Cold Blood is officially 40 and feeling younger than ever! The new album, LIVE BLOOD is out and getting rave reviews. We are adding new tunes to the set, and we have the Lavelle White tune, 'Can't Take It.' from the afore mentioned album. 'Kissing My Love' is now a duet between Lydia and trumpeter Rich Armstrong. We added a trilogy of gospel tinged Cold Blood oldies, and even pay homage to Janis Joplin and do a song Lydia used to cover in the first days of Cold Blood. As the story goes, Lydia was singing the song and looks over to Janis ranting and flipping her off on the side of the stage... Janis says "hey, that's my tune- I'm recording it!" and Lydia explains that it's an old R& B cover. That night over a bottle of whisky they become friends. The song, Piece of My Heart, has come to be known as Janis' and you should hear Lydia do it. Interwoven with the story, it has become one of the favorites of the set as the history lesson and amazing depth of Lydia's voice transforms to bring to life a piece of rock history.

Speaking of history, the band may have a major tour coming to fruition- something to do with the Fillmore Foundation and the band "A Beautiful Day". We're keeping our fingers crossed. Imagine the two bands with an art show of the Fillmore posters!

Our goals this year are to bring Lydia and Cold Blood to the East Coast, and then Europe. Lydia has never been to Europe and I think our 40th anniversary is the year that this will happen!

BTW, we will do another amazing show opening for Tower in Ann Arbor, Michigan on June 6th. Buy your tix early as this historic pairing always sells out fast. Cold Blood will tour the Midwest at after the gig.

That's our news for the new year... Here's to 2009- a new (real) president and a new outlook hopefully will bring peace and prosperity to all!

Palo Alto Daily News 1/9/09, Page A22 Cold Blood Stays Hot By Paul Freeman For The Daily News The hot-blooded vocals of Lydia Pense still fuel the fiery blues-rock of Cold Blood, one of the Bay Area’s most enduring bands. Pense’s energy, power and soul remain intact, as she’ll demonstrate at S.F.’s Biscuit & Blues tonight, Redwood City’s Big Fox (with Tower of Power) on Saturday, and Petaluma’s Mystic Theater on Jan. 17. Now a Sunnyvale resident, Pense was born in San Francisco and moved to Redwood City, where she graduated from high school. At 14, she was already singing in bands. She first encountered Bill Graham when he dropped by the Burlingame rehearsal space of her band Collage. That led to a Fillmore show. “Bill Graham had a huge influence. He helped a lot of Bay Area musicians get started. I miss him a lot. The way he put together gigs was awesome. He had so many different types of music in one night.” Cold Blood formed in ‘68. They played on incredible bills, once opening for the Doors. Pense chatted backstage with many of her blues idols, including B.B. King, Albert King and Albert Collins. “Those are moments I cherish.” She did a show with Janis Joplin. On Cold Blood’s set list was a tune Joplin had recorded, but hadn’t released yet. “We were doing an old R&B tune called ‘Piece of My Heart.’ Apparently she came up to the side of the stage and yelled, ‘You can’t do that song!’” The two met later, and Joplin told Pense how much she loved Cold Blood, then offered her a slug of Southern Comfort. “I never felt any bad vibe or felt challenged by her at all. I was compared to her, which was great. But there’s only one Janis. She opened the doors to a lot of female vocalists. She was an incredible person.” Pense sang at the Last Days of the Fillmore. “I was sad. It was like the beginning of the end. I sensed it wasn’t going to be the same anymore. And it wasn’t. After Bill’s death, that was it. There was nobody else like him.” Pense is a survivor. “It comes from family upbringing, family values and all that s--t,” she said with a laugh. “Having been able to do what you love to do is a blessing. So you can’t take advantage of it. You just try to keep on an even course, look at what you have in life and keep it together. I have a lot of close friends who have gone. But I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to work with them. I’ll never forget them.” Music fans haven’t forgotten Cold Blood. “At shows, we get young kids, as well as moms and grandmas. Younger kids know the old songs, because their parents played the hell out of those records.” Having had nodules scraped off her vocal cords long ago, Pense takes good care of her voice. “My dad used to tell me, the older you get, the better your voice gets. It matures with age. I think you reach your peak point of vocalization in your late 50s,” she said with a laugh. “Every audience is new to me, so I don’t feel like it’s same old, same old. It’s always new and fresh to me. The response we get totally blows my mind. I appreciate that and do my best, try to make each time I sing a song like it’s the first time.”

