Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Sex Podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today are musician Bobby Calumni and filmmaker John Shinfield,
Speaker 1: and they're here to talk about the new movie What
Speaker 1: the hell happened to Blood Sweat and Tears? Why this movie? Why? Now?
Speaker 1: It's all Bobby's fault, Bob we It was literally about
Speaker 1: two months before COVID hit and Bobby called up and said,
Speaker 1: I want to take you to lunch. I want to
Speaker 1: tell you a story. And we went to lunch. We're
Speaker 1: just talking a bit about the band. I've been a
Speaker 1: fan of Blood Sweat and Tears since my high school days.
Speaker 1: You know, your column you sort of had people talking
Speaker 1: about the Al Cooper Lovers and the David Clayton Thomas Lovers.
Speaker 1: I actually loved both of them. They're great albums, so
Speaker 1: I'm fine with both. But we were talking about it
Speaker 1: and I said to Bobby, what of hell happened to
Speaker 1: Blood Sweat and Tears? Because here we were in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one of the hottest bands going, and then suddenly
Speaker 1: they weren't and what happened? And he said, that's the
Speaker 1: story I'm going to tell you. And the more I
Speaker 1: heard about this, Bob, the more I wanted to do
Speaker 1: some due diligence and see what else was out there.
Speaker 1: And not a lot of people knew this story, and
Speaker 1: that's always a great thing for a filmmaker when it
Speaker 1: hasn't been covered too much. And I just I saw
Speaker 1: there were certainly some parallels to what's going on in
Speaker 1: the world today. But I'm a story guy, and it
Speaker 1: was a great story and there's always room for that
Speaker 1: when you're making the film. Okay, Bobby, since it was
Speaker 1: your idea, why now, well, you know, for all of us,
Speaker 1: life goes on, and that was just a brief chapter.
Speaker 1: It was ten years, but it was a chapter in
Speaker 1: my life. And we did that tour. We it was,
Speaker 1: you know, an insane situation. We saw things we didn't
Speaker 1: anticipate we were, which we'll get to I'm sure kind
Speaker 1: of kind of blackmailed into having to do it. And
Speaker 1: like in retrospect, now happened because another friend of mine,
Speaker 1: Rupert Perry, and I had dinner and we're just talking
Speaker 1: about something and they used to play drums and he's
Speaker 1: a wonderful guy and he just said kind of the
Speaker 1: same sort of thing. What happened and I started to
Speaker 1: tell the story, said, oh my god, where's that film?
Speaker 1: Because we were talking about a film that was shot.
Speaker 1: Let's go back to those who uninformed. You did this
Speaker 1: under the aegis of the government. In nineteen seventy you
Speaker 1: went on a tour of Eastern Europe three countries, Poland,
Speaker 1: Romania and Yugoslavia and film was shot, but it was
Speaker 1: for a documentary which was never released. So you're talking
Speaker 1: about that film, yes, absolutely, And it was not really
Speaker 1: to be made as a document entry. It was just
Speaker 1: like a music film that this independent film company tried
Speaker 1: to shoot so that they could sell it. But part
Speaker 1: I was the band leader at that point, and I
Speaker 1: had said to them, listen, you can come on this tour,
Speaker 1: but if I don't like this thing, it ain't going anywhere.
Speaker 1: And they went, no problem, you're gonna love it, and
Speaker 1: they shot the film, but then it disappeared and there
Speaker 1: was some vague version of it from a camcorda to
Speaker 1: a monitor on a television, and I'd seen it way
Speaker 1: back then, and it just it didn't really depict what
Speaker 1: I was hoping would be a great like a music
Speaker 1: film about the band, and it turned into something completely different,
Speaker 1: and at the time it was so convoluted. I just said,
Speaker 1: you know what, this is not for us, but thank you. Anyway,
Speaker 1: John has another take on this. Yeah, Bob, we found
Speaker 1: a lot of internal State Department communications memos, telegrams, telexes,
Speaker 1: so there's a lot going on behind the scenes that
Speaker 1: Bobby didn't know about. And when the deal was made
Speaker 1: for the band to go on this tour, the State
Speaker 1: Department received a certain amount of control over this film
Speaker 1: that was being shot. Bobby thinks he had control, but
Speaker 1: the truth is the State Department had the control. And
Speaker 1: we saw in memos all the way through the tour
Speaker 1: itself that the people on the ground from the State
Speaker 1: Department were very concerned about things that the cameras had
Speaker 1: captured that they might somehow affect the relationships that they
Speaker 1: were trying to develop with those three governments. So that
Speaker 1: was a concern almost all the way through. They did
Speaker 1: see a two and a half hour cut of the
Speaker 1: documentary and they had problems with it, and they said,
Speaker 1: but we've given notes and we're hoping to fix this.
Speaker 1: And then the next thing we see is that that
Speaker 1: two hour version that was meant for theaters in the
Speaker 1: US and internationally disappeared, and somehow a sixty minute version
Speaker 1: was made with some notion of selling it to television,
Speaker 1: and that never happened either, and then the company that
Speaker 1: made that funded the documentary went belly up at the
Speaker 1: end of nineteen seventy. The post production house where all
Speaker 1: the editing was happening went belly up in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: So essentially we're fifty two years on and nobody knows
Speaker 1: knew where this film was. Okay, a couple of questions before, Yeah,
Speaker 1: who paid for the film and how much did it cost?
Speaker 1: Fifty years ago? Yeah, it was a company called National
Speaker 1: General Productions. They had done some films. They had some
Speaker 1: sort of deal with Warner Brothers to make features. One
Speaker 1: of their top features was Chero, not the Entertainer, but
Speaker 1: the the Elvis Presley movie, and the whole thing seems
Speaker 1: to have cost somewhere under seventy five thousand dollars. They
Speaker 1: sent a whole crew over. They shot sixty five hours
Speaker 1: of material. The band brought along a portable a track,
Speaker 1: not the kind people used to have in their cars,
Speaker 1: but a portable studio thing, and they recorded all the
Speaker 1: concerts and in the fifty years since these had all disappeared. Okay,
Speaker 1: just before you get into finding them, you're talking about
Speaker 1: the State Department documents. How did you get those? Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to interrupt everyone. For just for anyone who's listening,
Speaker 1: the story begins with our singers. Canadian not as a
Speaker 1: band unified concept, but we all, everyone in the band
Speaker 1: hated the war in Vietnam, couldn't stand what was going
Speaker 1: on with Nixon. And this is not something we planned individually.
Speaker 1: And as the band got bigger and bigger, we would
Speaker 1: have Mike's under our chins every once in a while
Speaker 1: and someone would say, how do you feel so David?
Speaker 1: Being a Canadian, as all of us felt, this war
Speaker 1: in Vietnam is horrible, we shouldn't be in it, and
Speaker 1: Nixon's dodgy. I mean, we all had that opinion. But somewhere,
Speaker 1: somehow someone got wind of this, and I can't If
Speaker 1: you're into conspiracy, you can come up with ten thousand
Speaker 1: ways of looking at this. My feeling was that some
Speaker 1: extreme right wing congressman said, who is this Canadian thing?
Speaker 1: He is? They investigate and find out he had a
Speaker 1: jail record in Canada, then they pull his green card.
Speaker 1: We have gigantic hit records, singles, everything going, and we
Speaker 1: can no longer play in the United States. Lo and
Speaker 1: behold State Department, either through our manager, he contacted them
Speaker 1: or they contacted him. John probably knows more about this
Speaker 1: than I do, but at that point we had to
Speaker 1: do something to get his green card back. So a
Speaker 1: quid pro quo, we'll get you the green card, but
Speaker 1: you got to go to Eastern Europe and play behind
Speaker 1: the Iron curtain. So that's kind of I'm glad you
Speaker 1: added that in Yeah, but another set of film, the
Speaker 1: manager is a new manager and he's not described positively.
Speaker 1: How would you find that guy? And was he good,
Speaker 1: bad or otherwise? He was, Okay, that's a great question. Actually,
Speaker 1: because our attorney at the time was someone who lived
Speaker 1: out here. We were all in the East Coast in
Speaker 1: New York and this attorney, Lee Colton, super nice man.
Speaker 1: We're looking for a new manager. And he said, there's
Speaker 1: a guy. He's just smart, knows the business. His brother
Speaker 1: works for the Beach. But I don't know all this detail,
Speaker 1: but he said he's so, he's so clever, he'd be great.
Speaker 1: And I said, okay, can I talk to him? Well,
Speaker 1: he's just getting out of jail. I thought, you can't
Speaker 1: beat that punchline. I said, okay, okay, there's gonna be
Speaker 1: something coming. He said, no, he's getting out of jail.
Speaker 1: He's in Geno prison. Well, I said, okay. Well, as
Speaker 1: you see in the movie, my comment was sounds like
Speaker 1: he'd be perfect for us. And he was clever as
Speaker 1: can be. He got endorsements with Pioneer Electronics. He was
Speaker 1: he really was something else, I mean, and and he
Speaker 1: was wonderful. But I had a feeling because he had
Speaker 1: had written bad checks before and he had been in
Speaker 1: trouble before that there was a high likelihood that he
Speaker 1: would try something with us. So I just told our
Speaker 1: account and just be really careful. This guy, I like him.
Speaker 1: I hope everything works out, but be careful. And sure
Speaker 1: enough he caught him doing something and that was the
Speaker 1: end of it. But he lasted with us for a while.
Speaker 1: But he was terrific. Actually, he was a great man.
Speaker 1: And what he did was he was being proactive as
Speaker 1: a manager as he would be. And he said, we
Speaker 1: got this problem here with our singer. I've got to
Speaker 1: do something. To go back to your question, is we'll
Speaker 1: take us here usually what the State Department does is
Speaker 1: they hand over their files to the National Archive, and
Speaker 1: they had been there for a while, and somewhere in
Speaker 1: the eighties there was just too much and they were
Speaker 1: going to toss a bunch of it. And William Fulbright,
Speaker 1: who was a congressman from Arkansas, had a real interest
Speaker 1: in the Cultural Exchange Program, which was the department that
Speaker 1: sponsored the Blood Switt and Tears tour, and he said,
Speaker 1: I'll take those files. So all of the files from
Speaker 1: the Cultural Presentations program ended up at the University of Arkansas.
Speaker 1: Very few people know they're there. One of our researchers
Speaker 1: just sort of bumped into it quite by accident, but
Speaker 1: they're all there. And we got access to all the
Speaker 1: documents pertaining to the Blood Switt and Tears tour, which
Speaker 1: no one had seen in forty or fifty years. And
Speaker 1: what we learned is that there was communication between Larry Goldblatt,
Speaker 1: the manager, and the State Department. What's not clear, and
Speaker 1: we don't have any documents to tell us this we
Speaker 1: surmise based on circumstantial evidence, but that Larry was somehow
Speaker 1: proactive and got to somebody at the State Department and
Speaker 1: they had a conversation, and there was this notion that
Speaker 1: this would be a win win for both sides. The
Speaker 1: band takes care of their immigration problem for the lead singer,
Speaker 1: no more problems there, and with the State Department and
Speaker 1: the Nixon administration gets is the hottest, one of the
Speaker 1: hottest bands going on a tour for them, sponsored by
Speaker 1: the State Department, to try to reach out to these
Speaker 1: three governments that the State Department had identified as being
Speaker 1: possible partners, so that they could maybe break that The
Speaker 1: leaders were independent enough of the Russians that they felt
Speaker 1: that we could establish a relationship with them and therefore
Speaker 1: perhaps pull them a little bit out of the Russian orbit.
Speaker 1: And that was the notion of the State Department, So
Speaker 1: it was kind of a win win for both. What
Speaker 1: we don't exactly know Bobby touched on this before is
Speaker 1: did Larry suggest the quit proco or did the State
Speaker 1: Department suggest the quit proco. We don't really know that.
Speaker 1: What we do know from the internal documents is that
Speaker 1: as early as November of sixty nine this deal had
Speaker 1: been arranged and then they announced it in January of seventy. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's start with the making of the film. Then we'll
Speaker 1: go to the content of the film. So you go
Speaker 1: for this meeting with Bobby. Bobby tells you this crazy story.
Speaker 1: Then what happens. The first thing when I'm deciding if
Speaker 1: I want to do a documentary or not, is, Hey,
Speaker 1: what's the story? Is the story compelling enough, strong enough
Speaker 1: that it can be a feature documentary as opposed to
Speaker 1: just an hour on Discovery or the History Channel. This
Speaker 1: story was so compelling and like the best of a
Speaker 1: spy novel, so I thought, yeah, this is just great.
Speaker 1: But the second question, Bob, is is there enough in
Speaker 1: the way of audio visual assets that we can tell
Speaker 1: this story properly? What's out there? Bobby mentions this sixty
Speaker 1: five hours, and my ears like go up, and it's like,
Speaker 1: whoa excuse me? We gotta fight. So I put my
Speaker 1: researchers on this, and I think, had we not found
Speaker 1: this sixty minute version, we would probably not be here
Speaker 1: talking today. We would not have been able to make
Speaker 1: the film. But we did find it, and that's the
Speaker 1: foundation of the film itself, all of this film that
Speaker 1: was shot on the tour. Okay, did you guys have
Speaker 1: a pre existing relationship or did Bobby someone say you
Speaker 1: got to talk to this guy. We're both married. First
Speaker 1: of all, let me make that clear. No, No, we
Speaker 1: have a friend, a mutual friend, that invited me to
Speaker 1: a screening of a terrific I think early stages of
Speaker 1: a documentary that John had done is called Chasing Train
Speaker 1: about John Coltrane. And I'm a big jazz fan, and
Speaker 1: I grew up in a family of jazz fans and
Speaker 1: managers and friends of you know, I was lucky enough
Speaker 1: to I have two older brothers, much older than me.
Speaker 1: They both have passed, but the oldest was a trumpet
Speaker 1: player who's very close with Miles Davis. They were, you know,
Speaker 1: good friends. My other brother managed Monk Velonious Monk for
Speaker 1: fourteen years. So as a little kid, I had Bach
Speaker 1: and Beethoven in my living room basically. So that's the
Speaker 1: movie I grew up, I should that's the music that
Speaker 1: I grew up hearing. So when I heard about this
Speaker 1: film about Train, about John Coltrane, I thought, there's nothing
Speaker 1: on Coltrane. I haven't seen anything on John Coltrane. He was,
Speaker 1: you know, not a big interview and he was not
Speaker 1: someone that was seen all the time. And I'm and
Speaker 1: I was, actually I was astonished when I saw this
Speaker 1: because it was so well well done and there wasn't
Speaker 1: that much to go with, and John pulled it off.
Speaker 1: So so we had met around that time, and then
Speaker 1: we emailed once in a while, but we weren't close
Speaker 1: friends or anything. And then when he called me to
Speaker 1: have this lunch, that was really the first time we
Speaker 1: had a super in depth conversation. And now we talked
Speaker 1: like three or four times a day. So, okay, John,
Speaker 1: you talked about all these assets, you were excited about
Speaker 1: the project. Yeah. How many times do people pitch you?
Speaker 1: How often and you can only come up to bat
Speaker 1: a certain number of times? Yeah, that's a really good question.
