David Clayton-Thomas George Pimentel/WireImage David Clayton-Thomas, the emotive Canadian singer-songwriter who fronted Blood, Sweat & Tears on hits including “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” has died. He was 84.
Clayton-Thomas died Wednesday at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, a family spokesperson announced.
Clayton-Thomas, who lived on the streets of Toronto when he was 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 Blood, Sweat & Tears as a replacement for lead vocalist Al Kooper.
Related Stories
Lifestyle Ludacris, Caviar Ice Cream and Paris Hilton by Boat: Inside the UTA and DoorDash Ads Executive Soirée at Cannes Lions
Movies Kino Lorber Takes U.S. Rights to Manuela Martelli's Cannes Film 'The Meltdown' (Exclusive)
He contributed raw, powerful singing to the improvisational multi-player band that would become known for their fusion of rock, blues and brassy jazz.
Clayton-Thomas’ first record with Blood, Sweat & Tears, the eponymous second LP released in December 1968 on Columbia Records, was a sensation. It topped the Billboard Hot 200 album chart for seven (non-consecutive) weeks in 1969 and won two Grammys, including Album of the Year, beating out The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, Crosby, Stills & Nash’s self-titled debut and The 5th Dimension’s The Age of Aquarius.
On that album were a version of Brenda Holloway’s “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”; “Spinning Wheel,” written by Clayton-Thomas; and “And When I Die,” written 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 chart-topper) and ’71 before an exhausted Clayton-Thomas quit, only to return in 1975 and tour under the BS&T banner over the next three decades while also recording more than a dozen solo LPs.
“I think what we brought into 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, salsa being played in Spanish Harlem. Only New York has that kind of compressed melting pot. And that’s what we brought in: arrangements.”
One of two sons, David Henry Thomsett was born on Sept. 13, 1941, in Kingston Upon Thames in Surrey, England. His parents, Fred and Freda May, met in a London hospital during World War II when dad was a Canadian soldier and mom played the piano to entertain the troops.
The family settled in the Willowdale neighborhood of Toronto, and Clayton-Thomas said he was “routinely beaten” by his father, whose favorite nickname for his son was “Useless.” He left home at age 14 and slept in parked cars and abandoned buildings.
He also stole food and clothing, was arrested several times and, as he put it in 2010, “spent from age 15 to age 21 as a guest of the Ontario and Canadian government in many of their luxury hotels.”
He taught himself to play guitar on an instrument an inmate at the Burwash Industrial Farm prison had left behind and while singing in solitary confinement realized he had a rapt audience — his fellow convicts were in a courtyard listening to him through a vent.
After completing his four-year stretch, Clayton-Thomas in 1962 began frequenting the music scene on the Yonge Street strip, when Arkansas rockabilly great Ronnie Hawkins gave him his first paying job in music. (Clayton-Thomas would also sing with five other Hawkins’ protégés, 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 — got them on the NBC music program Hullabaloo in 1965 on a set that resembled an NHL rink.
That year also marked the recording of the album David Clayton Thomas and the Shays à Go-Go, followed by 1966’s David Clayton Thomas Sings Like It Is!, both on the Canadian label Roman Records.
With his next band, The Bossmen, he wrote and sang the hard-driving anti-Vietnam War song “Brain Washed,” a big hit in Canada.
David Clayton-Thomas performing circa 1974. Steve Morley/Redferns/Getty Images After sitting in with Hooker at a Yorkville club in Toronto, the two headed for New York to a gig in Greenwich Village. Folk singer Judy Collins heard Clayton-Thomas one night, and that led to her friend, drummer and manager Bobby Colomby, inviting him to join Blood, Sweat & Tears. (Kooper and two others had left the group after the album Child Is Father to the Man was released by Columbia in February 1968.)
Clive Davis, then president of Columbia, heard Clayton-Thomas perform at the Café Au Go-Go in the Village and came away impressed.
“He was staggering … a powerfully built singer who exuded an enormous 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 genuine, so in command of the lyric … a perfect combination of fire and emotion to go with the band’s somewhat cerebral appeal. I knew he would be a strong, strong figure.”
The Blood, Sweat & Tears album, which also featured a rendition of Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” was produced by onetime Mothers of Invention member James William Guercio, who also would work with Chicago, another jazz-rock outfit.
With three songs in the Top 10, Blood, Sweat & Tears performed at Woodstock, flown in and out by National Guard helicopter, in the wee hours of Monday morning on the final day. Playing between The Band and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, they aren’t seen in the Oscar-winning 1970 documentary because their managers wouldn’t sign a contract without a payment guarantee. (Watch them perform “More and More” as their opening number here before the cameras were shut off.)
Blood, Sweat & Tears 3 arrived in 1970 with a version of Carole King’s “Hi-De-Ho” (which made it to No. 14 on the Hot 100) and Clayton-Thomas’ “Lucretia Mac Evil” (No. 29) as the album advanced to No. 1 in July.
All things considered, 1970 was a rough year for BS&T. They were branded sellouts when they played in Las Vegas at Caesars Palace, hardly a place for a rock act at the time; cooperated with President Nixon’s State Department to tour communist Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland as American “goodwill ambassadors”; and supplied soundtrack music to the film The Owl and the Pussycat.
(In the 2023 documentary What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?, band members say they were blackmailed into touring behind the Iron Curtain; if they didn’t, Clayton-Thomas was going to be deported. “We were naïve,” the singer says in the film. “I don’t think we realized how [the tour] would bounce up and bite us.”
Colomby noted in 2023 that before a show at Madison Square Garden, Abbie Hoffman protested outside with signs saying “Blood, Sweat & Bullshit” — “handing out flyers, instructing people to disrupt our concerts, to not buy our records because we’re pigs and we’re collaborators,” he said. During the concert, the drummer was hit with a bag of horseshit.
In 1971, B,S&T; 4 yielded the Clayton-Thomas-penned “Go Down Gamblin’” (No. 32) and “Lisa Listen to Me,” making it to No. 10 on the album chart.
Worn down 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 gigantic money-making machine, and it only made money if it stayed on the road,” he said. “So if they weren’t going to 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 a CBC series, he returned to front Blood, Sweat & Tears on LPs released in 1975 (New City), ’76 (More Than Ever) and ’77 (Brand New Day).
“I had stayed in touch with Bobby Colomby — he and I had been friends all the time,” he recalled. “And he said, ‘How is it working for you?’ And I said, ‘Not so good; people want the Blood, Sweat & Tears name. How’s it working for you?’ And he said, ‘Not so good; people want David Clayton-Thomas.’ So I said, ‘Let’s give it another shot.’”
Clayton-Thomas recorded another solo album in 1978, then continued Blood, Sweat & Tears with the 1980 album Nuclear Blues. He toured on and off under the BS&T name 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 Tears, and got one of the maple-leaf stars on Canada’s Walk of Fame.
Survivors include his daughters, Ashleigh and Christine. A memorial concert celebrating his life and music will be held later, with proceeds benefiting Peacebuilders Canada.
“In the ’60s, it was a different philosophy,” Clayton-Thomas said in 2015. “We came into an era that was mostly big power rock bands like Hendrix, The Who, Cream … and we came out of left field with Juilliard graduates playing trombones, trumpets and flutes with Basie-Ellington types of arrangements and very much a New York City band. We succeeded so quickly because it was so different, there was nothing like it out there.”
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