We're off to Tokyo, Japan and our favorite club out there- the Cotton Club. And we're very excited to announce a new album- a live album called "Live Blood". I've got a copy and it's smokin'- full of old and new tunes. My favorite is a new tune we just started playing live called 'Can't Take It'. It was originally recorded by the fantastic blues singer, Lavelle White, and was brought in as an example of the direction the writing the next album should go in. The band liked the mix of horn driven funk and blues that seems to suit Lydia's voice so well that we started playing it live and now it's on the album!

We're hearing that a major Tokyo radio station is playing a different song from the album every day until we get there. Ticket sales are doing well- it's not cheap to see live music out there- tickets for this intimate nightclub go for a minimum of $87 and top out at $175. Now that's a night out! It's a great feeling to play a packed house no matter where we play.

We will be joined by our former drummer, Chris Sandoval, out there as Donny Baldwin can't make it out. The rest of the line-up will be the steady players with the band. We're also introducing a few of the vintage gospel tinged tracks we haven't been playing in a while to spice up the set- we'll be doing 2 shows a night and it'll be amazing!

We fly directly back to Oregon on the way home to play a big festival featuring a reunion of the Jefferson Airplane folks. It's called "Concert for Big Red" and should be a blast if we can recover from the flight and time change! We lose a half day going to Japan and then gain it back on Sunday's show- wow, that's going to be hard!

Hope to see you soon at a concert near you! We're celebrating 40 years as a band- same as ToP. BTW, I caught them out at the San Mateo fair and they had 8 horns, including Lenny Pickett and 3 keys and 2 guitars. Best they've ever sounded!

LP & CB

We land direcctly from Japan into this incredible festival- hope to see you there!


ORIGINAL AIRPLANE MEMBERS LAND IN OREGON - AUG. 22,23,24 2008


Originator of the Jefferson Airplane Marty Balin will perform with members from his original band, who have not played publicly together since 1965.

This historic benefit event in Astoria, Oregon will bring together vocalist Signe Anderson (now Signe Ettlin), bassist Bob Harvey, and percussionist Jerry Peloquin reuniting with the man who started it all, Marty Balin.

Not stopping there, the set will morph into a "family band" featuring members who have played with the Jefferson Starship, and the seldom seen Great Society, the band where Grace Slick began her singing and writing career. Slick Aguilar, Craig Chaquico, Darby Slick, and keyboardist Barry Flast will all be in the "family", along with other surprise guests.

The three day festival ticket that includes parking, camping, music, and access to gourmet organic food concessions, has much more than a reunion of a lifetime planned.

David and Linda LaFlamme bring their band with them; four of six members going back 25-40 years. It won't just be a beautiful day, it will be a weekend like no other.

Astorias' Clatsop County Fairgrounds' spacious meadow, outlined by lush woodland, also brings the Holy Modal Rounders featuring original percussionist (actor/director/playwright) Sam Shepard, the Freak Mountain Ramblers, Country Joe McDonald, Lydia Pense & Cold Blood, Alice Stuart, Supertrout, Marty Balin Band, Craig Chaquico, the Great Society, Bingo's Dream Band, Alexa Wiley, Jessica Stiles, Lewi Longmire, and much more.

Other headlining bands will be announced soon. The three day music and camping ticket can be purchased at: www.ConcertForBigRed.com

The event benefits Astoria arts and Signe Anderson Ettlin.

Peace, Concert for Big Red

Our recent trip to Cleveland, Ohio got me thinking. It's the site of the Rock & Roll Hall of fame (http://www.rockhall.com/) and many of us got to visit and walk the hallowed halls. Donnie (Our Drummer) even managed to get a 40% merch discount by being a current member of Jefferson Starship!

