New York audience. We were playing to our hometown fans. The band was on fire that night. After a thunderous reception and one encore, it was over. Following BS&T at around four in the morning was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I caught their first two songs and then we were hustled back onto the helicopter. They were still onstage as the chopper circled out over the site and then we were gone. After CSNY the festival began to empty out. I’d wanted to stay and see Jimi Hendrix but he didn’t get on until ten the next morning. Jimi’s manager had insisted on him closing the show, another brilliant managerial move. By that time there were only a few thousand people left to witness his iconic national anthem, but at least it was filmed.
The remarkable thing about Woodstock was that in the three days of the festival, with nearly 600,000 people packed into that farmer’s field, there was not one reported instance of violence. In spite of the rain and the mud and the shortage of water, food and toilets, in spite of the impossible conditions and with virtually no police presence, no one was murdered, no one was assaulted. That would have betrayed everything the love generation stood for. Besides, everyone was too stoned to fight. It may have been anger and frustration that brought people to Woodstock, but it was the music that kept them peaceful and the love that will be remembered.
Nineteen sixty-nine, the summer of love. It was the year of the mega-festivals. In Atlanta we played to over 100,000 people packed into a plowed field in the scorching Georgia sun. Some idiot spiked the water coolers with LSD, and long lines of ambulances were taking away kids who were freaking out and hallucinating. That summer marked the end of the giant festivals. They began with the best of intentions and gave voice to the frustrations of the anti-war movement, but the greed of the promoters was their undoing. The gigantic shows were unmanageable and years of litigation followed every event, so the promoters eventually gave up on them.
In 1970 we became the first rock band to headline the Newport Jazz Festival, another controversial booking. Jazz purists were opposed to this band with its hit records and rock reputation playing the premier jazz festival in America. We were well received but the concert ended in chaos, with tens of thousands of fans breaking down the fences and mobbing the previously well-behaved jazz festival. For years afterward the city refused to have rock acts at the festival.
Our appearance in Newport was followed by a cross-country tour with the other stars of the festival—Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, B.B. King, Thelonious Monk and Nina Simone. We travelled by bus—not the luxury coaches of today, but seated buses travelling from town to town … four big buses full of jazz musicians criss-crossing America. It was the Newport Jazz Festival on tour. In Ohio we were the Buckeye Jazz Festival. In Texas we became the Longhorn Jazz Festival, in Pennsylvania, the Keystone Festival and so on. We spent nearly six weeks on the road, packed into hard-seated buses without the luxury of bunks or private compartments, so it was inevitable that someone would get on someone else’s nerves.
By the third week on tour, Nina Simone had a bug up her ass about me, a white boy, having the audacity to sing “God Bless the Child,” a Billie Holiday song and a black anthem. At first I was confused and hurt by her attitude. I adored Nina Simone. I had listened to everything she had ever recorded and would stand by the side of the stage every night to hear this lady sing. She was one of the all-time greats and I desperately wanted her approval. Every night when she came offstage, I was there to tell her what a great performance it was and how much I admired her, but she completely ignored me, and after a few nights of being snubbed I decided that, legendary artist or not, I wasn’t going to take any more shit from her. I stopped trying to approach her and a distinct chill developed between us.
One night after a great BS&T set I came back to the dressing room. The crowd was still screaming for more and everyone was complimenting us on a great show, but Nina was furious. She snapped at me, “What do you know about black pain?” I snapped right back, “What do you know about where I came from?” Nat Adderley stepped between us and told her gently that the song said “God bless the child”—not the black child or the white child, but just “God bless the child.” Other members of the tour pointed out that the song had probably been heard by more people because we recorded it than had ever heard Billie’s recording. That pissed Nina off even more. “This white boy’s making all this money off a black woman’s song,” she said. She never acknowledged the fact that the Billie Holiday estate was making millions from BS&T’s recording of her song. None of these racial overtones had even occurred to me. I idolized Billie Holiday and was just flattered that so many people thought I did her song justice.
