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Going Out With A Bang: “And When I Die” by Blood, Sweat & Tears

By Marcello Carlin



In Britain, the last number two of the sixties was “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town” by Kenny Rogers and The First Edition – downbeat (in mood if not in key or tempo), introspective, menacing, fearful. In contrast, America saw out the decade with a defiant upbeat flourish. It is not generally known that after Al Kooper quit BS&T, Laura Nyro was approached ahead of David Clayton-Thomas to be their new singer; she apparently was in a relationship with bassist Jim Fielder and was friendly with drummer Bobby Colomby. However, after consulting with her manager, David Geffen, she opted to continue her own solo career, and given subsequent masterpieces such as Eli And The Thirteenth Confession and New York Tendaberry, who is to say she was wrong?

Nyro recorded “And When I Die” as a teenager in 1966, for her first album More Than A New Discovery (or, as we have it on CD, The First Songs) as a fairly standard gospel workout. She sold the song for $5000 to Peter, Paul and Mary, who interpreted it as a characteristically upbeat folk romp in 1967. Then came BS&T’s version, and it is not an exaggeration or an insult to say that the band – and specifically the song’s arranger, Dick Halligan – have great fun with what they can do with the song.

Indeed, BS&T’s reading sounds like a lightning-speed anthology of trends in twentieth-century American music, including the blues (with lonesome prairie harmonica blown by Steve Katz), staccato marches somewhere between Aaron Copland and “Wooden Heart,” Broadway show tunes, straight jazz, cowboy soundtracks, R&B workouts (“HERE COMES THE DEVIL!! RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIGHT BEHIND!” barks Clayton-Thomas, practically welcoming death and daring Satan to do his worst), Bo Diddley beats and – finally, and most poignantly – ecumenical church hymnals, with ghostly brass configurations worthy of Gil Evans.

I first heard this record on the radio when I was about five or six and the concept of death, or people dying, was still quite alien to me. Now, of course – and perhaps at the other end of life’s rainbow – I find it rather affecting, with the knowledge that poor Laura Nyro didn’t, in the end, get to “go naturally.” Much more than that, however, I can also think of this “And When I Die” as a loudly positive farewell to that most turbulent of decades – one which has been viewed through this blog in a new and peculiar but not displeasing light – roaring and ready to tackle whatever the next decade wants to throw at it. Die with the sixties? Not without a fight, mate. And with Clayton-Thomas’ concluding “There’ll be one child born in this world…to carry on…to carry on, yeah, yeah,” we can even look forward to the similarly defiant, era-ending 2006 coda of “Welcome To The Black Parade.” As for Nyro, I am sure she would have enjoyed the fun and games that the band have with her song – given her mishearing of the crowd at Monterey, I wonder with hindsight whether Streisand’s bizarre lounge act at an open-air rock festival in A Star Is Born wasn’t actually her subtle nod to Nyro (certainly it would have been a considerably subtler gesture than her grievously overwrought assault on “Stoney End”).

Date Record Made Number Two: 29 November 1969
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 1
Record At Number One: “Come Together/Something” by The Beatles
UK Chart Position: None

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