Speaker 1: It's a couple of things. I do get pitched quite
Speaker 1: a bit. This person, that person. You know, I've done
Speaker 1: a lot of music things, so I do get pitched
Speaker 1: those a lot. But for me, it's always do I
Speaker 1: have a passion for the artist to I have a
Speaker 1: passion for their work? Is this someone I would want
Speaker 1: to spend you know, a year, year and a half with,
Speaker 1: because that's what the amount of time it takes to
Speaker 1: make a documentary, So I can get past that, then
Speaker 1: it's okay. If I love that artist, I love, here's
Speaker 1: a great story, then do we have the stuff to
Speaker 1: tell it? And then we're sort of often running. But
Speaker 1: I've been really, you know, blessed of I've been working
Speaker 1: really regularly for a long long time. Do you only
Speaker 1: make one movie at one time, or do you have
Speaker 1: simultaneous productions simultaneous I will stagger them a bit, so
Speaker 1: they're not exactly on the same schedule. So at the moment,
Speaker 1: for example, we've finished this one and we're promoting it
Speaker 1: now for theatrical I just finished a fine cut for
Speaker 1: a new one that we delivered to the streaming service
Speaker 1: last week, and I'm in production on another one now,
Speaker 1: with another one kind of coming behind it. So I think,
Speaker 1: you know, Bob, it's the freelancers nightmare that you know,
Speaker 1: if you don't take a job somehow, you're never going
Speaker 1: to work again. But as I say, I'm really lucky.
Speaker 1: These things do present themselves, and so I usually have two,
Speaker 1: occasionally three that are going at the same time. Okay,
Speaker 1: what was the budget for this film and where did
Speaker 1: the money come from? I can't really say what the
Speaker 1: budget is. It's a very healthy budget for a documentary.
Speaker 1: We got it from an independent source. You know, it's
Speaker 1: interesting doing documentaries. You can do it one of several ways.
Speaker 1: You can kind of be Willie Lohman and you're out there,
Speaker 1: you know, carting your ideas around in your briefcase, trying
Speaker 1: to sell them to a streaming service or a network
Speaker 1: or a studio, and that sometimes is the best way
Speaker 1: to go. But other times you go out and you
Speaker 1: try to find independent financing so that I can make
Speaker 1: the film I want to make without any interference from
Speaker 1: a networker a studio, and then armed with a finished product,
Speaker 1: we can say, look here it is. You don't have
Speaker 1: to guess what it is now you can look at it.
Speaker 1: And in this case, we had independent financing that actually
Speaker 1: came through Bobby, So why don't you tell him about that?
Speaker 1: So this is wild. If you've seen the Michael Jordan piece,
Speaker 1: a lot of people comment that he paid for it,
Speaker 1: so obviously there's going to be nothing negative in there.
Speaker 1: So I asked John, what do you think this is
Speaker 1: going to cost? And he told me, And I'm not
Speaker 1: a rich guy, but I said I could figure out
Speaker 1: a way, and he said, and then we both kind
Speaker 1: of simultaneously said, you know what if I come up
Speaker 1: with the money. It's not you know, like yeah, like
Speaker 1: if I have pimples, show them. I mean, that's just
Speaker 1: that's just the way it is. So I'm, you know,
Speaker 1: obviously fine with that. Maybe a week later. I'm a
Speaker 1: very lucky person. I have to admit this. And I
Speaker 1: have crazy coincidences throughout my life. I get a phone call.
Speaker 1: My office calls and says, listen, there's a guy that
Speaker 1: owns a drum shop in Seattle and he needs to
Speaker 1: speak to you, but I don't want to give him
Speaker 1: your number. And this came from a club owner in
Speaker 1: Seattle who's a friend. So I said, that's okay, just
Speaker 1: you know, let me have his number and I'll call him.
Speaker 1: It's cool. So I called the guy up. I said,
Speaker 1: how you doing this? Bobby Columby said, oh man, thanks
Speaker 1: for colin um Listen, I've got a guy that's just
Speaker 1: a big fan of yours and he wants to buy
Speaker 1: memory of yeah, anything you want, you know, like he's
Speaker 1: into it. And I said, well, I'll talk to him.
Speaker 1: Just get him on the line. Here's a number you
Speaker 1: can call. When you get him on the line, we'll
Speaker 1: all talk. Calls Bobby, I want to introduce you to
Speaker 1: James Bryant, and I hear, oh my god, it's Bobby Columbia.
Speaker 1: I can't believe it. And I go, oh my god,
Speaker 1: it's James Bryan. Oh my god. And we start laughing.
Speaker 1: And he said, listen, I'm such a fan of the
Speaker 1: band and I loved the drums and blah blah, and
Speaker 1: he goes on and I said, James, I need your address.
Speaker 1: He said, what do you mean. I said, just give
Speaker 1: me your address. He said, well, I don't understand. I
Speaker 1: want to buy some memorabili. I said, I heard you, James. James,
Speaker 1: let me ask you a question. What do you do.
Speaker 1: I'm a lawyer. I said, okay, give me a address. No, no,
Speaker 1: I want to buy. I said, James, you're not a
Speaker 1: good Negotia give me your goddamn address. He says okay,
Speaker 1: and I get it. And he said I want to buy.
Speaker 1: I said, I'm not. I don't sell stuff. That's not
Speaker 1: what I'm interested in doing. I'll send you something. So, James,
Speaker 1: what do you do? He said, Well, I used to
Speaker 1: be a sports agent. Well who did you represent? Well,
Speaker 1: Nick van Exel, but you never heard of him. I said,
Speaker 1: I was at the NCAA quarterfinals when he scored thirty
Speaker 1: two points for Cincinnati in the first half, and I'm
Speaker 1: like rattling off, I'm a basketball freak. He goes, Oh
Speaker 1: my god. He gets more into it. He goes, oh,
Speaker 1: this is great. And here's the punchline. So James, what
Speaker 1: do you do now? I finance films, And of course
Speaker 1: I go, I'm gonna give you a phone number. I
Speaker 1: have a feeling. But there's one caveat this is what
Speaker 1: you can't get in the way. I said. Creative people
Speaker 1: need to be left alone so they can see their
Speaker 1: vision through. So whatever you're gonna do, I'm going to
Speaker 1: introduce you to someone. I think this is right up
Speaker 1: your alley. And I don't know how long it took
Speaker 1: to be financed, but I'm gonna I'm gonna guess five
Speaker 1: minutes or something. John. You know, Bob, it was the
Speaker 1: as an independent. Actually, what I should say is when
Speaker 1: you go to film school, they don't tell you that
Speaker 1: the hardest part of your job is going to be
Speaker 1: getting money. I call it the kneepad tour, where you
Speaker 1: get down on your knees and you have to beg
Speaker 1: somebody to give you money for your your projects. But
Speaker 1: This was one of the easiest I've ever had. He
Speaker 1: loved the band. When I told him the story and
Speaker 1: I told him my vision for the film, he just said, Uh,
Speaker 1: let's go. That's great. The lawyers talked about ten days
Speaker 1: later we were done and off and running. Did he
Speaker 1: personally finance it or does he have a syndicate? No,
Speaker 1: he personally financed it. Okay, let's go back to your
Speaker 1: earlier thing. The inspiration for actually push the button? You
Speaker 1: want his phone number? Is that where you're going? Not
Speaker 1: today anyway. But you said that you saw a sixty
Speaker 1: minute production. The question is did you ever find the footage? No,
Speaker 1: we never found the raw footage, and we suggest in
Speaker 1: the film why that is what we did find that
Speaker 1: We cast a very wide net. We talked to people
Speaker 1: that were involved with that documentary. There weren't many left,
Speaker 1: but I thought, you know, those two companies going bankrupt,
Speaker 1: that maybe the footage was just left in storage somewhere
Speaker 1: here in LA So we looked at every independent storage facility.
Speaker 1: We looked at Technicolor, we looked at Deluxe, we looked
Speaker 1: at all of these places. We looked at labs and
Speaker 1: storage facilities in New York. We looked at government facilities
Speaker 1: in Washington, DC and Virginia. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. So
Speaker 1: I was I was beginning to think, you know, we
Speaker 1: weren't going to be able to make this film. And
Speaker 1: then one day I got a call from a woman
Speaker 1: that ran a vault that we had approached, and she
Speaker 1: said her database had nothing. So we just sort of
Speaker 1: went on to the next one and and I and
Speaker 1: she called me, she said, you know something, this was
Speaker 1: COVID time. She was home, stuck at home. She had
Speaker 1: a loose leaf notebook that she had found with old
Speaker 1: stuff in the vault and with loose leaf pages, and
Speaker 1: she went through and she found some vague reference to
Speaker 1: something about blood, sweat and tears. So she next time
Speaker 1: she was in the vault, she went to look at
Speaker 1: it and it was in a far corner of the vault,
Speaker 1: and everything in this corner there was a sign there
Speaker 1: marked for destruction. So, Bob, did we get there at
Speaker 1: the right time or not. Anyway, what she found was
Speaker 1: two pristine prints of this sixty minute version that never
Speaker 1: got broadcast, and we got them, looked at them and
Speaker 1: it was like, wow, now we can make this movie.
Speaker 1: Because it was a great cross section of this tour.
Speaker 1: So we did a new HD transfer of this material
Speaker 1: and we were off and running. Okay, Bobby, let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about you and blood, sweat and tears.
Speaker 1: You grow up? Where and how do you start playing drums? Okay? Um, Okay.
Speaker 1: If this gets boring, just wave your arms and I'll
Speaker 1: just say I would. Okay, Okay. So I grew up,
Speaker 1: as I told you, in a family of two much
Speaker 1: older brothers, and they're listening to jazz morning, noon and night.
Speaker 1: That's the That's the only music I heard except for
Speaker 1: procaffee if who I loved and some classical stuff didn't.
Speaker 1: Did never listen to pop music. I always thought when
Speaker 1: I would hear it, I would just laugh and say,
Speaker 1: how could anyone listen to this? Because in those days
Speaker 1: was dan at that, dan At that, dann than yan
Speaker 1: At that that that that, that was it. And as
Speaker 1: as as a kid watching everything going on, because I
Speaker 1: was much younger, we had a little piano in our
Speaker 1: living room and when they would play music, there'd be
Speaker 1: an album jacket on the piano and a pair of brushes.
Speaker 1: And when someone was playing the piano or doing anything,
Speaker 1: another person who was in the room would start to
Speaker 1: play time and I would watch that and it just
Speaker 1: was fascinated. And then I heard one This is a
Speaker 1: little bit inside baseball, but I was I heard one
Speaker 1: piece of music. Tad Dameron, an arranger, wonderful arranger, had
Speaker 1: a song called Philly j J. And it was a
Speaker 1: piece featuring the trumpet player the greatest, Clifford Brown. Was unbelievable.
Speaker 1: And it was just one piece of musical called Philly JJ.
Speaker 1: And I was eleven, maybe I was fixated on it.
Speaker 1: And I heard this drumming because it featured a guy
Speaker 1: named Philly Joe Jones, and I was fixated. And I
Speaker 1: put together, I don't know a lamp, and that was
Speaker 1: my symbol, a marching snare I bought at an Army
Speaker 1: Navy store with a jacket over it. I lived in
Speaker 1: an apartment in Manhattan, up way uptown and disturbing everybody.
Speaker 1: I'm banging on stuff. There was a game, a game
Speaker 1: with like a backcam and birdie and these two little
Speaker 1: round things that you would bang back and forth. And
Speaker 1: I hooked them up to a standing ashtray and that
Speaker 1: was my drum set. And I'm trying to play this
Speaker 1: piece of music. What I didn't know, and I know.
Speaker 1: I knew later on it's maybe the hardest thing you
Speaker 1: can play on that instrument. It's unbelievably difficult. But no
Speaker 1: one said you can't do this. I had no idea
Speaker 1: what I was doing. I was playing ass backwards in
Speaker 1: my hands were like weird, and I was banging on
Speaker 1: the side and I just kept doing it hours and hours.
Speaker 1: And one day one of my brothers, I think, Jules,
Speaker 1: the older one, you know, here's me, and then he
Speaker 1: invites a friend. He said, you gotta hear this, and
Speaker 1: this little eleven year olds banging away, but he's trying
Speaker 1: to play like Philly Joe Jones and this piece was difficult.
Speaker 1: And that was my drum lesson. And then I started
Speaker 1: playing along with everything. And on January the twentieth, nineteen sixty,
Speaker 1: my brother and I remember, I was on the toilet.
Speaker 1: He says, I got a drum set for you, and
Speaker 1: I ran out of the toilet with my underwear on
Speaker 1: my angles like a Seinfeld episode, and went flying and
Speaker 1: there's Max Roach's old drum set, eighteen inch bass drum,
Speaker 1: handmade first one Sparkle Silva gretch set and that was it.
Speaker 1: And that was my first that was a drum set.
Speaker 1: I didn't have symbols yet, but that's how I started playing. Okay,
Speaker 1: to have such a creative family. What'd your parents do
Speaker 1: for a living? What was their story? Well, I love
Speaker 1: this guy. It's the greatest questions. My father was born
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty nine. My grandfather paternal was born ten
Speaker 1: years before the assassination of Lincoln. So and my mother
Speaker 1: played piano. And my father, whose name I guess there
Speaker 1: was Fred golub And because I saw like a thing
Speaker 1: of his like a cpia. He's an opera singer. He
Speaker 1: sang with Caruso So when I was growing up, Well,
Speaker 1: he died when I was three, But we had this
Speaker 1: a recording device. It looked like a big suitcase with
Speaker 1: one mic, and they would make discs on it and
Speaker 1: my mom would pay piano and my father would sing. Okay,
Speaker 1: you are playing drums basically jazz oriented. Two questions for
Speaker 1: most people. Was a huge turning point when the Beatles
Speaker 1: came on the scene and beginning A sixty four, So
Speaker 1: you were a jazz er? Was that a turning point
Speaker 1: for you and a lot of people who were fans
Speaker 1: of the Beatles in British invasion that caused them to
Speaker 1: play in bands. So after you got this drum set,
Speaker 1: were you just playing alone? Were you playing in groups?
Speaker 1: What kind of music? I love them? Okay, here we go.
Speaker 1: Here's the here's the answer. This is a little bit.
Speaker 1: If anyone's eating, stop eating for a second. So I
Speaker 1: got a call from some guy that's going to the
Speaker 1: high School for Music and Art. I'm I guess I'm
Speaker 1: fifteen at this point. I don't have symbols yet. I
Speaker 1: just have this like basic drum. I don't know how
Speaker 1: to use my feet yet we're playing drums. I got
Speaker 1: a call from this guy Fred, Hey, Bob, and you
Speaker 1: got your drums? I said, yeah, I just got a
Speaker 1: drum set. Good. We have a gig. So what we
Speaker 1: have a job NYU Fraternity Alpha something something at the
Speaker 1: Broadway Central Hotel and let's go. And we had a gig.
Speaker 1: I never thought even to get paid for doing this.
Speaker 1: I thought I'd have to pay. I said, sure, fifteen
Speaker 1: years old, I get all dressed up, I get my
Speaker 1: little drum set down to this place. I borrowed twenty
Speaker 1: bucks from my friend Harold's I could buy a symbol,
Speaker 1: and now I have a symbol. No high hat yet. No,
Speaker 1: I don't know how to use a bass drum pedal yet,
Speaker 1: but I got this drum set. It's a big band
Speaker 1: and they're playing things like Daddy Day. And I'd heard
Speaker 1: so much music as a kid. I knew almost everything
Speaker 1: that was out there, so I stopped playing along. Fred's
Speaker 1: the bass player. He's standing over me, smiling, and I'm
Speaker 1: playing Daddy Yadia and just smiling, and then he vomits
Speaker 1: on my shoulder, so I so I look up and
Speaker 1: he's but he's not vomiting in a in a position
Speaker 1: to vie. He's smiling and vomiting. And I look up
Speaker 1: and I feel this and I go, Fred, stop, stop,
Speaker 1: and he's just drunk. And that's my first gig. And
Speaker 1: I'm figuring, if there is a god, he's telling me,
Speaker 1: do not do this for a living. Whatever, Well, how
Speaker 1: ever your life turns out, don't do this for a living.
