Sat 6/21 @ 7pm
By David Budin
What was the most popular band … oh – wait a minute; I need to quickly explain something first: I hate articles that open with rhetorical questions. That’s why this one is not a rhetorical question; it’s a trick question. Okay, now: What was the most popular band in Cleveland in the mid-‘60s?
You’ll know the answer to this only if you are within a certain, relatively narrow age range, and were living in this region at that time. And if your mother let you go into the University Circle area, which most white parents who lived farther than, say, five miles away from it did not.
Or if you, like most of the younger people who frequented La Cave, were able to sneak away and slip down there, to that jazz, folk, blues and, eventually, rock club in the basement of a now-long-gone building on Euclid Avenue at East 107th Street.
The answer is the Blues Project. It’s a trick question because the band wasn’t from Cleveland and didn’t reside here and had no ties here. Except for La Cave. Because within a very short time, and for about the next three years, it developed as strong a cult following in Cleveland as any band could hope for, anywhere. Any band at that time, anyway, when only the Beatles and the Rolling Stones played huge auditoriums or stadiums, and rock clubs hadn’t really come into being yet.
“La Cave was our favorite place to play,” Steve Katz recently told me, “along with the Café Au Go Go and the Filmore.” The other two were famous music venues in New York City. The Blues Project was a New York band that played blues and blues-rock, and folk-rock, and jazz-rock, and psychedelic rock. Five young white guys – all great musicians – who totally packed La Cave about twice a year. In fact, La Cave had to start holding two separate shows a night when the Blues Project played there – cleared the place out after the first show to let in the crowd that was lined up on Euclid Avenue in the dead of winter or the heat of summer for the second show.
When you mention the Blues Project to just about anyone who saw them, you get pretty much the same reaction: some variation of “best band I ever heard live.” The band’s sound did not translate as effectively to recordings, for a few reasons.
“We were really good live,” Katz said. “It was a real shame that we had such a horrible record company. Out of three albums, they gave us enough money to do one studio album. We were never captured live. But nobody [at the label] really cared. Tom Wilson was our producer and he was more concerned with Eric Burdon and the Animals getting studio time than us. And the technology for capturing live performances really wasn’t there until the ‘70s.”
It’s a good thing it did come along, because Katz produced what he thinks may be “one of the seminal live albums of the ‘70s, Lou Reed’s Rock n Roll Animal.”
But, before that, when the Blues Project broke up – right after playing the most significant music event of that era, the Monterey International Pop Music Festival – Cleveland’s Blues Project fans were devastated. I came home at 5:00 a.m. from playing an all-night early June 1967 gig with my band, and the first words out of my girlfriend’s mouth were, “The Blues Project broke up.” The news felt deflating.
Al Kooper was in the Blues Project, fresh from his recording-session work on Bob Dylan’s first forays into rock music (Kooper came up with that iconic organ line on “Like a Rolling Stone”). And Steve Katz was a member – he played rhythm guitar (not lead, because the band already had one of the best lead guitarists in history, Danny Kalb), and he played harmonica, and he sang lead on the songs that required good singing – that is, the more pop-leaning ones. Kalb could sing the blues, and Kooper could sing white R&B, but Katz could sing nice.
And Katz is going to sing nice, here in Cleveland again, on Sat 6/21. But more than that, he’s going to tell fascinating and funny stories about taking guitar lessons as a teenager from two legends, Rev. Gary Davis and Dave Van Ronk; and playing in the Even Dozen Jug Band, the early-‘60s Elektra Records group that also spawned future stars, including John Sebastian and Maria Muldaur; and the tumultuous years with the Blues Project; and starting the massively successful horn band Blood, Sweat & Tears with Kooper; and producing two of Lou Reed’s most important albums; and starting the band American Flyer, with members of three other bands, that was produced by the Beatles’ producer George Martin; and serving as a label executive for two record companies; and more. And he’ll sing corresponding songs throughout.
Katz is a funny, articulate and self-effacing guy who’s a terrific story teller. He’s such a great story teller that I’m not going to tell you the stories he told me in a recent phone conversation. I want you to hear them from him.
Okay – I’ll tell you one thing he told me. I told Katz that when I was making records in New York in the late ‘60s, I had once seen the future Blood, Sweat & Tears lead singer and star, but then-still-unknown David Clayton Thomas having a tantrum in a record company’s offices.
Katz chuckled, knowingly, and said, “Yeah. Looking back – well, even then – what we really would have liked to have done was taken David’s vocal chords out and put them on a stool in front of an audience or at a mic’ in a recording session, and then put them in a box every night for the roadies to take with them – and not have to deal with person who owned them.”
But you’ll get the whole the story and a lot more behind-the-scenes stuff when you hear Katz at the Unity Center of the Heights, at 2653 S. Taylor Rd. at Fairmount Blvd., in Cleveland Heights. It’s in the basement – but it’s not like the La Cave “basement” – this one’s just a couple of steps down. Opening the show is the Cleveland ‘60s-style folk band Long Road, who also will be doing a song with Katz in his part of the concert. I’m in Long Road, but even if I weren’t, I still would have attended Katz’s show, and I still would have written this article, minus the sentence before this one.
The show is also a fund-raiser for the Steve Katz Music Scholarship for Underprivileged Children.
Get tickets at http://unitycenteronline.org, or 216-321-7566.
David Budin is a journalist and author and a musician living in Cleveland Heights. The former editor of Cleveland Magazine and Northern Ohio Live is currently writing two pop-music-history-related books. He is a member of the ’60s-style folk band Long Road.Cleveland Heights, OH 44118
One Response to “Relive the ’60s w/ The Blues Project’s Steve Katz”
Snarky
The original Paul Butterfield Blues Band just so many miles ahead of Kooper , Kalb , and company.
Typical small town opinion from a less than stellar source of musical acumen.
Yet another Cleveland piece of trivial nonsense.
Hound Dog Taylor was perhaps the best live blues band to play Cleveland in the day.