The difference between
Blood, Sweat & Tears and the group's preceding long-player,
Child Is Father to the Man, is the difference between a monumental seller that with its sheer weight of numbers moved onto peoples' turntables and with its instances of experimentation moved millions of listeners and shifted their tastes in new and unexpected ways, and a record that was "merely" a huge critical success. Arguably, the
Blood, Sweat & Tears that made this self-titled second album, consisting of five of the eight original members and four newcomers, including singer
David Clayton-Thomas, was really a different group from the one that made
Child Is Father to the Man, which was done largely under the direction of singer/songwriter/keyboard player/arranger
Al Kooper. They had certain similarities to the original: the musical mixture of classical, jazz, and rock elements was still apparent and the interplay between the horns and the keyboards was still occurring, even if those instruments were being played by different people.
Kooper was even still present as an arranger on two tracks, notably the initial hit "You've Made Me So Very Happy." But the second
BS&T, under the aegis of producer James William Guercio, was a less adventurous unit and, as fronted by
Clayton-Thomas, a far more commercial one. Not only did the album contain three songs that neared the top of the charts as singles -- "Happy," "Spinning Wheel," and "And When I Die" -- but the whole album, including an arrangement of "God Bless the Child" and the radical rewrite of
Traffic's "Smiling Phases," was wonderfully accessible. "Blues, Pt. 2" may have been nothing special to jazz aficionados, many of whom resented
BS&T, and its brief vignette into
Eric Clapton territory on its quotation of riffs from a pair of recent
Cream hits meant nothing to the converted, but it opened up a few million college students who bought this album to a field that they'd scarcely ever bothered with before. This was also the record that almost single-handedly turned French expressionist composer Erik Satie into a popular composer 44 years after his death with its opening and closing "Variations on a Theme of Erik Satie" and transformed Satie's "Trois Gymnopedies" into a popular composition (within a year it was being used in a Maxwell House commercial). It was a repertoire to build a career on, and
Blood, Sweat & Tears did exactly that, although they never came close to equaling this album. [An expanded CD version was released in 2000.] ~ William Ruhlmann & Bruce Eder