Blood, Sweat & Tears’ Steve Katz reflects on his life in music, ahead of East Lyme appearance

April 16, 2023 1:45 am • Last Updated: April 17, 2023 10:41 am

By Kristina Dorsey
Features Editor

Steve Katz (Courtesy of Steve Katz)

The cover of Steve Katz’s memoir

Steve Katz is a part of rock ‘n’ roll history.

Katz — a guitarist, singer and songwriter — was a founding member of both The Blues Project and Blood, Sweat & Tears. He played Woodstock with the latter and the Monterey Pop Festival with the former. He has won a trio of Grammys and sold nearly 29 million records.

That’s not all.

He produced Lou Reed’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal” and “Sally Can’t Dance” albums.

And he became an executive for Mercury Records and Green Linnet Records, which focused on traditional Irish music.

Katz, who has lived in northwestern Connecticut for years, will be in East Lyme on Saturday to tell tales about his storied life and play some of his best-known songs — no doubt including “Sometimes in Winter” and “Steve’s Song,” both of which he wrote.

His show will be held at East Lyme High School, and the free event is presented by the East Lyme Library Foundation.

Katz will also be at the Garde Arts Center on May 16 for a screening of the documentary “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”

In a phone interview last week, Katz said the first questions people tend to ask him are about Blood, Sweat & Tears or the group’s gig at Woodstock.

“Woodstock, we were in and out, and as I say in my book, it was really not comfortable. Monterey Pop Festival was really comfortable,” he says.

Indeed, in his memoir “Blood, Sweat and My Rock ‘n’ roll Years: Is Steve Katz a Rock Star?” — which is an entertaining read, well written and full of humor and insight — Katz elaborated about the 2 a.m. Woodstock performance: “We were very uncomfortable, played a decent set for an unholy amount of people, and left … For us it was a gig, slightly unusual, but a gig nonetheless.”

Katz says a lot of people are very interested in The Blues Project as well and what it was like in Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s.

“Greenwich Village, which was this beautiful little Italian neighborhood, became overrun by kids from Long Island, New Jersey, coming to see what the fuss was about. The fuss was about rock and roll. We were playing at the Night Owl Café along with James Taylor and the Flying Machine and Jerry Jeff Walker and Circus Maximus. And then you had the Lovin’ Spoonful up the block; when you made a right turn onto MacDougal Street, you had the Café Wha?, where Jimmy James and the Flames were playing. Jimmy went to England and became Jimi Hendrix. And Richie Havens was passing around the basket. It was incredible, it was an incredible time.”

With The Blues Project and BS&T, Katz had many great creative and career highs. BS&T, for instance, won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1970 for their self-titled album, and they were given the award by Louis Armstrong. (That release featured “Sometimes in Winter.”)

In his book, Katz also discusses dealing with some challenging personalities — notably David Clayton-Thomas in BS&T and Al Kooper in The Blues Project and BS&T — and the drama that’s possibly inherent in bands consisting of 20-somethings.

“We had very difficult personalities. We were all crazy. I don’t know how other bands dealt with that, but we went to a group therapist once. That’s how crazy we were. But when you’re that age when you’re in a band, it’s like a brotherhood. You love and hate the guys you work with at the same time. And basically, you’re immature. You don’t know how to really deal with it. You’re at each other’s throats one day, and you get up onstage and play with each other, and it sounds great. There’s no feeling in the world as good as being up on stage and having it click,” Katz says.

He adds, “When you have a good night onstage — like with Blood, Sweat & Tears, for instance, when the horns would come in — it’s just an amazing, cathartic experience.”

Meeting MLK and Groucho

Asked why he wrote his 2015 memoir when he did, Katz says, “I guess getting older, you figure, well, it’s time to put my memories down. And a lot of people — friends and relatives and stuff like that — said, ‘You know, you really ought to write a book because your stories are so good and funny and interesting,’ because I grew up at a place in rock ‘n’ roll that people especially now are really interested in. … It reflects what it was like in the early 1960s, growing up and playing in Greenwich Village, joining The Blues Project, quitting school and just becoming a rock ‘n’ roll person.”

Katz’s book boasts cameos by a who’s who of legends. Katz remembers accidentally slamming a car door on Eric Clapton’s fingers. During a party, Katz saw Groucho Marx; Marx asked what Katz was doing in a building he mentioned, and Katz said, “My brother works on that floor.” Marx responded, “He should get up and sit in a chair,” and then turned and walked away.

And sometimes the encounters were relatively uneventful. When Katz tells people that he spoke with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance, he says the response is “Oh, what was it about? What did you talk about?” Well, Katz recalls, “Martin Luther King said, ‘Can you give Joan a message?’ — Joan Baez —and I said, ‘Sure.’ That was the conversation.”

Katz writes in his memoir about working with Lou Reed, which tended to be taxing because of Reed’s raging drug habit and his ill-tempered personality. But the two releases Katz produced proved to be Reed’s most successful; “Sally Can’t Dance” was Reed’s only top-10 album, and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal” was his biggest seller.

An amusing sidenote: for the live “Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal,” Katz had to sub in an audience/applause track when one of the two recorded during the concert was missing, probably due to a faulty cable. So engineer Gus Mossler went to the RCA vault and suggested using an audience track from a John Denver show. That’s part of what ended up on “Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal.”

Feeling lucky

When he was in BS&T and making a lot of money, Katz was already thinking about getting out of the city and into the country. He now lives in South Kent with wife Alison Palmer, a ceramics artist.

On the morning of this interview, he had gone into his little studio/office and picked up his guitar to play it.

“I’m really lucky that, at my age and as I go into old age, that I can pick up an instrument and play it. I feel really bad for people that can’t do that. I feel blessed in that way. It’s your life.”