David Clayton Thomas, the soulful Canadian singer-songwriter whose hits included “Blood, Sweat & Tears,” including “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” has died. He was 84 years old.
Clayton Thomas died Wednesday at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, a family spokesman announced.
Clayton Thomas, who lived on the streets of Toronto as a teenager and spent years in detention, performed in clubs on Yonge Street before coming to New York in 1967. A year later, he joined the Greenwich Village-based band Blood, Sweat & Tears as a replacement for lead singer Al Kooper.
He contributed raw, powerful vocals to the multi-player improvisational ensemble that became known for fusing rock, blues, jazz and brass.
Clayton Thomas’s first recording with Blood, Sweat & Tears, the second album of the same name released in December 1968 on Columbia Records, was a sensation. It topped the Billboard Hot 200 albums chart for seven (non-consecutive) weeks in 1969 and won two Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, beating the Beatles’ single. Monastery Road, Johnny Cash in San QuentinCrosby, Stills & Nash’s self-titled debut and The 5th Dimension’s Age of Aquarius.
On this album was a version of Brenda Holloway’s song “You Make Me So Happy”; “The Spinning Wheel” written by Clayton Thomas; And “And When I Die” by Laura Nyro. All three peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969 in March, May and October, respectively.
The band recorded albums in 1970 (another charting album) and 71 before an exhausted Clayton Thomas resigned, returning in 1975 and touring under the BS&T banner for the next three decades while also recording over a dozen solo LPs.
“I think what we brought to it was that very unique New York City flavor,” Clayton Thomas said of the group’s early success in a 2019 interview with Jeff Tamarkin. “The influences were everything from Broadway shows to Duke Ellington to pure jazz in the Village, and salsa playing in Spanish Harlem. Only New York has that kind of compressed melting pot. And that’s what we brought: the arrangements.”
One of two sons, David Henry Tomsett was born on 13 September 1941 in Kingston upon Thames in Surrey, England. His parents, Fred and Freda May, met in a London hospital during World War II when his father was a Canadian soldier and his mother played the piano to entertain the troops.
The family settled in Toronto’s Willowdale neighbourhood, and Clayton Thomas said he was “routinely beaten” by his father, whose favorite nickname for his son was “useless.” He left home at the age of 14 and slept in parked cars and abandoned buildings.
He also stole food and clothing, was arrested several times, and, as he said in 2010, “spent from the age of 15 to 21 as a guest of the Ontario government and the Canadian government in several of their luxury hotels.”
He taught himself to play guitar on an instrument left by an inmate at the Burwash Industrial Farm prison, and while singing in solitary confinement he realized he had an enthusiastic audience – his fellow convicts in the courtyard listening to him through an air vent.
After Clayton Thomas completed his four-year tenure, in 1962 he began frequenting the Yonge Street bar music scene, when Arkansas rockabilly great Ronnie Hawkins gave him his first paying job in music. (Clayton Thomas also sang with five other Hawkins, the guys in the band.)
He took a new name and formed David Clayton Thomas and the Fabulous Shays, and their version of John Lee Hooker’s “Boom Boom” — plus help from Canadian singer Paul Anka — brought them to the NBC music show Hullabaloo in 1965 on a set that resembles an NHL arena.
That year also saw the recording of the album David Clayton Thomas and Shays à Go-Gofollowed in 1966 David Clayton Thomas sings it like it is!Both are on Canadian label Roman Records.
With his next band, The Bossmen, he wrote and sang the anti-Vietnam War song “Brain Washed”, which became a hit in Canada.
After sitting in with Hooker at the Yorkville Club in Toronto, the two headed to New York for a concert in Greenwich Village. Folk singer Judy Collins heard Clayton Thomas one night, which led to him inviting her friend, drummer and manager Bobby Coulombe to join Blood, Sweat & Tears. (Cooper and two others left the group after the album The child is the father to the man It was released by Columbia in February 1968.)
Clive Davis, then president of Columbia, heard Clayton Thomas perform at Café Au Go-Go in the Village and came away impressed.