Speaker 1: So that was my first gig. And then I eventually
Speaker 1: learned how to use my feet and I act. And
Speaker 1: I can't get into this, but this is the wildest
Speaker 1: part of this, which is going to pull us so
Speaker 1: far away from this conversation. I had inadvertently met someone who.
Speaker 1: I was in a hotel room. He was talking about
Speaker 1: doing a US version of The Beatles, and he plays
Speaker 1: me an ascetate, What do you think of this? I said,
Speaker 1: it's it's amazing, actually, and I was shocked at how
Speaker 1: good it was. Soa who is it? He goes, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's the boys the Beatles, I said, he said, I
Speaker 1: think he said something like I don't think we're gonna
Speaker 1: put this out, You're crazy. It was Brian Epstein and
Speaker 1: he's playing me an ascetate of a day in the
Speaker 1: life a year before it comes out. I don't tell you.
Speaker 1: My friends, yeah I heard this beetle thing and they're going, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's not full of shit? Oh really? And I'm saying
Speaker 1: no in the middle of goes, wake up, got out
Speaker 1: of bed, get a comb because something like that, and
Speaker 1: they all thing, I'm nuts until it comes out. Okay,
Speaker 1: have that one giga where the guy vomits on you?
Speaker 1: Now do you continue to play with bands? And what
Speaker 1: happens when the Beatles do a rock Okay? So I
Speaker 1: have your own career, all right? So I have two
Speaker 1: completely different sets of friends. Are these one of these
Speaker 1: young jazz musicians and older jazz musicians, and I become
Speaker 1: competent enough where I can play with these people, play
Speaker 1: jazz gigs not a lot, and we have jam sessions
Speaker 1: obviously in New York, roll over the place. The other
Speaker 1: thing was I like these pop, like these rock kids
Speaker 1: that I knew, and they would play at temple dances
Speaker 1: and schools and on weekends and they worked. But that
Speaker 1: was I was in college, so I would I would
Speaker 1: do the weekend gigs and I would hear all these
Speaker 1: you know songs, and they were Beatle fanatics, so I
Speaker 1: would hear all the Beatles songs that way, and we
Speaker 1: do you know, rock stuff. And then I had another
Speaker 1: friend who lived in my building who played Oregon, a
Speaker 1: guy named Mike Matthews. And he forms a little band
Speaker 1: and we go away in the summer and it's a
Speaker 1: blues band and we're just playing before I had heard
Speaker 1: anything about any blues bands other than authentic blues bands.
Speaker 1: And we're out in the Hampton's playing and so I I,
Speaker 1: you know, like I had a nice mix of music,
Speaker 1: but I had two sets, you know, they were very
Speaker 1: very separate sets of friends. So where did you go
Speaker 1: to college? And did you finish City College finished? And
Speaker 1: then I went to the same school in graduate school
Speaker 1: for a degree in psychology. Did you finish that? No?
Speaker 1: One day, I'm in advanced interviewing techniques as a woman,
Speaker 1: and I had to go to night school because I
Speaker 1: was playing already with people, so I had to sleep.
Speaker 1: So I'm watching this and I'm imagining myself at five
Speaker 1: years old, realizing that other than like the Lowden code
Speaker 1: and the hat with the ear flaps, I was doing
Speaker 1: exactly the same thing. I was going to school and
Speaker 1: September and I was off in June. But I was
Speaker 1: already twenty two, and I just panicked. I said, I
Speaker 1: got up, left my books and just started hanging out
Speaker 1: with my friends in the West Village. Okay, let's switch
Speaker 1: to you, John, How do you end up becoming a filmmaker?
Speaker 1: You know, I blamed Bobby for this film. I blame
Speaker 1: my parents for my career. They and I grew up
Speaker 1: in the Midwest. Born in Chicago, raised in Milwaukee, very
Speaker 1: far away from Hollywood. My parents took me to a
Speaker 1: revival of Lawrence of Arabia. It's the first movie I
Speaker 1: ever saw. And I'm sitting in the Fox Bay Theater
Speaker 1: in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, looking up at the screen and just
Speaker 1: with my mouth open, I couldn't believe this whole experience,
Speaker 1: the writing, the directing, the production, everything about it was
Speaker 1: fantastic and is about eleven at the time, and I
Speaker 1: remember saying to my parents, that's what I wanted to do,
Speaker 1: and as I yeah, yeah, sure, because when you're in Milwaukee,
Speaker 1: you know, Hollywood is very far away, and we don't
Speaker 1: make it there very often. In fact, if I had
Speaker 1: a dollar, Bob, for every person that said, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of people want to get the competition is fierce,
Speaker 1: You're never gonna make it. If I had a dollar
Speaker 1: for everybody who said that to me, I would not
Speaker 1: have had to come out here. I would have been
Speaker 1: so rich. But so anyway, I went to undergraduated Oberlin,
Speaker 1: and I went to film school at Northwestern and then
Speaker 1: I decided it was time to come out here. And
Speaker 1: I didn't know it well put, you know, because the
Speaker 1: movies went through great transition. What games are we talking about?
Speaker 1: This would be late sixties, Okay, so this is when
Speaker 1: the tours start to appear. On the scene where you
Speaker 1: inspired by that, you know, you talk about Lawrence the
Speaker 1: rebew But what other films are your inspirations to continue
Speaker 1: down this path. I was not into super popular films.
Speaker 1: Another early film I saw was an Elvis film, which
Speaker 1: was just dreadful, and I just remember, oh God, I
Speaker 1: don't think I want to do that. But I was
Speaker 1: really very much influenced by the classics. Love Casablanca, Loved
Speaker 1: Maltese Falcon, Love Gone with the Wind, all of that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. Great storytelling, and I think that's really
Speaker 1: what got me into this business, was I wanted to
Speaker 1: be a storyteller. And on top of the movies, I'm
Speaker 1: going to throw one other thing at you. When I
Speaker 1: was about ten, I had bought a Superman comic book,
Speaker 1: and at the back of the comic book, for a dollar,
Speaker 1: if you send it into this place, they would send
Speaker 1: you a real to real tape of radio drama shows
Speaker 1: the Lone Ranger on one side and the Shadow on
Speaker 1: the other side, And so I sent that in. I
Speaker 1: had no idea what a radio show was other than
Speaker 1: my local DJ, and I got this thing. I just
Speaker 1: was captivated. It was telling a story with actors and
Speaker 1: sound effects and music, and all of this just blew
Speaker 1: me away. And so I started collecting tapes of old
Speaker 1: radio shows. Drama, comedy, Jack Benny, you name it, and
Speaker 1: all of this kind of went into my head. But
Speaker 1: mostly it was all about telling stories, and that's what
Speaker 1: interested me more than the filmmakers themselves. So I went
Speaker 1: to filmmaking school at Northwestern and I still remember this
Speaker 1: to this day. First day, first class, we looked at
Speaker 1: Busby Berkeley's forty second Street. We're watching the film and
Speaker 1: it's over and we start to talk about it, and
Speaker 1: there's I could still see him to this day. There's
Speaker 1: this red headed kid in the back of the class
Speaker 1: who said, you know, on one level, Ruby Keeler's tap
Speaker 1: dancing was interesting, but you know, on a deeper, more
Speaker 1: metaphorical level, she is a representative of a depressed era America,
Speaker 1: pounding out, tapping out, if you will, their frustrations with
Speaker 1: an economic And I'm looking around at him and I
Speaker 1: wanted to say, she's tap dancing and she's not that great,
Speaker 1: And the teacher says, very good, excellent, anybody else and
Speaker 1: we got into this whole sort of intellectual conversation that
Speaker 1: I sort of decided this was not for me. I
Speaker 1: wanted to make movies. I wanted to tell stories. It
Speaker 1: wasn't about analyzing things. So I sort of went off
Speaker 1: on my own, and I think that kind of explains
Speaker 1: a lot about me. I'm a very independent soul and
Speaker 1: have kind of carved out my own little niche here.
Speaker 1: But what I did was, when I was finally ready
Speaker 1: to come out to California after graduate school, I didn't
Speaker 1: know a soul, so I put together a very flamboyant resume,
Speaker 1: and no one had ever seen anything like. In fact,
Speaker 1: I got written up in a book on how to
Speaker 1: get a job in Hollywood, and I sent it out
Speaker 1: to fifty studios, networks producers, and I said, I'm coming
Speaker 1: to California two months. We'd love to have an opportunity
Speaker 1: to interview with you. And out of the fifty, I
Speaker 1: got twenty responses, which is great. Twelve said now, sorry,
Speaker 1: you're not interested, but eight said come and see us.
Speaker 1: They were really struggle by stop stop. Yeah, what was
Speaker 1: so magical about this? Because amazing statistics. Um this was
Speaker 1: in pre computer days. I put together what looked like
Speaker 1: a reprint of a People magazine article. It was me
Speaker 1: on the cover. You know, I stole the typeface People,
Speaker 1: and it was direct from the Midwest, John Scheinfeld. And
Speaker 1: you opened it up and in the in the breezy,
Speaker 1: gossipy style of People magazine. It was my life story
Speaker 1: to that point. And if they didn't read it, and
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure that they were going to, I peppered
Speaker 1: it with pictures from my life with one line caption
Speaker 1: so they could still get the whole story. And um,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't the resume format we all learned in
Speaker 1: school of how to get a job. And so my
Speaker 1: first interview was a paramout. I got out here on
Speaker 1: a Sunday and on Tuesday, I had an interview at Paramount.
Speaker 1: Just be specific, because you have some great memory. What
Speaker 1: years This was nineteen eighty one, okay, and U Gary
Speaker 1: Nardino was the president of Paramount Television at the time.
Speaker 1: He had seen this resume wanted to meet me. So
Speaker 1: I went in, had a meeting that was on Tuesday.
Speaker 1: By Friday, they offered me a job. I didn't even
Speaker 1: have to go to any of these other interviews. Was like,
Speaker 1: Paramount was like right there. So they paid for me
Speaker 1: and my wife newlyweds to come out at the time,
Speaker 1: and I started as a TV development executive And well wait, wait,
Speaker 1: slow down a little bit. Yeah, what did your parents
Speaker 1: do for a living. Oh nice of you to ask.
Speaker 1: My father was a businessman, worked for He ran the
Speaker 1: international part of a business called Manpower. It was a
Speaker 1: temporary help service and he ran all the foreign offices.
Speaker 1: The headquarters was in Milwaukee, which is why we're there.
Speaker 1: My mom was a housewife, but actually she's the one
Speaker 1: who's responsible for me loving music as much as I do.
Speaker 1: She always had music playing around the house, and not
Speaker 1: just Frank's, not her Nat King Cole, which was her generation,
Speaker 1: but she loved a lot of the contemporary artists, and
Speaker 1: she'd loved, for example, Herb Albert, she loved Sergio Mendez.
Speaker 1: So I ended up making films about which was just
Speaker 1: great but had nothing to do with show business. And
Speaker 1: I think, I think Bob Bay they didn't. I think
Speaker 1: they ever quite understood what I did. I did a
Speaker 1: project in the early two thousands. I was working with
Speaker 1: the Frank Sinatra family and my dad, I think he
Speaker 1: really wanted to be a good dad. One day and
Speaker 1: he said, so, how did you spend your day to day?
Speaker 1: I'm trying to understand what it is you do. Tell
Speaker 1: me what you did today? And I said, well, I
Speaker 1: looked at five hours of Frank Sinatra TV shows from
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties and there's this dead silence on the
Speaker 1: other end of the phone, and my dad finally says,
Speaker 1: and they pay you for this. It's like you know anyway.
Speaker 1: So they were very but they were really supportive. It's like,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to do, it will support you whatever
Speaker 1: you want to do. And so I had that luxury
Speaker 1: growing up, and I think again it contributed to to
Speaker 1: my being very independent. I want to do what I
Speaker 1: want to do and things that will make me proud. Okay,
Speaker 1: you're a nice Jewish boy. Your parents usually want you
Speaker 1: to be a doctor or lawyer. Were they supportive? I mean,
Speaker 1: did ay? Did they pay for your education? And b
Speaker 1: when it ended all of a sudden, you're married, you
Speaker 1: have expenses and what was going on there economically? Yes,
Speaker 1: they paid for graduate school, they paid for college and
Speaker 1: it was gout in the world and make us proud.
Speaker 1: And as I said, they never quite understood how show
Speaker 1: business worked because that wasn't their frame of reference. But
Speaker 1: they couldn't have been more supportive through throughout my dad's
Speaker 1: past now and my mom too, but they couldn't have
Speaker 1: been more supportive up to the day they died. Well,
Speaker 1: what about getting married and are you still married to
Speaker 1: that same person? You immediately, you know, put an economic
Speaker 1: stone on your career. No, we are no longer married.
Speaker 1: We were married. We were married for fourteen years. Lovely
Speaker 1: women were still friends today, but we just got married
Speaker 1: way too young and went off in different directions and
Speaker 1: had different interests. She's terrific, But yeah, you sort of
Speaker 1: put that on. But you know, it's just I think
Speaker 1: if you it's really interesting. People talk to me a
Speaker 1: lot about jobs, and they're kind of what if I
Speaker 1: go here, What if I go here? What if I
Speaker 1: go here? I was always I want to go there.
Speaker 1: I want to be over there. I want to be
Speaker 1: making my own things. That's what I want to do.
Speaker 1: And so I was always very directed towards getting there.
Speaker 1: And it didn't sort of matter what the economic things were.
Speaker 1: It was just I always sort of found a way
Speaker 1: to do it. And you know, I was at Paramount,
Speaker 1: that was my first job, and so I had a
Speaker 1: decent salary. And then I got hired away by MTM
Speaker 1: Mary Chila Moore Productions, and then I got hired away
Speaker 1: by Embassy, which was Norman Lear's company. So I had
Speaker 1: really good pedigree where I learned from the best people
Speaker 1: of how to do quality work. And to this day
Speaker 1: I remember lessons that I got. Stephen Botchko from Hill
Speaker 1: Street Blues was a guy that I learned from and
Speaker 1: he was very arrogant guy, very difficult guy. I liked
Speaker 1: him a lot. And he said to me, you know,
Speaker 1: I will take an idea from the Xerox kid if
Speaker 1: it makes the show better. And that was a big lesson,
Speaker 1: you know, as opposed to no, no, it has to
Speaker 1: be me. I have to have all the idea. I know.
Speaker 1: That's not how I am. It's just like, whatever's going
Speaker 1: to make the film better, that's what you got to do.
