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