I want to start a campaign to maybe get Miss Lydia Pense and Cold Blood inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It's a long shot but it's worth a try. According to their web site, all requests have to be made by snail mail and here's the address.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation
1290 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10104

Requirements are as such:

Performers
Artists become eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first record. Criteria include the influence and significance of the artists' contributions to the development and perpetuation of rock and roll.
The Foundation's nominating committee, composed of rock and roll historians, selects nominees each year in the Performer category. Ballots are then sent to an international voting body of more than 500 rock experts. Those performers who receive the highest number of votes - and more than 50 percent of the vote - are inducted. The Foundation generally inducts five to seven performers each year.


2008 Inductees

Leonard Cohen
The Dave Clark Five
Madonna
John Mellencamp
The Ventures

Lydia's a long shot but a living breathing pioneer in the rock world. Please write to the foundation and tell them about her.


And yet another New Year's Eve Plug-

WHO: Lydia Pense
WHERE TO SEE HER: New Year's Eve concert featuring Lydia Pense and Cold Blood, with Puro Bandido and Jimmy O'Malley at 8 p.m. Dec. 31 at the Crockett Community Center, 850 Pomona St., Crockett. Tickets: $50 Call: 510-734-8320 or visit http://www.rootscellarmusic.com


Thanks!
RA

THE MONDAY PROFILE
Hot sounds live on with Cold Blood
By Jim Harrington
STAFF WRITER
Article Launched: 12/10/2007 02:58:56 AM PST



Cold Blood vocalist Lydia Pense hangs out with her cat at their home in Sunnyvale on Monday.

