Bobby Colomby & John Scheinfeld

Bobby Colomby, drummer of Blood, Sweat and Tears, and director John Scheinfeld talk about the new movie "What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?," and more!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Sex Podcast.
My guest today are musician Bobby Calumni and filmmaker John Shinfield,
and they're here to talk about the new movie What
the hell happened to Blood Sweat and Tears? Why this movie? Why? Now?
It's all Bobby's fault, Bob we It was literally about

(00:33):
two months before COVID hit and Bobby called up and said,
I want to take you to lunch. I want to
tell you a story. And we went to lunch. We're
just talking a bit about the band. I've been a
fan of Blood Sweat and Tears since my high school days.
You know, your column you sort of had people talking
about the Al Cooper Lovers and the David Clayton Thomas Lovers.

(00:53):
I actually loved both of them. They're great albums, so
I'm fine with both. But we were talking about it
and I said to Bobby, what of hell happened to
Blood Sweat and Tears? Because here we were in nineteen
seventy one of the hottest bands going, and then suddenly
they weren't and what happened? And he said, that's the
story I'm going to tell you. And the more I
heard about this, Bob, the more I wanted to do

(01:14):
some due diligence and see what else was out there.
And not a lot of people knew this story, and
that's always a great thing for a filmmaker when it
hasn't been covered too much. And I just I saw
there were certainly some parallels to what's going on in
the world today. But I'm a story guy, and it
was a great story and there's always room for that
when you're making the film. Okay, Bobby, since it was

(01:36):
your idea, why now, well, you know, for all of us,
life goes on, and that was just a brief chapter.
It was ten years, but it was a chapter in
my life. And we did that tour. We it was,
you know, an insane situation. We saw things we didn't

(02:00):
anticipate we were, which we'll get to I'm sure kind
of kind of blackmailed into having to do it. And
like in retrospect, now happened because another friend of mine,
Rupert Perry, and I had dinner and we're just talking

(02:20):
about something and they used to play drums and he's
a wonderful guy and he just said kind of the
same sort of thing. What happened and I started to
tell the story, said, oh my god, where's that film?
Because we were talking about a film that was shot.
Let's go back to those who uninformed. You did this
under the aegis of the government. In nineteen seventy you
went on a tour of Eastern Europe three countries, Poland,

(02:44):
Romania and Yugoslavia and film was shot, but it was
for a documentary which was never released. So you're talking
about that film, yes, absolutely, And it was not really
to be made as a document entry. It was just
like a music film that this independent film company tried

(03:04):
to shoot so that they could sell it. But part
I was the band leader at that point, and I
had said to them, listen, you can come on this tour,
but if I don't like this thing, it ain't going anywhere.
And they went, no problem, you're gonna love it, and
they shot the film, but then it disappeared and there
was some vague version of it from a camcorda to

(03:27):
a monitor on a television, and I'd seen it way
back then, and it just it didn't really depict what
I was hoping would be a great like a music
film about the band, and it turned into something completely different,
and at the time it was so convoluted. I just said,

(03:49):
you know what, this is not for us, but thank you. Anyway,
John has another take on this. Yeah, Bob, we found
a lot of internal State Department communications memos, telegrams, telexes,
so there's a lot going on behind the scenes that
Bobby didn't know about. And when the deal was made

(04:12):
for the band to go on this tour, the State
Department received a certain amount of control over this film
that was being shot. Bobby thinks he had control, but
the truth is the State Department had the control. And
we saw in memos all the way through the tour
itself that the people on the ground from the State

(04:34):
Department were very concerned about things that the cameras had
captured that they might somehow affect the relationships that they
were trying to develop with those three governments. So that
was a concern almost all the way through. They did
see a two and a half hour cut of the
documentary and they had problems with it, and they said,

(04:56):
but we've given notes and we're hoping to fix this.
And then the next thing we see is that that
two hour version that was meant for theaters in the
US and internationally disappeared, and somehow a sixty minute version
was made with some notion of selling it to television,
and that never happened either, and then the company that

(05:21):
made that funded the documentary went belly up at the
end of nineteen seventy. The post production house where all
the editing was happening went belly up in nineteen seventy one.
So essentially we're fifty two years on and nobody knows
knew where this film was. Okay, a couple of questions before, Yeah,
who paid for the film and how much did it cost?

(05:45):
Fifty years ago? Yeah, it was a company called National
General Productions. They had done some films. They had some
sort of deal with Warner Brothers to make features. One
of their top features was Chero, not the Entertainer, but
the the Elvis Presley movie, and the whole thing seems

(06:09):
to have cost somewhere under seventy five thousand dollars. They
sent a whole crew over. They shot sixty five hours
of material. The band brought along a portable a track,
not the kind people used to have in their cars,
but a portable studio thing, and they recorded all the
concerts and in the fifty years since these had all disappeared. Okay,

(06:31):
just before you get into finding them, you're talking about
the State Department documents. How did you get those? Hey,
I'm sorry to interrupt everyone. For just for anyone who's listening,
the story begins with our singers. Canadian not as a
band unified concept, but we all, everyone in the band

(06:53):
hated the war in Vietnam, couldn't stand what was going
on with Nixon. And this is not something we planned individually.
And as the band got bigger and bigger, we would
have Mike's under our chins every once in a while
and someone would say, how do you feel so David?
Being a Canadian, as all of us felt, this war

(07:14):
in Vietnam is horrible, we shouldn't be in it, and
Nixon's dodgy. I mean, we all had that opinion. But somewhere,
somehow someone got wind of this, and I can't If
you're into conspiracy, you can come up with ten thousand
ways of looking at this. My feeling was that some
extreme right wing congressman said, who is this Canadian thing?

(07:37):
He is? They investigate and find out he had a
jail record in Canada, then they pull his green card.
We have gigantic hit records, singles, everything going, and we
can no longer play in the United States. Lo and
behold State Department, either through our manager, he contacted them
or they contacted him. John probably knows more about this

(07:58):
than I do, but at that point we had to
do something to get his green card back. So a
quid pro quo, we'll get you the green card, but
you got to go to Eastern Europe and play behind
the Iron curtain. So that's kind of I'm glad you
added that in Yeah, but another set of film, the

(08:20):
manager is a new manager and he's not described positively.
How would you find that guy? And was he good,
bad or otherwise? He was, Okay, that's a great question. Actually,
because our attorney at the time was someone who lived
out here. We were all in the East Coast in
New York and this attorney, Lee Colton, super nice man.

(08:43):
We're looking for a new manager. And he said, there's
a guy. He's just smart, knows the business. His brother
works for the Beach. But I don't know all this detail,
but he said he's so, he's so clever, he'd be great.
And I said, okay, can I talk to him? Well,
he's just getting out of jail. I thought, you can't

(09:05):
beat that punchline. I said, okay, okay, there's gonna be
something coming. He said, no, he's getting out of jail.
He's in Geno prison. Well, I said, okay. Well, as
you see in the movie, my comment was sounds like
he'd be perfect for us. And he was clever as
can be. He got endorsements with Pioneer Electronics. He was

(09:26):
he really was something else, I mean, and and he
was wonderful. But I had a feeling because he had
had written bad checks before and he had been in
trouble before that there was a high likelihood that he
would try something with us. So I just told our
account and just be really careful. This guy, I like him.

(09:47):
I hope everything works out, but be careful. And sure
enough he caught him doing something and that was the
end of it. But he lasted with us for a while.
But he was terrific. Actually, he was a great man.
And what he did was he was being proactive as
a manager as he would be. And he said, we
got this problem here with our singer. I've got to
do something. To go back to your question, is we'll

(10:07):
take us here usually what the State Department does is
they hand over their files to the National Archive, and
they had been there for a while, and somewhere in
the eighties there was just too much and they were
going to toss a bunch of it. And William Fulbright,
who was a congressman from Arkansas, had a real interest

(10:30):
in the Cultural Exchange Program, which was the department that
sponsored the Blood Switt and Tears tour, and he said,
I'll take those files. So all of the files from
the Cultural Presentations program ended up at the University of Arkansas.
Very few people know they're there. One of our researchers
just sort of bumped into it quite by accident, but
they're all there. And we got access to all the

(10:53):
documents pertaining to the Blood Switt and Tears tour, which
no one had seen in forty or fifty years. And
what we learned is that there was communication between Larry Goldblatt,
the manager, and the State Department. What's not clear, and
we don't have any documents to tell us this we
surmise based on circumstantial evidence, but that Larry was somehow

(11:19):
proactive and got to somebody at the State Department and
they had a conversation, and there was this notion that
this would be a win win for both sides. The
band takes care of their immigration problem for the lead singer,
no more problems there, and with the State Department and
the Nixon administration gets is the hottest, one of the
hottest bands going on a tour for them, sponsored by

(11:42):
the State Department, to try to reach out to these
three governments that the State Department had identified as being
possible partners, so that they could maybe break that The
leaders were independent enough of the Russians that they felt
that we could establish a relationship with them and therefore

(12:03):
perhaps pull them a little bit out of the Russian orbit.
And that was the notion of the State Department, So
it was kind of a win win for both. What
we don't exactly know Bobby touched on this before is
did Larry suggest the quit proco or did the State
Department suggest the quit proco. We don't really know that.
What we do know from the internal documents is that

(12:23):
as early as November of sixty nine this deal had
been arranged and then they announced it in January of seventy. Okay,
let's start with the making of the film. Then we'll
go to the content of the film. So you go
for this meeting with Bobby. Bobby tells you this crazy story.
Then what happens. The first thing when I'm deciding if

(12:46):
I want to do a documentary or not, is, Hey,
what's the story? Is the story compelling enough, strong enough
that it can be a feature documentary as opposed to
just an hour on Discovery or the History Channel. This
story was so compelling and like the best of a
spy novel, so I thought, yeah, this is just great.
But the second question, Bob, is is there enough in

(13:07):
the way of audio visual assets that we can tell
this story properly? What's out there? Bobby mentions this sixty
five hours, and my ears like go up, and it's like,
whoa excuse me? We gotta fight. So I put my
researchers on this, and I think, had we not found
this sixty minute version, we would probably not be here

(13:29):
talking today. We would not have been able to make
the film. But we did find it, and that's the
foundation of the film itself, all of this film that
was shot on the tour. Okay, did you guys have
a pre existing relationship or did Bobby someone say you
got to talk to this guy. We're both married. First
of all, let me make that clear. No, No, we
have a friend, a mutual friend, that invited me to

(13:51):
a screening of a terrific I think early stages of
a documentary that John had done is called Chasing Train
about John Coltrane. And I'm a big jazz fan, and
I grew up in a family of jazz fans and
managers and friends of you know, I was lucky enough

(14:11):
to I have two older brothers, much older than me.
They both have passed, but the oldest was a trumpet
player who's very close with Miles Davis. They were, you know,
good friends. My other brother managed Monk Velonious Monk for
fourteen years. So as a little kid, I had Bach
and Beethoven in my living room basically. So that's the

(14:32):
movie I grew up, I should that's the music that
I grew up hearing. So when I heard about this
film about Train, about John Coltrane, I thought, there's nothing
on Coltrane. I haven't seen anything on John Coltrane. He was,
you know, not a big interview and he was not
someone that was seen all the time. And I'm and

(14:54):
I was, actually I was astonished when I saw this
because it was so well well done and there wasn't
that much to go with, and John pulled it off.
So so we had met around that time, and then
we emailed once in a while, but we weren't close
friends or anything. And then when he called me to

(15:15):
have this lunch, that was really the first time we
had a super in depth conversation. And now we talked
like three or four times a day. So, okay, John,
you talked about all these assets, you were excited about
the project. Yeah. How many times do people pitch you?
How often and you can only come up to bat

(15:35):
a certain number of times? Yeah, that's a really good question.
It's a couple of things. I do get pitched quite
a bit. This person, that person. You know, I've done
a lot of music things, so I do get pitched
those a lot. But for me, it's always do I
have a passion for the artist to I have a
passion for their work? Is this someone I would want

