What goes up must come down in the lost piece of musical history found in the rock doc What The Hell Happened To Blood, Sweat And Tears, written and directed by John Scheinfeld. When a rockumentary immediately poses such a blunt question, all sorts of answers sprout from freeze-dried reactions. My first guess was drugs, though I wasn’t going to count out murder, religious cults, or country western cross-over. Wrong on all counts.
No, the premature demise of this hugely influential rock band is something else that Nixon is to blame for. Seems that Blood, Sweat and Tears was already on his watch list for speaking out against the war in Vietnam, a war Nixon had promised to stop and instead escalated. Many bands were against the war, but Blood, Sweat and Tears was quickly becoming the biggest act in the land. Their album beat out The Beatles Abbey Road at the Grammys. They incorporated jazz horns into acid rock, accidentally creating the dominant sound of the 1970s. However, because their lead singer, David Clayton-Thomas, was Canadian, the Nixon administration was particularly pissed at them because of a foreigner bad-mouthing U.S. foreign policy. So, the band received word that Clayton-Thomas was going to be deported and barred from performing in the U.S. This would mean the end of the band.
“…the premature demise of this hugely influential rock band is something else that Nixon is to blame for.”
To save themselves, their manager made a devil’s bargain with the state department. In order to straighten out the deportation issue, Blood, Sweat and Tears would take part in a government-sponsored cultural exchange, where they would be the first rock band to tour behind the Iron Curtain. Under the control of the U.S.S.R., many people in these dictatorships had never seen or heard modern popular music, as it was against the law. As the band is sent off to play in various communist regimes, they have no idea the nightmare that awaits them there nor the uproar when they get back.
"…an crucial historical artifact for so many different reasons."
