still assaulted and set dogs on fans who were 
too demonstrative. Poland was more uniform-
ly positive, with a more sophisticated audience 
and concert facility. 
“The thing that really got to me was these 
people really loved what we did, and we made 
thousands of people very happy. That was our 
silver lining,
” Katz acknowledges.

MAKING THE FILM
The BS&T entourage — including other 
Jewish members Fred Lipsius, Lew Soloff 
and Jerry Hyman — was also invited to tour 
Auschwitz during its time in Poland; filmmak-
er Scheinfeld says some went, but Katz recalls 
the band declined. 
“I really wanted to go,
” he says, “but then I 
remembered they were making a film of this, 
and I could see them putting ‘Spinning Wheel’ 
under that scene or something. I didn’t want 
to show us going to Auschwitz with ‘Spinning 
Wheel’ playing underneath it, you know?”
The documentary marks the first time foot-
age from the trip is being seen. A crew led by 
Donn Cambern accompanied the band and 
captured 65 hours of footage for what was 
supposed to be a feature film. That was later 
recast as a one-hour TV special and eventually 
shelved altogether, with no record of where the 
footage was stored. 
“I’m always up for some good detec-
tive work,
” says Scheinfeld, whose 
interest was piqued during an early 
2020 lunch with Colomby, when the 
drummer told him about the tour 
and the circumstances behind it. “We 
cast a very wide net looking for this 
footage,
’ he adds, an arduous task because 
the original production company was long 
gone and there was no record of the footage 
in scores of storage facilities. Eventually, how-
ever, two “pristine” copies of the 53-minute 
television version were found, about to be 
destroyed, and gave Scheinfeld “the foundation 
of the movie.
”
What the Hell... includes a trove of additional 
unseen footage as well as government docu-
ments housed at the University of Arkansas. 
There are interviews with some of the band 
members and others in the entourage, as well 
as concert-goers still in those countries and 
historical commentators. Audio recordings of 
the concert were discovered in the Academy 
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret 
Herrick Library and will be released as a 
soundtrack on April 21, along with a digi-
tal-only version of a score Colomby co-wrote 
and recorded with the current BS&T lineup.

Scheinfeld’s team also located a memo from 
then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to 
Nixon about the trip; Katz, who didn’t know 
about it until he saw the film, chuckles as he 
says “the ironic thing is Henry Kissinger lives 
about a half a mile down the road from me 
(in Connecticut). I should really knock on his 
door — ‘Hey, do you remember this memo …
’
“The story absolutely broadened as we were 
doing this,
’ says Scheinfeld, whose great-grand-
father was a prominent rabbi in Milwaukee. 
‘We learned a lot more about what was going 
on both here and on the ground in Eastern 
Europe. I mean, we had no idea that the activ-
ities of a rock band would make it to the desk 
of the president of the United States, right? So 
we were able to piece together a multi-layered 
story, most of which had never been told.
”

CONCERT BACKLASH
It’s not a story with a happy ending, either. 
BS&T returned to the U.S. to face backlash 
from all sides — conservatives who didn’t like 
rock ’n’ roll in the first place or the group’s 
leftist stance, and a left wing that slammed the 
group for working for the government. Abbie 
Hoffman and the Yippies labeled the band 
Blood, Sweat & Bulls*** while protesting a 
concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden. 
Katz, Colomby and Clayton-Thomas had 
inadvertently made matters worse during an 
“ambush” press conference upon their return, 
talking about what they’
d learned from being 
in those countries. 
Even playing an ACLU show later that year 
to benefit victims of the Kent State University 
shootings didn’t help redeem the band. 

“It was really terrible,
” Katz says. “We lost 
a huge part of our audience. That Eastern 
European tour really stuck the nail in our cof-
fin, or career.
”
Scheinfeld says, “They were anti-Nixon, 
anti-Vietnam war, like a lot of people under 
30 years old. And then they go on this tour 
and they see what it really is like under 
authoritarian regimes and Communism. 
They came home with a whole different per-
spective: ‘Yeah, we don’t like the war. We don’t 
like Nixon. But if you’re thinking that over 
there is better than we have — not so. We saw 
it. We know.’ You have to admire those guys 
that they could experience this and change 
their thinking, and yet it caused them some 
significant problems.”
Despite the aftermath, Katz says now that 
the tour “really opened my eyes — it opened 

my eyes, for sure. It didn’t make me any more 
conservative or pro-America — probably the 
opposite. But it was pretty incredible to be 
in those communities and see what a REAL 
authoritarian government was like.”
What the Hell... opened March 24 in New 
York and Los Angeles and is rolling out 
to other cities during the next few weeks. 
Scheinfeld says it will then move to a 
streaming service, which is currently being 
negotiated. 
“I was totally surprised at how good it is,” 
Katz says. “John was like a detective, uncov-
ering all this stuff. There were things about 
this tour I didn’t even know about till I saw 
the movie. It’s something nobody really 
knew about, so I’m happy the story is being 
told, finally.” 

APRIL 6 • 2023 | 55

Steve Katz in Belgrade.

