NEW YORK — David Clayton-Thomas, the lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose husky, high-strung tenor on “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die,” and other hits helped make the so-called “brass rock” band among the most popular acts of the late 1960s, has died at age 84.
Spokesperson Eric Alper said that Mr. Clayton-Thomas died “peacefully” Wednesday at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Alper did not cite a specific cause.
Mr. Clayton-Thomas was a onetime street fighter and petty thief from Canada who briefly became a rock superstar, the front man of a nine-member group that sold millions of records and won two Grammys for Blood, Sweat & Tears, which beat out the Beatles’ Abbey Road for best album of 1969. Calling out amid a jazzy parade of horns, keyboards, and percussion, Mr. Clayton-Thomas’ urgent shout was a signature voice of the era, preaching love on the Motown cover “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” a lasting legacy on Laura Nyro’s “And When I Die,” and a cool head on his own “Spinning Wheel.” Meanwhile, Blood, Sweat & Tears helped inspire a wave of horn-led bands, among 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,” Mr. Clayton-Thomas told 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’ appeal was so broad it helped lead to the band’s downfall.
Hip enough to perform at the 1969 Woodstock festival, where they were among the highest paid acts, they also were known enough to the establishment to tour Eastern Europe the following year on behalf of the State Department. When Mr. Clayton-Thomas and other band members denounced the Communist regimes on the other side of the Cold War, Rolling Stone’s David Felton wrote that “the State Department got its money worth.” Yippies would turn up at a 1970 Blood, Sweat & Tears show at Madison Square Garden, carrying obscene banners outside and dumping manure by the front gate.
The band had practical reasons for going along with the government: Mr. Clayton-Thomas, who had allegedly wielded a gun at his girlfriend, had been denied a green card and faced deportation. But after topping the charts in 1970 with the album Blood, Sweat & Tears 3, their appeal soon faded. A burned out Mr. Clayton-Thomas left the group in 1972, and neither he nor the remaining musicians ever regained their old stature. Blood, Sweat & Tears would continue recording over the next few years, and even briefly reunited with Mr. Clayton-Thomas, who went on to release more than a dozen solo albums and tour on his own for decades.
Mr. Clayton-Thomas was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996. “Spinning Wheel,” covered by everyone from James Brown to TV star Barbara Eden, was voted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame a decade later.
Mr. Clayton-Thomas is survived by his daughters, Ashleigh Clayton-Thomas and Christine Graham.
Up from the streets
Born David Henry Thomsett in Surrey, England, and raised near Toronto and Ottawa, he was the son of a Canadian World War II veteran and of a pianist-entertainer who helped inspire her son’s interest in music. Thomsett was lucky to have the chance. He fought violently with his father, was living in the streets by his mid-teens and by age 20 was serving time in a reformatory for vagrancy, assault and other crimes.
An old guitar, left behind by a fellow inmate, changed his life. He taught himself to play and began spending extensive time in the early 1960s around Toronto’s Yonge Street music “strip,” where peers included the American rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins, a mentor to Robbie Robertson and other future members of the Band and a guide for Thomsett early in his career.
Anxious to reinvent himself, he changed his last name to Clayton-Thomas while leading his own groups. In the mid-60s, he released such albums as Sings Like It Is and had a hit single with the anti-war rocker “Brainwashed.” He would also befriend a rising star, Joni Mitchell, whose childlike “Circle Game” helped inspire “Spinning Wheel,” and the venerable John Lee Hooker, who would indirectly contribute to Mr. Clayton-Thomas’ breakthrough in the U.S.
America beckons
Hooker had encouraged Mr. Clayton-Thomas to move to New York, where the American bluesman had an engagement at the Cafe Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. When Hooker unexpectedly departed for a tour of Europe, club owner Howard Solomon needed a replacement and recruited Mr. Clayton-Thomas.
“So I played him a couple songs on the guitar,” Mr. Clayton-Thomas told 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 same time, session man-producer Al Kooper was looking to a form jazz-rock group and was joined by such musicians as guitarist Steve Katz, drummer Bobby Colomby, and horn players Randy Brecker and Jerry Weiss. They called themselves Blood, Sweat & Tears, releasing the debut album Child Is Father to the Man early in 1968. Although praised by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner as “a fine, exemplary group,” members were torn between those allied with Kooper and those who thought his vocals too weak to attract a substantial audience.
By the end of the year, Kooper and others had departed, and the band was seeking a new singer. After Judy Collins saw Mr. Clayton-Thomas perform, she recommended 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?”’ Mr. Clayton-Thomas told bestclassicbands.com. ”I said, ‘You’re damn right.’ I knew [bassist] Jim Fielder real well and I knew they were superb musicians. So I was on the next plane. We had a rehearsal that afternoon, an audition, and it was instant magic. We just knew right off the bat.”
