Over the weekend, while visiting my hometown of Wheeling, WV I found myself riding past the historic Capitol Music Hall, the one-time home to Jamboree USA (think smaller hootenanny cousin of the Grand Ole Opry) and the famous WWVA country music radio station (referenced, I will have you know, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, something that amazed me when I was a kid). The once-threadbare theater has had a million-dollar makeover in recent years, the new marquee had just gone up and was brightly advertising upcoming shows by Bill Cosby and Kenny Rogers.

The Jamboree hosted some pretty big country music performers in the 1970s and 80s—Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Roy Clark, Ray Price, Charlie Pride, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Wheeling’s own Doc Williams—and a number of middling rock acts like Cheap Trick, Bay City Rollers, The Michael Schenker Group, Blue Öyster Cult, Ted Nugent, Golden Earring, Brownsville Station, Angel… you get the picture. I never saw all that many shows there, but I did catch Harry Chapin (which was absolutely magical), Tanya Tucker and… Blood, Sweat & Tears who absolutely blew my doors off. I wasn’t a fan when I walked in—I think I’d won a pair of tickets from a radio station, I can’t recall—but I was knocked out by how hard a band of horn players could ROCK.
 

 
All of this was aided and abetted by the (much) larger-than-life voice of their lead singer David Clayton-Thomas.

I still love BS&T to this day and my favorite song by them is “Lucretia MacEvil” which I have never seen a live clip of on YouTube… until today and it’s only had 182 views at this point. This is from Sweden, 1971 and they fucking KILL IT. Nearly fifteen minutes long and it never gets boring.