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Singer David Clayton-Thomas on Nov. 4, 1976. The front man of jazz-rock pioneers Blood, Sweat & Tears died in Toronto on June 24 at the age of 84.Barrie Davis/The Globe and Mail
Canada’s David Clayton-Thomas was blessed with a big, booming baritone, one of the most recognizable voices in pop music, a gift that took him from the clubs and coffee houses of Toronto’s Yonge Street and Yorkville all the way to Woodstock, Hollywood and beyond.
As the front man of jazz-rock pioneers Blood, Sweat & Tears, which topped the charts in 1969 with horn-driven hits such as And When I Die, You’ve Made Me So Very Happy and his own Spinning Wheel, the singer lived a charmed life, winning awards, adulation and a king’s ransom of earnings that allowed him to indulge his taste for luxury cars and sprawling, palatial homes in coveted locations like the Catskill Mountains.
But Mr. Clayton-Thomas, who died in Toronto on June 24 at 84, was also cursed with a past that haunted him for much of his life. The victim of a physically abusive father, Mr. Clayton-Thomas fled the family home at 15, lived on the streets, became a petty criminal, spent time in prison and for many years expressed anger with his fists.
His reputation as a brawler with a temper dogged him, as stories about his early days – leaping off stages to flatten a heckling spectator with one punch or jumping into the boxing ring to spar with heavyweight champion George Chuvalo – were all woven into the Clayton-Thomas legend.
“David was certainly known to be difficult before he softened and became more sophisticated in his later years,” admitted producer-keyboardist Lou Pomanti, who worked with Mr. Clayton-Thomas periodically after first being recruited to join BS&T in 1980. “When you saw him in his prime, dressed from head to toe in black leather with fringes on his jacket sleeves, he was the definition of a badass. Don’t mess with him – on stage or off.”
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David Clayton-Thomas photographed during an interview in 2005.Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail
Devoted to his craft, Mr. Clayton-Thomas remained prolific throughout his career. After spending over three decades off and on with BS&T and releasing recordings under his own name while living in the United States, he finally left the often-fractious band for good in 2004 and returned to his hometown of Toronto. There, he settled into being a father to his daughter Ashleigh, championing new artists, singing jazz and blues in the intimate clubs of Toronto where he started out and recording a steady stream of solo albums with producers such as Mr. Pomanti, Doug Riley and George Koller.
He also made peace with his past. In 2010, the self-educated Mr. Clayton-Thomas published his autobiography, Blood, Sweat and Tears, which critics praised as an inspirational story of redemption. “His author’s voice,” The Globe and Mail reviewer wrote, “is much like the lyrics to his songs – intuitive, direct and genuine.”
Frank Davies, founder of the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, which inducted Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s Spinning Wheel in 2007, agreed. “Spinning Wheel is very autobiographical,” Mr. Davies said. “David had a tough adolescence in rough circumstances and his lyrics touch on not giving up hope despite such problems.” He added: “That song has really stood the test of time, helped by recordings by over 200 others artists, and the original sounds as soulful and edgy today as it did all those years ago.”
When Mr. Clayton-Thomas died peacefully at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, friends, family and fans mourned the loss of an exceptional musician and a compassionate man with deep convictions who, under that rugged exterior, had a big heart. “David had the strongest willpower of anyone I’ve ever met,” Mr. Koller said. “If he wanted something to happen, it got done. And it made everyone around him better.”
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David Clayton-Thomas seen wearing a shirt saying “Elbows Up.”David Clayton-Thomas Estate/Supplied
Singer Dione Taylor called Mr. Clayton-Thomas “delightfully salty, deliciously sweet, smart as a whip and passionate about life, love, equality and truth.” Jazz-FM broadcaster and impresario Jaymz Bee noted that Mr. Clayton-Thomas, strongly opinionated and staunchly Canadian, was “never a fan of Donald Trump and often railed at the American President on CNN.” Added Mr. Bee: “David wrote a few politically charged songs in his later years and enthusiastically embraced Mark Carney’s elbows-up stance.”
David Henry Thomsett was born on Sept. 13, 1941 in Kingston upon Thames, near London, England. He was the elder of two sons of Fred Thomsett, a Toronto hydro lineman who was serving overseas as a motorcycle dispatch rider in the Royal Canadian Signals Corps during the Second World War, and Freda Thomsett (née Smith), an English pianist-entertainer.
Following the war, the family settled in the Toronto suburb of Willowdale, where the six-foot-tall, 200-pound veteran, a violent alcoholic, beat his sons with fists, boots and razor straps, according to Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s memoir. “I hated this man with a passion and would often cry myself to sleep at night wishing he were dead. I took my suppressed rage out at school,” he wrote.
Arrests for assault and car theft led the teenage Mr. Clayton-Thomas to incarcerations at Guelph Reformatory and the notorious Burwash Industrial Farm in northern Ontario, including a brutal stint in solitary confinement. When he stepped out of Millbrook Reformatory, near Peterborough, Ont., Mr. Clayton-Thomas left with a cheap guitar from a fellow inmate and some old blues songs he had learned, and headed straight for Yonge Street.
