Inside Scoop: Blood, Sweat & Tears at Woodstock. What happened?!

KENT — Steve Katz, just 24 years old at the time yet already a founding member of two major rock groups — including superstar band Blood, Sweat & Tears (BS&T) — looked out over a faceless crowd of half a million rain-soaked kids and worried that he was about to get electrocuted by a microphone.

It was 50 years ago at Max Yasgur’s Bethel, N.Y., farm, long before Katz became a Kent resident and local music legend. 

In 1969, BS&T was a top-headlined platinum-album band, promised to be the Woodstock festival’s second-highest-paid act (behind Jimi Hendrix, at the peak of his popularity.) 

Best recording ever of BS&T

Katz loathed being there. As he recalls, his white pants were muddy, the huge stage was slick with rain puddles, the air was chilly, and when the band went on at 2 a.m. their fabled horn section was way out of tune. Electric cables made scary buzzing noises through the gargantuan speakers. Katz was exhausted, having driven in from a previous gig in Portland, Maine, and due in L.A. the following day.

Film cameras (including one operated by Martin Scorsese) and tape decks were running, but for half a century nobody heard a note of the band’s performance — not until this past August, when a 38-disc boxed CD set was produced by Andy Zax and released by Rhino Records. 

The BS&T contract for Woodstock — agreed to more than a year before the event — had specified that if a movie or album were made, the group would get a hefty percentage of the take. So the cameras were shut off during their performance. Several other bands missing from the Woodstock movie and original albums, including Janis Joplin and The Band, suffered the same fate. 

BS&T ended up never getting paid a dime, and Katz only heard how the band sounded when Zax shared the recording with him during this past summer. 

“I never knew they made a recording of us,” said Katz in a recent interview at his Kent home. “That was a shock.” 

Even better, Zax had painstakingly re-engineered the recordings to get the horns to sound in tune. 

“We sounded great!”, Katz said. “It’s certainly the best live recording BS&T ever made.”

Woodstock = Critical mass

For Katz, who has just released a new CD of his own, “The Juggle” (www.stevekatzmusic.wordpress.com), Woodstock was the end of an era, not the epitome of hippie culture many others make it out to be. 

“Now that millions of people are into this counterculture thing, that’s the end of it,” he recalls thinking. Prior to Woodstock, Katz’ experiences playing in Greenwich Village coffee shops and the hippie love-fest that was the 1967 Monterey Pop festival felt liberating. 

“All our rebelliousness against the ’50s was blossoming. We could wear the clothes we wanted to, we could have the sex we wanted to, we could do all these things that were counter to what we grew up with. The adults were making bad decisions politically, and black people didn’t have civil rights. We just rebelled against all of that. It was wonderful. And the music was part of that. We were doing music nobody had done before.” 

With Woodstock, however, corporations and politicians started turning the youth movement into just another commercial opportunity. 

“I felt it at the time,” Katz said. “I think of the word ‘co-opting’” — taking the momentum built up for enacting societal change and turning toward individual monetary gains. Typically self-effacing, Katz owns up to his own role in the change. 

“I plead guilty to being part of the end of the counterculture,” he said, with a sad smile. 

After the first BS&T album, he said, the band really wanted to get hit singles, which soon arrived fast and furious. They were tired of being hungry hippies. Katz enjoyed the fruits of reaching a broader demographic even if it meant Las Vegas gigs and being shunned by some die-hard early fans. 

New album mixes old, new

Today, Katz still plays and records, but on a much more manageable scale. His new CD combines live recordings of recent gigs, some studio work, and some gems from long ago, including a cut of Lou Reed’s signature song, “Sweet Jane,” that features Katz singing and Reed playing backup guitar. 

Mostly these days, Katz plays finger-style guitar, evoking folk and blues greats like the Rev. Gary Davis, whom he knew in New York City when he first began to play, and Dave Van Ronk, who took the time to mentor Katz as a free-range teenager who was commuting to Greenwich Village from his home in Long Island. 

But Katz can’t keep away from rock and roll. Just a few weeks ago, he rejoined his friend Roy Blumenfeld on drums to reprise songs from The Blues Project, the highly influential psychedelic rock band Katz founded in 1967. The band performed at My Father’s Place in Old Saybrook and Jalopy in Brooklyn, among other spots.

Katz’ autobiography, “Blood, Sweat, and My Rock ‘n’ Roll Years,” has just come out in paperback. It’s a funny, honest, and engaging must-read for anyone seeking a clear-eyed snapshot of how rock, Katz and all of us in his generation collectively lost their innocence in times that were a-changing.