(15:58):
to spend you know, a year, year and a half with,
because that's what the amount of time it takes to
make a documentary, So I can get past that, then
it's okay. If I love that artist, I love, here's
a great story, then do we have the stuff to
tell it? And then we're sort of often running. But
I've been really, you know, blessed of I've been working
really regularly for a long long time. Do you only

(16:19):
make one movie at one time, or do you have
simultaneous productions simultaneous I will stagger them a bit, so
they're not exactly on the same schedule. So at the moment,
for example, we've finished this one and we're promoting it
now for theatrical I just finished a fine cut for
a new one that we delivered to the streaming service
last week, and I'm in production on another one now,

(16:42):
with another one kind of coming behind it. So I think,
you know, Bob, it's the freelancers nightmare that you know,
if you don't take a job somehow, you're never going
to work again. But as I say, I'm really lucky.
These things do present themselves, and so I usually have two,
occasionally three that are going at the same time. Okay,
what was the budget for this film and where did

(17:03):
the money come from? I can't really say what the
budget is. It's a very healthy budget for a documentary.
We got it from an independent source. You know, it's
interesting doing documentaries. You can do it one of several ways.
You can kind of be Willie Lohman and you're out there,
you know, carting your ideas around in your briefcase, trying
to sell them to a streaming service or a network

(17:24):
or a studio, and that sometimes is the best way
to go. But other times you go out and you
try to find independent financing so that I can make
the film I want to make without any interference from
a networker a studio, and then armed with a finished product,
we can say, look here it is. You don't have
to guess what it is now you can look at it.
And in this case, we had independent financing that actually

(17:45):
came through Bobby, So why don't you tell him about that?
So this is wild. If you've seen the Michael Jordan piece,
a lot of people comment that he paid for it,
so obviously there's going to be nothing negative in there.
So I asked John, what do you think this is
going to cost? And he told me, And I'm not
a rich guy, but I said I could figure out

(18:07):
a way, and he said, and then we both kind
of simultaneously said, you know what if I come up
with the money. It's not you know, like yeah, like
if I have pimples, show them. I mean, that's just
that's just the way it is. So I'm, you know,
obviously fine with that. Maybe a week later. I'm a
very lucky person. I have to admit this. And I

(18:28):
have crazy coincidences throughout my life. I get a phone call.
My office calls and says, listen, there's a guy that
owns a drum shop in Seattle and he needs to
speak to you, but I don't want to give him
your number. And this came from a club owner in
Seattle who's a friend. So I said, that's okay, just
you know, let me have his number and I'll call him.

(18:48):
It's cool. So I called the guy up. I said,
how you doing this? Bobby Columby said, oh man, thanks
for colin um Listen, I've got a guy that's just
a big fan of yours and he wants to buy
memory of yeah, anything you want, you know, like he's
into it. And I said, well, I'll talk to him.
Just get him on the line. Here's a number you
can call. When you get him on the line, we'll

(19:10):
all talk. Calls Bobby, I want to introduce you to
James Bryant, and I hear, oh my god, it's Bobby Columbia.
I can't believe it. And I go, oh my god,
it's James Bryan. Oh my god. And we start laughing.
And he said, listen, I'm such a fan of the
band and I loved the drums and blah blah, and

(19:32):
he goes on and I said, James, I need your address.
He said, what do you mean. I said, just give
me your address. He said, well, I don't understand. I
want to buy some memorabili. I said, I heard you, James. James,
let me ask you a question. What do you do.
I'm a lawyer. I said, okay, give me a address. No, no,

(19:53):
I want to buy. I said, James, you're not a
good Negotia give me your goddamn address. He says okay,
and I get it. And he said I want to buy.
I said, I'm not. I don't sell stuff. That's not
what I'm interested in doing. I'll send you something. So, James,
what do you do? He said, Well, I used to
be a sports agent. Well who did you represent? Well,

(20:13):
Nick van Exel, but you never heard of him. I said,
I was at the NCAA quarterfinals when he scored thirty
two points for Cincinnati in the first half, and I'm
like rattling off, I'm a basketball freak. He goes, Oh
my god. He gets more into it. He goes, oh,
this is great. And here's the punchline. So James, what
do you do now? I finance films, And of course

(20:35):
I go, I'm gonna give you a phone number. I
have a feeling. But there's one caveat this is what
you can't get in the way. I said. Creative people
need to be left alone so they can see their
vision through. So whatever you're gonna do, I'm going to
introduce you to someone. I think this is right up
your alley. And I don't know how long it took

(20:55):
to be financed, but I'm gonna I'm gonna guess five
minutes or something. John. You know, Bob, it was the
as an independent. Actually, what I should say is when
you go to film school, they don't tell you that
the hardest part of your job is going to be
getting money. I call it the kneepad tour, where you
get down on your knees and you have to beg

(21:16):
somebody to give you money for your your projects. But
This was one of the easiest I've ever had. He
loved the band. When I told him the story and
I told him my vision for the film, he just said, Uh,
let's go. That's great. The lawyers talked about ten days
later we were done and off and running. Did he
personally finance it or does he have a syndicate? No,

(21:38):
he personally financed it. Okay, let's go back to your
earlier thing. The inspiration for actually push the button? You
want his phone number? Is that where you're going? Not
today anyway. But you said that you saw a sixty
minute production. The question is did you ever find the footage? No,

(22:01):
we never found the raw footage, and we suggest in
the film why that is what we did find that
We cast a very wide net. We talked to people
that were involved with that documentary. There weren't many left,
but I thought, you know, those two companies going bankrupt,
that maybe the footage was just left in storage somewhere

(22:23):
here in LA So we looked at every independent storage facility.
We looked at Technicolor, we looked at Deluxe, we looked
at all of these places. We looked at labs and
storage facilities in New York. We looked at government facilities
in Washington, DC and Virginia. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. So

(22:44):
I was I was beginning to think, you know, we
weren't going to be able to make this film. And
then one day I got a call from a woman
that ran a vault that we had approached, and she
said her database had nothing. So we just sort of
went on to the next one and and I and
she called me, she said, you know something, this was

(23:05):
COVID time. She was home, stuck at home. She had
a loose leaf notebook that she had found with old
stuff in the vault and with loose leaf pages, and
she went through and she found some vague reference to
something about blood, sweat and tears. So she next time
she was in the vault, she went to look at
it and it was in a far corner of the vault,

(23:26):
and everything in this corner there was a sign there
marked for destruction. So, Bob, did we get there at
the right time or not. Anyway, what she found was
two pristine prints of this sixty minute version that never
got broadcast, and we got them, looked at them and
it was like, wow, now we can make this movie.
Because it was a great cross section of this tour.

(23:50):
So we did a new HD transfer of this material
and we were off and running. Okay, Bobby, let's talk
a little bit about you and blood, sweat and tears.
You grow up? Where and how do you start playing drums? Okay? Um, Okay.

(24:12):
If this gets boring, just wave your arms and I'll
just say I would. Okay, Okay. So I grew up,
as I told you, in a family of two much
older brothers, and they're listening to jazz morning, noon and night.
That's the That's the only music I heard except for
procaffee if who I loved and some classical stuff didn't.

(24:32):
Did never listen to pop music. I always thought when
I would hear it, I would just laugh and say,
how could anyone listen to this? Because in those days
was dan at that, dan At that, dann than yan
At that that that that, that was it. And as
as as a kid watching everything going on, because I
was much younger, we had a little piano in our

(24:55):
living room and when they would play music, there'd be
an album jacket on the piano and a pair of brushes.
And when someone was playing the piano or doing anything,
another person who was in the room would start to
play time and I would watch that and it just
was fascinated. And then I heard one This is a

(25:17):
little bit inside baseball, but I was I heard one
piece of music. Tad Dameron, an arranger, wonderful arranger, had
a song called Philly j J. And it was a
piece featuring the trumpet player the greatest, Clifford Brown. Was unbelievable.
And it was just one piece of musical called Philly JJ.

(25:39):
And I was eleven, maybe I was fixated on it.
And I heard this drumming because it featured a guy
named Philly Joe Jones, and I was fixated. And I
put together, I don't know a lamp, and that was
my symbol, a marching snare I bought at an Army

(25:59):
Navy store with a jacket over it. I lived in
an apartment in Manhattan, up way uptown and disturbing everybody.
I'm banging on stuff. There was a game, a game
with like a backcam and birdie and these two little
round things that you would bang back and forth. And
I hooked them up to a standing ashtray and that

(26:22):
was my drum set. And I'm trying to play this
piece of music. What I didn't know, and I know.
I knew later on it's maybe the hardest thing you
can play on that instrument. It's unbelievably difficult. But no
one said you can't do this. I had no idea
what I was doing. I was playing ass backwards in
my hands were like weird, and I was banging on

(26:43):
the side and I just kept doing it hours and hours.
And one day one of my brothers, I think, Jules,
the older one, you know, here's me, and then he
invites a friend. He said, you gotta hear this, and
this little eleven year olds banging away, but he's trying
to play like Philly Joe Jones and this piece was difficult.
And that was my drum lesson. And then I started

(27:05):
playing along with everything. And on January the twentieth, nineteen sixty,
my brother and I remember, I was on the toilet.
He says, I got a drum set for you, and
I ran out of the toilet with my underwear on
my angles like a Seinfeld episode, and went flying and
there's Max Roach's old drum set, eighteen inch bass drum,

(27:25):
handmade first one Sparkle Silva gretch set and that was it.
And that was my first that was a drum set.
I didn't have symbols yet, but that's how I started playing. Okay,
to have such a creative family. What'd your parents do
for a living? What was their story? Well, I love
this guy. It's the greatest questions. My father was born

(27:47):
in eighteen eighty nine. My grandfather paternal was born ten
years before the assassination of Lincoln. So and my mother
played piano. And my father, whose name I guess there
was Fred golub And because I saw like a thing
of his like a cpia. He's an opera singer. He

(28:07):
sang with Caruso So when I was growing up, Well,
he died when I was three, But we had this
a recording device. It looked like a big suitcase with
one mic, and they would make discs on it and
my mom would pay piano and my father would sing. Okay,
you are playing drums basically jazz oriented. Two questions for

(28:33):
most people. Was a huge turning point when the Beatles
came on the scene and beginning A sixty four, So
you were a jazz er? Was that a turning point
for you and a lot of people who were fans
of the Beatles in British invasion that caused them to
play in bands. So after you got this drum set,

(28:53):
were you just playing alone? Were you playing in groups?
What kind of music? I love them? Okay, here we go.
Here's the here's the answer. This is a little bit.
If anyone's eating, stop eating for a second. So I
got a call from some guy that's going to the
high School for Music and Art. I'm I guess I'm

(29:14):
fifteen at this point. I don't have symbols yet. I
just have this like basic drum. I don't know how
to use my feet yet we're playing drums. I got
a call from this guy Fred, Hey, Bob, and you
got your drums? I said, yeah, I just got a
drum set. Good. We have a gig. So what we
have a job NYU Fraternity Alpha something something at the

(29:34):
Broadway Central Hotel and let's go. And we had a gig.
I never thought even to get paid for doing this.
I thought I'd have to pay. I said, sure, fifteen
years old, I get all dressed up, I get my
little drum set down to this place. I borrowed twenty
bucks from my friend Harold's I could buy a symbol,
and now I have a symbol. No high hat yet. No,

(29:56):
I don't know how to use a bass drum pedal yet,
but I got this drum set. It's a big band
and they're playing things like Daddy Day. And I'd heard
so much music as a kid. I knew almost everything
that was out there, so I stopped playing along. Fred's
the bass player. He's standing over me, smiling, and I'm

(30:16):
playing Daddy Yadia and just smiling, and then he vomits
on my shoulder, so I so I look up and
he's but he's not vomiting in a in a position
to vie. He's smiling and vomiting. And I look up
and I feel this and I go, Fred, stop, stop,
and he's just drunk. And that's my first gig. And

(30:37):
I'm figuring, if there is a god, he's telling me,
do not do this for a living. Whatever, Well, how
ever your life turns out, don't do this for a living.
So that was my first gig. And then I eventually
learned how to use my feet and I act. And
I can't get into this, but this is the wildest
part of this, which is going to pull us so

(30:58):
far away from this conversation. I had inadvertently met someone who.
I was in a hotel room. He was talking about
doing a US version of The Beatles, and he plays
me an ascetate, What do you think of this? I said,
it's it's amazing, actually, and I was shocked at how

(31:22):
good it was. Soa who is it? He goes, Oh,
it's the boys the Beatles, I said, he said, I
think he said something like I don't think we're gonna
put this out, You're crazy. It was Brian Epstein and
he's playing me an ascetate of a day in the
life a year before it comes out. I don't tell you.
My friends, yeah I heard this beetle thing and they're going, yeah,
he's not full of shit? Oh really? And I'm saying

(31:44):
no in the middle of goes, wake up, got out
of bed, get a comb because something like that, and
they all thing, I'm nuts until it comes out. Okay,
have that one giga where the guy vomits on you?
Now do you continue to play with bands? And what
happens when the Beatles do a rock Okay? So I

(32:06):
have your own career, all right? So I have two
completely different sets of friends. Are these one of these
young jazz musicians and older jazz musicians, and I become
competent enough where I can play with these people, play
jazz gigs not a lot, and we have jam sessions
obviously in New York, roll over the place. The other

(32:26):
thing was I like these pop, like these rock kids
that I knew, and they would play at temple dances
and schools and on weekends and they worked. But that
was I was in college, so I would I would
do the weekend gigs and I would hear all these
you know songs, and they were Beatle fanatics, so I

(32:46):
would hear all the Beatles songs that way, and we
do you know, rock stuff. And then I had another
friend who lived in my building who played Oregon, a
guy named Mike Matthews. And he forms a little band
and we go away in the summer and it's a
blues band and we're just playing before I had heard
anything about any blues bands other than authentic blues bands.

