A BOLD & BRASSY RELEASE
It was the debut album that really wasn’t. A band of New York musicians had come up with a new sound, a bold and brassy kind of rock that they committed to vinyl in fall 1968, released in December with just the name of the band, Blood, Sweat & Tears, on the front cover above a stark image of the nine band members. That was a lot of people for a rock and roll band, but that was the right amount for a record like this one. Seeing them all there together seemed to be a nonverbal indication that something big was going on here.
And, indeed, there was. Just eight months after the release, they would be performing in front of half a million people at Woodstock, and in 1970, the record would claim the Grammy Album of the Year — beating The Beatles’ Abbey Road. “I didn’t really know that at the time; I found that out later,” remembers lead singer David Clayton-Thomas, now 79, still singing and making records. “But as an absolute Beatles fanatic myself, it’s quite a statement.”
It was the most auspicious of debuts — but it wasn’t the debut album by Blood, Sweat & Tears. Al Kooper’s Hammond organ riffs had already changed the direction of rock and roll when he played on Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” He’d then become a member of The Blues Project, a sophisticated rock band that included guitarist Steve Katz. After that group’s short life, Kooper and Katz conceived a new group, and they wanted horns. An eight-member lineup came together, and Blood, Sweat & Tears was born. Their debut album, , had come out in early 1968, an innovative, jazz-infused rock exploration. It was a great record by a great new band, whose founder