The Bay Area music scene produced more than its share of legends in the 1960s, from the Grateful Dead and Carlos Santana to the Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Many expected that Lydia Pense -- a powerhouse R&B vocalist most frequently compared to Janis Joplin -- was destined to join that legion of honor. One of those with sky-high hopes for Pense was, by several reports, Joplin herself.
"Lydia's the woman that Janis Joplin talked about when she talked about influences around the Bay," said drummer Donny Baldwin, a longtime fixture on the local music scene who is best known for setting the beat in the 1990s for the Jerry Garcia Band. "She's just got so much soul -- she's like a little fireball, and she's got a voice like thunder."
Pense would never receive the type of national recognition that came to the Dead, Joplin and other members of the Bay music scene. Yet she has managed to stay in the business for more than 40 years, and things are definitely looking up for her career.
"I'm really happy with the way things are now," said Pense, a Sunnyvale resident who has also lived in San Leandro, Hayward, Castro Valley, Redwood City and other parts of the Bay Area. "I just wish they'd happened about 10 years ago."
The biggest event in Pense's life, musically speaking, is that she's returned to her career as a recording artist. In 2005, the vocalist reunited her famed Bay Area band Cold Blood and released "Transfusion" -- which marked the
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group's first new studio album in more than 30 years.
Cold Blood has also been increasingly busy on the concert circuit -- Pense estimates that the gigs have increased tenfold from just a few years ago -- and it's seeing action from coast to coast, as well as internationally. On the home front, Pense and Cold Blood will perform a New Year's Eve show at the Crockett Community Center, and fans should expect more local concerts to follow in 2008.
The 59-year-old vocalist says the current version of Cold Blood -- featuring Baldwin, guitarist Steve Dunne, bassist Evan Palmerston, keyboardist Steve Salinas, saxophonist Rob Zuckerman and trumpeter Rich Armstrong -- is a strong ensemble. She's also happy to report that recent shows have attracted sizable, enthusiastic crowds.
"It blows my mind," Pense says. "After all these years, people still show up to gigs. Thank God. I wouldn't want to do anything else."
Born in San Francisco, Pense knew at an early age she wanted to be a professional singer. She had a gift -- a strong, agile voice perfectly suited for handling the type of R&B and soul tunes that she grew up listening to in the '50s and '60s -- and she began putting it to use while still attending high school on the Peninsula.
After leading a number of different bands through the mid-'60s, Pense came to the attention of legendary rock promoter Bill Graham, reportedly thanks to a little bird by the name of Joplin whispering in his ear. Graham was duly impressed with Pense and her backup band, soon to be known as Cold Blood, and signed them to his Fillmore Records.
Graham, most assuredly, thought it was the first step in the making of a new star on the national scene. A news release from the late '60s issued by Graham, found online at the Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco (www.sfmuseum.org), trumpets the signing with great fanfare: "One of rock music's most exciting on-stage acts is Cold Blood, San Francisco's big R&B band," the press release reads. "With blues belter Lydia Pense as the catalyst, Cold Blood grabs hold of an audience and works with it."
The band would go on to deliver four highly regarded R&B-rock albums -- 1968's "Cold Blood," 1969's "Sisyphus," 1972's "First Taste of Sin" and 1973's "Thriller" (beating Michael Jackson to the punch on that title by nine years) -- and would share the stage with a who's who of Bay Area acts, including Santana and the Dead.
Rock-star riches and fame, however, would elude the band. That does not diminish the impact Cold Blood had on the San Francisco music scene.
"Tower of Power, Sly and the Family Stone and Cold Blood gave San Francisco it's definitive funky sound -- body-rocking soul," said J.C. Smith, a local blues guitarist-vocalist who has performed on several of the same bills with Pense.
Somewhat disillusioned with the music business, and the band's direction, the Cold Blood members went their separate ways in the late '70s. Pense would marry, have a daughter and relocate to Humboldt County, where the family lived a very rustic existence.
"We had no electricity, no running water," Pense recalls. "We were living out of ice chests."
She stayed in Humboldt through the '80s, but then moved back to the Bay Area to give music another shot. In the early '90s, she got together with some old and new friends and, together, they decided to dust off the Cold Blood name. Many of these new players -- Pense being the only original member-- were very excited about the chance to work with the accomplished vocalist.
"She's got soul," Dunne said of Pense. "She's got that magical ingredient that you can't buy, and you can practice all your life and you can never learn it."
The familiar band name came with familiar results -- and Pense has yet to achieve true celebrity status with this new group of players.
The vocalist says she's OK with the fact she never hit the commercial heights reached by her peers from the local music scene of the '60s. Then again, fame and fortune weren't the primary reasons she got into the music business.
"I never thought of it that way," she said. "It was about keeping the band together and, every time we play, doing the best job that we could. My goal when I was real young was just to sing. It wasn't to be a superstar."
With all the positive recent developments in her career -- as well as solid plans to record another Cold Blood album in 2008 -- Pense really has something to sing about these days. To the point, whether or not it's a stated goal, Pense could yet wind up a superstar.
Bio
WHO: Lydia Pense

WHERE TO SEE HER: New Year's Eve concert featuring Lydia Pense and Cold Blood, with Puro Bandido and Jimmy O'Malley at 8 p.m. Dec. 31 at the Crockett Community Center, 850 Pomona St., Crockett. Tickets: $50 Call: 510-734-8320 or visit http://www.rootscellarmusic.com

Wow! Playing a sold out show out at a great winery for a great cause... not much better than that! We got to open the show a get people loosened up for the great day of music. Get this- Cold Blood, Tower, Huey, and then, ya know, the Doobies!

Talk about a ton of great music and a nice high profile nudge for the band. Especially after such a great rush playing for 60,000 people at the Summer of Love show.

We came up and rocked with a full horn section- our friend and future band mate- Joel Behrman played trumpet and bone and we got the amazing Mick Gillette- a Tower and Cold Blood alum to sit in as well. As we were playing Funky on My Back, he turned to me and said, "Great tune... I loved it when I wrote it and I love it today!" Watching those guys swap horns and having it sound so full was a joy. And having the horns from Tower and Huey Lewis right behind us watching us and egging us on wasn't so bad, either. We made our way through the set flawlessly and it sounded amazing for a festival gig. Everyone had great solos and Lydia was strong. She don't say much, but I see her still get excited for the big gigs.

