“Cowboys And Indians”
Blood, Sweat & Tears
4
1971, Columbia Records
This Exit: Since the inception of the nine-piece jazz-rock fusion band in 1967, Blood, Sweat & Tears have endured a staggering amount of personnel changes (as of 2008, there have been 130 official members on record), playing out more like a modern-day baseball roster than a rock outfit. The band’s most well-known lead singer was its first, Al Kooper, whose legend is arguably more celebrated for crashing Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited studio sessions in 1965 and offering his lack of familiarity for the organ, most notably on the groundbreaking hit “Like A Rolling Stone” (whose eerie excitement is characterized and driven by Kooper’s unsure riff), but the pipes most inexorably linked to the legacy of the band were lent by David Clayton-Thomas, who replaced Kooper in 1968. Blood, Sweat & Tears are less known for easygoing, contemplative ballads like “Cowboys And Indians,” and celebrated more for the dynamic, brassy arrangements treated chart-toppers like Clayton-Thomas’s own “Spinning Wheel,” Berry Gordy and Brenda Holloway’s ”You’ve Make Me So Very Happy,” and Laura Nyro’s ”And When I Die,” but like the vocal stylings of the tragic Terry Kath during the early 1970’s incarnation of Chicago—arguably the more famous jazz-rock fusion band of its day, and perhaps the Yankees to Blood, Sweat & Tears’ Mets—I find the subdued, honey-gospel purr of Clayton Thomas’s ballads more exciting, driven, inviting, and less predictable than the obvious power contained in his soul-joy exaltations, however impressive his singing on those tracks may be. Refer to Clayton-Thomas’s masterful interpretation of Richard Manuel’s “Lonesome Suzie” for another example his genius for restraint.
