David Clayton-Thomas, the lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose husky, high-strung tenor on “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die” and different hits helped make the so-called brass rock band among the many hottest acts of the late Sixties, has died at age 84.
Spokesperson Eric Alper stated that Clayton-Thomas died “peacefully” Wednesday at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Alper didn’t cite a selected trigger.
Clayton-Thomas was a onetime avenue fighter and petty thief from Canada who briefly turned a rock celebrity, the entrance man of a nine-member group that offered tens of millions of data and gained two Grammys for “Blood, Sweat & Tears,” which beat out the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” for finest album of 1969. Calling out amid a jazzy parade of horns, keyboards and percussion, Clayton-Thomas’ pressing shout was a signature voice of the period, preaching love on the Motown cowl “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” a long-lasting legacy on Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die” and a cool head on his personal “Spinning Wheel.” Meanwhile, Blood, Sweat & Tears helped encourage a wave of horn-led bands, amongst them Chicago, the Electric Flag and Ten Wheel Drive.
“A lot of the guys (in Blood, Sweat & Tears) would play a Broadway show matinee, then go up to Harlem and play Latin music or R&B and funk at night, or come down to the Village and play pure jazz the next night,” Clayton-Thomas advised bestclassicbands.com in 2023. “I was just a blues player: give me three chords and I’ve got a song.”
At its peak, Blood, Sweat & Tears’ enchantment was so broad it helped result in the band’s downfall.
Hip sufficient to carry out on the 1969 Woodstock competition, the place they had been among the many highest paid acts, in addition they had been identified sufficient to the institution to tour Eastern Europe the next yr on behalf of the State Department. When Clayton-Thomas and different band members denounced the Communist regimes on the opposite facet of the Cold War, Rolling Stone’s David Felton wrote that “the State Department got its money worth.” Yippies would flip up at a 1970 Blood, Sweat & Tears present at Madison Square Garden, carrying obscene banners exterior and dumping manure by the entrance gate.
The band had sensible causes for going together with the federal government: Clayton-Thomas, who had allegedly wielded a gun at his girlfriend, had been denied a inexperienced card and confronted deportation. But after topping the charts in 1970 with the album “Blood, Sweat & Tears 3,” their enchantment quickly light. A burned out Clayton-Thomas left the group in 1972, and neither he nor the remaining musicians ever regained their outdated stature. Blood, Sweat & Tears would proceed recording over the following few years, and even briefly reunited with Clayton-Thomas, who went on to launch greater than a dozen solo albums and tour on his personal for many years.
Clayton-Thomas was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996. “Spinning Wheel,” lined by everybody from James Brown to TV star Barbara Eden, was voted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame a decade later.
Clayton-Thomas is survived by his daughters, Ashleigh Clayton-Thomas and Christine Graham.
Born David Henry Thomsett in Surrey, England, and raised close to Toronto and Ottawa, he was the son of a Canadian World War II veteran and of a pianist-entertainer who helped encourage her son’s curiosity in music. Thomsett was fortunate to have the prospect. He fought violently along with his father, was residing within the streets by his mid-teens and by age 20 was serving time in a reformatory for vagrancy, assault and different crimes.
An outdated guitar, left behind by a fellow inmate, modified his life. He taught himself to play and commenced spending in depth time within the early Sixties round Toronto’s Yonge Street music “strip,” the place friends included the American rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins, a mentor to Robbie Robertson and different future members of the Band and a information for Thomsett early in his profession.
Anxious to reinvent himself, he modified his final identify to Clayton-Thomas whereas main his personal teams. In the mid-60s, he launched such albums as “Sings Like It Is” and had successful single with the anti-war rocker “Brainwashed.” He would additionally befriend a rising star, Joni Mitchell, whose childlike “Circle Game” helped encourage “Spinning Wheel,” and the venerable John Lee Hooker, who would not directly contribute to Clayton-Thomas’ breakthrough within the U.S.
Hooker had inspired Clayton-Thomas to maneuver to New York, the place the American bluesman had an engagement on the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. When Hooker unexpectedly departed for a tour of Europe, membership proprietor Howard Solomon wanted a substitute and recruited Clayton-Thomas.
“So I played him a couple songs on the guitar,” Clayton-Thomas advised bestclassicbands.com. “He said, ‘Do you have a band?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and went out into Greenwich Village looking for anybody carrying a guitar case or even looking like a musician, and we put together a little band and we opened there that night. We ended up staying there for several months.”
Around the identical time, session man-producer Al Kooper was trying to type a jazz-rock group and was joined by such musicians as guitarist Steve Katz, drummer Bobby Colomby and horn gamers Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss. They known as themselves Blood, Sweat & Tears, releasing the debut album “Child Is Father to the Man” early in 1968. Although praised by Rolling Stone writer Jann Wenner as “a fine, exemplary group,” members had been torn between these allied with Kooper and those that thought his vocals too weak to draw a considerable viewers.
By the top of the yr, Kooper and others had departed, and the band was in search of a brand new singer. After Judy Collins noticed Clayton-Thomas carry out, she really helpful him to Colomby.
“I got home and just a couple of days later, Bobby Colomby called me up and said, ‘Hey, Kooper’s gone. We got four guys left out of the nine. And we still got a record contract with Columbia. Do you want to come down and try out for the band?”’ Clayton-Thomas advised bestclassicbands.com. ”I stated, ‘You’re rattling proper.’ I knew (bassist) Jim Fielder actual nicely and I knew they had been excellent musicians. So I used to be on the following aircraft. We had a rehearsal that afternoon, an audition, and it was prompt magic. We simply knew proper off the bat.”
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