And now for a bit of a rant...
As you may not know, the band is coming back from the brink of obscurity through bad management and, well a ton of other reasons I need not go into.

But there's people that believe in this band and it's potential. The guys that stand up on stage with me and have survived a million bad gigs and still get up there because they love the music. Lydia for never doing less than 120 percent. Dennis Cruzan for just about forcing us to do a new album with enthusiasm and paying for the whole damn thing. Our die hard fans that show up and dig every minute. Every person that buys an actual album and doesn't download the damn thing off of iTunes or steal it off some file sharing network. DJ's who have found that old Cold Blood vinyl and keep it alive in clubs where 20 year olds dance to it and have no clue where it came from. And the booking agents and club owners that actually get that a 40 year old band with no big hits can still draw and kick ass. And if you're still reading this, YOU!

I hope you will see that this band still has some miles on it and it's about time for us to break out and take the ones we never got. Lydia has never been to Europe- sacrilege! It's been 30 plus years since the band's gone to the East Coast! With all this talk about Janice Joplin and how famous she is and blah blah blah... we have someone who is still here, pumping it out. What's it going to take for people to realize that we tend to celebrate the dead ones, but they ain't ever going to give anything back or do anything. I guess death is the great enigma. Let's not wait for that to happen to discover Lydia Pense and Cold Blood.




Here's an article covering the day. (This article appeared on page E - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday, October 1, 2007)

If he didn't know so many people, Bruce Cohn could easily walk unrecognized through the crowd at the 21st annual B.R. Cohn Fall Music Festival on his winery north of Sonoma. He is a good-looking middle-aged fellow in a sport shirt moving along the concourse lined by concession stands without a hint of flamboyance that might identify him as a rock 'n' roll outlaw, the lifelong manager of the Doobie Brothers, headliner of the two-day festival and celebrity golf classic that has raised more than $4 million for local charities over the years.

He moved up to the Valley of the Moon in 1974 - "right after the Doobies hit," he says - to raise his two sons, now grown and working alongside their father at the winery (his two grown daughters were also in evidence over the weekend). He started making wine in 1984. He began producing olive oil from 100-year-old trees on the 90-acre property in 1994.

"My wife got tired of the kids tracking olives all over the floor," he says. "She told me I had to either buy her new carpets or go into the olive oil business."

This weekend's program was all about family. Along with the Doobie Brothers, appearing on Saturday at the beautiful 2,500-seat amphitheater Cohn built on the hillside beneath his own home, was Huey Lewis and the News and Tower of Power. Most rock bands from Northern California sooner or later come to know each other, but these bands have history.

The Doobies and Tower used to play the same nightclubs, different nights, long before either was noticed outside the Bay Area. Huey Lewis and the News - as Lewis remembered from the stage on Saturday before the capacity crowd - went on the band's first tour as the opening act for the Doobie Brothers ("They took us on the road and showed us the ropes," he said).

And when Huey Lewis and the News was the top rock group in America in the mid-'80s, one of the band's extravagances was to hire the Tower of Power horn section to tour with them. The News' cover of "Simple as That," a song from the Tower songwriting team of Emilio Castillo and Steve "Doc" Kupka, is probably the duo's best-selling song. The News used to delight in their shows in bringing Doc down from the horn section to play a funky one-note solo center stage on his baritone sax.

Castillo, known to all as "Mimi," lives in New Mexico these days, but grew up in the East Bay. He was joined backstage by his two brothers and wives. Huey Lewis' octogenarian mother, Magda Cregg, sat backstage at a table with Guido and Rose Colla, parents of the News guitarist-saxophonist Johnny Colla.

And the show was kicked off by the next generation of Doobies. High school senior Pat Simmons Jr. opened the daylong affair with some acoustic numbers, and adorable 17-year-old Lara Johnston brought her set to a fever pitch with Edgar Winter's "Free Ride," her father Tom Johnston laying down some fiery lead guitar on the number.

