Imagine an on-the-road concert documentary shot in the anything-goes days of 1970 — a hurly-burly vérité jamboree like “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” or “Elvis on Tour.” It’s about the biggest rock band in the world. It encompasses 11 shows in 26 days, with headlines and controversies and a film crew out to capture it all. We see the band members backstage, on planes, in their nightly lodgings, and onstage. The crowds are rapturous.
As the documentary explains, David Clayton-Thomas was from Canada, where he had grown up as a delinquent troublemaker. As a star, he still had traces of his wild ways; when he was arrested for allegedly threatening a girlfriend with a gun, the U.S. officials decided to deny him his green card. He was going to get kicked out of the country — which meant, in a pop-music landscape even more America-centric than it is now, that the band, in effect, would be finished.
Yet the success of a band like Blood, Sweat & Tears was already knocking down those kinds of perceptions. The band’s members were against the war, but except for the guitarist Steve Katz , they weren’t really political. Offered the chance to salvage their success by spending June and July of 1970 touring Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland, they thought, “Why not?”
Blood, Sweat & Tears were so square that they won the Grammy for best album, in 1970, over “Abbey Road.” They were so square that they played at Woodstock but never made it into the movie — though that was because their manager resented the fact they weren’t being paid and ordered the cameras to stop filming. They were so square that they were the first rock band to play at Caesars Palace, where they broke Frank Sinatra’s attendance record.
Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)
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