Speaker 1: So it's always been a series of steps of sort
Speaker 1: of getting to where I wanted to be. I thought
Speaker 1: it was going to be scripted things, whether it was
Speaker 1: television or film, and then I discovered documentaries and I
Speaker 1: loved the form, and so the scripted stuff sort of
Speaker 1: faded off to the side, and for the last twenty
Speaker 1: three years I've been doing documentaries and loving it. So
Speaker 1: what was the job that you had was an embassy
Speaker 1: where you segued into documentaries? What was the what were
Speaker 1: you doing just before where you made that switch. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well I am. I had been at Embassy, but then
Speaker 1: I went off. I didn't see much future for a
Speaker 1: producer that didn't write, so I took about two years
Speaker 1: off and I wrote and I wrote, and I wrote
Speaker 1: episodes of TV shows Bob, I would be embarrassed to
Speaker 1: tell you that I wrote for. And then I got
Speaker 1: some jobs writing episodes for some of those shows. And
Speaker 1: then Bob Greenblatt was at Fox at the time, and
Speaker 1: he read a spec script of mine and he said,
Speaker 1: I want you to come out. He said, you have
Speaker 1: an original voice. I want you to come in and
Speaker 1: let's talk about doing something. So he made me into
Speaker 1: a pilot writer. And I was writing drama shows for
Speaker 1: about six years, not one of which got made. I
Speaker 1: came closer a couple of times, but I did like
Speaker 1: two or three a year for the various networks drama
Speaker 1: shows with a sense of humor. But I didn't see
Speaker 1: much future for this either. You know, you write him
Speaker 1: for a while, you're on the A list, and then somehow,
Speaker 1: if you don't get him made, you're you're you're going
Speaker 1: to get off that list. And I saw that coming
Speaker 1: in around the same time I got to know of
Speaker 1: grout Show, Marx's grandson, and he said, you know, you
Speaker 1: should do a documentary about the Marx brothers. Nobody's done
Speaker 1: a really great documentary about the Marx Brothers. It was like,
Speaker 1: what do I know about making documentaries. I'm in the
Speaker 1: scripted world. He's yeah, but you're a storyteller. So he
Speaker 1: gave me the rights to do this, and I teamed
Speaker 1: up with a guy that actually had done a little
Speaker 1: bit of documentary work, guy named David Leaf. And David
Speaker 1: and I did this documentary together called The Unknown Marx Brothers.
Speaker 1: Got a lot of attention for it, and from that
Speaker 1: it was sort of off to do other things. And
Speaker 1: I just love the form. Okay, Bobby, how do you
Speaker 1: end up in Blood, Sweat and Tears? Understand, I'm in
Speaker 1: graduate school, just walked out hanging around in the West Village.
Speaker 1: Being a jazz drummer. You jazz generally, you should have
Speaker 1: a certain amount of technique, and you know, like like
Speaker 1: Shakespeare understood English pretty well so he could express himself.
Speaker 1: It's very hard to play jazz without having chops, having
Speaker 1: some sort of technique. Pop music rock and roll at
Speaker 1: that time, in particular, you didn't need all of that
Speaker 1: great technique. So I started hanging around in the village.
Speaker 1: I think it's fascinating. I become friends with a guy
Speaker 1: whose band is about to break up named Steve Katz,
Speaker 1: and he's in a band that's called the Blues Project,
Speaker 1: and that band was breaking up, so he and I
Speaker 1: were extremely close friends. And it's gonna sound awful. They
Speaker 1: were girls in the Westville hit a lot of girls,
Speaker 1: and that was true because you know, I went to
Speaker 1: Stuveston High School. Its all boys school, so as soon
Speaker 1: as I got to co ed situations, it's pretty good.
Speaker 1: And then I'm in the West Village, where you know,
Speaker 1: it was great, and there's a lot of folk music.
Speaker 1: Bob Dylan was hanging around, Dave Van Ronk was hanging around,
Speaker 1: and there weren't a lot of drummers that could play well.
Speaker 1: I would say, enough to be versatile. So I would
Speaker 1: play with Tiny tim one night, or play with all
Speaker 1: these different people. I mean, not even for money, just
Speaker 1: for fun, for hanging out. And there was one okay, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: just stop one. Can you drop out of graduate school?
Speaker 1: Do you then say to yourself, I'm gonna make it
Speaker 1: as a musician. Never. I never had that in my
Speaker 1: understand Fred vomited, so that lingered long enough to go
Speaker 1: I ain't doing this for a living, but I could play.
Speaker 1: So I'm hanging out with Steve. His band's breaking up.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking, I say to Steve, you know what, let's
Speaker 1: you know, let's put something together. It would be fun.
Speaker 1: Cut to I meet Al Cooper. Al Cooper's down there.
Speaker 1: He hears me play. I don't remember the exact circumstances,
Speaker 1: but he hears me play and then says, would you
Speaker 1: do me a favor? I'm leaving the United States. I
Speaker 1: want to go to England and be a record producer.
Speaker 1: I don't have money, so I want to do a
Speaker 1: fundraiser at the Cafe Go Go, which was on Blika
Speaker 1: Street where we didn't hang out anywhere but that, and
Speaker 1: across the street where you know, there was what was
Speaker 1: it called the Bitter End the ten Angel and the
Speaker 1: dugout was underneath, and that was it. That was like,
Speaker 1: that's the one the area on Blika Street. But you know,
Speaker 1: Alt said would you help? I said, sure, you know, sure?
Speaker 1: Should I not? Al was a force of nature. I'm
Speaker 1: a guy that just walked out of graduate school. Know
Speaker 1: nothing about the music business at all. I'm just you know,
Speaker 1: playing drums and hanging out. And so al found a
Speaker 1: bass player I think in California named Jim Fielder, and
Speaker 1: he said, you know, I got a bass player, okay,
Speaker 1: Seth Stewart hurt. I said, you know what, because I
Speaker 1: knew that he had left the Blues Project and he
Speaker 1: and Steve did not like each other at all. And
Speaker 1: I said to Alice said, you know, you only live once,
Speaker 1: and you know it'd be fun to have Steve on
Speaker 1: the gig because Steve wasn't doing anything. And he said, oh,
Speaker 1: he's not gonna do it. He hates me. I said,
Speaker 1: you know, let me talk to him. And I spoke
Speaker 1: to Steve and Steve said, well he won't let me.
Speaker 1: I said, no, it'll be fine. You know you can
Speaker 1: do it. So so we play as a quartet in
Speaker 1: at the CAFEO Go Go, and I think we did
Speaker 1: three nights and I even somehow in my brain think
Speaker 1: Paul Simon and Judy Collins played also us. But we
Speaker 1: didn't sell out. I mean it was no one, you know, like,
Speaker 1: it wasn't very crowded. But al had all these songs
Speaker 1: that I really liked. So that was that I end
Speaker 1: up at this moment, I'm playing with Odetta and she's
Speaker 1: playing in Washington, d C. So I get an idea.
Speaker 1: I said, hey, Steve, since we're, you know, gonna put
Speaker 1: something together, why don't you ask Al if we can
Speaker 1: use some of the songs because I can't quit or
Speaker 1: I love I love Emmano was a great tune, and
Speaker 1: these are things that we played with him there, I said,
Speaker 1: And I like this other one called my Day's a
Speaker 1: Numbered I think it was called. I asked him, like,
Speaker 1: if we can use a song? And I will never
Speaker 1: forget this moment. Odette is knocking on my door for something.
Speaker 1: I'm on the phone. Steve calls and he goes, oh,
Speaker 1: I spoke to Al, and so like hush tones because
Speaker 1: I don't want to yell. So she knows him in
Speaker 1: the room. Because I want to have the conversation, I said,
Speaker 1: so what happened? He said, oh, yeah, we can absolutely
Speaker 1: the songs. Oh, and he wants to he wants to
Speaker 1: be in the band. In fact, he wants to be
Speaker 1: the singer. And went, well when no, wait, wait wait,
Speaker 1: and like I'm thinking, what's going on? And he's got
Speaker 1: a name blood Sweat. I'm writing down blood Sweats. What
Speaker 1: kind of name is for a band? And we've got
Speaker 1: a gig. I said, you gotta be kidding. Al, apparently,
Speaker 1: who is amazing at this. He's he's he's ubiquitous. Was
Speaker 1: talking to a promoter at the Village Theater, which soon
Speaker 1: became the film or East, and that person said, Al,
Speaker 1: do you have a band? I need an opening act
Speaker 1: for the James Cotton Band, like a blues band. I
Speaker 1: got a band and that was it, and I go, man,
Speaker 1: this is unbelievable what I don't And I'm now I'm
Speaker 1: I'm realizing that whatever I had planned to put together
Speaker 1: was off and running. And Al's already talking to labels.
Speaker 1: He's a mile ahead of us. And I'll never forget.
Speaker 1: So we have this gig at the Village Theater and
Speaker 1: I woke in for a sound check and there's a
Speaker 1: riser in the middle of the stage as an organ
Speaker 1: way up on this riser, we're all on the ground
Speaker 1: and I'm looking up and I had suggested because because
Speaker 1: we're talking about adding horns, I said, yeah, yeah, And
Speaker 1: because I have all these jazz playing really good players,
Speaker 1: I said, yeah, that's what I want to do Fred
Speaker 1: Lipsia says a guy. He's great. There's a guy named
Speaker 1: Paul Fleischer that I called first unavailable. Fred said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I give it a shot. So Fred comes and we're playing,
Speaker 1: but we're on the ground and I was way up
Speaker 1: in the air and I'm looking up. I said, oh,
Speaker 1: why are you up there? Oh oh, it's much better
Speaker 1: for the sound. I went, oh, okay, I have no clue.
Speaker 1: And we're playing the gig and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: Al with his hand shuts the band down, like stop playing,
Speaker 1: and he just starts to play. He puts the heel
Speaker 1: of his left hand on the lowest notes of the organ. Organs.
Speaker 1: Organs have all plastic keys, so it's not like a piano,
Speaker 1: so you can roll your hands around an organ without
Speaker 1: getting hurt. So he puts the heel of his left
Speaker 1: hand on the lowest part and he starts to work
Speaker 1: his way up to the middle of the keyboard, and
Speaker 1: then his right hand takes over. He turns on the
Speaker 1: leslie speakers, so it's going whooo like this, and he
Speaker 1: goes to the highest note on the organ and he's
Speaker 1: just sliding his hands up. HiT's the highest note and
Speaker 1: starts writhing in pain, as if it's harder to play
Speaker 1: that note than any other note. And he's holding down
Speaker 1: the note and writhing, and I'm looking up and the
Speaker 1: audience is going nuts, and I'm thinking he's got them
Speaker 1: completely fooled. They think, oh my god, this spot, this
Speaker 1: rock and roll shit is unbelievable, This is crap. And
Speaker 1: I'm thinking this is so insane. The end of the gig,
Speaker 1: half an hour, they pay me two hundred and forty
Speaker 1: two dollars. I'm thinking, now, as an industrial psychologist, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna make about fifteen grand the year. I just made
Speaker 1: two hundred and forty two bucks his name. But this
Speaker 1: is a good thing. And Al is off. He's now
Speaker 1: conjuring up stuff. His publisher becomes a manager, and I'm
Speaker 1: a passenger. I'm just going, what the hell is going on?
Speaker 1: And he's going to labels And now he's got a
Speaker 1: guy to come down and hear us audition or play
Speaker 1: a gig at the ogogo and we had a record
Speaker 1: deal on Columbia Records. It's unbelievable. Okay, jumping to the
Speaker 1: second al, but that's a big gem, bro, Believe me,
Speaker 1: it is. But I could go on for an hour
Speaker 1: or what you just told me. I feel bad because
Speaker 1: I want to hear some of that more than some
Speaker 1: of the stuff. I know. Al's version of leaving the band,
Speaker 1: there's a version in the movie. Is that how you remember?
Speaker 1: Here's exactly what happened. I call him meeting. I'm at
Speaker 1: this point savvy enough, having been in the band, now
Speaker 1: a band, and signed to a label for a year
Speaker 1: and change, and the and the album tanks. It doesn't
Speaker 1: sell in anything for like forty thousand records or something.
Speaker 1: And in those days, like Columbia Records could could easily
Speaker 1: drop one hundred grande excuse me, like about one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand records. But this thing really tanked, and it didn't
Speaker 1: look like there was going to be a lot of success.
Speaker 1: And in my view, I thought with his voice, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't get on the radio. I don't I didn't think
Speaker 1: we would. I mean, I loved them in the band,
Speaker 1: but just his singing was a little less than what
Speaker 1: radio would allow. I thought. Al. I read somewhere that
Speaker 1: he said he was calling a meeting to actually get
Speaker 1: rid of Steve, to fire Steve. I'm calling a meeting
Speaker 1: because I want to suggest we need a new lead singer,
Speaker 1: you know, just he I never want to kick him
Speaker 1: out of the band, but I knew we needed a
Speaker 1: lead singer. So we called a band meeting and we
Speaker 1: got to the thing or I said, al, I really
Speaker 1: think we have to have a lead singer. I mean,
Speaker 1: if this thing is gonna last, And he said, I'm
Speaker 1: the singer or I'm walking. And I said, well, let's vote,
Speaker 1: and he was voted down and he left, and that's
Speaker 1: what happened. Okay. He also says that the band reacted
Speaker 1: negatively to the song The Moderate Adventures of Plato Diogenes
Speaker 1: in Freud about his therapy. Any truth to that, I
Speaker 1: don't know if the band did. I hated the idea
Speaker 1: that we have a band of eight musicians and he
Speaker 1: does a song about himself with a string court that
Speaker 1: we're not even playing on it. He just he does
Speaker 1: a song without us, and I thought, well, that's really
Speaker 1: what he wants to do. He wants to be a
Speaker 1: solo artist, then he should just be a solo artist,
Speaker 1: because you don't have a band like with Randy Brecker
Speaker 1: in it. And he placed four bars on the entire album.
Speaker 1: You gotta be kidding, Okay, so I'm watching the movie,
Speaker 1: and the movie is primarily about this nineteen seventy Eastern
Speaker 1: European tour, and I figured that Al would not be mentioned,
Speaker 1: and I was very surprised what he was somewhat favorably.
Speaker 1: So how did that end up in the movie. It
Speaker 1: almost didn't. Honestly, John wanted it, and he said, I
Speaker 1: think we need the history of the band. And I
Speaker 1: was saying, John, text, context, context, and I said, John,
Speaker 1: in my humble opinion, it has nothing to do with
Speaker 1: that band. That's a different iteration. That's another band, completely
Speaker 1: different band, even in concept. So this thing we're doing
Speaker 1: is about this band. And he said, Noah, I really
Speaker 1: think we should put it in. And I said, yep,
Speaker 1: but you're putting an in kind of late and should start.
Speaker 1: John knows his business. I don't know that business. And
Speaker 1: he just said, no, you know, I want to leave
Speaker 1: it in. I said, all right, So that's why we did.
Speaker 1: It was important to know where they came from and
Speaker 1: how David came to be in the band. So it's
Speaker 1: not a significant part of the film, but it is
Speaker 1: something I thought people needed to know. And I'm an
Speaker 1: Al Cooper fan. I have some of his solo records,
Speaker 1: and I love that first album, and so I thought,
Speaker 1: let's give him his due. And we actually found a
Speaker 1: rare piece of audio from back in the day where
Speaker 1: he's talking about the band, and that's in there. And
Speaker 1: I don't know that many people have heard that. Okay,
Speaker 1: professionals know that sometimes you have to leave the best
Speaker 1: stuff out because it doesn't serve the story. What was
Speaker 1: left out of this film? That's really great? Well, a
Speaker 1: great question. That's a great question, Bob. Let me think
Speaker 1: about this just for a second. I don't know that
Speaker 1: we left out anything that was really great. We did
Speaker 1: have a lovely emotional moment where this manager, Larry Goldblatt,
Speaker 1: is going to marry his assistant and they're going to
Speaker 1: get married in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and the US ambassador to
Speaker 1: Yugoslavia arranges the whole thing with the government so they
Speaker 1: can get married in this church in Belgrade, and he
Speaker 1: gives away Tina. It's Tina Cunningham who you see in
Speaker 1: the film. She talks a lot about being there on
Speaker 1: the tour. He gives her away. David Clayton Thomas is
Speaker 1: Larry's best man, and they get married in this church
Speaker 1: and the documentary film crew shoots the whole thing and
Speaker 1: outside it's a lovely, sweet little moment. And they had
Speaker 1: given the documentary film crew had given the film to
Speaker 1: Tina and it was sitting in her attic for a
Speaker 1: long time. She found it, send it to us. We
Speaker 1: had a new transfer made and it was in for
Speaker 1: the longest time because it was just sort of nice.