(33:10):
And we're out in the Hampton's playing and so I I,
you know, like I had a nice mix of music,
but I had two sets, you know, they were very
very separate sets of friends. So where did you go
to college? And did you finish City College finished? And
then I went to the same school in graduate school
for a degree in psychology. Did you finish that? No?

(33:33):
One day, I'm in advanced interviewing techniques as a woman,
and I had to go to night school because I
was playing already with people, so I had to sleep.
So I'm watching this and I'm imagining myself at five
years old, realizing that other than like the Lowden code

(33:55):
and the hat with the ear flaps, I was doing
exactly the same thing. I was going to school and
September and I was off in June. But I was
already twenty two, and I just panicked. I said, I
got up, left my books and just started hanging out
with my friends in the West Village. Okay, let's switch
to you, John, How do you end up becoming a filmmaker?

(34:19):
You know, I blamed Bobby for this film. I blame
my parents for my career. They and I grew up
in the Midwest. Born in Chicago, raised in Milwaukee, very
far away from Hollywood. My parents took me to a
revival of Lawrence of Arabia. It's the first movie I
ever saw. And I'm sitting in the Fox Bay Theater

(34:40):
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, looking up at the screen and just
with my mouth open, I couldn't believe this whole experience,
the writing, the directing, the production, everything about it was
fantastic and is about eleven at the time, and I
remember saying to my parents, that's what I wanted to do,
and as I yeah, yeah, sure, because when you're in Milwaukee,
you know, Hollywood is very far away, and we don't

(35:03):
make it there very often. In fact, if I had
a dollar, Bob, for every person that said, you know,
a lot of people want to get the competition is fierce,
You're never gonna make it. If I had a dollar
for everybody who said that to me, I would not
have had to come out here. I would have been
so rich. But so anyway, I went to undergraduated Oberlin,

(35:24):
and I went to film school at Northwestern and then
I decided it was time to come out here. And
I didn't know it well put, you know, because the
movies went through great transition. What games are we talking about?
This would be late sixties, Okay, so this is when
the tours start to appear. On the scene where you
inspired by that, you know, you talk about Lawrence the

(35:47):
rebew But what other films are your inspirations to continue
down this path. I was not into super popular films.
Another early film I saw was an Elvis film, which
was just dreadful, and I just remember, oh God, I
don't think I want to do that. But I was
really very much influenced by the classics. Love Casablanca, Loved

(36:09):
Maltese Falcon, Love Gone with the Wind, all of that
sort of stuff. Great storytelling, and I think that's really
what got me into this business, was I wanted to
be a storyteller. And on top of the movies, I'm
going to throw one other thing at you. When I
was about ten, I had bought a Superman comic book,
and at the back of the comic book, for a dollar,

(36:31):
if you send it into this place, they would send
you a real to real tape of radio drama shows
the Lone Ranger on one side and the Shadow on
the other side, And so I sent that in. I
had no idea what a radio show was other than
my local DJ, and I got this thing. I just
was captivated. It was telling a story with actors and

(36:53):
sound effects and music, and all of this just blew
me away. And so I started collecting tapes of old
radio shows. Drama, comedy, Jack Benny, you name it, and
all of this kind of went into my head. But
mostly it was all about telling stories, and that's what
interested me more than the filmmakers themselves. So I went
to filmmaking school at Northwestern and I still remember this

(37:16):
to this day. First day, first class, we looked at
Busby Berkeley's forty second Street. We're watching the film and
it's over and we start to talk about it, and
there's I could still see him to this day. There's
this red headed kid in the back of the class
who said, you know, on one level, Ruby Keeler's tap
dancing was interesting, but you know, on a deeper, more
metaphorical level, she is a representative of a depressed era America,

(37:42):
pounding out, tapping out, if you will, their frustrations with
an economic And I'm looking around at him and I
wanted to say, she's tap dancing and she's not that great,
And the teacher says, very good, excellent, anybody else and
we got into this whole sort of intellectual conversation that
I sort of decided this was not for me. I

(38:04):
wanted to make movies. I wanted to tell stories. It
wasn't about analyzing things. So I sort of went off
on my own, and I think that kind of explains
a lot about me. I'm a very independent soul and
have kind of carved out my own little niche here.
But what I did was, when I was finally ready
to come out to California after graduate school, I didn't

(38:25):
know a soul, so I put together a very flamboyant resume,
and no one had ever seen anything like. In fact,
I got written up in a book on how to
get a job in Hollywood, and I sent it out
to fifty studios, networks producers, and I said, I'm coming
to California two months. We'd love to have an opportunity

(38:46):
to interview with you. And out of the fifty, I
got twenty responses, which is great. Twelve said now, sorry,
you're not interested, but eight said come and see us.
They were really struggle by stop stop. Yeah, what was
so magical about this? Because amazing statistics. Um this was

(39:06):
in pre computer days. I put together what looked like
a reprint of a People magazine article. It was me
on the cover. You know, I stole the typeface People,
and it was direct from the Midwest, John Scheinfeld. And
you opened it up and in the in the breezy,
gossipy style of People magazine. It was my life story

(39:26):
to that point. And if they didn't read it, and
I wasn't sure that they were going to, I peppered
it with pictures from my life with one line caption
so they could still get the whole story. And um,
so it wasn't the resume format we all learned in
school of how to get a job. And so my
first interview was a paramout. I got out here on

(39:48):
a Sunday and on Tuesday, I had an interview at Paramount.
Just be specific, because you have some great memory. What
years This was nineteen eighty one, okay, and U Gary
Nardino was the president of Paramount Television at the time.
He had seen this resume wanted to meet me. So
I went in, had a meeting that was on Tuesday.

(40:10):
By Friday, they offered me a job. I didn't even
have to go to any of these other interviews. Was like,
Paramount was like right there. So they paid for me
and my wife newlyweds to come out at the time,
and I started as a TV development executive And well wait, wait,
slow down a little bit. Yeah, what did your parents

(40:31):
do for a living. Oh nice of you to ask.
My father was a businessman, worked for He ran the
international part of a business called Manpower. It was a
temporary help service and he ran all the foreign offices.
The headquarters was in Milwaukee, which is why we're there.
My mom was a housewife, but actually she's the one

(40:52):
who's responsible for me loving music as much as I do.
She always had music playing around the house, and not
just Frank's, not her Nat King Cole, which was her generation,
but she loved a lot of the contemporary artists, and
she'd loved, for example, Herb Albert, she loved Sergio Mendez.
So I ended up making films about which was just

(41:13):
great but had nothing to do with show business. And
I think, I think Bob Bay they didn't. I think
they ever quite understood what I did. I did a
project in the early two thousands. I was working with
the Frank Sinatra family and my dad, I think he
really wanted to be a good dad. One day and

(41:34):
he said, so, how did you spend your day to day?
I'm trying to understand what it is you do. Tell
me what you did today? And I said, well, I
looked at five hours of Frank Sinatra TV shows from
the nineteen fifties and there's this dead silence on the
other end of the phone, and my dad finally says,
and they pay you for this. It's like you know anyway.

(41:57):
So they were very but they were really supportive. It's like,
whatever you want to do, it will support you whatever
you want to do. And so I had that luxury
growing up, and I think again it contributed to to
my being very independent. I want to do what I
want to do and things that will make me proud. Okay,
you're a nice Jewish boy. Your parents usually want you
to be a doctor or lawyer. Were they supportive? I mean,

(42:17):
did ay? Did they pay for your education? And b
when it ended all of a sudden, you're married, you
have expenses and what was going on there economically? Yes,
they paid for graduate school, they paid for college and
it was gout in the world and make us proud.
And as I said, they never quite understood how show
business worked because that wasn't their frame of reference. But

(42:39):
they couldn't have been more supportive through throughout my dad's
past now and my mom too, but they couldn't have
been more supportive up to the day they died. Well,
what about getting married and are you still married to
that same person? You immediately, you know, put an economic
stone on your career. No, we are no longer married.
We were married. We were married for fourteen years. Lovely

(43:02):
women were still friends today, but we just got married
way too young and went off in different directions and
had different interests. She's terrific, But yeah, you sort of
put that on. But you know, it's just I think
if you it's really interesting. People talk to me a
lot about jobs, and they're kind of what if I

(43:24):
go here, What if I go here? What if I
go here? I was always I want to go there.
I want to be over there. I want to be
making my own things. That's what I want to do.
And so I was always very directed towards getting there.
And it didn't sort of matter what the economic things were.
It was just I always sort of found a way
to do it. And you know, I was at Paramount,
that was my first job, and so I had a

(43:46):
decent salary. And then I got hired away by MTM
Mary Chila Moore Productions, and then I got hired away
by Embassy, which was Norman Lear's company. So I had
really good pedigree where I learned from the best people
of how to do quality work. And to this day
I remember lessons that I got. Stephen Botchko from Hill
Street Blues was a guy that I learned from and

(44:08):
he was very arrogant guy, very difficult guy. I liked
him a lot. And he said to me, you know,
I will take an idea from the Xerox kid if
it makes the show better. And that was a big lesson,
you know, as opposed to no, no, it has to
be me. I have to have all the idea. I know.
That's not how I am. It's just like, whatever's going

(44:29):
to make the film better, that's what you got to do.
So it's always been a series of steps of sort
of getting to where I wanted to be. I thought
it was going to be scripted things, whether it was
television or film, and then I discovered documentaries and I
loved the form, and so the scripted stuff sort of
faded off to the side, and for the last twenty
three years I've been doing documentaries and loving it. So

(44:53):
what was the job that you had was an embassy
where you segued into documentaries? What was the what were
you doing just before where you made that switch. Yeah,
well I am. I had been at Embassy, but then
I went off. I didn't see much future for a
producer that didn't write, so I took about two years

(45:14):
off and I wrote and I wrote, and I wrote
episodes of TV shows Bob, I would be embarrassed to
tell you that I wrote for. And then I got
some jobs writing episodes for some of those shows. And
then Bob Greenblatt was at Fox at the time, and
he read a spec script of mine and he said,

(45:38):
I want you to come out. He said, you have
an original voice. I want you to come in and
let's talk about doing something. So he made me into
a pilot writer. And I was writing drama shows for
about six years, not one of which got made. I
came closer a couple of times, but I did like
two or three a year for the various networks drama
shows with a sense of humor. But I didn't see
much future for this either. You know, you write him

(46:01):
for a while, you're on the A list, and then somehow,
if you don't get him made, you're you're you're going
to get off that list. And I saw that coming
in around the same time I got to know of
grout Show, Marx's grandson, and he said, you know, you
should do a documentary about the Marx brothers. Nobody's done
a really great documentary about the Marx Brothers. It was like,
what do I know about making documentaries. I'm in the
scripted world. He's yeah, but you're a storyteller. So he

(46:24):
gave me the rights to do this, and I teamed
up with a guy that actually had done a little
bit of documentary work, guy named David Leaf. And David
and I did this documentary together called The Unknown Marx Brothers.
Got a lot of attention for it, and from that
it was sort of off to do other things. And
I just love the form. Okay, Bobby, how do you

(46:53):
end up in Blood, Sweat and Tears? Understand, I'm in
graduate school, just walked out hanging around in the West Village.
Being a jazz drummer. You jazz generally, you should have

(47:13):
a certain amount of technique, and you know, like like
Shakespeare understood English pretty well so he could express himself.
It's very hard to play jazz without having chops, having
some sort of technique. Pop music rock and roll at
that time, in particular, you didn't need all of that
great technique. So I started hanging around in the village.

