David Clayton-Thomas, the powerhouse Canadian singer who lifted American band Blood, Sweat & Tears to the heights of pop music success, including Grammy awards and one of the biggest selling albums of its time, has died.
Clayton-Thomas, 84, died peacefully at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto on Wednesday, according to his publicist, Eric Alper. The cause of his death was not immediately clear.
Clayton-Thomas was just a few years on from time spent in correctional institutions as a youth and young adult when he began to make a name for himself in Toronto’s Yonge Street and Yorkville music scenes with bands the Shays and the Bossmen.
The singer’s fortunes changed rapidly, and forever, after a successful 1968 audition with Blood, Sweat & Tears, the New York City-based jazz-rock group with a four-piece horn section, who were looking for a new singer for their second album.
It proved a match made in musical heaven.
“Everything David sang sounded right — and even better, sounded like a hit,” said Steve Katz, the band’s guitarist, in a 2015 memoir.
Chart-topping hits
The album Blood, Sweat & Tears, released in the waning days of 1968, sold millions, as singles You’ve Made Me So Very Happy, the Clayton-Thomas-penned Spinning Wheel and And When I Die each reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart. Only the Who, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Crosby, Stills & Nash had bigger selling studio albums in 1969.
Just two years after joining the band, Clayton-Thomas was celebrating onstage at the Grammys in March 1970, as the group took home album of the tear and several other awards.
“Blood, Sweat & Tears are one of those bands whose moment is so big, it’s almost like they can’t follow it,” said longtime music journalist David Wild, in the 2023 documentary, What The Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?.
That was indeed the case as the next two Blood, Sweat & Tears albums with Clayton-Thomas as lead vocalist sold more modestly, and they were soon outpaced on the charts by like-minded bands such as Chicago and Three Dog Night.
By 1972, Clayton-Thomas was embarking on a solo career, and through the decades he would alternate between those projects and stints with Blood, Sweat & Tears.
He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996 and the Canadian Walk of Fame in Toronto in 2010, while Spinning Wheel was honoured in 2007 at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Tumultuous youth
He was born David Henry Thomsett in Kingston, England, on Sept. 13, 1941. His father, Fred, served overseas in the Canadian military, and his mother, Freda, was a British nurse.
The family settled in the Willowdale section of Toronto just a few years later, but Clayton-Thomas didn’t have overly fond memories of his childhood. His father, a police constable, was abusive, the singer later wrote, saying it fuelled his own rage.
“I was a big strong kid and met the slightest perceived insult with flying fists,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir, Blood, Sweat and Tears.
Clayton-Thomas dropped out of high school after the ninth grade. In addition to working menial jobs, he rung up arrests for car theft, breaking and entering and vagrancy, spending about four years in various Ontario reformatories and correctional facilities.
While incarcerated, Clayton-Thomas learned to strum a guitar to blues artists such as John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf.
He took on blue-collar jobs after his release, but the lure of Toronto’s burgeoning Yonge Street music scene, led by Ronnie Hawkins and the musicians who would later form the Band, proved too irresistible, though the change in lifestyle led to the dissolution of his first marriage.
The Shays scored an opening slot at Maple Leaf Gardens in April 1965, for the first-ever Rolling Stones concert in Toronto. Also that year, he fronted the band’s Walk That Walk, on an appearance on the U.S. music show Hullabaloo the week it was hosted by Canadian star Paul Anka.
‘Staggering’ presence: Clive Davis
By 1968, Clayton-Thomas was eking out a living on the bar circuit, including some gigs in New York City. While accounts vary, most have folksinger Judy Collins — also instrumental in helping spread the word about budding Canadian songwriters Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell — alerting Blood, Sweat & Tears to Clayton-Thomas’s talents.
The band was seeking a new frontman after parting ways with singer and co-founder Al Kooper after the debut album Child Is Father to the Man, which earned strong reviews but lacked hit singles.
Columbia Records label boss Clive Davis, whose death was announced earlier this week, was won over after seeing them at a gig with Clayton-Thomas, who prowled the stage and punctuated lyrics with growls, grunts and shouts.
“He was staggering — a powerfully built singer who exuded enormous earthy confidence. He jumped right out at you,” Davis wrote in his 1975 book, Clive: Inside the Record Business.
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The magnitude of the opportunity wasn’t lost on the Canadian. “A year ago I couldn’t have got a job as chauffeur for these people,” Clayton-Thomas told the Toronto Star in 1968.
They group rocketed to the top of the charts, paced by You’ve Made Me So Very Happy, originally a Motown song.
Some music critics considered the band unhip at a time of an emerging counterculture and widespread anti-Vietnam War protests. They played a Las Vegas casino, a relative rarity at the time for a rock band, and more controversially, embarked on a tour of Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland at the behest of the Richard Nixon government’s State Department.
Years later, in the 2023 documentary, the group insisted they had been pressured into conducting the Iron Curtain tour, as U.S. government officials were threatening not to renew Clayton-Thomas’s work visa, given his criminal past in Canada.
Band drummer and co-founder Bobby Colomby praised Clayton-Thomas in the documentary as “the best band member in terms of work ethic.” Clayton-Thomas brought songs Lucretia MacEvil and Go Down Gamblin’ to the table, among the highlights on two albums that followed their breakthrough.
But in a band of nine people, friction was inevitable over song material and the direction of their career.
“Steve Katz and I were oil and water, and were never destined to get along,” the singer remembered in his memoir. Katz, band guitarist, claimed Clayton-Thomas was a “blowhard” and that “stardom went to his head,” in his own 2016 memoir.
Memorial concert planned
Clayton-Thomas departed the band for two solo albums in the 1970s, where he collaborated with noted artists such as Steve Cropper and Chaka Khan.
He was back in the fold with BS&T for their final three albums, capped by 1980’s Nuclear Blues, but they couldn’t recapture past glories. Worse yet, Clayton-Thomas and bandmates were devastated in 1978 when saxophonist Gregory Herbert died in an Amsterdam hotel on tour after taking heroin.
Colomby owned the band’s name but withdrew from touring. Clayton-Thomas, who declared bankruptcy in the late 1970s after indulging in a love of sports cars and living in Hollywood, fronted a revolving lineup that toured under the BS&T moniker, sometimes at less-than-prestigious gigs.
“Sometimes I would be introduced to guys at the airport who would be in Blood, Sweat & Tears that night,” Clayton-Thomas said in his memoir.
The Canadian carried on this way for a couple of decades. After over three decades residing in the U.S., Clayton-Thomas returned to Canada permanently in 2004, continuing to release music independently, with his last album being 2020’s Say Somethin’.
The singer’s survivors include daughters Ashleigh Clayton-Thomas and Christine Graham. Alpert said a memorial concert celebrating his career will be announced, with proceeds going to Peacebuilders Canada, which helps young Canadians navigate the justice systems and integrate into society.