Speaker 1: It wasn't about politics, it wasn't about the music. It's
Speaker 1: just a sweet moment about two people that that we're
Speaker 1: getting to know as participants in the story, and it's just,
Speaker 1: you know, Bobby got to the point where and we
Speaker 1: were sorry, we were a little long, and you just
Speaker 1: have to cut certain things. So we did cut that one. Um, Bobby,
Speaker 1: I don't know do we cut anything else that we
Speaker 1: would say is important. I can say that when I
Speaker 1: saw that very early version and saw that, here's what
Speaker 1: came to mind. Number one, that's Larry Gold that's scamming
Speaker 1: the government into paying for his wedding and shooting it
Speaker 1: and putting the hole that I said, oh, that's perfect.
Speaker 1: And then and then I you know, you know, John said,
Speaker 1: what the hell happened about web tears? And I'm thinking
Speaker 1: why the hell are we watching this guy get married?
Speaker 1: It was just it didn't make sense. But I can't
Speaker 1: think of anything significant that you had in there, because
Speaker 1: but you know, John's a storyteller, so he I started
Speaker 1: to talk for you. But he sees the movie a
Speaker 1: certain way and realizes, here's hear us some bridges I need,
Speaker 1: and significantly he finds Don Cameron. Yeah, the director of
Speaker 1: the documentary That Never Happened was a guy named Don Cambern.
Speaker 1: Your listeners may or may not know that name, but
Speaker 1: they should. He was famous as an editor. He did
Speaker 1: five easy Pieces, He did one of the Romancing the Stone,
Speaker 1: he did one of the Ghostbusters movies, he did Drive.
Speaker 1: He said, he did a lot of those sort of
Speaker 1: early movies, and this was going to be his first
Speaker 1: directing job. And I saw his name, and we couldn't
Speaker 1: find him for the longest time, and we finally tracked
Speaker 1: him down to an independent living facility in Burbank. He's
Speaker 1: ninety years old and he was living there, and because
Speaker 1: it was COVID time, we couldn't get him out to
Speaker 1: do an interview. They weren't letting people out or in.
Speaker 1: And finally there was a week where they were going
Speaker 1: to let him out, and we had him come to
Speaker 1: our place and we shot an interview and then you
Speaker 1: see him in the film. He's wonderful. It's just the
Speaker 1: way he describes him things and the way he expresses himself.
Speaker 1: It's just fantastic. So that wasn't in the first cut
Speaker 1: Bobby saw, and because Don was so great, we added
Speaker 1: some more elements to that part of the story of
Speaker 1: the making of the documentary that never happened. But I
Speaker 1: would say, Bob, rather than things we had to leave
Speaker 1: on the cutting room floor, I would rather mention a
Speaker 1: couple of things that if we hadn't found film, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been able to illustrate half as well as
Speaker 1: we did. So you remember that Bloodswitt and Tears was
Speaker 1: one of the headliners at Woodstock, but nobody knows because
Speaker 1: they weren't in the movie and they weren't on the soundtrack.
Speaker 1: And we explain why that is in the film, but
Speaker 1: what and Bobby said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's no film,
Speaker 1: and I said, I can't believe. Anyway, we tracked down
Speaker 1: in a corner of Warner Brothers. It turns out they
Speaker 1: didn't turn off the film cameras on Blood Sweat and
Speaker 1: Tears until after the fifth song. So there are five
Speaker 1: songs that were captured by Blood Sweat and Tears, and
Speaker 1: so we work out to deal with Warner Brothers. It
Speaker 1: took months, but we work out to deal with Warner Brothers.
Speaker 1: And I want to use a song that we don't
Speaker 1: have Blood Sweat and Tears performing anywhere else, and that's
Speaker 1: More and More, which was a great rendition of a
Speaker 1: motown song, And so we get my favorite song on
Speaker 1: that second is right. It's just a killer song. It
Speaker 1: just gets you. So we see they make a new
Speaker 1: HD transfer for us, and we're looking at this film
Speaker 1: that no one's ever seen because it was just cut up,
Speaker 1: you know, they no one knew it was there anyway.
Speaker 1: So we were able to tell the Woodstock story with
Speaker 1: a piece of film that no one has ever seen.
Speaker 1: That's what I really liked. I like that we had
Speaker 1: at least the hour that we had here. And now
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you another story. In the one
Speaker 1: hour version, we're a number of performance sequences with the band,
Speaker 1: but they were it was all shot on sixteen and
Speaker 1: when they finished this thing, it was the optical track
Speaker 1: on the side of the film that compresses the sound
Speaker 1: and it's mono. I can live with this if we
Speaker 1: have to, but as Bobby knows, I am never satisfied.
Speaker 1: And so we got to. But nobody knew where these
Speaker 1: eight track tapes were. Band didn't have him, never knew
Speaker 1: about him. I thought, well, maybe they ended up at
Speaker 1: Columbia Records because they were the label. They had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with this documentary that never happened, so they
Speaker 1: didn't have them. And we're just going around and around
Speaker 1: all these same storage units. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And
Speaker 1: then Kathleen, my wonderful researcher, ends up talking to the
Speaker 1: family of the associate producer of this documentary that never happened.
Speaker 1: He was on the tour with him and he had
Speaker 1: died in twenty eighteen, so we didn't get him and
Speaker 1: to learn the story behind it. But when he died,
Speaker 1: his family gave the contents of his storage unit to
Speaker 1: the Academy Emotion Picture Arts and sign it's his library,
Speaker 1: and they were just sitting there like on a shelf.
Speaker 1: Nobody even bothered to inventory this thing. So Kathleen, because
Speaker 1: she is very sweet and extremely persistent, gets this wonderful
Speaker 1: archivist to finally do an inventory, and what do you know?
Speaker 1: There's five eight track tapes there, three, seven, eight, nine,
Speaker 1: and eighteen. We know there were eighteen at one time.
Speaker 1: What happened to the others. We don't know why he
Speaker 1: saved these five. We don't know, but there they are, pristine,
Speaker 1: never been played since they were recorded in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: So I call up Bobby. He can't believe it. He
Speaker 1: pulls in this fantastic engineer, Alan Sides. Tell him what
Speaker 1: we did at Capitol Records. I said, okay. He said,
Speaker 1: I want these to sound great. You know, you mix them.
Speaker 1: So we have to make these eight tracks into stereo.
Speaker 1: So we have to mix them. And Alan's brilliant, and
Speaker 1: I love gadgets and I love ducing, and you know,
Speaker 1: that's my favorite part of it, anything is recording. So
Speaker 1: I'm in the studio with Alan and we're mixing these
Speaker 1: things down. And this is humble bragging. I was never
Speaker 1: a fan of my drumming. I just because I heard
Speaker 1: Tony Williams and Philly Joe and I heard these unbelievably
Speaker 1: great drummers that you know. I was with a band
Speaker 1: that was successful, and at that point I was the
Speaker 1: band leader and I was playing all over the record,
Speaker 1: but I didn't love my playing. So I'm sitting in
Speaker 1: the room and I'm I'm mixing with Alan, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, I'm thrown back in time fifty years
Speaker 1: and it's like I'm a surgeon in the middle of
Speaker 1: an operation and a doctor next to me taps me
Speaker 1: on the shoulder and says, by the way, do you
Speaker 1: know who you're operating on. That's you fifty years ago.
Speaker 1: And that was like an out of body experience. I
Speaker 1: started realizing it, and we're mixing away and I for
Speaker 1: the first time in my life, I said I would
Speaker 1: go to hear that drummer. He was good, that could play.
Speaker 1: He's good. It was the first time. And I was
Speaker 1: walking around on air and John was there and I said,
Speaker 1: I was good, I could play. He was like a
Speaker 1: little kid. It was really funny. But I think what
Speaker 1: the most interesting thing for me was how good this
Speaker 1: band was live. They were just great. And the way
Speaker 1: that Bobby and Allan mixed these and that's why I
Speaker 1: hope your listeners are going to go see us on
Speaker 1: a big screen with a great sound exploding out of
Speaker 1: the speakers. They mixed it in a way that you
Speaker 1: just feel like this was recorded yesterday and the band
Speaker 1: is just killing it and they're they're fantastic. So across
Speaker 1: these five tapes were all but one song that they
Speaker 1: had performed on the tour. We couldn't find one of them,
Speaker 1: so that is in mono in the film, but the
Speaker 1: rest are great, and it just brought those sequences alive.
Speaker 1: The other thing that was interesting, there's a little bit
Speaker 1: of a Raschiman thing here, Bob, where not all the
Speaker 1: band members saw everything because they weren't there. Some were there,
Speaker 1: some weren't. Only one guy knew about the story of
Speaker 1: having to smuggle the film out of Romania. Only one guy, Bobby,
Speaker 1: didn't know that story. None of the other guys knew
Speaker 1: the story. And I'm sitting there hearing it from this
Speaker 1: guy because it hadn't shown up in any of the research.
Speaker 1: It's like, what's going on here? And I thought, this
Speaker 1: is like the stuff of a great spy movie or
Speaker 1: a great espionage novel, you know how they had to
Speaker 1: deal with the secret police of Romania and get this
Speaker 1: stuff out. And so that's another thing that until somebody
Speaker 1: told me the story, I wouldn't have known to put
Speaker 1: it in there, and it ended up being kind of
Speaker 1: a really cool sequence of the film. Okay, the film
Speaker 1: really captures the era so in terms of the overall
Speaker 1: because the movie's about blood, sweat and tears, but you
Speaker 1: really get a vibe for the lead sixties. So when
Speaker 1: you're constructing the film, to what degree do you decide
Speaker 1: what the emphasis on? Did your conscially you want to
Speaker 1: set the time, in the tone, what was going on?
Speaker 1: This is really fascinating. Bobby and I've been doing interviews
Speaker 1: for a couple of days now. These are like We've
Speaker 1: never been asked these questions before. This is like fantastic.
Speaker 1: I'm having a time in my life here. When I'm
Speaker 1: making a documentary, I view it very much as a
Speaker 1: jigsaw puzzle. We all got him when we were kids
Speaker 1: for birthday holiday, and you open up the box and
Speaker 1: you dump out and there's a thousand pieces and eventually
Speaker 1: you fit it together and they make a pretty picture,
Speaker 1: but they only fit together one way. Those pieces what
Speaker 1: we do as documentary filmmakers. You can fit him together
Speaker 1: ten ways, twenty ways, fifty ways, one hundred ways, and
Speaker 1: it's how you fit those pieces together that makes your
Speaker 1: film good, bad, or ugly, and so when Bobby says,
Speaker 1: I kind of see the whole thing in my head,
Speaker 1: he's right, I kind of see how we want to
Speaker 1: fit all these pieces together in a way that one
Speaker 1: scene leads you to the next, to the next. It
Speaker 1: isn't just in nineteen sixty eight. This happened. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine. That happened. So what I wanted to do was,
Speaker 1: first of all, we didn't want this to be a
Speaker 1: music doc. We I really wanted this to be a thriller,
Speaker 1: political thriller, and that's how we always felt about it.
Speaker 1: And so really early on, right in the first two
Speaker 1: and a half minutes of the opening, we're already introducing
Speaker 1: Cold War and footage of tanks and marching soldiers and
Speaker 1: all of this. And then very soon after we come
Speaker 1: back after the main title, I wanted to set the
Speaker 1: context of the times, So we talk about Vietnam and
Speaker 1: what that was doing to rip the country apart. We
Speaker 1: talk about Nixon and the White House, We talk about
Speaker 1: marching in the streets for civil rights and all these
Speaker 1: kind of things that were the mid to late sixties.
Speaker 1: Because I felt it was really important to understand what
Speaker 1: blood sweat and tears was going to run into at
Speaker 1: the end of this tour, we had to understand where
Speaker 1: the country was. So context became very very important, and
Speaker 1: that's why some of those pieces became part of the
Speaker 1: overall jigsaw. And and then we needed to know what
Speaker 1: they were going into in these countries. So if you notice,
Speaker 1: we found some really rare film of Nixon going to
Speaker 1: Romania and holding hands, if you will, with Cecheski, the dictator,
Speaker 1: and we had to set that up because ultimately that's
Speaker 1: what was so important was Nixon wanted to have detont
Speaker 1: with Romania to sort of split them off from the
Speaker 1: Russian orbit, and he didn't want anything that was to
Speaker 1: get in the way. And when we started to look
Speaker 1: at these internal memos from the State Department, you saw
Speaker 1: that they were all concerned about this, Oh, we don't
Speaker 1: offend the Romanians. We don't know of the Yugoslavs and
Speaker 1: the Poles, and so everybody had an agenda here. But
Speaker 1: to understand the agenda, we had to know where the
Speaker 1: country was and what was happening. Okay, Bobby emphasized in
Speaker 1: the film, is that everybody was eager to do this.
Speaker 1: Certain members of the band were anti war, anti Nixon.
Speaker 1: What do you remember about all We were all anti
Speaker 1: war and all anti Nixon individually, not as a group.
Speaker 1: We never made group statements. We all felt the same
Speaker 1: at that point. I mean, the country was as polarized
Speaker 1: as it is today, but it was age. It was
Speaker 1: up and down, so like over thirty was one way
Speaker 1: and under thirty was another, and we were under thirty.
Speaker 1: So you know, we all felt badly about Nixon, and
Speaker 1: we all felt badly about the war. It was just
Speaker 1: that's what we felt. So going there, we understood that
Speaker 1: we couldn't tell anybody the fact that we're going, and
Speaker 1: the State Department wanted to make sure that it was
Speaker 1: a State Department sponsors sure tour. I mean they it was,
Speaker 1: you know, advertised that way. We knew it, said Davis
Speaker 1: hugging Nixon. We knew that was not going to work
Speaker 1: for us. Steve in particular, didn't even want to go.
Speaker 1: He just said, you know, this is crazy. I don't
Speaker 1: I don't want to have anything to do with the
Speaker 1: State Department. Ironically, what I ascertained from going to DC
Speaker 1: and meeting some of these people, the State Department as
Speaker 1: a unit was pretty much not into Nixon. They were
Speaker 1: on the other side of this thing. It was just
Speaker 1: a you know, it was the State Department, but they
Speaker 1: weren't big fans of Nixon, so I didn't feel as
Speaker 1: badly about it. Plus we had to get the green
Speaker 1: card for David had to and look, we really and
Speaker 1: David says this, you know throughout the film, we're just
Speaker 1: musicians and that's really what we were. We were not politicians.
Speaker 1: We didn't you know, that wasn't a marketing stick for
Speaker 1: us to say, hey, we're anti war, so follow us.
Speaker 1: We just played. And for me individually, I just I
Speaker 1: was so proud of the band because we had, you know,
Speaker 1: a couple of great musicians and for people to hear
Speaker 1: this level of musicianship to me and playing jazz solos,
Speaker 1: legitimate jazz solos was great on a pop record. The
Speaker 1: fact that it got successful was shocking to me. And
Speaker 1: I was thrilled to death by the way, but shocking.
Speaker 1: One of the highlights of the film is what goes
Speaker 1: on in Romania? Can you tell us what happened and
Speaker 1: how you ultimately put it together in a satisfying way
Speaker 1: in the film? Sure, again, Bob, Had we not found
Speaker 1: that sixteen minute version, we would have not been able
Speaker 1: to tell that part of the story, but there was
Speaker 1: wonderful footage of what happened in Romania. So they were
Speaker 1: scheduled for two concerts in Bucharest, which is the capitol,
Speaker 1: and the first night it's totally packed with young people
Speaker 1: who go biser at the sounds and the energy of
Speaker 1: this American rock and roll, and they're up on their
Speaker 1: feet and they're cheering, and they're yelling and they're screaming,
Speaker 1: and there's some of them are trying to get to
Speaker 1: the stage, and the government doesn't know how to handle this.
