“The world turned upside down. It was a revelation.” That’s what Romanian musician Doru Stănculescu says about a pivotal moment experienced a day after he turned 20 years old. Was this a sexual awakening? A political one? In a way, both: he saw Blood, Sweat & Tears. Director John Scheinfeld (Chasing Trane) tells this story in the riveting but distracted documentary What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? With a little more focus, this might have been one of the great music docs instead of a very good one. But perhaps the tension between pop stardom and the counterculture, however delicious, hampers the story in the end.
Part of the problem is that there’s so much story to tell, and the most compelling narrative was something out of the band’s control. What the Hell opens with grainy film footage of a ‘70s rock concert, a horn section launching sweaty vocalist David Clayton-Thomas into his set. It looks like typical footage of the era, though soon you begin to notice the hints of fascism, the flanks of uniformed guards patrolling the crowd. The location? Romania!
Clayton-Thomas was an unlikely front man to lead the first American rock band to play behind the iron curtain, and how he got there is a story in itself. “It seemed very much like a James Bond movie,” band member Jim Fielder remembers, and it’s this element, which dominates the film, that’s so fascinating. Clayton-Thomas’ drenching perspiration and his band’s fevered process set the Bucharest crowd chanting what sounds like “USA! USA! USA!” The uniformed officials were so unsettled by the effects of this rock music that they sent in vicious dogs for crown control.
All this, at a Blood, Sweat & Tears show? As much as the band might have been dismissed as so much schlock, for young Romanians, theirs was the sound of freedom for many, and the film’s most effective interviewees are the young people who were there. Mike Godoroja remembers, “The show meant more to me than just a rock concert. That outside the borders there is life, and it a very free one.” What makes What the Hell even more intriguing is what seems at first like a jarring talking head. One expects rock docs to have talking heads like Bono and Henry Rollins. But Timothy Naftali, founding director of the Nixon Library? He turns out to be part of the fascinating context.
BS&T’s tour behind the iron curtain turned out to be part of a State Department initiative to promote American ideals in communist countries. Not everybody in the band was on board with this; Steve Katz, the most serious activist in the group, can be seen telling press at the time, “I didn’t want to go on this tour as a tool of the United States government.”
That Eastern Bloc narrative is powerful stuff – what better contrast can you get than rock ‘n’ roll and communism? And how funny is it that the US fought this war with BS&T? But at almost two hours, the filmmakers take too many detours, losing just a little momentum when they break away from the Cold War to backtrack on band history, including mention of founding member Al Kooper, the session man perhaps most famous for playing the organ on “Like a Rolling Stone.” Kooper was out of the band by the time they went to Romania, but he is still associated with the group; how do you comfortably fit that information into a dramatic structure?
It’s a complicated story, and not an easy one to parse. John Scheinfeld made a solid John Coltrane documentary in Chasing Trane, but that was a more straightforward tale. This material, aided greatly by generous existing footage from that Eastern Bloc tour, footage, seems like gold, but it doesn’t all pan out. What the Hell Happened makes you appreciate the kind of thought that goes into a good documentary – that even with a non-fiction feature, you need a good script, and most importantly, structure, structure, structure. The movie at the very least proves that there’s a lot more story in Blood, Sweat & Tears than you’d ever have imagined. Maybe, just maybe, instead of a focused on this international incident, what the band deserved was an epic along the lines of the four-hour Grateful Dead doc Long Strange Trip. On the other hand, the late director Dusan Makavejev would have been perfect for this look at the counterculture’s uneasy alliance with politics. BS&T: Mysteries of the Organism anyone?
What the Hell Happened turns out to be a story about film preservation too. The reason so much film footage exists is because of Donn Cambern, who at the time chronicled the tour for what was for years a lost documentary.
One is reluctant to offer spoilers, but the film gets back on track after returning to the fated tour, and the resolution is powerful. It’s worth quoting at length a Rolling Stone article written about the band’s return to the states: “’We went over there with the idea of just how much so-called Communist fascism is American propaganda,’ said David Clayton-Thomas, the group’s pudgy-faced lead vocalist [that was nasty, writer David Felton explains]. ‘And I found out that the propaganda is pretty damn close to the truth. It’s scary.’” And it’s a lesson that, as Naftali explains, the American public didn’t want to hear. So Naftali’s presence is part of Scheinfeld’s ploy. Note that the director is no right-winger—Bill Clinton is one of the talking heads in his Coltrane doc, after all; but the film seems to set up its own Eastern Bloc tour in a sense: are you going to dismiss the message because of who’s delivering it?
Photo courtesy of Abramorama
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