It is extremely fitting that the opening song on this album, titled "Overture," is just someone laughing over a groove. They are laughing at me. They are laughing because I thought that, after a whole year of trying to discover some hitherto blind spots in my musical knowledge, I'd be any closer to feeling secure in my quest to know music. I feel like there are a hundred thousand blind spots left to go. Cue laughter.
Welcome back to another Year of Blind Spots. As I did for 2021, I currently have a list of 50 albums that I used a number generator to randomly organize for 2022. Unlike last year, I took great care in only including artists that I knew of but didn't actually know. This means that you won't be finding many artists who discographies I partially know (by my count, that'll happen three times this year, but for very specific reasons). These are artists that I have definitely heard of before, but know almost nothing about, and they certainly have never been on my iPod before in any capacity.
Take the band Blood, Sweat & Tears. That's a band I've heard of before. Like, I'm familiar with the phrase. I had no idea what they sounded like or who was in it or anything like that. I think I assumed that they were a funk band, à la Earth, Wind & Fire? Probably just due to the similar names (both even forgo the oxford comma!). But BST sounds nothing like EWF, or funk in general. So that was a surprise (or: cue laughter).
I don't think I could describe their sound with any one description, but if there was a gun to my head, I'd say "late '60s flower power music" I guess? There's definitely some flowery, folky stuff akin to the Zombies. There's some stuff leaning farther into rock 'n' roll, some proto shit like Tommy James & the Shondells. Yeah, sure, I guess there's some funk in there—"My Days Are Numbered" feints like it's going to be, before swerving into a Forever Changes-type sound; "Somethin' Goin' On" gets closer to James Brown than I thought possible of such a band. My main point being that this is all stuff that you've heard on a dusty vinyl before, even if the songs themselves aren't much like each other.
The frontman for Blood, Sweat & Tears, at least for this one album, was a man named Al Kooper (no, not Alice Cooper, though we'll eventually get to him in this column I'm sure). I've known that name for a while—and this should tell you more about what specific blind spots I do and do not have than anything else—because I poured over the credits for Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited in my youth, and knew that he played the Hammond organ on "Like a Rolling Stone." Pretty important part of a pretty important song, I'd say! And I had no idea that the dude had his own band! (If you're looking for that same organ sound here, you can find it on at least "Morning Glory.")
According to what I read, the big inspiration for Kooper in putting together the band was the idea of "brass rock," i.e. rock that had a horn section. There is some nice brass work all over the album, for sure, e.g. the outro on "Just One Smile," and so on. I think it's something I take for granted these days, honestly. I feel like bands that I listen to usually can't afford to have full time trumpet players, so they briefly hire session musicians for recording specific songs on an album. BST had eight full time members when they created Child Is Father to the Man. Shit was different back then! Pretty cool!
Also different—that the name "Blood, Sweat & Tears" could be such a collaborative entity that they could kick out their frontman (and the person who put the band together in the first place!) immediately after their debut, and still function for another 50+ years. A new guy (David Clayton-Thomas) came in to replace Kooper as the new frontman for their second album, a self-titled that beat Abbey Road for the Album of the Year Grammy(!).
But so my point here is that I have to imagine that anything I say about the "sounds of Father Is Child to the Man" probably doesn't apply to Blood, Sweat & Tears. That's a different kind of blind spot, one that I'll have to get to on my own time eventually. And, like, BST is the type of band that has 161 musicians listed under their "other members" section on Wikipedia, so I can't imagine that they ever sounded the same twice.
So, in a few respects, this was the perfect album to start Phase II of this project. I knew of them, but I didn't know them, except that I kind of knew some of the bits and pieces already, and then I am left holding the bag for so many other tangential blind spots because of them that it really just opens my eyes to how vast and wonderful and mysterious this thing we call "music" truly is.
P.S. this has to be one of the creepiest album covers ever, right?
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