Speaker 1: You know when when when we talk about repressive regimes
Speaker 1: or authoritarian regimes, it's all about control. We got to
Speaker 1: control these people. These kids were out of control. They
Speaker 1: were so excited by this music and what it represented
Speaker 1: to them. And so part of what we wanted to
Speaker 1: do was see if we couldn't track down some people
Speaker 1: that were actually in the crowd that night and then
Speaker 1: the second night in Bucharest. So we hired researchers in
Speaker 1: the Croatia Romanian Poland, and they through the social media,
Speaker 1: God blessed social media, they found of six people that
Speaker 1: were in these concerts, and so it wasn't me as
Speaker 1: the filmmaker trying to suggest how they felt about it.
Speaker 1: It was these people actually telling you from the heart
Speaker 1: what this meant to people that were living under communism,
Speaker 1: who had no freedom, who had no freedom of choice,
Speaker 1: who were listening to music that was basically banned up
Speaker 1: until this time, and here it is, they can do it.
Speaker 1: And so we really wanted to capture this, so we
Speaker 1: set all of this up in the film getting to Romania,
Speaker 1: and then we have this one night and it's going
Speaker 1: so great and the government freaks out and there's a
Speaker 1: meeting the next morning where they present points of demands
Speaker 1: to Larry Goldblad about this is what you have to
Speaker 1: do if you're going to do your second concert, and
Speaker 1: it was just ridiculous. It was, you know, keep your
Speaker 1: shirts buttoned, don't show too much chest, don't let the
Speaker 1: roadies come out with their long hair because that's going
Speaker 1: to get people excited. And especially for Bobby's point of view,
Speaker 1: it's like more jazz less rock because that'll keep the
Speaker 1: crowd quiet. And we had this footage of the band
Speaker 1: in a hotel tell room discussing and arguing about where
Speaker 1: they going to meet these demands. Of the Romanian government
Speaker 1: or not. And how many times, Bob can you can
Speaker 1: we think of a situation where a rock band, a
Speaker 1: rock band is being told what to do by the
Speaker 1: highest levels of a foreign government. And so these guys,
Speaker 1: you know, in the best thrillers, whether it's Hitchcock or
Speaker 1: anybody else, it's usually some kind of innocent party gets
Speaker 1: drawn into the intrigue. And that's what happened to these guys.
Speaker 1: These are just innocent musicians, and now they're drawn into
Speaker 1: all of this stuff that's going on. And so what
Speaker 1: we had to do then was we had to figure out,
Speaker 1: all right, how do we tell the story of the
Speaker 1: second night, because part of what they demanded was that
Speaker 1: you cannot have the cameras going the second night. And
Speaker 1: what we learned was that Don cambern our fabulous director,
Speaker 1: had told all of his crew guys, all right, you
Speaker 1: can't use the movie cameras, but use your still cameras.
Speaker 1: We had a ton of still film, so we could
Speaker 1: tell the story of what happened the second night. But
Speaker 1: what happened was they were so excited again maybe even
Speaker 1: more so, that the government brought out the dogs and
Speaker 1: they brought out the soldiers to try to control everybody.
Speaker 1: That only made things worse. There were fires up in
Speaker 1: the balcony and all that kind of stuff, and then
Speaker 1: they were beating kids up, and it was just it
Speaker 1: was a look at that part of the world that
Speaker 1: maybe most Americans hadn't really thought about, And Bobby and
Speaker 1: the guys I know hadn't really thought about it till
Speaker 1: they experienced it. So what I wanted was a very
Speaker 1: visceral experience. So there are moments where we don't have
Speaker 1: anybody actually telling the story, we just let the footage
Speaker 1: speak for itself. And then other times we have people
Speaker 1: telling the story in a very emotional way. And that's
Speaker 1: what I felt was important here in this particular sequence. Okay, Bobby,
Speaker 1: you know, and most people don't know the adrenaline, the
Speaker 1: power of the feeling of being on stage. You know,
Speaker 1: we live in in an era of deep fakes, etc.
Speaker 1: You can tell the story anyway. Did you really feel
Speaker 1: a difference in Romania. Well, we hit the stage. We're excited.
Speaker 1: We always loved to perform, you know, we enjoyed the
Speaker 1: real you know, I mean, you played better when there's
Speaker 1: an audience's reacting to you. We hit the stage. I
Speaker 1: don't think one person in that audience knew the name
Speaker 1: of the band. They just knew USA. And I felt
Speaker 1: like I was playing and there were bars between us
Speaker 1: and the audience, and once we started playing, the bars
Speaker 1: dissolved and these people, we could feel this unbelievable energy.
Speaker 1: They're chanting USA, they're screen and they are moving to
Speaker 1: the music. And as you can imagine, and you're very right,
Speaker 1: your adrenaline when you're especially when you're playing drums, when
Speaker 1: you're on stage, they're they're feeding you and you're getting
Speaker 1: more excited. The irony is when we had that meeting
Speaker 1: that John just described, they did say more jazz, less
Speaker 1: rock and roll, and I said, what do you have
Speaker 1: a jazz meter? How would you? And truthfully I never
Speaker 1: played backbeats, you know all that loudly. The second night
Speaker 1: when they said play more jazz, I played rock and
Speaker 1: roll through everything a guy could be playing a jazz
Speaker 1: So I'm like, bump, bump, back back, I'm banging away
Speaker 1: because how dare you tell us what to play? And
Speaker 1: we rock, We rock and rolled more the second night
Speaker 1: and the audience went berserk. They told David, don't throw
Speaker 1: like your instruments off the stage. We're going, what instrument?
Speaker 1: What are you talking about? David just dropped a gong
Speaker 1: that was part of the show. He threw the thing.
Speaker 1: On the second night. It was like, we did exactly
Speaker 1: the opposite of, you know, what they told us to do,
Speaker 1: and the audience was amazing and we, you know, afterwards finished.
Speaker 1: They kept cheering and cheering and cheering, and we're backstage
Speaker 1: and it's it's in the film. I'm like, we're going, okay,
Speaker 1: so okay, so we have to do something else. What
Speaker 1: are we going to do? And we have to fit,
Speaker 1: you know, I figure out what songs should we play next?
Speaker 1: And David's freaking out because our singer, David, because he's
Speaker 1: watching kids get beaten out, he's seeing the police come
Speaker 1: in with dogs, and he said, meant, all we want
Speaker 1: to do is but we have to play for these kids.
Speaker 1: I said, let's go, let's go, let's play. And we
Speaker 1: went out and did another song, and the cops and
Speaker 1: the police and the soldiers rather and the dogs. It
Speaker 1: just got worse. It just got worse. Okay. Um. A
Speaker 1: couple of questions, how long was this from the time
Speaker 1: you left New York? Do you return to the stage.
Speaker 1: And I know somebody who was a photographer for Led Zeppelin,
Speaker 1: and this was of course in the film era, and
Speaker 1: he says, I've been around the world and see nothing.
Speaker 1: So to what degree did you partake and actually see
Speaker 1: what was going on in these communist countries? We all did.
Speaker 1: We all went out. We all. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: not a drugged out, drunk band. We were not a
Speaker 1: typical rock and roll band like that. And even when
Speaker 1: I toured here, I would go to stores, you know,
Speaker 1: in the daytime. I'd go into towns early. As you said,
Speaker 1: there's adrenaline even when you're playing, and certainly it doesn't
Speaker 1: go away the second you're off stage, so you have
Speaker 1: to really try and go to sleep. Find something super
Speaker 1: boring like in England was fantastic because they had international darts,
Speaker 1: they had darts on television. I said, oh, this is perfect.
Speaker 1: I can sleep through this. But that was our first
Speaker 1: European tour. So we left and I think we would
Speaker 1: on for two weeks or three weeks, three weeks three
Speaker 1: and we did Eastern Europe and Western Europe. But you know,
Speaker 1: we left not feeling that our country was in great shape.
Speaker 1: We felt it was racism. We saw I'm repeating myself,
Speaker 1: but we saw what's going on Vietnam. We saw Nixon.
Speaker 1: But we came back and we right off the plane
Speaker 1: and there's a press conference. No one tells us. So
Speaker 1: three of us are sitting there, and you could tell
Speaker 1: from the questions they hated us, like we did something wrong,
Speaker 1: and they were you know, questions, and the attitude of
Speaker 1: the questions was awful. And we knew that, oh, something's
Speaker 1: wrong here. And what we all everyone in the band
Speaker 1: saw the same thing. As bad as things were here.
Speaker 1: Certainly we had problems. Comunism is the last thing you
Speaker 1: want in this country, and we said it. We came
Speaker 1: back and we just said no matter, Yes we're screwed,
Speaker 1: Yes we have problems, but that you don't want in
Speaker 1: this country ever, because we saw it right in front
Speaker 1: of our faces. I mean, we experienced it. It was horrifying,
Speaker 1: absolutely horrifying, Okay, John, The tone changes during that press conference.
Speaker 1: In addition, you contrast reviews and then you find the
Speaker 1: people who write them who basically say we tracked what
Speaker 1: they said. Tell us how all that came together. Sure,
Speaker 1: the band members and Tina, who was Larry Goblatt's ex wife,
Speaker 1: all had photographs, and I was lucky enough to go
Speaker 1: out to all their houses and went through all the photos,
Speaker 1: and there was stuff there that that was just perfect
Speaker 1: for helping us tell the story. Tina had about seven
Speaker 1: or eight photos of the press conference. Nobody else had that,
Speaker 1: so we're able to do that. But then Bobby talks
Speaker 1: about the press conference. But how are we going to
Speaker 1: illustrate this? So I would go over to Bobby's house
Speaker 1: and we're down in his man cave downstairs, and he's
Speaker 1: got all these ten or twelve inch tapes up on
Speaker 1: a shelf so high. I had to go get a ladder.
Speaker 1: It's like, what are those? He says, I don't know
Speaker 1: what they are. It's like, well, I gotta get up there,
Speaker 1: so he lets me get it ladder. I go up
Speaker 1: on these shelves and I'm kind of going through and
Speaker 1: a lot of them are bands he produced or sessions
Speaker 1: that he did with somebody or another, having nothing whatsoever
Speaker 1: to do with Beverly Hills. But then I must have
Speaker 1: said something like oh shit, and Bobby says, what is it?
Speaker 1: And I said, look at this. There was this tape
Speaker 1: that said National General Productions on it. So I knew
Speaker 1: it had to have something to do with this film,
Speaker 1: So I said, can I take this? And he says, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: please take it. So we take it off to a
Speaker 1: studio and we put it on and what is it, Bob?
Speaker 1: It is the sound from the press conference they've given
Speaker 1: Bobby a copy of years ago. He didn't know what
Speaker 1: was on it. He had never heard it. And so
Speaker 1: now I have photos, now I have the sound, and
Speaker 1: we could illustrate this. But then what I had done
Speaker 1: was the first article that really slammed them in the counterculture.
Speaker 1: Of note was a Rolling Stone article written by David Felton,
Speaker 1: who was an award winning writer for Rolling Stone. He
Speaker 1: did the Charles Manson article that won a Pulitzer Prize,
Speaker 1: and so he's assigned to this and he doesn't like Blood,
Speaker 1: Switt and Tears. He doesn't think they're part of the
Speaker 1: counter culture. He doesn't think they're very interesting. And so
Speaker 1: he was at this press conference because he was running
Speaker 1: the Rolling Stone office in LA at the time, and
Speaker 1: he's just determined to go after them. So he takes
Speaker 1: every opportunity he has to write this very smug, snarky
Speaker 1: article about this band, and unfortunately it had a real impact,
Speaker 1: because Rolling Stone had some real influence at that time,
Speaker 1: and he just trashes them. So I thought, well, it
Speaker 1: would be interesting to have if we could find him,
Speaker 1: be interesting to have him talk about the article. I
Speaker 1: didn't know what he was going to say to me,
Speaker 1: but we get him, We get him for an interview,
Speaker 1: and he comes down and he was an alcohol He
Speaker 1: was an alcoholic. He's been sober for twenty five years.
Speaker 1: And he looks back at what he did in those
Speaker 1: days and he says, you know, that sounds like me.
Speaker 1: It was too smarmy, he said, But looking back at
Speaker 1: it now, I was wrong. And I thought, wow, what
Speaker 1: kind of you know, journalists will kind of do that
Speaker 1: look back and say, you know something, I really made
Speaker 1: a mistake back then. And I just thought that was
Speaker 1: a wonderful moment in the film to sort of say,
Speaker 1: in a way, he's standing in for all the counterculture
Speaker 1: and all the mainstream articles that called them the fascist
Speaker 1: rock band and all other things, to say, you know,
Speaker 1: some we were caught up in the moment. They didn't
Speaker 1: seem to be super hip, so we were going to
Speaker 1: go after him. But now, you know, looking back, I
Speaker 1: think that was a mistake. And I think that sort
Speaker 1: of again sets a tone for an attitude. What I'm
Speaker 1: trying to do is put the audience back in this
Speaker 1: time to help them understand what was going on and
Speaker 1: how people were responding to them, and to know that
Speaker 1: this guy thinks they were wrong. I thought was a
Speaker 1: really important piece of the jigsaw. He said, it sounds
Speaker 1: like me I was a prick. It sounds like me
Speaker 1: I was a prick back then. Yeah, okay, Bobby. To
Speaker 1: what degree was the framework of the second album established
Speaker 1: by Al Cooper. We had been gigging already after the
Speaker 1: first album, and we were doing other songs, and Al
Speaker 1: found another song I Love You More and You'll Ever
Speaker 1: Know More and more, And we had songs that we
Speaker 1: would expand, like we'd play a song and then just
Speaker 1: solo on it and expand so there'd be another section
Speaker 1: to it. But now it's time to make a record.
Speaker 1: We had spent most of our time organizing a new band,
Speaker 1: finding musicians, finding the shape of the band. But we
Speaker 1: already had this material. And I remember a band meeting
Speaker 1: where at this point I'm the band leader and I'm
Speaker 1: I'm putting things together, and it was great because Clive
Speaker 1: Davis was fabulous, and he came to me after the
Speaker 1: band broke up. He said, what do you think? And
Speaker 1: I said, I think we're going to be a great
Speaker 1: band and I think I'm going to put the thing together. Right.
Speaker 1: He said, what do you need? I told it was
Speaker 1: like a ten thousand bucks or something. He said, oh,
Speaker 1: I'll get it to you. I just so I can
Speaker 1: pay some guys so we can rehearse and put it together.
Speaker 1: So the real emphasis at that point was find the band,
Speaker 1: finding musicians. Okay, now we have the band, we have
Speaker 1: some songs that have spilled over into this new band,
Speaker 1: and we have a band meeting and I explain my
Speaker 1: vision and I said, guys, I want to try and
Speaker 1: find songs that we all really like. And one of
Speaker 1: the band members just started laughing at me, saying, there,
Speaker 1: you'll never find a single song that everyone in this
Speaker 1: band likes. There's no way. We come from completely different sources.
Speaker 1: This is not a neighborhood bank the kids that grew
Speaker 1: up in a neighborhood. We're finding, you know, people from
Speaker 1: all over New York that we hear about that all
Speaker 1: this guy's grave, you should try and get him. So
Speaker 1: Steve is playing Eric Sati in his house Steve Katz,
Speaker 1: and it's just beautiful. So I take a copy of that.
