Color Blind The Blues Project didn’t need a reason to love the blues text John Kruth photography Kai Shuman, Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images
Although the band’s diversity and eclecticism produced some great music (Kalb lived only to jam the blues, while Katz’s specialty was wistful ballads like Donovan’s “Catch the Wind,” and Kooper led R&B cookers like “Shake Me, Wake Me”), it ultimately would suffer an identity crisis that led to its early demise. “Kooper and Kalb’s insanity got to the point like they were bash- ing each other’s heads together. Al and Danny used to have fights onstage to see who could play the loudest and the highest,” Katz recalls. “Whenever they did this, they would make mistakes, but the audience at the Café Au Go Go, which was always very stoned, would look at us and say, ‘Far out!’ [ laughs ] And I would turn to Roy and say, ‘My God, that was the worst sounding thing I ever heard in my life!’ ” “I always took chances musically,” Kalb counters. “Al’s organ and my guitar were like two intersecting horn lines that kept building and building in the manner of Charlie Mingus’s horns in his Jazz Workshop. These days, our music and the contribution we made seems like it’s been airbrushed out of history. “We were out in California when Tommy Flanders quit, and we were about to break up,” Kalb continues. “We didn’t know if we could go on without a lead singer. So we went back to New York and played the Café Au Go Go, on the same bill with Muddy Waters, and were debuting our version of [Muddy’s song] ‘Two Trains Run- ning.’ It was eleven minutes long, and we’d changed it all around. And Muddy was there, watching. He meant everything and a half to us. After the set, I asked him what he thought. And he said, ‘You really got to me.’ And that’s my reason for living today!” The band fell apart in ’67. Al, inspired by archrival Paul But- terfield’s Blues Band, opted to add horns to the mix, while Kalb was staunchly opposed. Exit Kooper with Katz in tow. Enter (the original/pre–David Clayton Thomas) Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose brilliant debut album Child Is Father to the Man (produced by John Simon) featured Kooper’s funky White-boy-soul arrangements. Kulberg and Blumenfeld would hook up with Seatrain, the first post-Beatles band that George Martin produced, and Danny Kalb, after a long bad trip to the “Twilight Zone,” is back once again play- ing blues in small clubs with passion, taste, and chops. .
It all began in the summer of ’63 when Elektra producer Paul Roth- child felt the time had come to put together an album of young, White blues singers. Amongst the best of this often-mocked genre were a bunch of country-style blues pickers hailing from the coffee- houses of New York, Cambridge, and Minneapolis, including Dave Van Ronk, Geoff Muldaur, and Danny Kalb. Rothchild’s hunch (as with Tim Buckley, the Doors, and Janis Joplin) was spot on. The compilation, titled The Blues Project , sold nearly 300,000 copies. On New Year’s Eve 1964, Danny Kalb, a session guitarist on albums by folk singers Judy Collins and Van Ronk, began assem- bling a band of fellow blues fanatics that would include drummer Roy Blumenfeld, guitarist Steve Katz of the Even Dozen Jug Band (which featured Maria Muldaur and the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Se- bastian), and classical flautist turned bassist, Andy Kulberg (Check out Kulberg’s electric flute on “Flute Thing,” written by Al Kooper, who nicked the riff from Barney Kessell and was later sampled for “Flute Loop” by the Beastie Boys). Tommy Flanders, a Mick Jagger look-alike from Cambridge, Massachussetts, fronted the group. “It’s a funny story,” Steve Katz says, recalling his audition for the Blues Project. “I was used to playing acoustic guitar, and Danny came to see me because [guitarist] Artie Traum had gone on vaca- tion to Europe for a couple weeks, and he wanted to know if I could sub for him. I told him I never played electric guitar before. I put a D’Armond pickup on my [Gibson] J-200, plugged it in, and the feedback was so ridiculous, I just turned it down to zero. It looked like I was playing with the band, but nobody could hear me. After- wards, Danny told me, ‘That was some really tasty playing.’ ” Appropriating their name from the hot-selling album, Kalb’s crew had their first audition at Columbia Records. Producer Tom Wilson (best known for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”) called in session guitarist turned organist Al Kooper to loan some support. (Columbia passed but they would later sign with Verve, with Wilson at the helm.) The next day over lunch, Kooper was asked to join what he later dubbed “The Mystic White Knights of the Blues.” But around the Village (after Flanders’s departure over refusing to pony up for new equipment and the artistry of Steve’s mom’s scissors), the Blues Project became known as “The Jewish Beatles.”
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