Album Reviews

Probably not by accident was this second Blood, Sweat & Tears album not called Blood, Sweat & Tears 2, even though that’s what it is. Child Is Father to The Man the first BS&T album, a jazz infused production featuring on occasion a string section and heavily under Al Kooper’s influence, including the some would call grotesque album cover, was a critical success and a commercial flop.

Most people who bought this one probably weren’t even aware of the first album’s existence and this album's producer (Chicago producer James William Guercio) and the label, Columbia Records, were happy to keep it that way. Or all of this is a hallucination of mine.

As much as the record buying public ate this one up, the critics positively hated it, one calling the new lead singer David Clayton Thomas, an England born Canadian citizen, a “glorified lounge singer”.

Back in 1969 you couldn’t call a rock singer anything worse—not that BS&T was a “rock” group. The critic’s charge was confirmed when the band played Caesar’s Palace a year after this album’s release.

Listening to some of Clayton-Thomas’s jive vocal affectations on “And When I Die” makes a good case for that one rock critic’s complaint but listening now it’s also easy to understand why suburban kids found attractive the Canadian’s smoky voice and this more pop oriented album and having penned the big hit “Spinning Wheel” Clayton-Thomas could afford to laugh at his critics all the way to the bank.

Al Kooper gets co-arranging credit on Stevie Winwood’s “Smiling Phases” on “More and More” and on “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”, after which he was forced out. Most of the kids buying this record for songs like “And When I Die” and “Smiling Phases” probably had never heard of Laura Nyro or of Traffic for that matter.

No matter, this record won “Album of the Year” at The Grammy’s beating out, among others, Abbey Road. It was also topped the charts for weeks.

Yes, this album was big but was it any good? By now you can answer that question for yourself. My take is that it’s corny (the musical "Americana" on "And When I Die" always makes me gag), especially compared to the first BS&T album that featured Kooper and Randy Brecker who also quit after the first record.

This record is “jazz-affected”. The first album was “jazz-infused” despite the occasional strings. Both can rightly be accused of being gimmicky and both can rightly be lauded for featuring spectacular playing by all involved.

One thing is for sure: both of these BS&T albums sounded fantastic, particularly this “brightly lit” one, engineered by Columbia engineering team greats Roy Halee and Fred Catero (on one of New York City’s first AMPEX 16 track machines).

Everyone’s taken a swing at reissuing this, from Nashville’s DirectDisk (SD16605) cut half-speed by, I believe John Golden, to Mobile Fidelity cut half-speed by Stan Ricker, to more recently Pure Pleasure cut by Ray Staff and finally this most recent double 45rpm reissue from ORG cut by Bernie Grundman. And then of course there’s the original Columbia issue, which was no sonic slouch either.

I have them all and listened to them all, even though I was pretty much sick of the album back in 1969, other than to get sonic jollies, and that wears thin pretty fast!

Golden’s cut for DirectDisk is the warmest and despite half-speed mastering has very good bass, Staff’s for Pure Pleasure is the chilliest, though with particularly clean high frequency transients, Ricker’s is dry, a bit bleached and lacking in bottom-end energy as were many of Mo-Fi’s Anadisc 200s of that second Mo-Fi era and in my opinion the ORG double 45 is the best sounding of the lot (and well-pressed by RTI) though if you have any of them, unless you are BS&T obsessed, you are done. I am too.