(47:37):
I think it's fascinating. I become friends with a guy
whose band is about to break up named Steve Katz,
and he's in a band that's called the Blues Project,
and that band was breaking up, so he and I
were extremely close friends. And it's gonna sound awful. They

(47:58):
were girls in the Westville hit a lot of girls,
and that was true because you know, I went to
Stuveston High School. Its all boys school, so as soon
as I got to co ed situations, it's pretty good.
And then I'm in the West Village, where you know,
it was great, and there's a lot of folk music.
Bob Dylan was hanging around, Dave Van Ronk was hanging around,

(48:21):
and there weren't a lot of drummers that could play well.
I would say, enough to be versatile. So I would
play with Tiny tim one night, or play with all
these different people. I mean, not even for money, just
for fun, for hanging out. And there was one okay, wait, wait,

(48:42):
just stop one. Can you drop out of graduate school?
Do you then say to yourself, I'm gonna make it
as a musician. Never. I never had that in my
understand Fred vomited, so that lingered long enough to go
I ain't doing this for a living, but I could play.
So I'm hanging out with Steve. His band's breaking up.

(49:05):
I'm thinking, I say to Steve, you know what, let's
you know, let's put something together. It would be fun.
Cut to I meet Al Cooper. Al Cooper's down there.
He hears me play. I don't remember the exact circumstances,
but he hears me play and then says, would you
do me a favor? I'm leaving the United States. I

(49:26):
want to go to England and be a record producer.
I don't have money, so I want to do a
fundraiser at the Cafe Go Go, which was on Blika
Street where we didn't hang out anywhere but that, and
across the street where you know, there was what was
it called the Bitter End the ten Angel and the
dugout was underneath, and that was it. That was like,

(49:48):
that's the one the area on Blika Street. But you know,
Alt said would you help? I said, sure, you know, sure?
Should I not? Al was a force of nature. I'm
a guy that just walked out of graduate school. Know
nothing about the music business at all. I'm just you know,
playing drums and hanging out. And so al found a

(50:11):
bass player I think in California named Jim Fielder, and
he said, you know, I got a bass player, okay,
Seth Stewart hurt. I said, you know what, because I
knew that he had left the Blues Project and he
and Steve did not like each other at all. And
I said to Alice said, you know, you only live once,
and you know it'd be fun to have Steve on

(50:34):
the gig because Steve wasn't doing anything. And he said, oh,
he's not gonna do it. He hates me. I said,
you know, let me talk to him. And I spoke
to Steve and Steve said, well he won't let me.
I said, no, it'll be fine. You know you can
do it. So so we play as a quartet in
at the CAFEO Go Go, and I think we did
three nights and I even somehow in my brain think

(50:56):
Paul Simon and Judy Collins played also us. But we
didn't sell out. I mean it was no one, you know, like,
it wasn't very crowded. But al had all these songs
that I really liked. So that was that I end
up at this moment, I'm playing with Odetta and she's
playing in Washington, d C. So I get an idea.

(51:19):
I said, hey, Steve, since we're, you know, gonna put
something together, why don't you ask Al if we can
use some of the songs because I can't quit or
I love I love Emmano was a great tune, and
these are things that we played with him there, I said,
And I like this other one called my Day's a
Numbered I think it was called. I asked him, like,

(51:39):
if we can use a song? And I will never
forget this moment. Odette is knocking on my door for something.
I'm on the phone. Steve calls and he goes, oh,
I spoke to Al, and so like hush tones because
I don't want to yell. So she knows him in
the room. Because I want to have the conversation, I said,
so what happened? He said, oh, yeah, we can absolutely

(52:00):
the songs. Oh, and he wants to he wants to
be in the band. In fact, he wants to be
the singer. And went, well when no, wait, wait wait,
and like I'm thinking, what's going on? And he's got
a name blood Sweat. I'm writing down blood Sweats. What
kind of name is for a band? And we've got
a gig. I said, you gotta be kidding. Al, apparently,

(52:23):
who is amazing at this. He's he's he's ubiquitous. Was
talking to a promoter at the Village Theater, which soon
became the film or East, and that person said, Al,
do you have a band? I need an opening act
for the James Cotton Band, like a blues band. I
got a band and that was it, and I go, man,

(52:44):
this is unbelievable what I don't And I'm now I'm
I'm realizing that whatever I had planned to put together
was off and running. And Al's already talking to labels.
He's a mile ahead of us. And I'll never forget.
So we have this gig at the Village Theater and

(53:05):
I woke in for a sound check and there's a
riser in the middle of the stage as an organ
way up on this riser, we're all on the ground
and I'm looking up and I had suggested because because
we're talking about adding horns, I said, yeah, yeah, And
because I have all these jazz playing really good players,

(53:26):
I said, yeah, that's what I want to do Fred
Lipsia says a guy. He's great. There's a guy named
Paul Fleischer that I called first unavailable. Fred said, yeah,
I give it a shot. So Fred comes and we're playing,
but we're on the ground and I was way up
in the air and I'm looking up. I said, oh,
why are you up there? Oh oh, it's much better
for the sound. I went, oh, okay, I have no clue.

(53:50):
And we're playing the gig and all of a sudden,
Al with his hand shuts the band down, like stop playing,
and he just starts to play. He puts the heel
of his left hand on the lowest notes of the organ. Organs.
Organs have all plastic keys, so it's not like a piano,
so you can roll your hands around an organ without
getting hurt. So he puts the heel of his left

(54:11):
hand on the lowest part and he starts to work
his way up to the middle of the keyboard, and
then his right hand takes over. He turns on the
leslie speakers, so it's going whooo like this, and he
goes to the highest note on the organ and he's
just sliding his hands up. HiT's the highest note and
starts writhing in pain, as if it's harder to play

(54:31):
that note than any other note. And he's holding down
the note and writhing, and I'm looking up and the
audience is going nuts, and I'm thinking he's got them
completely fooled. They think, oh my god, this spot, this
rock and roll shit is unbelievable, This is crap. And
I'm thinking this is so insane. The end of the gig,

(54:52):
half an hour, they pay me two hundred and forty
two dollars. I'm thinking, now, as an industrial psychologist, I'm
gonna make about fifteen grand the year. I just made
two hundred and forty two bucks his name. But this
is a good thing. And Al is off. He's now
conjuring up stuff. His publisher becomes a manager, and I'm

(55:12):
a passenger. I'm just going, what the hell is going on?
And he's going to labels And now he's got a
guy to come down and hear us audition or play
a gig at the ogogo and we had a record
deal on Columbia Records. It's unbelievable. Okay, jumping to the

(55:33):
second al, but that's a big gem, bro, Believe me,
it is. But I could go on for an hour
or what you just told me. I feel bad because
I want to hear some of that more than some
of the stuff. I know. Al's version of leaving the band,
there's a version in the movie. Is that how you remember?
Here's exactly what happened. I call him meeting. I'm at

(55:54):
this point savvy enough, having been in the band, now
a band, and signed to a label for a year
and change, and the and the album tanks. It doesn't
sell in anything for like forty thousand records or something.
And in those days, like Columbia Records could could easily
drop one hundred grande excuse me, like about one hundred

(56:16):
thousand records. But this thing really tanked, and it didn't
look like there was going to be a lot of success.
And in my view, I thought with his voice, we
wouldn't get on the radio. I don't I didn't think
we would. I mean, I loved them in the band,
but just his singing was a little less than what
radio would allow. I thought. Al. I read somewhere that

(56:41):
he said he was calling a meeting to actually get
rid of Steve, to fire Steve. I'm calling a meeting
because I want to suggest we need a new lead singer,
you know, just he I never want to kick him
out of the band, but I knew we needed a
lead singer. So we called a band meeting and we

(57:02):
got to the thing or I said, al, I really
think we have to have a lead singer. I mean,
if this thing is gonna last, And he said, I'm
the singer or I'm walking. And I said, well, let's vote,
and he was voted down and he left, and that's
what happened. Okay. He also says that the band reacted
negatively to the song The Moderate Adventures of Plato Diogenes

(57:26):
in Freud about his therapy. Any truth to that, I
don't know if the band did. I hated the idea
that we have a band of eight musicians and he
does a song about himself with a string court that
we're not even playing on it. He just he does
a song without us, and I thought, well, that's really
what he wants to do. He wants to be a

(57:47):
solo artist, then he should just be a solo artist,
because you don't have a band like with Randy Brecker
in it. And he placed four bars on the entire album.
You gotta be kidding, Okay, so I'm watching the movie,
and the movie is primarily about this nineteen seventy Eastern
European tour, and I figured that Al would not be mentioned,

(58:10):
and I was very surprised what he was somewhat favorably.
So how did that end up in the movie. It
almost didn't. Honestly, John wanted it, and he said, I
think we need the history of the band. And I
was saying, John, text, context, context, and I said, John,
in my humble opinion, it has nothing to do with

(58:31):
that band. That's a different iteration. That's another band, completely
different band, even in concept. So this thing we're doing
is about this band. And he said, Noah, I really
think we should put it in. And I said, yep,
but you're putting an in kind of late and should start.
John knows his business. I don't know that business. And

(58:52):
he just said, no, you know, I want to leave
it in. I said, all right, So that's why we did.
It was important to know where they came from and
how David came to be in the band. So it's
not a significant part of the film, but it is
something I thought people needed to know. And I'm an
Al Cooper fan. I have some of his solo records,
and I love that first album, and so I thought,

(59:12):
let's give him his due. And we actually found a
rare piece of audio from back in the day where
he's talking about the band, and that's in there. And
I don't know that many people have heard that. Okay,
professionals know that sometimes you have to leave the best
stuff out because it doesn't serve the story. What was
left out of this film? That's really great? Well, a

(59:36):
great question. That's a great question, Bob. Let me think
about this just for a second. I don't know that
we left out anything that was really great. We did
have a lovely emotional moment where this manager, Larry Goldblatt,

(59:57):
is going to marry his assistant and they're going to
get married in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and the US ambassador to
Yugoslavia arranges the whole thing with the government so they
can get married in this church in Belgrade, and he
gives away Tina. It's Tina Cunningham who you see in

(01:00:20):
the film. She talks a lot about being there on
the tour. He gives her away. David Clayton Thomas is
Larry's best man, and they get married in this church
and the documentary film crew shoots the whole thing and
outside it's a lovely, sweet little moment. And they had

(01:00:41):
given the documentary film crew had given the film to
Tina and it was sitting in her attic for a
long time. She found it, send it to us. We
had a new transfer made and it was in for
the longest time because it was just sort of nice.
It wasn't about politics, it wasn't about the music. It's
just a sweet moment about two people that that we're

(01:01:02):
getting to know as participants in the story, and it's just,
you know, Bobby got to the point where and we
were sorry, we were a little long, and you just
have to cut certain things. So we did cut that one. Um, Bobby,
I don't know do we cut anything else that we
would say is important. I can say that when I

(01:01:23):
saw that very early version and saw that, here's what
came to mind. Number one, that's Larry Gold that's scamming
the government into paying for his wedding and shooting it
and putting the hole that I said, oh, that's perfect.
And then and then I you know, you know, John said,
what the hell happened about web tears? And I'm thinking
why the hell are we watching this guy get married?

