Album Year: 1982
Age: 0
Track Number: 6
Yes, this is the second Blood, Sweat, and Tears song on this mixtape. While the last two entries were presented for cultural ambiance (a means of describing the musical world I was born into), “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” is a song that was actually probably played both around me and for me when I was a baby. As previously mentioned, the self-titled album by Blood, Sweat, and Tears was one that came on quite a bit in my house growing up. As such, the band always signified the generational divide to me while I was growing up. They were my parents’ rock band, not Poison or Nine Inch Nails or whoever I happened to be into at the time. It wasn’t that I found the group to be offensively irksome or maudlin (like I did with The Beach Boys- a band I love now). I just didn’t understand their appeal. Given the existence of other great music in the world, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would settle for BST.
Yet now, though I still don’t particularly care for the group, I find my parents’ embrace of them somewhat endearing. I can get how the group’s complex jazz musicianship and classical theatrics might have at one time sounded drastic and exciting. Their use of polyphonics were surely vibrant and new in a world where records had only recently been rescued from mono. David Clayton-Thomas’s voice could sound both sweet and gruff and it was a great mimesis of all black voices, a simulation that seemed to serve a blow to the argument for “authenticity” as the crucial crux of a good record.
Before Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, which it should be noted, only came out a year prior to Blood, Sweat and Tears, audiences mostly looked upon rock as a cheap commodity and if the word “glut” or “bloat” was to be placed next to it, it was only to emphasize the large volume of turnover in the market. By the end of the 1970s, the center had shifted and massive budgets and overproduction were the norm. Lenny Kaye/Lester Bangs types dismissed BST as symptomatic of everything wrong with music, and championed instead dumb, stripped-down, primal, adolescent noisy music (what would eventually become punk), a music that was not only anti-prog and anti-fusion, but its opposite.
In an interview with Rob Sheffield, Fluxblog’s Matthew Perpetua used a term from comic books to refer to musicians who were once big who have been “written out of continuity”. Music history, like any history, is written by the winners. For years I thought Blood, Sweat, and Tears were just some also-rans that my parents happened to like in tandem to big acts like The Beatles. But as it turns out the group was exceptionally popular. “You’ve Made Me So Happy” was the first of three #2 singles from the album, one of several to go multi-platinum. The group were even a headlining act at Woodstock.
Most infamously, the group even swiped a Grammy for Album of the Year in 1970 for Blood, Sweat, and Tears, beating out Abbey Road. To be fair, The Beatles had actually only won one previous album of the year Grammy, for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Album of the Year winners in the ensuing years included the illustrious likes of Toto, Lionel Ritchie, Celine Dion, and Christopher Cross, proving that the bar was not exactly set very high.
Another Album of the Year artist nominee in 1970, Johnny Cash (nominated for At San Quentin), had previously recorded an album called Blood, Sweat, and Tears. Although both essentially covers records, the divide between the two albums couldn’t be greater. Whereas Cash had sung gritty paeans to the working man, BST had an opulent-sounding sheen to their music, complete with gentle flutes, apocalyptic brass, and song suite like structures. It was perhaps this that so frustrated BST’s critics, the fact that they not only got rich, but decidedly sounded rich as well.
“You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” is adapted from a Brenda Holloway song on Motown. Somewhat unusually for Motown, Holloway actually retains a songwriting credit on the track, so she really does own the tune. As such though, it’s one of the more poppy songs from the Blood, Sweat, and Tears album, but that doesn’t mean that the group didn’t do everything in their willpower to add a mosaic of different patterns and shapes into the mix. At times, the group’s virtuosity even appears to drown the passion that the song’s lyrics allude to, or, at worst, divert from it entirely. With that said, it’s not a bad song. It’s just pointlessly tiered. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this is through a play-by-play.
The song starts with horns gallantly fluttering as if announcing some kind of regal entrance as the organs sing the chorus in a kind of pageantry that seems destined to secure the track as a wedding anthem hereafter. The organs soon bleed out into harmonic chords juxtaposed against a mobile cool-jazz bassline. As Clayton-Thomas announces “I’ve lost at love before”, it’s clear that the opening was a tease, as the track is now a blues, a sad lament at the singer’s previous romantic missteps.