“He was astonishing… a burly singer who exuded tremendous earthy confidence,” Davis wrote in his 1975 autobiography. “He jumped right out at you. I went with a small group of people, and we were electrified. He seemed so real, so he was in control of the lyricism…a perfect combination of fire and passion that went along with the band’s somewhat cerebral charisma. I knew he was going to be a strong, powerful character.”
the Blood, sweat and tears The album, which also included a rendition of Billie Holiday’s song “God Bless the Child,” was produced by Mothers of Invention member James William Guercio, who would also work with Chicago, another jazz-rock band.
With three songs in the top 10, “Blood, Sweat & Tears” was performed at Woodstock, which was flown back and forth by National Guard helicopter, in the early hours of Monday morning on the final day. They play between The Band and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and were not seen in the 1970 Oscar-winning documentary because their managers would not sign a contract without guaranteed payment. (Watch them perform “More and More” as their opening number here before the cameras turn off.)
Blood, sweat and tears 3 He arrived in 1970 with versions of Carole King’s “Hi-De-Ho” (which reached No. 14 on the Hot 100) and Clayton Thomas’ “Lucretia Mac Evil” (No. 29) as the album advanced to No. 1 in July.
Considering that 1970 was a difficult year for us PS&T. They were labeled traitors when they played in Las Vegas at Caesars Palace, a venue that was not a venue for rock shows at the time. cooperated with President Nixon’s State Department to tour communist Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland as American “goodwill ambassadors”; She provided the film’s soundtrack Owl and kitten.
(In the documentary 2023 What the hell happened to the blood, sweat and tears?Band members say they were blackmailed into touring behind the Iron Curtain; If they don’t, Clayton Thomas will be deported. “We were naive,” the singer says in the film. “I don’t think we realized how [the tour] “It will bounce back and bite us.”
Colombi recalled in 2023 that before a show at Madison Square Garden, Abbie Hoffman protested outside with signs reading “Blood, Sweat and Bullshit” — “handing out flyers, telling people to disrupt our concerts, and not buy our records because we are pigs and collaborators.” During the concert, the drummer was hit by a bag of horse droppings.
In 1971, B, S&T; 4 It yielded the Clayton Thomas-penned “Go Down Gamblin'” (No. 32) and “Lisa Listen to Me”, which made it to No. 10 on the album chart.
Exhausted by constant touring and losing his voice, Clayton Thomas left the group after a 1971 New Year’s Eve show in Anaheim. “It was a giant money-making machine, and you only made money if you stayed on the road,” he said. “So, if they wouldn’t give me a break, I took it myself.”
But after moving to Los Angeles to record solo albums in 1972, 73 and 74 and hosting the CBC series, he returned to fronting Blood, Sweat & Tears on LPs released in 1975 (New city), ’76 (More than ever) and ’77 (A whole new day).
“I kept in touch with Bobby Coulombe, we were friends the whole time,” he recalls. “He said, ‘How does it work for you?’ “And I said, ‘Not good; people want the name blood, sweat and tears. How’s it going for you?’ He said: Not good; People want David Clayton Thomas. So I said: Let’s give it another chance.
Clayton Thomas recorded another solo album in 1978, then followed up Blood, Sweat & Tears with 1980’s album. Nuclear blues. He toured sporadically under the name BS&T until 2004, when he returned to Toronto after nearly 40 years in New York.
He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996, and in 2010, he published his autobiography, David Clayton Thomas: Blood, sweat and tearsShe received one of the Maple Leaf Stars on Canada’s Walk of Fame.
Survivors include his daughters, Ashley and Christine. A memorial concert celebrating his life and music will be held at a later date, with proceeds benefiting Peacebuilders Canada.
“In the ’60s, it was a different philosophy,” Clayton Thomas said in 2015. “We entered an era that was mostly big power rock bands like Hendrix, The Who, and Cream…and we came out of the field with Juilliard graduates playing trombones, trumpets, and flutes with sort of arrangements of Basie Ellington, and very much the New York City Band. We succeeded very quickly because it was so different, and there was nothing like it out there.”