(01:01:44):
It was just it didn't make sense. But I can't
think of anything significant that you had in there, because
but you know, John's a storyteller, so he I started
to talk for you. But he sees the movie a
certain way and realizes, here's hear us some bridges I need,
and significantly he finds Don Cameron. Yeah, the director of

(01:02:10):
the documentary That Never Happened was a guy named Don Cambern.
Your listeners may or may not know that name, but
they should. He was famous as an editor. He did
five easy Pieces, He did one of the Romancing the Stone,
he did one of the Ghostbusters movies, he did Drive.
He said, he did a lot of those sort of

(01:02:31):
early movies, and this was going to be his first
directing job. And I saw his name, and we couldn't
find him for the longest time, and we finally tracked
him down to an independent living facility in Burbank. He's
ninety years old and he was living there, and because
it was COVID time, we couldn't get him out to
do an interview. They weren't letting people out or in.

(01:02:54):
And finally there was a week where they were going
to let him out, and we had him come to
our place and we shot an interview and then you
see him in the film. He's wonderful. It's just the
way he describes him things and the way he expresses himself.
It's just fantastic. So that wasn't in the first cut
Bobby saw, and because Don was so great, we added
some more elements to that part of the story of

(01:03:15):
the making of the documentary that never happened. But I
would say, Bob, rather than things we had to leave
on the cutting room floor, I would rather mention a
couple of things that if we hadn't found film, we
wouldn't have been able to illustrate half as well as
we did. So you remember that Bloodswitt and Tears was

(01:03:36):
one of the headliners at Woodstock, but nobody knows because
they weren't in the movie and they weren't on the soundtrack.
And we explain why that is in the film, but
what and Bobby said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's no film,
and I said, I can't believe. Anyway, we tracked down
in a corner of Warner Brothers. It turns out they

(01:03:58):
didn't turn off the film cameras on Blood Sweat and
Tears until after the fifth song. So there are five
songs that were captured by Blood Sweat and Tears, and
so we work out to deal with Warner Brothers. It
took months, but we work out to deal with Warner Brothers.
And I want to use a song that we don't
have Blood Sweat and Tears performing anywhere else, and that's
More and More, which was a great rendition of a

(01:04:20):
motown song, And so we get my favorite song on
that second is right. It's just a killer song. It
just gets you. So we see they make a new
HD transfer for us, and we're looking at this film
that no one's ever seen because it was just cut up,
you know, they no one knew it was there anyway.

(01:04:40):
So we were able to tell the Woodstock story with
a piece of film that no one has ever seen.
That's what I really liked. I like that we had
at least the hour that we had here. And now
I'm going to tell you another story. In the one
hour version, we're a number of performance sequences with the band,
but they were it was all shot on sixteen and

(01:05:01):
when they finished this thing, it was the optical track
on the side of the film that compresses the sound
and it's mono. I can live with this if we
have to, but as Bobby knows, I am never satisfied.
And so we got to. But nobody knew where these
eight track tapes were. Band didn't have him, never knew
about him. I thought, well, maybe they ended up at

(01:05:24):
Columbia Records because they were the label. They had nothing
to do with this documentary that never happened, so they
didn't have them. And we're just going around and around
all these same storage units. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And
then Kathleen, my wonderful researcher, ends up talking to the
family of the associate producer of this documentary that never happened.

(01:05:45):
He was on the tour with him and he had
died in twenty eighteen, so we didn't get him and
to learn the story behind it. But when he died,
his family gave the contents of his storage unit to
the Academy Emotion Picture Arts and sign it's his library,
and they were just sitting there like on a shelf.
Nobody even bothered to inventory this thing. So Kathleen, because

(01:06:07):
she is very sweet and extremely persistent, gets this wonderful
archivist to finally do an inventory, and what do you know?
There's five eight track tapes there, three, seven, eight, nine,
and eighteen. We know there were eighteen at one time.
What happened to the others. We don't know why he

(01:06:29):
saved these five. We don't know, but there they are, pristine,
never been played since they were recorded in nineteen seventy.
So I call up Bobby. He can't believe it. He
pulls in this fantastic engineer, Alan Sides. Tell him what
we did at Capitol Records. I said, okay. He said,
I want these to sound great. You know, you mix them.

(01:06:50):
So we have to make these eight tracks into stereo.
So we have to mix them. And Alan's brilliant, and
I love gadgets and I love ducing, and you know,
that's my favorite part of it, anything is recording. So
I'm in the studio with Alan and we're mixing these
things down. And this is humble bragging. I was never

(01:07:14):
a fan of my drumming. I just because I heard
Tony Williams and Philly Joe and I heard these unbelievably
great drummers that you know. I was with a band
that was successful, and at that point I was the
band leader and I was playing all over the record,
but I didn't love my playing. So I'm sitting in

(01:07:34):
the room and I'm I'm mixing with Alan, and all
of a sudden, I'm thrown back in time fifty years
and it's like I'm a surgeon in the middle of
an operation and a doctor next to me taps me
on the shoulder and says, by the way, do you
know who you're operating on. That's you fifty years ago.

(01:07:56):
And that was like an out of body experience. I
started realizing it, and we're mixing away and I for
the first time in my life, I said I would
go to hear that drummer. He was good, that could play.
He's good. It was the first time. And I was
walking around on air and John was there and I said,
I was good, I could play. He was like a

(01:08:16):
little kid. It was really funny. But I think what
the most interesting thing for me was how good this
band was live. They were just great. And the way
that Bobby and Allan mixed these and that's why I
hope your listeners are going to go see us on
a big screen with a great sound exploding out of
the speakers. They mixed it in a way that you

(01:08:37):
just feel like this was recorded yesterday and the band
is just killing it and they're they're fantastic. So across
these five tapes were all but one song that they
had performed on the tour. We couldn't find one of them,
so that is in mono in the film, but the
rest are great, and it just brought those sequences alive.
The other thing that was interesting, there's a little bit

(01:08:59):
of a Raschiman thing here, Bob, where not all the
band members saw everything because they weren't there. Some were there,
some weren't. Only one guy knew about the story of
having to smuggle the film out of Romania. Only one guy, Bobby,
didn't know that story. None of the other guys knew
the story. And I'm sitting there hearing it from this
guy because it hadn't shown up in any of the research.

(01:09:21):
It's like, what's going on here? And I thought, this
is like the stuff of a great spy movie or
a great espionage novel, you know how they had to
deal with the secret police of Romania and get this
stuff out. And so that's another thing that until somebody
told me the story, I wouldn't have known to put
it in there, and it ended up being kind of
a really cool sequence of the film. Okay, the film

(01:09:50):
really captures the era so in terms of the overall
because the movie's about blood, sweat and tears, but you
really get a vibe for the lead sixties. So when
you're constructing the film, to what degree do you decide
what the emphasis on? Did your conscially you want to
set the time, in the tone, what was going on?

(01:10:11):
This is really fascinating. Bobby and I've been doing interviews
for a couple of days now. These are like We've
never been asked these questions before. This is like fantastic.
I'm having a time in my life here. When I'm
making a documentary, I view it very much as a
jigsaw puzzle. We all got him when we were kids
for birthday holiday, and you open up the box and

(01:10:33):
you dump out and there's a thousand pieces and eventually
you fit it together and they make a pretty picture,
but they only fit together one way. Those pieces what
we do as documentary filmmakers. You can fit him together
ten ways, twenty ways, fifty ways, one hundred ways, and
it's how you fit those pieces together that makes your
film good, bad, or ugly, and so when Bobby says,
I kind of see the whole thing in my head,

(01:10:55):
he's right, I kind of see how we want to
fit all these pieces together in a way that one
scene leads you to the next, to the next. It
isn't just in nineteen sixty eight. This happened. In nineteen
sixty nine. That happened. So what I wanted to do was,
first of all, we didn't want this to be a
music doc. We I really wanted this to be a thriller,
political thriller, and that's how we always felt about it.

(01:11:18):
And so really early on, right in the first two
and a half minutes of the opening, we're already introducing
Cold War and footage of tanks and marching soldiers and
all of this. And then very soon after we come
back after the main title, I wanted to set the
context of the times, So we talk about Vietnam and

(01:11:38):
what that was doing to rip the country apart. We
talk about Nixon and the White House, We talk about
marching in the streets for civil rights and all these
kind of things that were the mid to late sixties.
Because I felt it was really important to understand what
blood sweat and tears was going to run into at
the end of this tour, we had to understand where

(01:12:00):
the country was. So context became very very important, and
that's why some of those pieces became part of the
overall jigsaw. And and then we needed to know what
they were going into in these countries. So if you notice,
we found some really rare film of Nixon going to
Romania and holding hands, if you will, with Cecheski, the dictator,

(01:12:23):
and we had to set that up because ultimately that's
what was so important was Nixon wanted to have detont
with Romania to sort of split them off from the
Russian orbit, and he didn't want anything that was to
get in the way. And when we started to look
at these internal memos from the State Department, you saw
that they were all concerned about this, Oh, we don't

(01:12:45):
offend the Romanians. We don't know of the Yugoslavs and
the Poles, and so everybody had an agenda here. But
to understand the agenda, we had to know where the
country was and what was happening. Okay, Bobby emphasized in
the film, is that everybody was eager to do this.
Certain members of the band were anti war, anti Nixon.

(01:13:06):
What do you remember about all We were all anti
war and all anti Nixon individually, not as a group.
We never made group statements. We all felt the same
at that point. I mean, the country was as polarized
as it is today, but it was age. It was
up and down, so like over thirty was one way

(01:13:27):
and under thirty was another, and we were under thirty.
So you know, we all felt badly about Nixon, and
we all felt badly about the war. It was just
that's what we felt. So going there, we understood that
we couldn't tell anybody the fact that we're going, and

(01:13:48):
the State Department wanted to make sure that it was
a State Department sponsors sure tour. I mean they it was,
you know, advertised that way. We knew it, said Davis
hugging Nixon. We knew that was not going to work
for us. Steve in particular, didn't even want to go.
He just said, you know, this is crazy. I don't

(01:14:10):
I don't want to have anything to do with the
State Department. Ironically, what I ascertained from going to DC
and meeting some of these people, the State Department as
a unit was pretty much not into Nixon. They were
on the other side of this thing. It was just
a you know, it was the State Department, but they

(01:14:32):
weren't big fans of Nixon, so I didn't feel as
badly about it. Plus we had to get the green
card for David had to and look, we really and
David says this, you know throughout the film, we're just
musicians and that's really what we were. We were not politicians.