Then, suddenly, joyful horns burst out in segmented hits to crush this spell of depression. “I chose you for the one”, Clayton-Thomas says, and, contra just a few seconds ago, “Now we’re having so much fun”. The snare and the kick become a four-to-the-floor under these vocals, making the connection of the bridge to the chorus seem almost mechanical. It’s a device which allows the chorus to sound more loose and freeing in comparison, but the chorus almost becomes an afterthought to the high tension of the bridge. To ameliorate this contrast, the chorus itself is split between the tension of the “You’ve made me so/Very Happy/ I’m so glad you/” and the release of “Came into my liiiiiife”. For a moment at this juncture as that line is drawn out, the song almost resembles a mid-tempo rock song, but the affect is only temporary.
A whining trumpet then beckons in, caked in reverberation as if coming from an (tin pan) alley down the block. The band goes through another verse of sad blues, joyful horns on the bridge, and the chorus, but this time the chorus is followed by three secessions of horns echoing the melody of chorus as Clayton-Thomas bellows a guttural “Thank you baby!”.
Then, less than halfway through the songs, the horns and guitar/bass engage in a call & response before a fierce round of shouts (“Thank you baby”) are so intense that the music stops and pauses. This (for some odd goddamned reason) causes the entire group to meltdown into sinister minor chords and staccato organ notes like they’re all the sudden in the middle of a Bach concerto. This is where the song loses me completely. Is this supposed to be the rocky road of a relationship? Or the thought of life without each other? If none of these reaching arguments apply, the entire mid-section where they riff on some dark groove like they’ve been transported to an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer 18 minute opus doesn’t really seem to serve any purpose other than pure, undistilled wankery.
Like it never happened, there’s then an immediate revamp of the chorus, which is back in a major key, though the chorus is now sonically different. The instrumentation has multiplied and the rhythm section is maintaining the intensity of the solo, which makes the final breakdown into sweet piano and organ all the more cathartic. This last part, which is probably the most conservative part of the song, is also probably my favorite part of the song.
In comparison, the original by Brenda Holloway sounds practically minimalist. Her version is driven by bass, which may be why BST’s Jim Fielder sounds like he’s competing against it (and amazingly enough, seems to win vs. The Funk Brothers). Though Holloway has a fantastic voice, she seems to be layering a too-loose melody on top of a kind of stiff composition, approaching almost Tori Amos levels of melisma and staggered syncopated articulation.
In my opinion, this Little Miss Soul rendition is the better Motown version:
Of course, this was cut in 1970, after the BST version. The success of the Blood, Sweat, and Tears rendition caused this song to have something of a massive shelf life, to the point where it’s practically a standard now. Do a YouTube search and you’ll find the archives flooded with covers, ranging from treacle crap to the sublime. Here’s a few of the good ones.
The bass work of the original may explain why the song seemed a good fit for reggae stars like Alton Ellis and Barrington Levy:
Lou Rawls even named an album after the song. This version (produced by David Axelrod) may be the definitive version of the song. It was also sampled by Kanye West:
I think the energy of the instrumental on this Sammy Davis Jr. version (released on Tamla Motown) matches the energy level BST was looking for in its weird asides, but overall Sammy’s vocal is a bit lacking. You can even here his voice cracking in parts. Wish they’d cut a version without Sammy:
These aren’t really quality versions, but to those who think BST took a black song and made it white, you obviously haven’t heard how white this song could be:
And here’s a French cover, to prove the phenomena was not restricted to our shores:
Amazingly enough, my second favorite may be Cher’s cover, which was an unreleased track left off her self-titled 1969 album.
Then there’s this one, by Chris Clark. For some reason, this song was from the only album (C.C. Rides Again) released on Motown imprint Weed. Their infamous byline was “Your Favorite Artists Are On Weed”. Notable in the below is a musical quote from Nina Rota’s score to Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.
And it’s the Romeo and Juliet aspect of the song that will make me never able to hate the Blood, Sweat, and Tears version. As a song, it’s kind, polite, and patient, everything people like Bangs despised, but hardly less-than-admirable. It will also always make me think of my parents hearing the song and thinking of one another. Though, I’m not sure Clayton-Thomas was entirely sincere in transforming this song into a hit, I know at least my parents were, as were the myriad people playing it at their weddings, as they sang along to an expression of their mutual admiration. Even if it’s a bit overindulgent, it’s the sweetness of Holloway’s sentiment that shines through in the BST version’s best parts.
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