The Wine Country crowd sat on a hillside in the shade of olive trees and watched the show - which also featured another East Bay soul alumnus, Cold Blood with Lydia Pense, still giving it up after all these years - with the bands framed against a breathtaking backdrop of Cohn's grapevines, beginning to show the gold and red burnish of fall colors. They bought wine by the bottle, not the glass, and promoters turned off alcohol sales an hour before the end of the show.

Both Huey Lewis and Tom Johnston wandered out from backstage to watch the dazzling Tower of Power, joined for the occasion by the band's original arranger Mic Gillette, who doubled on trumpet and trombone, sometimes during the same number. "Pass the wine and cheese, please," shouted Castillo, as the band headed into "Diggin' on James Brown."

The Tower horn section joined the set by Huey Lewis and the News, who have transformed themselves into an R&B band these days anyway, although Kupka and Castillo had to refresh their recollection backstage about the parts to "Working For a Living." Everybody joined the Doobie Brothers finale - what else? - "Listen to the Music," including the other bands, the bands' kids and even the Santana percussion squad of Michael Carabello and Adrian Areas.

The audience gets on and off the property using off-duty Sonoma County school buses to shuttle to and from an off-highway parking field only a few minutes away. Cohn had the sold-out crowd headed home before dark after a day of music in the sun.

Cohn, who grew up with his brother on a goat farm outside Forestville, was a rock 'n' roll outsider when he first came to the valley. Now he produces 50,000 cases of premium wine a year and, though he first had to play down his rock 'n' roll connections in the sometimes snooty world of Napa/Sonoma vintners, he is now making a Doobies Red and giving the proceeds to the National Veterans Foundation, a longtime charity of the Doobies.

The Doobies have, in fact, long been associated with much heartfelt fundraising. At the band's considerable height, the Doobies always did an annual event with Stanford's Children's Hospital. When conga player Bobby LaKind, whose son Nicky was wandering around Saturday with Cohn's daughter, was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the reunion concert the band held on his behalf led to the Doobies getting back together, more or less permanently.

Neil Young is justly known worldwide for his annual fall classic, the Bridge School Benefit, but over the same period of time, Cohn has been quietly producing his Wine Country event and has clearly become a part of the area's fall calendar, even on the same weekend as the Vintage Festival in the Sonoma town square.

But he isn't sitting still. He is not only introducing a line of food products from his Olive Hill Estates, but he is building a larger, 4,000-seat amphitheater immediately adjacent to the current site, ready in time for next year's fall classic.

The Cotton Club has proven to be an amazing venue for us. Our well attended shows have mostly been Japanese audiences made up of funk lovers, horn band followers, and some real hardcore fans. Amazing to see a sea of Japanese fans getting into it and hooting and hollering and singing the lyrics. Seems that the older albums have made their way here and now the new one is somehow distributed. Amazing in that it's hardly available in the US, but seems to be at every record store out here!

We have had encores on every show and the club treats us like royalty- totally amazing food and there's such a level of respect and camaraderie for us as musicians.
I love coming off stage to the wait staff giving us high fives and yelling "funky show!"
Gotta love it!

The hotel is an amazing blend of old and new and is quite a swanky place. We have views of Tokyo tower and we're amazingly close to the ex-pat nightclub district, Roppongi. Our first night here had us traipsing around the business district looking for a place that both had an "Ego" menu (English) and took credit cards. We eventually found, through stranger recommendation, a sashimi place that was amazing enough to have included in our pics. The menu and wait staff were in full Kanji (Japanese) and had no pictures, so we just gestured and made it clear we were hungry. It ended up being $45 a person, but at the end of the day, we had a great story and full bellies.

Only 2 more days left, so we're halfway through. Lydia is sounding better than ever and we are adding a bunch of the funkier tunes to the set. Our club liason was absolutely floored by Lydia's voice and took some of us aside and worriedly said, "Do I need to make tea for her- will she make it to Monday???" We sort of laughed it off, and said, "Naw, she always sings like that." The look on his face was both relief and absolute amazement.

Thank God for Lydia Pense! She's a living treasure. And we're finally getting to show the world.