(01:14:53):
We didn't you know, that wasn't a marketing stick for
us to say, hey, we're anti war, so follow us.
We just played. And for me individually, I just I
was so proud of the band because we had, you know,
a couple of great musicians and for people to hear
this level of musicianship to me and playing jazz solos,

(01:15:16):
legitimate jazz solos was great on a pop record. The
fact that it got successful was shocking to me. And
I was thrilled to death by the way, but shocking.
One of the highlights of the film is what goes
on in Romania? Can you tell us what happened and
how you ultimately put it together in a satisfying way

(01:15:37):
in the film? Sure, again, Bob, Had we not found
that sixteen minute version, we would have not been able
to tell that part of the story, but there was
wonderful footage of what happened in Romania. So they were
scheduled for two concerts in Bucharest, which is the capitol,
and the first night it's totally packed with young people

(01:15:59):
who go biser at the sounds and the energy of
this American rock and roll, and they're up on their
feet and they're cheering, and they're yelling and they're screaming,
and there's some of them are trying to get to
the stage, and the government doesn't know how to handle this.
You know when when when we talk about repressive regimes

(01:16:21):
or authoritarian regimes, it's all about control. We got to
control these people. These kids were out of control. They
were so excited by this music and what it represented
to them. And so part of what we wanted to
do was see if we couldn't track down some people
that were actually in the crowd that night and then
the second night in Bucharest. So we hired researchers in

(01:16:42):
the Croatia Romanian Poland, and they through the social media,
God blessed social media, they found of six people that
were in these concerts, and so it wasn't me as
the filmmaker trying to suggest how they felt about it.
It was these people actually telling you from the heart
what this meant to people that were living under communism,

(01:17:03):
who had no freedom, who had no freedom of choice,
who were listening to music that was basically banned up
until this time, and here it is, they can do it.
And so we really wanted to capture this, so we
set all of this up in the film getting to Romania,
and then we have this one night and it's going
so great and the government freaks out and there's a

(01:17:27):
meeting the next morning where they present points of demands
to Larry Goldblad about this is what you have to
do if you're going to do your second concert, and
it was just ridiculous. It was, you know, keep your
shirts buttoned, don't show too much chest, don't let the
roadies come out with their long hair because that's going
to get people excited. And especially for Bobby's point of view,

(01:17:50):
it's like more jazz less rock because that'll keep the
crowd quiet. And we had this footage of the band
in a hotel tell room discussing and arguing about where
they going to meet these demands. Of the Romanian government
or not. And how many times, Bob can you can
we think of a situation where a rock band, a

(01:18:12):
rock band is being told what to do by the
highest levels of a foreign government. And so these guys,
you know, in the best thrillers, whether it's Hitchcock or
anybody else, it's usually some kind of innocent party gets
drawn into the intrigue. And that's what happened to these guys.
These are just innocent musicians, and now they're drawn into

(01:18:34):
all of this stuff that's going on. And so what
we had to do then was we had to figure out,
all right, how do we tell the story of the
second night, because part of what they demanded was that
you cannot have the cameras going the second night. And
what we learned was that Don cambern our fabulous director,
had told all of his crew guys, all right, you

(01:18:55):
can't use the movie cameras, but use your still cameras.
We had a ton of still film, so we could
tell the story of what happened the second night. But
what happened was they were so excited again maybe even
more so, that the government brought out the dogs and
they brought out the soldiers to try to control everybody.
That only made things worse. There were fires up in
the balcony and all that kind of stuff, and then

(01:19:16):
they were beating kids up, and it was just it
was a look at that part of the world that
maybe most Americans hadn't really thought about, And Bobby and
the guys I know hadn't really thought about it till
they experienced it. So what I wanted was a very
visceral experience. So there are moments where we don't have

(01:19:37):
anybody actually telling the story, we just let the footage
speak for itself. And then other times we have people
telling the story in a very emotional way. And that's
what I felt was important here in this particular sequence. Okay, Bobby,
you know, and most people don't know the adrenaline, the
power of the feeling of being on stage. You know,

(01:19:59):
we live in in an era of deep fakes, etc.
You can tell the story anyway. Did you really feel
a difference in Romania. Well, we hit the stage. We're excited.
We always loved to perform, you know, we enjoyed the
real you know, I mean, you played better when there's

(01:20:19):
an audience's reacting to you. We hit the stage. I
don't think one person in that audience knew the name
of the band. They just knew USA. And I felt
like I was playing and there were bars between us
and the audience, and once we started playing, the bars
dissolved and these people, we could feel this unbelievable energy.

(01:20:44):
They're chanting USA, they're screen and they are moving to
the music. And as you can imagine, and you're very right,
your adrenaline when you're especially when you're playing drums, when
you're on stage, they're they're feeding you and you're getting
more excited. The irony is when we had that meeting
that John just described, they did say more jazz, less

(01:21:09):
rock and roll, and I said, what do you have
a jazz meter? How would you? And truthfully I never
played backbeats, you know all that loudly. The second night
when they said play more jazz, I played rock and
roll through everything a guy could be playing a jazz
So I'm like, bump, bump, back back, I'm banging away
because how dare you tell us what to play? And

(01:21:33):
we rock, We rock and rolled more the second night
and the audience went berserk. They told David, don't throw
like your instruments off the stage. We're going, what instrument?
What are you talking about? David just dropped a gong
that was part of the show. He threw the thing.
On the second night. It was like, we did exactly

(01:21:55):
the opposite of, you know, what they told us to do,
and the audience was amazing and we, you know, afterwards finished.
They kept cheering and cheering and cheering, and we're backstage
and it's it's in the film. I'm like, we're going, okay,
so okay, so we have to do something else. What
are we going to do? And we have to fit,

(01:22:16):
you know, I figure out what songs should we play next?
And David's freaking out because our singer, David, because he's
watching kids get beaten out, he's seeing the police come
in with dogs, and he said, meant, all we want
to do is but we have to play for these kids.
I said, let's go, let's go, let's play. And we
went out and did another song, and the cops and

(01:22:40):
the police and the soldiers rather and the dogs. It
just got worse. It just got worse. Okay. Um. A
couple of questions, how long was this from the time
you left New York? Do you return to the stage.
And I know somebody who was a photographer for Led Zeppelin,

(01:23:01):
and this was of course in the film era, and
he says, I've been around the world and see nothing.
So to what degree did you partake and actually see
what was going on in these communist countries? We all did.
We all went out. We all. I mean, this is
not a drugged out, drunk band. We were not a

(01:23:22):
typical rock and roll band like that. And even when
I toured here, I would go to stores, you know,
in the daytime. I'd go into towns early. As you said,
there's adrenaline even when you're playing, and certainly it doesn't
go away the second you're off stage, so you have
to really try and go to sleep. Find something super

(01:23:45):
boring like in England was fantastic because they had international darts,
they had darts on television. I said, oh, this is perfect.
I can sleep through this. But that was our first
European tour. So we left and I think we would
on for two weeks or three weeks, three weeks three
and we did Eastern Europe and Western Europe. But you know,

(01:24:08):
we left not feeling that our country was in great shape.
We felt it was racism. We saw I'm repeating myself,
but we saw what's going on Vietnam. We saw Nixon.
But we came back and we right off the plane
and there's a press conference. No one tells us. So

(01:24:30):
three of us are sitting there, and you could tell
from the questions they hated us, like we did something wrong,
and they were you know, questions, and the attitude of
the questions was awful. And we knew that, oh, something's
wrong here. And what we all everyone in the band

(01:24:53):
saw the same thing. As bad as things were here.
Certainly we had problems. Comunism is the last thing you
want in this country, and we said it. We came
back and we just said no matter, Yes we're screwed,
Yes we have problems, but that you don't want in
this country ever, because we saw it right in front

(01:25:15):
of our faces. I mean, we experienced it. It was horrifying,
absolutely horrifying, Okay, John, The tone changes during that press conference.
In addition, you contrast reviews and then you find the
people who write them who basically say we tracked what
they said. Tell us how all that came together. Sure,

(01:25:40):
the band members and Tina, who was Larry Goblatt's ex wife,
all had photographs, and I was lucky enough to go
out to all their houses and went through all the photos,
and there was stuff there that that was just perfect
for helping us tell the story. Tina had about seven
or eight photos of the press conference. Nobody else had that,

(01:26:03):
so we're able to do that. But then Bobby talks
about the press conference. But how are we going to
illustrate this? So I would go over to Bobby's house
and we're down in his man cave downstairs, and he's
got all these ten or twelve inch tapes up on
a shelf so high. I had to go get a ladder.

(01:26:23):
It's like, what are those? He says, I don't know
what they are. It's like, well, I gotta get up there,
so he lets me get it ladder. I go up
on these shelves and I'm kind of going through and
a lot of them are bands he produced or sessions
that he did with somebody or another, having nothing whatsoever
to do with Beverly Hills. But then I must have
said something like oh shit, and Bobby says, what is it?
And I said, look at this. There was this tape

(01:26:46):
that said National General Productions on it. So I knew
it had to have something to do with this film,
So I said, can I take this? And he says, yeah, sure,
please take it. So we take it off to a
studio and we put it on and what is it, Bob?
It is the sound from the press conference they've given
Bobby a copy of years ago. He didn't know what
was on it. He had never heard it. And so

(01:27:09):
now I have photos, now I have the sound, and
we could illustrate this. But then what I had done
was the first article that really slammed them in the counterculture.
Of note was a Rolling Stone article written by David Felton,
who was an award winning writer for Rolling Stone. He
did the Charles Manson article that won a Pulitzer Prize,

(01:27:30):
and so he's assigned to this and he doesn't like Blood,
Switt and Tears. He doesn't think they're part of the
counter culture. He doesn't think they're very interesting. And so
he was at this press conference because he was running
the Rolling Stone office in LA at the time, and
he's just determined to go after them. So he takes
every opportunity he has to write this very smug, snarky

(01:27:52):
article about this band, and unfortunately it had a real impact,
because Rolling Stone had some real influence at that time,
and he just trashes them. So I thought, well, it
would be interesting to have if we could find him,
be interesting to have him talk about the article. I
didn't know what he was going to say to me,
but we get him, We get him for an interview,

(01:28:14):
and he comes down and he was an alcohol He
was an alcoholic. He's been sober for twenty five years.
And he looks back at what he did in those
days and he says, you know, that sounds like me.
It was too smarmy, he said, But looking back at
it now, I was wrong. And I thought, wow, what

(01:28:34):
kind of you know, journalists will kind of do that
look back and say, you know something, I really made
a mistake back then. And I just thought that was
a wonderful moment in the film to sort of say,
in a way, he's standing in for all the counterculture
and all the mainstream articles that called them the fascist
rock band and all other things, to say, you know,
some we were caught up in the moment. They didn't

(01:28:55):
seem to be super hip, so we were going to
go after him. But now, you know, looking back, I
think that was a mistake. And I think that sort
of again sets a tone for an attitude. What I'm
trying to do is put the audience back in this
time to help them understand what was going on and
how people were responding to them, and to know that
this guy thinks they were wrong. I thought was a
really important piece of the jigsaw. He said, it sounds

(01:29:18):
like me I was a prick. It sounds like me
I was a prick back then. Yeah, okay, Bobby. To
what degree was the framework of the second album established
by Al Cooper. We had been gigging already after the

(01:29:41):
first album, and we were doing other songs, and Al
found another song I Love You More and You'll Ever
Know More and more, And we had songs that we
would expand, like we'd play a song and then just
solo on it and expand so there'd be another section
to it. But now it's time to make a record.

(01:30:02):
We had spent most of our time organizing a new band,
finding musicians, finding the shape of the band. But we
already had this material. And I remember a band meeting
where at this point I'm the band leader and I'm
I'm putting things together, and it was great because Clive
Davis was fabulous, and he came to me after the

(01:30:27):
band broke up. He said, what do you think? And
I said, I think we're going to be a great
band and I think I'm going to put the thing together. Right.
He said, what do you need? I told it was
like a ten thousand bucks or something. He said, oh,
I'll get it to you. I just so I can
pay some guys so we can rehearse and put it together.
So the real emphasis at that point was find the band,

(01:30:49):
finding musicians. Okay, now we have the band, we have
some songs that have spilled over into this new band,
and we have a band meeting and I explain my
vision and I said, guys, I want to try and
find songs that we all really like. And one of
the band members just started laughing at me, saying, there,

(01:31:10):
you'll never find a single song that everyone in this
band likes. There's no way. We come from completely different sources.
This is not a neighborhood bank the kids that grew
up in a neighborhood. We're finding, you know, people from
all over New York that we hear about that all
this guy's grave, you should try and get him. So
Steve is playing Eric Sati in his house Steve Katz,

(01:31:34):
and it's just beautiful. So I take a copy of that.
I love obviously, godb It's a Child, Billie Holiday's songs,
gorgeous song. To prove a point, and I come into
the next meeting, I said, okay, I'm gonna play with
some songs. I play Eric Sati anyone not like this,
And it was no, that's not fair. I mean, I said,

(01:31:56):
I said, wait, wait, and they play godbas A Child
anyone not like this song. But that's not fair. It's
like Godsachai said, no, it's fair. The difference is we
can play these songs other people can not in a
popular band setting. So I just tried to find songs
that were great songs that we could add to the

