We’ve had some pretty weird cover versions on Dilate Choonz in the past, for sure, but this has to be one of the weirdest ones I’ve ever heard.

I was lucky enough to pick up Blood, Sweat & Tears’s 3rd album very cheap and in good condition at a car boot sale last week – I had a vinyl copy on long-term, er, “loan” (sorry Paul) from a while back but it had unfortunately become warped beyond playability on most equipment. Given the subject matter, perhaps it was Satan himself distorting the fabric of the record. That’s what Sarah Palin said, anyway, when I raised the matter with her in the run-up to next week’s Vice Presidential debates.

Blood, Sweat and Tears was a late 60s US ‘jazz-pop-rock combo’ outfit (for want of a better term) put together by the legendary Al Kooper, who was a member of Bob Dylan’s touring band in 1965-66 (he played organ on ‘Like a Rolling Stone’.) Their debut album Child Is Father To The Man featured jazzy cover versions of tunes by such luminaries as Tim Buckley (who surely should be featured on DC himself at some point), Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Carole King. Unfortunately, Kooper left after the debut, leaving a still-commercially-successful outfit increasingly unsure what to do with itself.

By the third album, the intelligently titled Blood Sweat & Tears 3, vocalist David Clayton-Thomas (described by my trusty, well-thumbed copy of the Rolling Stone Record Guide (1979 edition) as “an acquired taste at best”) had joined the group, giving them the confidence needed to produce berserk masterpieces like this.

An avant-garde classical brass opening is bolted onto something that sounds a like Tom Jones locked in the recording studio with Herb Alpert’s Tijuana brass and an organist who plays any chord he wants just as long as it’s not in the key of the song, all fed very bad acid and told that Miles Davis is coming to eat their children. And it gets weirder still, with the hilarious spoken/whispered third verse.

One wonders what the Rolling Stones made of it all. Probably they thought ‘some nice royalties coming to us from this.’

I haven’t yet managed to find anything else in the B,S & T canon that comes anywhere near this for sheer craziness (and given the tedium of most of the rest of their 3rd album, I’m not that inclined to explore much further) but do let me know if you know differently.

• Available to buy here :: in a 2-CD package with the next album, called - you guessed it - Blood Sweat & Tears 4.
• Al Kooper's website :: See what the great man has to say.

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