John Scheinfeld‘s What The Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? (Abramorama, 3.24) is not a biography of the band, and basically has zip to do with Al Kooper‘s version of it (late ’67 to late ’68).

It’s about the David Clayton Thomas incarnation (’69 to ’71), I’m told, and more particularly about “a moment in time when BS&T found itself in the crosshairs of a polarized America, as divided then as it is now. It really is a political thriller with great music in it, not a music doc.”

Another description: A doc about how Blood, Sweat & Tears was pressured into sacrificing their cred with a sector of their audience that considered itself hip and anti-establishment.

Wiki: “In May/June ’70 the jazz-fusion band went on a United States Department of State-sponsored tour of Eastern Europe. Voluntary association with the U.S. government was highly unpopular with New Lefty-influenced fans at the time, and BS&T was criticized for this. It is now known that the State Department subtly pressured the group into the tour in exchange for a U.S. residency permit to Clayton-Thomas, who had a criminal record in Canada and had been deported from the U.S. after overstaying his visa.”

The Soviet bloc tour was compounded by BS&T accepting a lucrative gig at Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip — another extremely uncool thing to do at the time.

There’s actually a section of the doc in which Kooper appears (including a rare piece of audio from back in the day), but he’d left the band more than two years before the events depicted in the film.