WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS? (B) - To enjoy this documentary it helps to be a passing fan of the brassy band "Blood, Sweat & Tears," which had its moment in the late 1960s -- and I'm sure that's a dwindling population -- but others might appreciate the hook of the film. It tells the tale of the band's downfall that followed its ill-advised tour, arranged by the U.S. State Department, to three nations behind the Iron Curtain in 1970.
That summer tour came just a few months after the band's second record elbowed out the Beatles' "Abbey Road" for the Grammy for album of the year. And, as the trailer suggests, the band was coerced into doing the tour (to Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia) as part of a quid pro quo. If you don't know the whole story (singer David Clayton-Thomas revealed the details in his autobiography), then save it for the entertaining unveiling here. It's the hook that makes this worth viewing.
It's a fine story, but the presentation here is distractingly hectic. Writer-director John Scheinfeld -- who specializes in music docs, such as "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" and "Who Is Harry Nilsson?" -- can't let the screen sit still for more than a second or two. Images and words flash by and disappear before we can comprehend it all. I don't get that tactic in a film targeted toward boomers.
Scheinfeld also employes a few tired tricks, including some unnecessary re-enactments. It's never clear how much archival footage he is using (it seems that only one hour survived) or whether the pristine soundtrack is from that footage (it appears to be so). You get the sense that he is stretching the soup or papering over the holes in the archive. But he gathers notable talking heads, including key band members Clayton-Thomas, drummer Bobby Colomby and guitarist Steve Katz. He tracks down Donn Cambern, who shot the original footage in 1970 and went on to have a career as a film editor, from "Easy Rider" to "The Bodyguard." (He died earlier this year at age 93.) Cambern is an entertaining storyteller.
The film takes a facile but passable approach to the Nixon years of the Cold War and digs into the State Department documents that reveal a few gems of insight. Cambern and the band have a good time contrasting iron-fisted Romania (the middle stop on the tour) with the relatively more enlightened communist regimes of Yugoslavia and Poland. As a snapshot of the world in 1970, it does the job.
BONUS TRACKS
From the debut album, led by Al Kooper, "I Can't Quit Her":
And a good example of the band's brass and Clayton-Thomas' pipes, doing Carole King and Gerry Goffin's "Hi-De-Ho":
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