This week in Texas music history: Fort Worth band Bloodrock releases debut album

From KUTX:

This Week In Texas Music History is supported by Brane Audio.

In February 1970, Fort Worth hard rockers Bloodrock issued their debut album. The band formed the year before with a core of players — Jim Rutledge, Lee Pickens, Nick Taylor, Ed Grundy, and Stevie Hill — who were experienced in the Dallas and Fort Worth scenes that launched the careers of Steve Miller, Boz Scaggs, Don Henley and Jimmie Vaughan.

Some version of the group preceded the Bloodrock name, recording a few regionally successful singles, first as the Naturals in 1963 and then under the name Crowd +1. The group really took off, though, under the influence of the more baroque, even psychedelic, hard blues of Cream, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s.

Their path would actually cross with Hendrix’s a few times, opening for him and sharing the bill at the second Atlanta International Pop Festival in 1970. They also worked with Hendrix’s bandmate Mitch Mitchell at Electric Lady Studios.

Grand Funk Railroad’s manager Terry Knight influenced the band’s reinvention and new name and also engineered their signing to Capitol Records. Bloodrock’s first album was classic 70s hard rock, a stew of psychedelia, riff-heavy machismo, and experimental proto-prog.

The band’s second album, “Bloodrock 2,” achieved their greatest chart success with the horror rock single “D.O.A.” Its lyrics explored the last thoughts of a pilot perishing in a crash. The song’s chart success was the more impressive due to the fact that many radio stations shied from airing it due to its grisly subject matter and the inclusion of ambulance sirens in the mix.

A spring 1971 tour with Grand Funk Railroad cemented Bloodrock’s rise in the hard rock hierarchy. The following year, key founding members Jim Rutledge and Lee Pickens left.

The band then leaned into the prog rock side of its ethos over its formerly trademark guitar riffs, stirring in more saxophone and flute. This later version of Bloodrock recorded a number of rich, but less commercially successful, albums before disbanding in 1974.

Sources:

Lawrence J. Jasinski in Laurie E. Jasinski, Gary Hartman, Casey Monahan, and Ann T. Smith, eds. The Handbook of Texas Music. Second Edition. Denton, TX: Texas State Historical Association, 2012.

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