Listen to 'Hi-De-Ho' From 'Blood, Sweat & Tears 3' Second, is are the audio-visual assets out there with which we could tell this story properly. "The two questions I always ask myself when deciding if I want to do a film is – first, is the story compelling enough? Yes, it was. "I thought, 'This is kind of fascinating,'" Scheinfeld says. The idea for What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? was stoked over an early 2020 lunch between Scheinfeld and Colomby, during which the drummer shared intriguing details behind the tour – and also that a film crew led by Donn Cambern had gone over with the band and captured 65 hours of footage that had never been released. "But people bought it, and it hurt us." Rolling Stone magazine's David Felton also slammed the group, though in the documentary he recants and admits it was "kind of a snotty story." "Abbie Hoffman, who loves to be on camera, and the extreme left used this as an excuse to rail against a very successful band and say, 'They're CIA agents!' and just the most awful crap he was spewing," Colomby recalls. A commercial slide followed that reflected developing disdain in the counter-culture, including a Yippie demonstration outside a concert at New York's Madison Square Garden. 1 but wasn't nearly as successful as its predecessor. I would do it again today, even knowing all the repercussions."īlood, Sweat & Tears 3, released shortly after the band's return, went to No. I don't know if it was a conspiracy or whatever, but looking back we really had no choice. "I didn't get the sense that the State Department was under the thumb of Nixon as other departments, at least the people we spoke to anyway, but yeah, someone may have set us up by pulling his green card so that we had to do this. "And, you know, these are tricky people," Colomby adds. That's a place we should be playing with a No. ![]() ![]() We were, like, the biggest band in the world, and if he didn't get his green card we couldn't have played in the United States anymore. "We went because we had to," says Colomby, who also composed the film's score with David Mann and recorded it with the current edition of Blood, Sweat & Tears. Larry Goldblatt, the band's manager at the time, brokered a deal to get the singer his green card in exchange for an agreement to the tour. That caused problems as Clayton-Thomas attempted to renew his work visa, and he was suddenly facing deportation. Or as Katz says in the film, "We were blackmailed."Ĭlayton-Thomas was a Canadian who joined the band in 1968 to replace co-founder and original leader Al Kooper, and he had a criminal record back home. What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? makes it clear that the band "didn't have a choice" about doing the tour, as Colomby notes. Watch a Trailer for 'What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?' We know.' You have to admire those guys that they could experience this and change their thinking, and yet it caused some significant problems." They came home with a whole different perspective: 'Yeah, we don't like the war we don't like Nixon – but if you're thinking that over there is better than what we have? Not so. "And then they go over on this tour and see what it really is like under authoritarian regimes and Communism. "They were anti-Nixon, anti-Vietnam War, like a lot of people under 30 years old," Scheinfeld says. government and therefore "uncool." Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies even dubbed the band "Blood, Sweat & Bullshit."īlood, Sweat & Tears didn't help themselves at an ambush post-tour news conference in Los Angeles, when Colomby, singer David Clayton-Thomas and guitarist Steve Katz unwittingly spoke about how the tour had changed their perspective on some issues back home. Afterward, however, the left began to describe them as a tool of the U.S. On one side was the conservative right, which was anti-rock 'n' roll to begin with and was well aware of the group's opposition to the war in Vietnam. The tour itself was stressful, especially in Romania where government troops assaulted animated concert-goers, but it also put Blood, Sweat & Tears in a precarious position. State Department-sponsored tour behind the Iron Curtain into Romania, Czechoslovakia and Poland. "They said, 'Jeez, I was there I didn't know half this stuff."īlood, Sweat & Tears was riding high in the spring of 1970 with a chart-topping Grammy Award-winning second album and three Top 5 hits, "You've Made Me So Very Happy," "And When I Die" and "Spinning Wheel." Then they went on a U.S. "The highest praise I had is when and some of the other saw the film the first time," Scheinfeld tells UCR in a separate conversation. Some of the stories are known, but the nearly two-hour film unearths more details – not to mention lots of previously unseen footage, photos and documentation – that cast the story in a markedly different light.
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