Wanting to distance himself from his criminal past, he changed his name first to Sonny Thomas and then to David Clayton-Thomas and showed up at Le Coq D’Or, where Ronnie Hawkins was drawing lineups with his band the Hawks. The young singer sat in for a song or two and immediately impressed the rockabilly star from Arkansas. “He’s tough and mean and sings the blues like he comes from Mississippi,” said Mr. Hawkins, who promptly began mentoring the young singer.
Before long, Mr. Clayton-Thomas had a manager, CHUM radio deejay Duff Roman, and one of the best bands on the Yonge Street Strip, the Shays. He recorded his first hit, a cover of John Lee Hooker’s bluesy Boom Boom. After scoring again with Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s own Walk That Walk, the Shays became the first Canadian band to appear on American network television’s Hullabaloo – surrounded by dancers dressed as hockey players.
Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s next band, the jazz-flavoured Bossmen, enjoyed even greater success with Brainwashed, a song he called an “anti-war primal scream of refusal and outrage.” And Mr. Clayton-Thomas started hanging out in the city’s hippie district of Yorkville, soaking up the songwriting influence of Joni Mitchell and John Kay, future leader of Steppenwolf.
While living in Yorkville, Mr. Clayton-Thomas wrote both Spinning Wheel, borrowing carousel imagery from Ms. Mitchell’s The Circle Game, and another future BS&T hit song, Lucretia MacEvil. “Musically, I went to high school on Yonge Street and college in Yorkville,” he told this writer in 1996. “I learned everything I know about music thanks to my association with Toronto musicians.”
Ultimately, music saved him from a life in prison. As he wrote in his memoir: “In my mind, it was the only thing standing between me and where I came from, and I wasn’t going back.”
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David Clayton-Thomas performing with the Shays. The Shays became the first Canadian band to appear on American network television’s Hullabaloo.David Clayton-Thomas Estate/Supplied
Tagging along with the visiting Mr. Hooker in early 1967, Mr. Clayton-Thomas followed the veteran bluesman down to New York and started gigging around Greenwich Village himself. There, one night, folk singer Judy Collins heard him and tipped off BS&T founder Bobby Colomby, who was looking for a new vocalist for his band. A Clayton-Thomas performance caused a shocked Mr. Colomby to declare: “He sings just like Ray Charles.”
Thus began Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s long, celebrated role in BS&T. With the gritty, charismatic Toronto man out front, the band became an instant sensation, knocking the Beatles’ Abbey Road out of the top of the album charts. The Globe and Mail’s Ritchie Yorke raved about the “big, ballsy bull of a lead singer,” while New York Times critic John Rockwell called Mr. Clayton-Thomas the group’s “greatest strength, one of the best [voices] in pop music – gravelly and strong for upbeat numbers, huskily evocative for more lyrical material.” Forging a jazz-rock fusion, Mr. Clayton-Thomas and BS&T inspired other horn-powered bands, including Chicago and Toronto’s Lighthouse, to follow suit.
But infighting within BS&T, along with fallout from several ill-advised bookings, tarnished the glow around the group. First, it undertook a tour behind the Iron Curtain – to Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland – as part of U.S. president Richard Nixon’s State Department-sponsored visit to promote cultural exchange. Fans of the band called them sellouts. As the 2023 documentary What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears made clear, the Nixon administration essentially blackmailed the group to do the tour, otherwise Mr. Clayton-Thomas would be deported for his criminal record. After the tour, when BS&T performed at Madison Square Garden, activist Abbie Hoffman and his Yippie followers carried signs denouncing the band and others threw dog feces at them onstage.
Then, BS&T took a residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where Mr. Clayton-Thomas met Sammy Davis Jr., a huge fan of the Canadian singer, whom many saw as a fiery alternative to Welsh powerhouse Tom Jones. This led to the band sharing a bill with the Rat Pack veteran at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles – hardly cool in the minds of Rolling Stone magazine’s editors and readers.
Mr. Clayton-Thomas lacked control of BS&T (Mr. Colomby owned the name), which led him to repeatedly quit the band, only to return when his solo endeavours failed to measure up. He needed BS&T and BS&T needed him. Said Mr. Pomanti, who produced Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s 2010 album Soul Ballads and last year’s tribute concert for him at Toronto’s Redwood Theatre: “It plagued David that he couldn’t have the same success under his own name.”
But once back in Toronto, the habitually driven Mr. Clayton-Thomas mellowed and accepted a more moderate career and pace of life. Single after four failed marriages that produced two children, he settled into a penthouse suite in a downtown condominium overlooking Lake Ontario. Singer Genevieve (Gigi) Marentette, a close friend, got him a dog named Maggie, and noted how much he enjoyed the little schnauzer’s company. Recalls Ms. Marentette: “He and Maggie would sit on a bench on the boardwalk and talk to everyone walking by, with David holding court in his Adidas track suit.”
Ms. Marentette says a major tribute concert in Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s memory is planned for next year, with all proceeds going to Peacemakers Canada, the Toronto-based charity that promotes conflict resolution in schools and communities and alternatives to incarceration. Mr. Clayton-Thomas headlined numerous fundraising galas and benefit concerts on its behalf and wrote and recorded the song The System, from his 2020 Say Somethin’ album, specifically to support the organization’s restorative youth justice programs.
Mr. Clayton-Thomas, who was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996 and earned a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2010, was predeceased by his brother, John, and leaves his daughters, Ashleigh Clayton-Thomas and Christine Graham.
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