The next day Nina sent a petition around the bus. It asked George Wein, the promoter, to remove the song from the show. I watched as the letter was passed around the bus. Big Cannonball Adderley read it, looked back at me, smiled and passed it on without signing it. It was then passed to Miles Davis. The respect for Miles even among this legendary group was unquestioned, and I knew him to be notoriously militant about black causes. “Oh shit,” I thought, “here it comes.” Miles read the petition slowly, got up and walked down the bus toward me. All eyes were on him but he walked right past me without even looking and stood in front of Nina Simone. He bent down until his nose was an inch from hers and said in his soft, raspy voice, “Nina, leave the boy alone.” Nina just sat there in shocked silence. No one talked back to Miles Davis. Miles turned and walked back up the aisle, and as he passed me, behind his ever-present shades I caught just the faintest twinkle in his eye. The subject of me singing “God Bless the Child” was never mentioned again. For the rest of the tour, every time I sang that song I would notice Miles and Monk and Cannonball, along with several other members of our troupe, seated by the side of the stage. One night I was surprised to see Nina Simone among them. She was a woman of tremendous presence and dignity. She stood and applauded briefly for that one song, smiled at me and returned to her dressing room. Miles had made his point.
As the Newport tour continued across America, some really warm friendships developed. I became close friends with a couple of guys from the Cannonball Adderley Quintet, Roy McCurdy and Larry Willis. When “Cannon” died in Gary, Indiana, a few years later, Larry and I were at his bedside. Both Larry and Roy would go on to become members of BS&T. Willis and I toured the world together for over five years.
Growing up in Canada, I had never paid much attention to race, but the Newport tour was an eye-opener. The Nina Simone incident wasn’t the only episode that brought home the reality of race in America. In the late sixties there were still huge parts of the States that were racially divided. Black musicians checking in to a posh hotel in Dallas, Texas, still brought hostile stares. Which brings us to my favourite Miles Davis story.
Behind Miles’s serious demeanour there was a wicked sense of humour, and in Dallas I got a glimpse of the wit and intelligence of the man. We were in a tenth-floor hotel room one afternoon—me and Willis, Cannonball and Miles, along with some local musicians—just hangin’ out watching some football. The locals had brought some cocaine. Suddenly there was a knock on the door. Someone said, “Who is it?” A voice said, “Police! Open up.” Oh shit! The bag of coke went out the window, we hurriedly swept any evidence off the table and Miles opened the door. It was this goofy roadie from B.B. King’s band, laughing his ass off ... yuk yuk, very funny. We rushed over to the window and looked down. There on the roof of the cab stand in front of the hotel, hidden from view, was the bag of coke, still intact. Unfortunately, the windows over the cabstand were in the main dining room. Remember, many of the players on the Newport tour were black, and how the hell could anyone,
let alone a black jazz musician, walk into the main dining room of one of the finest hotels in Dallas and casually climb out the window? For two days we pondered the problem. I would come back to the hotel in the middle of the afternoon and there would be a half-dozen heads hanging out the windows, staring wistfully down at the bag of coke. Then Miles had a stroke of genius. He sent a couple of the local brothers to a hardware store, where they purchased a pair of overalls, a mop and a bucket. They walked into the restaurant with their best Stepin Fetchit walk, climbed out the window, threw the coke into the bucket and shuffled on out of the dining room. I asked Miles later how he ever came up with such an idea. He said, in his soft whispery voice, “Hell, David, no one ever pays any attention to a nigger with a mop and a bucket in Texas.” I loved that man, and from that tour on we had a special relationship. In subsequent years, when we had the chance to appear together, we always enjoyed a private chuckle about Dallas. Miles shared the bill with BS&T many times in the late sixties and early seventies—Madison Square Garden twice, Newport twice, several international jazz festivals. He loved our band and we, of course, idolized him. Once a jazz critic who was something of a purist asked Miles why he compromised his standards by appearing so often with a “rock band.” Miles replied, “All I know is there were a lot of trumpet players out of work before this band came along.” When asked what he thought of this new music, referring to fusion jazz, his reply was typical Miles Davis. He said, “There ain’t no new music, there’s only eight notes and two of them repeat.” Miles had a gift for saying a lot with a few words.
We had many memorable concerts in those early years, but a couple stood out for me because they were in Toronto. The first was a pop festival at Varsity Stadium. It was my first appearance in my hometown since I’d left nearly three years earlier, and it was a triumphant homecoming. The kid who had been struggling in little clubs on Yorkville came home to 15,000 screaming fans in a football stadium. My face was plastered all over the Toronto newspapers, and my parents were in shock. My father, who had maintained for years that I was a useless, no-good bum and would never amount to anything, was suddenly silent. My mother, who always told me that I had a special gift and always believed that someday I would be somebody, was so happy I thought she would burst with pride. They didn’t come to that show. It was a two-day festival, a mini-Woodstock. Traffic was jammed to a standstill for miles around the downtown stadium, and bringing family into that melee was impossible.
Blood, Sweat and Tears Page 10