(01:32:17):
ones we already had that everyone in the band liked.
And it was an opportunity because the whole concept of
bluss wed Tier is really for me was in every
iteration of the band, it's it's it's a it's a
concept as let's find great songs with these musicians, how

(01:32:39):
do we make these songs work for us? And it's
the arrangers. So we had two excellent arrangers in the band,
Dick Halligan and for Elipsians, and I would have signed
to each a song that I thought that they could arrange.
And that was the fun for us, was to find
a way to take these songs and and really do
them differently that we could play them and have fun

(01:33:03):
playing them. And that was that was it. To this day,
there's a Blood Sweat and Tears. I'm still involved with them.
I'm trying to find material and finding great arranges to
work with, and there a lot better than we were
right now. There's some great musicians right now. Okay, it's
implied in the film that the downfall of Blood, Sweat

(01:33:24):
and Tears was the result of that press conference in
the press that ultimately came out from it. Bobby, what
do you think really happened? You know, what do we know?
The second album was mega successful, was played a long time.
Third album did not come out that soon. All right,

(01:33:45):
big point. That's a great point. Actually, good for you,
that's a great point. We had a new manager and wait,
stop for one second. Okay, what happened to this? Larry
Green Black Alive Gold Black, excuse me? I kind of
said earlier. Our accountant caught him trying to steal something

(01:34:05):
and he was fired and since then he had passed away.
I'm not sure what he did right afterwards, but there
was no anger or anything, like you knew this was
going to happen. It was a matter of time and
that was okay. So you have this new manager, right,
and Paul Simon and I have been friends for a
very long time, and I said, you know, I like

(01:34:26):
your manager. He was more Lewis fantastic. He's just really great.
He say, oh man, yeah, this is wonderful. Let's get him.
So so the deal that's structured is he gets a
piece a significant as a management piece of our touring,
but not of the records that he has nothing to
do with. That was it's a whole different thing. So

(01:34:46):
he figures, well, I'll just tour him and he had
us touring forever. We're on the road forever, and I'm
knowing and Clive and I have friends, is like, when
don't gonna make a record? It's like, I know, And
we got to do so, and we didn't have time
to really put together all new material. We had about

(01:35:06):
half of the stuff was new and half was you know,
things that Al had had had picked and we ended
up doing the record kind of fast, like okay, you know,
let's do it now, finally we can do it. And
you're right, that was that was I mean, we really
should have had an album out probably five months sooner.

(01:35:28):
You're absolutely right. And everyone around us felt the same way,
except the manager. And I asked Paul and day I said,
so he so he's a great manager. He says, yeah,
he does everything I tell him. I went, oh Jesus, Paul,
why did a new manage us? Oh? Now, he was
a great guy, but he had an agenda and what
had nothing to do with us recording. But but if

(01:35:50):
you're asking what the downfall was anytime you hit those
heights and you have a very specific sound, horns and
day Vid Clayton Thomas's voice. We were played all the
time on every station. We were played on R and
B stations, country stations, classical stations, and they picked certain

(01:36:12):
songs to play that would fit their programming. And I
think when you hear so much of one thing, and
if you're a kid and you get in a cab
and the cab has a radio on, and pose when
and plose when tiers song comes on and the cab
driver turns around and says, now there's a band I
like here, immediately turned off. I don't want you to

(01:36:33):
like this, bense my band. So we became so popular,
and there was so much in this condensed, you know,
time period that was harmful, but that Eastern European tour
that triggered everything because that was a chance for anyone
that wanted to shoot down a band that was on top,

(01:36:54):
on top, that gave them the opportunity that was That
was easily the reason a word we use a lot
today as zeitgeist, and they really captured the zeitgeist back then.
But those moments are fleeting, and those moments are fragile,
and the littlest thing can throw it all off, and

(01:37:15):
that's what the tour did. And Bobby and I may
have slightly different opinions here, but what I feel happened
is that, yes, it was Vegas, Yes it was Woodstock,
Yes it was they were ubiquitous, But I think it
also was that this experience in Eastern Europe and what
happened to them when they got back, and how they
were slammed by the right and the left, which is

(01:37:37):
a unique situation. Usually you get it from one side
or the other. They got it from both sides, and
I think that exacerbated the personality conflicts within the band,
and I think they started to fracture in terms of
what are we going to play on stage, how are
we going to play on stage? What are we going
to record, how are we going to record it? All
of that started to happen. And then eighteen months after

(01:37:59):
they got back, David and Fred and Dick leave. The
next year Steve and Jim leave. Bobby soldiered on brilliantly,
but the moment was gone. The zeitgeist was gone, and
I do look back at the Eastern European tour as
being the real turning point for the band. We did

(01:38:20):
not disagree on any of that. Okay, how did this
end up being a theatrical film? How did you end
up selling it? Tell me about the distribution? Go ahead,
thank you. I always envisioned this as a feature doc.
In fact, most of the times I start off with
a project, I am thinking this is going to be

(01:38:41):
a feature doc because I have this experience us versus
John Lennon, Who is Harry Nilson? Why is everybody talking
about him? Chasing train? They were all feature doc so
I'm always thinking that sort of ninety to one hundred
and ten minute version of how to tell the story.
Story's got to be strong enough, and this one was.
So I always thought of it as being a feature doc.

(01:39:01):
Because we were financed, fully financed upfront by James Bryant,
one of the best bosses I've ever had. We could
make I could make the film I wanted to make,
and then armed with a finished product, we can go
to these young buyers at at the platform services or
at the theaters. They don't have to guess what it is.

(01:39:22):
They can look at the film and see what it is.
So it's like, you know, you don't have to go
there and say, well, it's gonna have this, It's gonna
have this, It's gonna have this, and it's like, no,
we can just show it to you. So I always
thought this is what it was gonna be. I'd had
a great experience with a distributor Abrama Rama and Richard Abrama,
which is the head guy, and love him, and so

(01:39:43):
I showed him the film and I said, does this
have theatrical legs? I hope it does, because this is
what I want to want it to do with it,
and He just went nuts for it. He just thought
this was great and I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. So we put together marketing budget and we've
gone with Richard and here we are. We opened Theatrically

(01:40:06):
in New York on March twenty fourth for a week
at the Quad Cinema. We opened in LA the next
week at the Lemley Monica Film Center for a week.
And now I counted this morning. Bobby and I hadn't
even talked about this. I counted this morning. We got
fifty theaters across the country now and growing thanks to
you and a number of other buzz that we're getting.

(01:40:29):
People are hearing about this film. They want to see it,
and I think it's that kind of thing that it's
a compelling enough story that it may may bring people
back to the theaters. And that's what we wanted to do. Okay,
we all know that primary viewership is on the flat screen. Yeah,
So have you already made a TV distribution deal or

(01:40:51):
you're waiting to see how it works theatrically. Yeah, we
wanted to wait to see how it was going to
turn out theatrically because there's so much out there's so
much noise, there's so much product out there. We felt
we wanted to distinguish ourselves, so we bet on ourselves.
We bet that we were going to get good buzz.
We're betting that we're going to get good reviews, and

(01:41:12):
then armed with that, we will go to the streamers
and say, look, you got to have this because everybody
is talking about it. So we have not talked to
any of the streamers yet. Actually I got an inquiry
the other day from one that we slipped them a
copy of it to see if they might want to
make a preemptive bid. So we're waiting to see what
happens there. But I think it will end up on

(01:41:33):
a very good streamer, just not sure which one at
the moment. Okay, Bobby, going back to the band, explain
to me the economics of a band of eight or
nine people's that doesn't people that don't generally speaking even
write their own songs. Where is the money and how
do you end up owning the name Blood, Sweat and Tears.

(01:41:55):
When we began, that lawyer that I spoke about that
found the Slowy Gobla said you need an internal employment
agreement agreement employee agreement. So there were shares like like
like a corporation, and each person would get a share
of the band. If I think five of us were

(01:42:15):
the primary guys, and then well that begs a question.
Were the other four or three getting paid less? No? No, no,
we all got paid exactly the same amount of money.
It was just the ownership concept. So so now what
happens is we have this agreement and the way it structured,

(01:42:37):
if anyone leaves the band, whatever the band is worth
at that moment, whatever stuff we have, the value of it,
they get that money. They have royalties ongoing obviously, and
they leave and then the share, that share goes back
to the pot. Eventually, one day I realized there's nobody left.

(01:42:59):
And it's so funny because I have friends like all,
you were really smart, man, you had it all worked out.
I had nothing worked out. It's just it landed on me.
I said, Oh, man, but I love I love the
idea of the band. I always love the idea of
having a band that would play anything, could play anything,
and and be loose and have wonderful musicians. That was

(01:43:22):
that was a concept in my head from from day one.
So uh, that's how I ended up with it. I
didn't have a master plan, you know. Okay, so eventually
you stopped playing in the men and you go to
the other side. Okay, so I love this guy. I'm sorry,

(01:43:43):
I'm in loving your questions because they're opening up a
Pandora's box for me. Okay. So what happens is h
I stopped producing. I have a studio in my house
up in Rockland County, UM. The band is playing in Florida.
I'm playing softball with a club team and there's an outfielder,

(01:44:07):
little blonde girl playing center field. I'm playing left field,
and she has her hands in her mit and her
hand on her knees, going bad bad. I hate bad bad,
and I'm thinking, wow, this goes really into it. So
we go back to this kind of dugout situation and
I say, I said, who are you? She goes, oh,
I work at the club. I said, I never saw
you there because while I'm married and I have kids,

(01:44:29):
pause to the best bass player in the world. And
my comment is, oh, that's very sweet of you. I
hope if I get married one day my wife thinks
I'm a good I'm the best drop I'm not. But no, no,
she's no, he really is. I said, of course, and
then my New York arrogance kicks in and I go, oh, really,
if I go to your house, Now, what's on your turntable?

(01:44:49):
She says, Giant Steps, said Coltrane's Giant Steps. She goes, yeah,
Now I take it another step. So if you're listening
to it, can you tell me while he's soloing when
the chorus began, and she goes, yeah, I said, I
got to meet your husband. Husband's Joco Pastorius. So so
that's how I meet Jocko. And I have a relationship

(01:45:10):
with Steve Popovich, who was head of promotion in Cleveland
when I was out there, and he's the most passionate guy.
And I told Climb and I came back and said,
you've got a guy in Cleveland that's fantastic, you know,
bring him here, he'd be great. He did. He ends
up being head of A and R for Epic Records.
They call me and say, we want to make a

(01:45:30):
production deal with you because we know you love to
produce and you're going to go somewhere else. We don't
want that. We want you in the group. So I
get it. What's called a put Like anything I want
to produce, I can produce and they'll you know, I
mean unlyst it's insane and you know, billion dollars. And
I said, okay, I I have something I want to produce.