Speaker 1: I love obviously, godb It's a Child, Billie Holiday's songs,
Speaker 1: gorgeous song. To prove a point, and I come into
Speaker 1: the next meeting, I said, okay, I'm gonna play with
Speaker 1: some songs. I play Eric Sati anyone not like this,
Speaker 1: And it was no, that's not fair. I mean, I said,
Speaker 1: I said, wait, wait, and they play godbas A Child
Speaker 1: anyone not like this song. But that's not fair. It's
Speaker 1: like Godsachai said, no, it's fair. The difference is we
Speaker 1: can play these songs other people can not in a
Speaker 1: popular band setting. So I just tried to find songs
Speaker 1: that were great songs that we could add to the
Speaker 1: ones we already had that everyone in the band liked.
Speaker 1: And it was an opportunity because the whole concept of
Speaker 1: bluss wed Tier is really for me was in every
Speaker 1: iteration of the band, it's it's it's a it's a
Speaker 1: concept as let's find great songs with these musicians, how
Speaker 1: do we make these songs work for us? And it's
Speaker 1: the arrangers. So we had two excellent arrangers in the band,
Speaker 1: Dick Halligan and for Elipsians, and I would have signed
Speaker 1: to each a song that I thought that they could arrange.
Speaker 1: And that was the fun for us, was to find
Speaker 1: a way to take these songs and and really do
Speaker 1: them differently that we could play them and have fun
Speaker 1: playing them. And that was that was it. To this day,
Speaker 1: there's a Blood Sweat and Tears. I'm still involved with them.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to find material and finding great arranges to
Speaker 1: work with, and there a lot better than we were
Speaker 1: right now. There's some great musicians right now. Okay, it's
Speaker 1: implied in the film that the downfall of Blood, Sweat
Speaker 1: and Tears was the result of that press conference in
Speaker 1: the press that ultimately came out from it. Bobby, what
Speaker 1: do you think really happened? You know, what do we know?
Speaker 1: The second album was mega successful, was played a long time.
Speaker 1: Third album did not come out that soon. All right,
Speaker 1: big point. That's a great point. Actually, good for you,
Speaker 1: that's a great point. We had a new manager and wait,
Speaker 1: stop for one second. Okay, what happened to this? Larry
Speaker 1: Green Black Alive Gold Black, excuse me? I kind of
Speaker 1: said earlier. Our accountant caught him trying to steal something
Speaker 1: and he was fired and since then he had passed away.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what he did right afterwards, but there
Speaker 1: was no anger or anything, like you knew this was
Speaker 1: going to happen. It was a matter of time and
Speaker 1: that was okay. So you have this new manager, right,
Speaker 1: and Paul Simon and I have been friends for a
Speaker 1: very long time, and I said, you know, I like
Speaker 1: your manager. He was more Lewis fantastic. He's just really great.
Speaker 1: He say, oh man, yeah, this is wonderful. Let's get him.
Speaker 1: So so the deal that's structured is he gets a
Speaker 1: piece a significant as a management piece of our touring,
Speaker 1: but not of the records that he has nothing to
Speaker 1: do with. That was it's a whole different thing. So
Speaker 1: he figures, well, I'll just tour him and he had
Speaker 1: us touring forever. We're on the road forever, and I'm
Speaker 1: knowing and Clive and I have friends, is like, when
Speaker 1: don't gonna make a record? It's like, I know, And
Speaker 1: we got to do so, and we didn't have time
Speaker 1: to really put together all new material. We had about
Speaker 1: half of the stuff was new and half was you know,
Speaker 1: things that Al had had had picked and we ended
Speaker 1: up doing the record kind of fast, like okay, you know,
Speaker 1: let's do it now, finally we can do it. And
Speaker 1: you're right, that was that was I mean, we really
Speaker 1: should have had an album out probably five months sooner.
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right. And everyone around us felt the same way,
Speaker 1: except the manager. And I asked Paul and day I said,
Speaker 1: so he so he's a great manager. He says, yeah,
Speaker 1: he does everything I tell him. I went, oh Jesus, Paul,
Speaker 1: why did a new manage us? Oh? Now, he was
Speaker 1: a great guy, but he had an agenda and what
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with us recording. But but if
Speaker 1: you're asking what the downfall was anytime you hit those
Speaker 1: heights and you have a very specific sound, horns and
Speaker 1: day Vid Clayton Thomas's voice. We were played all the
Speaker 1: time on every station. We were played on R and
Speaker 1: B stations, country stations, classical stations, and they picked certain
Speaker 1: songs to play that would fit their programming. And I
Speaker 1: think when you hear so much of one thing, and
Speaker 1: if you're a kid and you get in a cab
Speaker 1: and the cab has a radio on, and pose when
Speaker 1: and plose when tiers song comes on and the cab
Speaker 1: driver turns around and says, now there's a band I
Speaker 1: like here, immediately turned off. I don't want you to
Speaker 1: like this, bense my band. So we became so popular,
Speaker 1: and there was so much in this condensed, you know,
Speaker 1: time period that was harmful, but that Eastern European tour
Speaker 1: that triggered everything because that was a chance for anyone
Speaker 1: that wanted to shoot down a band that was on top,
Speaker 1: on top, that gave them the opportunity that was That
Speaker 1: was easily the reason a word we use a lot
Speaker 1: today as zeitgeist, and they really captured the zeitgeist back then.
Speaker 1: But those moments are fleeting, and those moments are fragile,
Speaker 1: and the littlest thing can throw it all off, and
Speaker 1: that's what the tour did. And Bobby and I may
Speaker 1: have slightly different opinions here, but what I feel happened
Speaker 1: is that, yes, it was Vegas, Yes it was Woodstock,
Speaker 1: Yes it was they were ubiquitous, But I think it
Speaker 1: also was that this experience in Eastern Europe and what
Speaker 1: happened to them when they got back, and how they
Speaker 1: were slammed by the right and the left, which is
Speaker 1: a unique situation. Usually you get it from one side
Speaker 1: or the other. They got it from both sides, and
Speaker 1: I think that exacerbated the personality conflicts within the band,
Speaker 1: and I think they started to fracture in terms of
Speaker 1: what are we going to play on stage, how are
Speaker 1: we going to play on stage? What are we going
Speaker 1: to record, how are we going to record it? All
Speaker 1: of that started to happen. And then eighteen months after
Speaker 1: they got back, David and Fred and Dick leave. The
Speaker 1: next year Steve and Jim leave. Bobby soldiered on brilliantly,
Speaker 1: but the moment was gone. The zeitgeist was gone, and
Speaker 1: I do look back at the Eastern European tour as
Speaker 1: being the real turning point for the band. We did
Speaker 1: not disagree on any of that. Okay, how did this
Speaker 1: end up being a theatrical film? How did you end
Speaker 1: up selling it? Tell me about the distribution? Go ahead,
Speaker 1: thank you. I always envisioned this as a feature doc.
Speaker 1: In fact, most of the times I start off with
Speaker 1: a project, I am thinking this is going to be
Speaker 1: a feature doc because I have this experience us versus
Speaker 1: John Lennon, Who is Harry Nilson? Why is everybody talking
Speaker 1: about him? Chasing train? They were all feature doc so
Speaker 1: I'm always thinking that sort of ninety to one hundred
Speaker 1: and ten minute version of how to tell the story.
Speaker 1: Story's got to be strong enough, and this one was.
Speaker 1: So I always thought of it as being a feature doc.
Speaker 1: Because we were financed, fully financed upfront by James Bryant,
Speaker 1: one of the best bosses I've ever had. We could
Speaker 1: make I could make the film I wanted to make,
Speaker 1: and then armed with a finished product, we can go
Speaker 1: to these young buyers at at the platform services or
Speaker 1: at the theaters. They don't have to guess what it is.
Speaker 1: They can look at the film and see what it is.
Speaker 1: So it's like, you know, you don't have to go
Speaker 1: there and say, well, it's gonna have this, It's gonna
Speaker 1: have this, It's gonna have this, and it's like, no,
Speaker 1: we can just show it to you. So I always
Speaker 1: thought this is what it was gonna be. I'd had
Speaker 1: a great experience with a distributor Abrama Rama and Richard Abrama,
Speaker 1: which is the head guy, and love him, and so
Speaker 1: I showed him the film and I said, does this
Speaker 1: have theatrical legs? I hope it does, because this is
Speaker 1: what I want to want it to do with it,
Speaker 1: and He just went nuts for it. He just thought
Speaker 1: this was great and I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. So we put together marketing budget and we've
Speaker 1: gone with Richard and here we are. We opened Theatrically
Speaker 1: in New York on March twenty fourth for a week
Speaker 1: at the Quad Cinema. We opened in LA the next
Speaker 1: week at the Lemley Monica Film Center for a week.
Speaker 1: And now I counted this morning. Bobby and I hadn't
Speaker 1: even talked about this. I counted this morning. We got
Speaker 1: fifty theaters across the country now and growing thanks to
Speaker 1: you and a number of other buzz that we're getting.
Speaker 1: People are hearing about this film. They want to see it,
Speaker 1: and I think it's that kind of thing that it's
Speaker 1: a compelling enough story that it may may bring people
Speaker 1: back to the theaters. And that's what we wanted to do. Okay,
Speaker 1: we all know that primary viewership is on the flat screen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So have you already made a TV distribution deal or
Speaker 1: you're waiting to see how it works theatrically. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: wanted to wait to see how it was going to
Speaker 1: turn out theatrically because there's so much out there's so
Speaker 1: much noise, there's so much product out there. We felt
Speaker 1: we wanted to distinguish ourselves, so we bet on ourselves.
Speaker 1: We bet that we were going to get good buzz.
Speaker 1: We're betting that we're going to get good reviews, and
Speaker 1: then armed with that, we will go to the streamers
Speaker 1: and say, look, you got to have this because everybody
Speaker 1: is talking about it. So we have not talked to
Speaker 1: any of the streamers yet. Actually I got an inquiry
Speaker 1: the other day from one that we slipped them a
Speaker 1: copy of it to see if they might want to
Speaker 1: make a preemptive bid. So we're waiting to see what
Speaker 1: happens there. But I think it will end up on
Speaker 1: a very good streamer, just not sure which one at
Speaker 1: the moment. Okay, Bobby, going back to the band, explain
Speaker 1: to me the economics of a band of eight or
Speaker 1: nine people's that doesn't people that don't generally speaking even
Speaker 1: write their own songs. Where is the money and how
Speaker 1: do you end up owning the name Blood, Sweat and Tears.
Speaker 1: When we began, that lawyer that I spoke about that
Speaker 1: found the Slowy Gobla said you need an internal employment
Speaker 1: agreement agreement employee agreement. So there were shares like like
Speaker 1: like a corporation, and each person would get a share
Speaker 1: of the band. If I think five of us were
Speaker 1: the primary guys, and then well that begs a question.
Speaker 1: Were the other four or three getting paid less? No? No, no,
Speaker 1: we all got paid exactly the same amount of money.
Speaker 1: It was just the ownership concept. So so now what
Speaker 1: happens is we have this agreement and the way it structured,
Speaker 1: if anyone leaves the band, whatever the band is worth
Speaker 1: at that moment, whatever stuff we have, the value of it,
Speaker 1: they get that money. They have royalties ongoing obviously, and
Speaker 1: they leave and then the share, that share goes back
Speaker 1: to the pot. Eventually, one day I realized there's nobody left.
Speaker 1: And it's so funny because I have friends like all,
Speaker 1: you were really smart, man, you had it all worked out.
Speaker 1: I had nothing worked out. It's just it landed on me.
Speaker 1: I said, Oh, man, but I love I love the
Speaker 1: idea of the band. I always love the idea of
Speaker 1: having a band that would play anything, could play anything,
Speaker 1: and and be loose and have wonderful musicians. That was
Speaker 1: that was a concept in my head from from day one.
Speaker 1: So uh, that's how I ended up with it. I
Speaker 1: didn't have a master plan, you know. Okay, so eventually
Speaker 1: you stopped playing in the men and you go to
Speaker 1: the other side. Okay, so I love this guy. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm in loving your questions because they're opening up a
Speaker 1: Pandora's box for me. Okay. So what happens is h
Speaker 1: I stopped producing. I have a studio in my house
Speaker 1: up in Rockland County, UM. The band is playing in Florida.
Speaker 1: I'm playing softball with a club team and there's an outfielder,
Speaker 1: little blonde girl playing center field. I'm playing left field,
Speaker 1: and she has her hands in her mit and her
Speaker 1: hand on her knees, going bad bad. I hate bad bad,
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking, wow, this goes really into it. So
Speaker 1: we go back to this kind of dugout situation and
Speaker 1: I say, I said, who are you? She goes, oh,
Speaker 1: I work at the club. I said, I never saw
Speaker 1: you there because while I'm married and I have kids,
Speaker 1: pause to the best bass player in the world. And
Speaker 1: my comment is, oh, that's very sweet of you. I
Speaker 1: hope if I get married one day my wife thinks
Speaker 1: I'm a good I'm the best drop I'm not. But no, no,
Speaker 1: she's no, he really is. I said, of course, and
Speaker 1: then my New York arrogance kicks in and I go, oh, really,
Speaker 1: if I go to your house, Now, what's on your turntable?
Speaker 1: She says, Giant Steps, said Coltrane's Giant Steps. She goes, yeah,
Speaker 1: Now I take it another step. So if you're listening
Speaker 1: to it, can you tell me while he's soloing when
Speaker 1: the chorus began, and she goes, yeah, I said, I
Speaker 1: got to meet your husband. Husband's Joco Pastorius. So so
Speaker 1: that's how I meet Jocko. And I have a relationship
Speaker 1: with Steve Popovich, who was head of promotion in Cleveland
Speaker 1: when I was out there, and he's the most passionate guy.
Speaker 1: And I told Climb and I came back and said,
Speaker 1: you've got a guy in Cleveland that's fantastic, you know,
Speaker 1: bring him here, he'd be great. He did. He ends
Speaker 1: up being head of A and R for Epic Records.
Speaker 1: They call me and say, we want to make a
Speaker 1: production deal with you because we know you love to
Speaker 1: produce and you're going to go somewhere else. We don't
Speaker 1: want that. We want you in the group. So I
Speaker 1: get it. What's called a put Like anything I want
Speaker 1: to produce, I can produce and they'll you know, I
Speaker 1: mean unlyst it's insane and you know, billion dollars. And
Speaker 1: I said, okay, I I have something I want to produce.
Speaker 1: Steve used to play bass. His head of marketing is
Speaker 1: a guy named a guy named Jim Terrell, bass player.
Speaker 1: I used to play with him. He was a very
Speaker 1: good bass player, he said of marketing. And I'm thinking, God,
Speaker 1: this two bass players, this is even easier. So I said, okay,
Speaker 1: I have something. It's a bass player. Okay, I said, great,
Speaker 1: like we hear, I said sure. I said, so I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do an album with a bass player and then
Speaker 1: an accordion. Looking at me, I said, I'm just kidding
Speaker 1: about the accordion. But this guy is a great bass player.
Speaker 1: So I end up you're producing and enjoying the hell
Speaker 1: out of that. And I have Jocko in my house.
