Steve Katz - Blood, Sweat, and My Rock n Roll Years: Is Steve Katz a Rock Star?

An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright 2015 by Steve Katz

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Katz, Steve, 1945- author.

Blood, sweat, and my rock n roll years : is Steve Katz a rock star? / Steve Katz.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-4930-9999-3 (hardcover)

1. Katz, Steve, 1945- 2. Blood, Sweat, and Tears (Musical group) 3. GuitaristsUnited StatesBiography 4. Rock musiciansUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

ML419.K375A3 2015

782.42166092dc23

[B]

2014048518

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Alison

Contents

INTRODUCTION

A One and a Two and a...

Once upon a time, I had an incredibly passionate and some what dysfunctional affair with Mimi Faria. When that went south, I had a fling with Joni Mitchell. Jim Morrisons girlfriend Pam used to come over to make love when Jim was drunk and abusing her. And it all seemed normal.

I almost got into a fight with Bob Dylanand I did many times with Lou Reed. And of course, Al Koopera formerly nice Jewish boy like me, and my partner in the Blues Project and then Blood, Sweat & Tears, who became Dylans sidekick and dined out for years telling the story of how he crashed the Highway 61 recording session to play the organ on Like a Rolling Stonewell, we spent half a lifetime trying to kill each other.

I played at Monterey and Woodstocknot to mention one of those crazy Murray the K shows with the Who and Cream and Wilson Pickettand partied with Groucho Marx, Sidney Poitier, Elizabeth Taylor, and the 69 Mets.

Somewhere around my house here in the foothill of the Berkshires I have three Grammy Awardsnot bad out of ten nominations. I have a few DownBeat Readers Poll Awards, which are awesome, but also contributed to the downfall of Blood, Sweat & Tears when the jazz guys in the band thought that was their cue to take over and start blowing serious shit, promptly driving our rock n roll audience away. Ive got three gold albums and one that went quadruple platinum. All together Ive sold something like 29 million records. My neighbors dont have a clue.

Ive done tours with Miles Davis and Nina Simone, did my damnedest to teach Sammy Davis Jr. how to roll a serviceable joint, and eventually became everything I hateda suit at a record company.

Occasionally I gig, but never again with the guys who seemingly defined my career: Al Kooper, Lou Reed, and the woman-beating, arrogant Blood, Sweat & Tears singer David Clayton-Thomas.

Of the three, though, Lou was the real poison pill. He was the catalyst for me falling out with my brother, who was head of Artists and Repertoire at RCA, and Lous putative boss. I produced two pretty good records for Lou and pretty much saved him from a career as a cult figure living on the margins.

A magazine once published a feature story called Blood, Sweat & Blintzes. The subtitle on the cover was Is Steve Katz a Rock Star? It was a fairly accurate portrait of me. There I was, listening to show tunes and leaving my parents house with a weeks worth of suppliesstuffed cabbage, chicken soup with rice, salad with sour cream dressing, pot roast, potato kugel, corn on the cob, and in-case-you-are-still-hungry roast chicken, not to mention a bag full of clean linens.

I was, and am, kind of a nerd. I never wore cool on my sleeve like some guys could, and never tried. Jimi Hendrix once asked me if he could borrow my horn section for his next record; how much cooler did I need to be? Too bad he died before he got around to it.

I got lucky. Its kind of hard to imagine now just how big Blood, Sweat & Tears was back thensmash records, traveling the world on private jets, too much money and sex to keep track of. And as proud as I am of our big hitsYouve Made Me So Very Happy and And When I Die (I never liked Spinning Wheel)unfortunately, we get blamed for a lot of bad jazz-rock fusion. (I swear I had nothing to do with that; Im a rock n roll guy.)

I was a product of the times in which I lived, but thankfully, I wasnt a casualty. Talking about drugs in that magazine article, I sound like an idiot: Its great to play when you are stoned on grassthe psychic vibrations are much stronger. And then there was my mom, right there in the story, asking me if I ever took LSD, and me confessing that I had, but promising her I would never do it again. I guess its kind of ironic that I ended up working with a notorious pincushion like Lou Reed.

Rock stardom, real or imagined, drives people to some pretty weird places. Im one of the fortunate ones. I walked through that door and, for the most part, stayed fairly sane.

But boy, do I have a story to tell you...

CHAPTER 1

The Birth of the Blues

Mineola High School was close to being torn down when I first arrived. It was 1960. Vietnam was just the tiniest tempest in a teapot, and prior to the protests and riots to come, colleges were strictly where one went to get an education.

Mineola High was an old brick behemoth and, like most high schools of the time, smelled of Brylcreem and body odor. It would be a while before the boys room was filled with pot smoke.

The school housed four kinds of kidsjocks, hoods (post-greaser punks, Sharks and Jets who kept their cigarettes rolled up in their T-shirt sleeves), the kids not smart enough to consider college who majored in woodshop, and the few weirdoes who went out for drama. Music at Mineola was pretty much nonexistent, and probably thought of by the administration to be totally off-the-wall, if not dangerously extreme. Rock music was still considered a threat.

As a nice Jewish boy with beatnik tendencies, I didnt really fit in to any of those four categories (I didnt know it then, but I was just waiting for the 60s to really get started), so I quickly had to find a way to survive high school without being shunned by the entire student body and doomed to acute social depression and greater than normal teen angst.

I decided to become a journalistnot the news kind of journalist, more like the gossip kind of journalistreporting on the comings and goings of the underbelly of our little postpubescent adolescent society. I took journalism class and somehow talked my way into getting my own column in the school newspaper. I would become the J. J. Hunsecker of Mineola High School. Why on earth would I want to have a column? To blackmail my fellow classmates. What could I possibly gain by putting everybodys dirty laundry out to dry? Security. I would use my column to blackmail the physically threatening hoods and pompously condescending jocks so that they would allow me to survive in this depressing teenage jungle that I was stuck in, and in return they would not have to suffer the humiliation that my malevolent little world of gossip and innuendo could offer.