(01:45:50):
Steve used to play bass. His head of marketing is
a guy named a guy named Jim Terrell, bass player.
I used to play with him. He was a very
good bass player, he said of marketing. And I'm thinking, God,
this two bass players, this is even easier. So I said, okay,
I have something. It's a bass player. Okay, I said, great,

(01:46:12):
like we hear, I said sure. I said, so I'm
gonna do an album with a bass player and then
an accordion. Looking at me, I said, I'm just kidding
about the accordion. But this guy is a great bass player.
So I end up you're producing and enjoying the hell
out of that. And I have Jocko in my house.
He's living with me, and we're coming up with ideas
how to make an album of a bass player, which

(01:46:34):
ain't the easiest thing to do. So anyway, back to
your question. So these executives at CBS Records at the time,
now Sony saw my interest in producing and they and
they all of a sudden. Rona Lexenberg, who's now the
head of Epic Records, who was head of promotion for
Columbia Records and a friend of mine. He came to

(01:46:57):
me and said, how'd you like to be the head
of an r of Epic Records in California. I said,
as much as my eye teeth extracted, I said, why
in the world would I want to do that? It
was like the last thing. And I said, no, But
you'd be great at it. You'd be I said, but
I you know, I get why it would be nice
for you, but I have no interest, first of all,

(01:47:19):
in being in California at all. And I have no
And so it started out that way. And then Bruce Lunvoll,
who was my product manager epliswent in tears. He's now
head of all of CBS, and he says, man, you
should do it and be fun. I figure, I'll do
it for six months, like a couple of months. It's
a challenge. I love new stuff to do. But the
most important thing, secretly, I'm infiltrating. I'm thinking, you know what,

(01:47:44):
I'm going to that side. I can help I can
actually help artists. I can bail him out of bad deals.
I even I can do things to help them. And
at the time, Minnie Ripertson was a dear friend and
her husband was a dear friend. She was signed to Epic.
I thought, oh, I gotta do this. I actually live
where I live because it was near where they live
lived at that time, and so I took the gig

(01:48:07):
just thinking I'm gonna help people, this will be fun,
and I'm out of here in six months. I never left. Okay,
you stopped playing drums? Did you miss Yeah? You missed it?
When was How do you ever played drums again? Okay?
So I'm playing with the band. It's I guess nineteen
seventy five. Ish. I add a percussionist, Donna Lias, fantastic

(01:48:31):
Jocko's in the band at this point, just you know,
like like for a little while. Larry Willis is playing
in the band of piano and Mike Sterns on guitar.
The band's unbelievably good, and I'm actually playing well at
this point because I have no choice. These guys are
so good. So I see Donna Lias on percussion, and
I go, let's switch. And Don's a great drummer, and

(01:48:51):
he looks at me, no, no, no no, I said, come on,
come on, come on, switch. I forced him to sit
at the drums. I don't know what. I don't know
how to play conga drums. I'm horrible, and I'm sitting
like an idiot, like you know, like slapping away, and
he's killing He's playing great. And it occurred to me,
I have a studio in my house in New York.
I love to produce. Why am I out here? He

(01:49:12):
sounds great, the band is great. They don't need me
at all. And I just said, you know what, this
is my last gig. You got it, and I left.
I got a call from the manager saying, you have
to do one more gig. I sas, what do you
mean while there's a guy out in Nassau at the
coliseum and he's not like he's gonna drop us unless
you're on the gig. I said, oh jeezus. And I

(01:49:34):
had already not played for a few months. I said, okay,
I'll do it. And again, you know, if there's a god,
I don't know, but certainly something happened. I sit down,
like to do this gig. You know, I'm already not
playing a lot, and my throne the seat I sit
on collapses. Then the symbol stand just dropped, like symbol

(01:49:58):
start dropping, snared ROMs a hole in it everything, and
there's a new road. He has no idea what he's doing.
That's a calamity. And I'm thinking, oh, this is this
is like Fred vomiting on me. This is this is
my last game. And I really don't miss it at all,
because if I did, i'd play. There's no one saying
you can't play anymore. But I'm so interested in everything

(01:50:20):
else about music and recording and finding artists and working
with people in the studio. That's to me the most
exciting thing. And really it almost always was okay on
these records. I'm sure your deal is cross collateralized. Ever
see any royalties on those hit records? Another great question.

(01:50:41):
So I end up leaving Epic after every about a
year and a half, and Capitol Records kind of you know,
gets me and they say we need you here, we
need you. So I go there and end up back.
Well there's a long story between mean, I end up
on television for about five years, but then I come

(01:51:04):
I come back. I get offered a job a creative
development with which like a friend of mine coined that.
I said, what does that mean? He goes, nothing, It
doesn't mean anything. But they want to hire you so badly.
Just take the gig. I said, all right, so I
go back. Just now it's Sony, but I'm not really
reporting to a label. I'm actually just Sony. They didn't

(01:51:29):
really structure a deal where I had to report in.
I could do what I wanted to do, which was
exactly the way I wanted to work, because otherwise, at
this point, you know, I don't want to do it.
So it was super enjoyable. I got the question. I
just went Blounts went in tears royalties. Right. So luckily,

(01:51:50):
since I have an executive job. Now I meet Scott Pascucci.
He is the I think that they had lawyer out here,
and he's just a fabulous guy. And I sit with him.
I said, Scott, I don't know if the guys are
getting paid. I don't know what's going on. I haven't
tracked this thing at all. Can you help me? He said, yeah,

(01:52:14):
speak to this woman. I speak to a woman and
I sit down with her and tell her who played
on what everything that anyone would have done on any record.
I said, please get these people paid. She goes, okay,
it was the first time because in the first place,
our deal was horrible to begin with, like nothing, and

(01:52:34):
then we split it with a lot of people, so
no one really expected anything but what they were doing
at the record company like there'd be a new version
of a Blood, Sweat and Tears greatest hit. So I'm
like newly mastered, but no one came to me and said,
we'd like to put this out and we want to
use our mastering. And all of a sudden, I started realizing,

(01:52:58):
wait a minute, no one's asking me without permission. They
keep finding ways to charge us more money. I said,
why are we being charged money? We haven't played together
in twenty years, and you're finding ways to charge us
money for what. There's no advances? What, oh like the
cost of this new version of this record? I said,

(01:53:19):
enough because and now I actually I have a day
gig that gives me enough power that I can call
someone say you can't do this anymore. So all of
a sudden, the guy, I mean not a lot of money,
but the guys starting started to get paid. And one
member of the band, guy Chuck Winfield, called me and said, man,
it had to be you this first time I saw

(01:53:41):
any money, I said, it was and thank god you're
getting paid. Okay, talking about the band, you're making a
movie with so many members. We all know everybody doesn't
remember the story the same way. So to what degree
with their disagreements and who had the final call that

(01:54:04):
I wouldn't say disagreements. I would just say Raschiman. They
remembered things differently, and I was the final arbiter here.
Bobby didn't tell me the movie to make. James Bryant
didn't tell me the movie to make. So I felt
I had to corroborate things twice or three times or
I couldn't go down that road. So I really had

(01:54:27):
to evaluate what they were saying to me, and is
this true? Is this not true? Is it borne out
by what other people are saying? Is it borne out
by the documents that we found? And ultimately it was
my call, and so for better and worse, I'm responsible. Okay,
we live and you referenced it earlier. We live in
an era of cacophony. What do we know? The peak

(01:54:50):
of blood, sweat and tears was really sixty eight sixty nine.
That's in excess of fifty years ago. How do you
get the message out? And to what degree are you
frustrated excited about what's coming down the road. I'm very excited.
And I think of some of this is your fault, Bob.

(01:55:12):
You were the first person that wrote about it, and
and what you said meant so much to me and
Bobby where you said, you know, you don't need to
know Blitzwitt and Tears to appreciate this movie. You don't
need to know the hits to appreciate this movie. And
I think that's what distinguishes it from your basic music doc.
It's not about the band in a way that you
need to know him or appreciate him or love them.

(01:55:33):
It's a story of It's a thriller story that happens
to have great music in it. And you started us off.
And now we're getting coverage from Rolling Stone in the
New York Times, and all these people are calling and
wanting to do interviews, and they're asking reasonably smart, thoughtful
questions that are not about and I do say, it's

(01:55:55):
not a history of the band, it's and they said,
no, no no, no, we know that, and they're onto the
politics of it and all of that. So I'm actually
quite excited that that as a result of the buzz
we're getting and hopefully the reviews were going to get that,
they're going to be people out there is it. It
sounds really interesting and you should talk about it because
you get this all the time. I had such a

(01:56:16):
it's so funny. All of a sudden, my phone's ringing
like crazy to see what bob Let's sits it. I said, no,
I don't. I who what, Oh, you gotta see this?
And I read this. I go, oh, this is so nice.
He's so right. Oh my god. And I'm getting a
lot of phone calls from people in the music business
that I know. And that called John Up. I said, John,

(01:56:41):
my only experiences in the music business and my only
experience for hit records because I've been involved with the
whole bunch of them. It's like, and I explained what
you did. I said, here's the analogy. There was a
station in Chicago it was called WLS that had them.
It was the most powerful station. It reached Mexico, for

(01:57:03):
God's sake, again out of Chicago. They would play fifteen songs,
maybe a top twenty. But I didn't even think that much.
You could never ever get break into that rotation unless
a million of the stations had been playing it in
the area. People were responding, buying the I mean, it's

(01:57:23):
a whole process. Called John, I said, you know what
Bob just did for us, what we're on LS. We're
on LS before any stations. I said, this feels like
a hit record. This is insane. And that's like I
don't want to blow too much smoked your way, but
it was amazing. Well, you know, in this particular case,
I certainly was a fan of the band. I saw

(01:57:46):
the band. Where did you see us? Bridgeport, Connecticut, Katie
Kennedy Stadium. Wow. So as I say that, just the
concept of the film was fascinating to me. I wanted
to know more. I didn't expect, you know, after watching
the film, I remembered the blowback about the statements after

(01:58:06):
the trip to Eastern Europe, but it was not top
of mind. But you know, only right from the heart.
The film is fantastic. It really is. And I think
I said it's one of the best rock documentaries ever done.
And I do believe that, And I could go on

(01:58:27):
and on, but I just hope people see it. I
think we've come to the end of the feeling we've known.
I have a lot more questions, but for a different time.
John and Bobby, thank you for taking this time to
speak to my audience, and thank you for asking the
most questions that we haven't been asked before. It's fantastic

(01:58:48):
and I have many more, but not today, especially about
the band. You couldn't call me any side one and
there's a gay history, and you know all these songs
because the other thing is Blood, Sweat and Tears. Was
the first rock band to do a Laura Neuros song. Yeah,
well she was going to be our lead singer. Listen

(01:59:09):
to do you have time for a little bit? Yes? Yes, okay, okay,
sorry after Al's gone. I loved Laura. She was a
friend of mine. Both signed to Columbia Records. Jimmy Field
are our bass player, starts living with her and we're
all friends. And I hear Eli that album she has Eli,

(01:59:30):
and it blows me out of my chair. And it's
got great horn arrangements by Charlie Callella. I mean, it's
really a cool record, and I'm falling in love. And
I said, man, she would be the perfect singer for us,
So I call her her managers David Geffen, and I said,
what do you think of this idea? She goes, oh, Bobby,

(01:59:51):
I don't know. I have to speak to David, and
I said, we'll call him. I know him really well.
I said, call him. Let's let's do it. We had
a rehearsal and we oh yeah, and we're I think,
at the cafe, Go go, and we have the charts
to Eli's Eli's Coming, and she started and she's at

(02:00:11):
the piano. She starts singing Eli's Coming, and I had
some falsetto then I'd say, Elias coming, whoa you bet?
And we look at each other. We're laughing and it
sounds and went down to day and we're playing. It's killing.
It's so great, and I said, oh, man, Clive's gotta
be he's gonna be happy. Here's two artists. This band's

(02:00:32):
gonna be fantastic. And David was calling me, oh, this
is gonna be great, and he actually wanted to manage
the band. And I knew David well, and I thought,
you know, I think be better to get like a
neutral manager. And so then she calls me one day
and says, I don't think it's gonna work I can't
do it. I said, what do you mean what David

(02:00:54):
said that you guys are never gonna make it and
you know I'm gonna be a big star, And I said,
I just spoke to him. He said, this is a
great idea. I probably spoke to him right at the
point when I said I don't think you should be
the manager when he called her up and said, forget it,
this is never gonna work, and she was going to be.
I mean, the choices that we were going after. Let

(02:01:15):
me give you some names. Stevie Wonder he was not
doing amazingly well at that point. And I got to
Motown spoke. I spoke to a lawyer, and not knowing
he was not only Stevie's lawyer but also Moto's lawyer,
I said, any chance that he would ever be free
to no, sorry, okay, that was the end of that idea.
And then I hear very superstitious like, oh, it would

(02:01:37):
have been perfect for us, so like you know, going
step by step. And then our bass player knew like
Steve Stills well because he was in the springfield with
them for a minute. He said, be great. I said, yeah,
he'd be great, and I spoke to him and he
said no, I'm forming a super band with Buddy Miles.
I said, okay, he's not available, and that's the point
when we started to look for other people. But but

(02:02:00):
you happen to mention Lauren, he or I couldn't just
sit here well like I know that. I mean, I've
never heard that story and that kind of blows my
mind and everybody all the personalities there. We could go
much deeper, but not today. I want to thank you
guys so much. Till next time. This is Bob left
Sex