Speaker 1: He's living with me, and we're coming up with ideas
Speaker 1: how to make an album of a bass player, which
Speaker 1: ain't the easiest thing to do. So anyway, back to
Speaker 1: your question. So these executives at CBS Records at the time,
Speaker 1: now Sony saw my interest in producing and they and
Speaker 1: they all of a sudden. Rona Lexenberg, who's now the
Speaker 1: head of Epic Records, who was head of promotion for
Speaker 1: Columbia Records and a friend of mine. He came to
Speaker 1: me and said, how'd you like to be the head
Speaker 1: of an r of Epic Records in California. I said,
Speaker 1: as much as my eye teeth extracted, I said, why
Speaker 1: in the world would I want to do that? It
Speaker 1: was like the last thing. And I said, no, But
Speaker 1: you'd be great at it. You'd be I said, but
Speaker 1: I you know, I get why it would be nice
Speaker 1: for you, but I have no interest, first of all,
Speaker 1: in being in California at all. And I have no
Speaker 1: And so it started out that way. And then Bruce Lunvoll,
Speaker 1: who was my product manager epliswent in tears. He's now
Speaker 1: head of all of CBS, and he says, man, you
Speaker 1: should do it and be fun. I figure, I'll do
Speaker 1: it for six months, like a couple of months. It's
Speaker 1: a challenge. I love new stuff to do. But the
Speaker 1: most important thing, secretly, I'm infiltrating. I'm thinking, you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm going to that side. I can help I can
Speaker 1: actually help artists. I can bail him out of bad deals.
Speaker 1: I even I can do things to help them. And
Speaker 1: at the time, Minnie Ripertson was a dear friend and
Speaker 1: her husband was a dear friend. She was signed to Epic.
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, I gotta do this. I actually live
Speaker 1: where I live because it was near where they live
Speaker 1: lived at that time, and so I took the gig
Speaker 1: just thinking I'm gonna help people, this will be fun,
Speaker 1: and I'm out of here in six months. I never left. Okay,
Speaker 1: you stopped playing drums? Did you miss Yeah? You missed it?
Speaker 1: When was How do you ever played drums again? Okay?
Speaker 1: So I'm playing with the band. It's I guess nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy five. Ish. I add a percussionist, Donna Lias, fantastic
Speaker 1: Jocko's in the band at this point, just you know,
Speaker 1: like like for a little while. Larry Willis is playing
Speaker 1: in the band of piano and Mike Sterns on guitar.
Speaker 1: The band's unbelievably good, and I'm actually playing well at
Speaker 1: this point because I have no choice. These guys are
Speaker 1: so good. So I see Donna Lias on percussion, and
Speaker 1: I go, let's switch. And Don's a great drummer, and
Speaker 1: he looks at me, no, no, no no, I said, come on,
Speaker 1: come on, come on, switch. I forced him to sit
Speaker 1: at the drums. I don't know what. I don't know
Speaker 1: how to play conga drums. I'm horrible, and I'm sitting
Speaker 1: like an idiot, like you know, like slapping away, and
Speaker 1: he's killing He's playing great. And it occurred to me,
Speaker 1: I have a studio in my house in New York.
Speaker 1: I love to produce. Why am I out here? He
Speaker 1: sounds great, the band is great. They don't need me
Speaker 1: at all. And I just said, you know what, this
Speaker 1: is my last gig. You got it, and I left.
Speaker 1: I got a call from the manager saying, you have
Speaker 1: to do one more gig. I sas, what do you
Speaker 1: mean while there's a guy out in Nassau at the
Speaker 1: coliseum and he's not like he's gonna drop us unless
Speaker 1: you're on the gig. I said, oh jeezus. And I
Speaker 1: had already not played for a few months. I said, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll do it. And again, you know, if there's a god,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but certainly something happened. I sit down,
Speaker 1: like to do this gig. You know, I'm already not
Speaker 1: playing a lot, and my throne the seat I sit
Speaker 1: on collapses. Then the symbol stand just dropped, like symbol
Speaker 1: start dropping, snared ROMs a hole in it everything, and
Speaker 1: there's a new road. He has no idea what he's doing.
Speaker 1: That's a calamity. And I'm thinking, oh, this is this
Speaker 1: is like Fred vomiting on me. This is this is
Speaker 1: my last game. And I really don't miss it at all,
Speaker 1: because if I did, i'd play. There's no one saying
Speaker 1: you can't play anymore. But I'm so interested in everything
Speaker 1: else about music and recording and finding artists and working
Speaker 1: with people in the studio. That's to me the most
Speaker 1: exciting thing. And really it almost always was okay on
Speaker 1: these records. I'm sure your deal is cross collateralized. Ever
Speaker 1: see any royalties on those hit records? Another great question.
Speaker 1: So I end up leaving Epic after every about a
Speaker 1: year and a half, and Capitol Records kind of you know,
Speaker 1: gets me and they say we need you here, we
Speaker 1: need you. So I go there and end up back.
Speaker 1: Well there's a long story between mean, I end up
Speaker 1: on television for about five years, but then I come
Speaker 1: I come back. I get offered a job a creative
Speaker 1: development with which like a friend of mine coined that.
Speaker 1: I said, what does that mean? He goes, nothing, It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean anything. But they want to hire you so badly.
Speaker 1: Just take the gig. I said, all right, so I
Speaker 1: go back. Just now it's Sony, but I'm not really
Speaker 1: reporting to a label. I'm actually just Sony. They didn't
Speaker 1: really structure a deal where I had to report in.
Speaker 1: I could do what I wanted to do, which was
Speaker 1: exactly the way I wanted to work, because otherwise, at
Speaker 1: this point, you know, I don't want to do it.
Speaker 1: So it was super enjoyable. I got the question. I
Speaker 1: just went Blounts went in tears royalties. Right. So luckily,
Speaker 1: since I have an executive job. Now I meet Scott Pascucci.
Speaker 1: He is the I think that they had lawyer out here,
Speaker 1: and he's just a fabulous guy. And I sit with him.
Speaker 1: I said, Scott, I don't know if the guys are
Speaker 1: getting paid. I don't know what's going on. I haven't
Speaker 1: tracked this thing at all. Can you help me? He said, yeah,
Speaker 1: speak to this woman. I speak to a woman and
Speaker 1: I sit down with her and tell her who played
Speaker 1: on what everything that anyone would have done on any record.
Speaker 1: I said, please get these people paid. She goes, okay,
Speaker 1: it was the first time because in the first place,
Speaker 1: our deal was horrible to begin with, like nothing, and
Speaker 1: then we split it with a lot of people, so
Speaker 1: no one really expected anything but what they were doing
Speaker 1: at the record company like there'd be a new version
Speaker 1: of a Blood, Sweat and Tears greatest hit. So I'm
Speaker 1: like newly mastered, but no one came to me and said,
Speaker 1: we'd like to put this out and we want to
Speaker 1: use our mastering. And all of a sudden, I started realizing,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, no one's asking me without permission. They
Speaker 1: keep finding ways to charge us more money. I said,
Speaker 1: why are we being charged money? We haven't played together
Speaker 1: in twenty years, and you're finding ways to charge us
Speaker 1: money for what. There's no advances? What, oh like the
Speaker 1: cost of this new version of this record? I said,
Speaker 1: enough because and now I actually I have a day
Speaker 1: gig that gives me enough power that I can call
Speaker 1: someone say you can't do this anymore. So all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, the guy, I mean not a lot of money,
Speaker 1: but the guys starting started to get paid. And one
Speaker 1: member of the band, guy Chuck Winfield, called me and said, man,
Speaker 1: it had to be you this first time I saw
Speaker 1: any money, I said, it was and thank god you're
Speaker 1: getting paid. Okay, talking about the band, you're making a
Speaker 1: movie with so many members. We all know everybody doesn't
Speaker 1: remember the story the same way. So to what degree
Speaker 1: with their disagreements and who had the final call that
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say disagreements. I would just say Raschiman. They
Speaker 1: remembered things differently, and I was the final arbiter here.
Speaker 1: Bobby didn't tell me the movie to make. James Bryant
Speaker 1: didn't tell me the movie to make. So I felt
Speaker 1: I had to corroborate things twice or three times or
Speaker 1: I couldn't go down that road. So I really had
Speaker 1: to evaluate what they were saying to me, and is
Speaker 1: this true? Is this not true? Is it borne out
Speaker 1: by what other people are saying? Is it borne out
Speaker 1: by the documents that we found? And ultimately it was
Speaker 1: my call, and so for better and worse, I'm responsible. Okay,
Speaker 1: we live and you referenced it earlier. We live in
Speaker 1: an era of cacophony. What do we know? The peak
Speaker 1: of blood, sweat and tears was really sixty eight sixty nine.
Speaker 1: That's in excess of fifty years ago. How do you
Speaker 1: get the message out? And to what degree are you
Speaker 1: frustrated excited about what's coming down the road. I'm very excited.
Speaker 1: And I think of some of this is your fault, Bob.
Speaker 1: You were the first person that wrote about it, and
Speaker 1: and what you said meant so much to me and
Speaker 1: Bobby where you said, you know, you don't need to
Speaker 1: know Blitzwitt and Tears to appreciate this movie. You don't
Speaker 1: need to know the hits to appreciate this movie. And
Speaker 1: I think that's what distinguishes it from your basic music doc.
Speaker 1: It's not about the band in a way that you
Speaker 1: need to know him or appreciate him or love them.
Speaker 1: It's a story of It's a thriller story that happens
Speaker 1: to have great music in it. And you started us off.
Speaker 1: And now we're getting coverage from Rolling Stone in the
Speaker 1: New York Times, and all these people are calling and
Speaker 1: wanting to do interviews, and they're asking reasonably smart, thoughtful
Speaker 1: questions that are not about and I do say, it's
Speaker 1: not a history of the band, it's and they said,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, we know that, and they're onto the
Speaker 1: politics of it and all of that. So I'm actually
Speaker 1: quite excited that that as a result of the buzz
Speaker 1: we're getting and hopefully the reviews were going to get that,
Speaker 1: they're going to be people out there is it. It
Speaker 1: sounds really interesting and you should talk about it because
Speaker 1: you get this all the time. I had such a
Speaker 1: it's so funny. All of a sudden, my phone's ringing
Speaker 1: like crazy to see what bob Let's sits it. I said, no,
Speaker 1: I don't. I who what, Oh, you gotta see this?
Speaker 1: And I read this. I go, oh, this is so nice.
Speaker 1: He's so right. Oh my god. And I'm getting a
Speaker 1: lot of phone calls from people in the music business
Speaker 1: that I know. And that called John Up. I said, John,
Speaker 1: my only experiences in the music business and my only
Speaker 1: experience for hit records because I've been involved with the
Speaker 1: whole bunch of them. It's like, and I explained what
Speaker 1: you did. I said, here's the analogy. There was a
Speaker 1: station in Chicago it was called WLS that had them.
Speaker 1: It was the most powerful station. It reached Mexico, for
Speaker 1: God's sake, again out of Chicago. They would play fifteen songs,
Speaker 1: maybe a top twenty. But I didn't even think that much.
Speaker 1: You could never ever get break into that rotation unless
Speaker 1: a million of the stations had been playing it in
Speaker 1: the area. People were responding, buying the I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a whole process. Called John, I said, you know what
Speaker 1: Bob just did for us, what we're on LS. We're
Speaker 1: on LS before any stations. I said, this feels like
Speaker 1: a hit record. This is insane. And that's like I
Speaker 1: don't want to blow too much smoked your way, but
Speaker 1: it was amazing. Well, you know, in this particular case,
Speaker 1: I certainly was a fan of the band. I saw
Speaker 1: the band. Where did you see us? Bridgeport, Connecticut, Katie
Speaker 1: Kennedy Stadium. Wow. So as I say that, just the
Speaker 1: concept of the film was fascinating to me. I wanted
Speaker 1: to know more. I didn't expect, you know, after watching
Speaker 1: the film, I remembered the blowback about the statements after
Speaker 1: the trip to Eastern Europe, but it was not top
Speaker 1: of mind. But you know, only right from the heart.
Speaker 1: The film is fantastic. It really is. And I think
Speaker 1: I said it's one of the best rock documentaries ever done.
Speaker 1: And I do believe that, And I could go on
Speaker 1: and on, but I just hope people see it. I
Speaker 1: think we've come to the end of the feeling we've known.
Speaker 1: I have a lot more questions, but for a different time.
Speaker 1: John and Bobby, thank you for taking this time to
Speaker 1: speak to my audience, and thank you for asking the
Speaker 1: most questions that we haven't been asked before. It's fantastic
Speaker 1: and I have many more, but not today, especially about
Speaker 1: the band. You couldn't call me any side one and
Speaker 1: there's a gay history, and you know all these songs
Speaker 1: because the other thing is Blood, Sweat and Tears. Was
Speaker 1: the first rock band to do a Laura Neuros song. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well she was going to be our lead singer. Listen
Speaker 1: to do you have time for a little bit? Yes? Yes, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: sorry after Al's gone. I loved Laura. She was a
Speaker 1: friend of mine. Both signed to Columbia Records. Jimmy Field
Speaker 1: are our bass player, starts living with her and we're
Speaker 1: all friends. And I hear Eli that album she has Eli,
Speaker 1: and it blows me out of my chair. And it's
Speaker 1: got great horn arrangements by Charlie Callella. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: really a cool record, and I'm falling in love. And
Speaker 1: I said, man, she would be the perfect singer for us,
Speaker 1: So I call her her managers David Geffen, and I said,
Speaker 1: what do you think of this idea? She goes, oh, Bobby,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I have to speak to David, and
Speaker 1: I said, we'll call him. I know him really well.
Speaker 1: I said, call him. Let's let's do it. We had
Speaker 1: a rehearsal and we oh yeah, and we're I think,
Speaker 1: at the cafe, Go go, and we have the charts
Speaker 1: to Eli's Eli's Coming, and she started and she's at
Speaker 1: the piano. She starts singing Eli's Coming, and I had
Speaker 1: some falsetto then I'd say, Elias coming, whoa you bet?
Speaker 1: And we look at each other. We're laughing and it
Speaker 1: sounds and went down to day and we're playing. It's killing.
Speaker 1: It's so great, and I said, oh, man, Clive's gotta
Speaker 1: be he's gonna be happy. Here's two artists. This band's
Speaker 1: gonna be fantastic. And David was calling me, oh, this
Speaker 1: is gonna be great, and he actually wanted to manage
Speaker 1: the band. And I knew David well, and I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, I think be better to get like a
Speaker 1: neutral manager. And so then she calls me one day
Speaker 1: and says, I don't think it's gonna work I can't
Speaker 1: do it. I said, what do you mean what David
Speaker 1: said that you guys are never gonna make it and
Speaker 1: you know I'm gonna be a big star, And I said,
Speaker 1: I just spoke to him. He said, this is a
Speaker 1: great idea. I probably spoke to him right at the
Speaker 1: point when I said I don't think you should be
Speaker 1: the manager when he called her up and said, forget it,
Speaker 1: this is never gonna work, and she was going to be.
Speaker 1: I mean, the choices that we were going after. Let
Speaker 1: me give you some names. Stevie Wonder he was not
Speaker 1: doing amazingly well at that point. And I got to
Speaker 1: Motown spoke. I spoke to a lawyer, and not knowing
Speaker 1: he was not only Stevie's lawyer but also Moto's lawyer,
Speaker 1: I said, any chance that he would ever be free
Speaker 1: to no, sorry, okay, that was the end of that idea.
Speaker 1: And then I hear very superstitious like, oh, it would
Speaker 1: have been perfect for us, so like you know, going
Speaker 1: step by step. And then our bass player knew like
Speaker 1: Steve Stills well because he was in the springfield with
Speaker 1: them for a minute. He said, be great. I said, yeah,
Speaker 1: he'd be great, and I spoke to him and he
Speaker 1: said no, I'm forming a super band with Buddy Miles.
Speaker 1: I said, okay, he's not available, and that's the point
Speaker 1: when we started to look for other people. But but
Speaker 1: you happen to mention Lauren, he or I couldn't just
Speaker 1: sit here well like I know that. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: never heard that story and that kind of blows my
Speaker 1: mind and everybody all the personalities there. We could go
Speaker 1: much deeper, but not today. I want to thank you
Speaker 1: guys so much. Till next time. This is Bob left
Speaker 1: Sex