Louis Armstrong, left, presents a Grammy Award to David Clayton-Thomas, lead singer of the rock group "Blood, Sweat and Tears", in New York, March 11, 1970.Dave Pickoff/The Associated Press
David Clayton-Thomas, the burly-voiced Toronto-raised singer who died Wednesday at 84, didn’t write most of the words he sang as lead vocalist of the U.S.-based jazz-rock psychedelians Blood, Sweat & Tears. The hits And When I Die and You’ve Made Me So Very Happy were cover songs.
Clayton-Thomas did pen Spinning Wheel, though. He not only wrote the summer-of-’69 single about life’s ups, downs and personal revolutions, he lived it − he rode the painted pony.
The son of a Canadian soldier and a British music student was a homeless, brawling petty thief by the time he was 14. “I would go into used-car lots at night and find one with the door open and sleep in the parked car overnight,” the singer told The Globe and Mail in 1997. “Then steal doughnuts from out front of the restaurants in the morning to eat, steal clothes off the rack outside of Honest Ed’s.”
A car thief, he graduated from reformatories to Millbrook Correctional Centre, known as the Alcatraz of Ontario. At age 21 in 1962 he walked out of the prison with $20 dollars in his pocket and a mail-order guitar in his hands. The cliché would be to say that Clayton-Thomas never looked back. But he did look back: Not only with Spinning Wheel but in his unflinching 2010 autobiography and in an article he wrote for The Globe and Mail three years later.
“Music saved me,” he recalled in 2013. “It was a crazy fluke that I ever discovered my talent.”
Others discovered that talent in time. Ronnie Hawkins, the musical king of Toronto’s Yonge Street, was his mentor. After Clayton-Thomas moved to New York in the late 1960s, folk star Judy Collins suggested the singer audition for the Greenwich Village music collective Blood, Sweat & Tears.
In his 1974 memoir Clive: Inside the Record Business, music executive Clive Davis, who died June 22, described his impression of seeing Clayton-Thomas sing at the Café Au Go Go: “He jumped right out at you. He seemed so genuine, so in command of the lyric lines, a perfect combination of fire and emotion to go with the band’s somewhat cerebral appeal. He was almost animalistic.”
(Hawkins, who saw Clayton-Thomas as a pure blues singer, later wrote off the jazz-rocking Blood Sweat & Tears as “smart-ass, big-city music.”)
On the strength of three Top 5 singles, including Spinning Wheel (which Clayton-Thomas had brought with him from Toronto), the band’s self-titled 1969 LP was a blockbuster sales success that earned a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1970. The group’s big, brassy aesthetic was briefly in vogue; Chicago and Toronto’s Lighthouse were other rockestras whose boldly trippy (yet radio-friendly) rock is evocative of a far-out era.
Spinning Wheel was partly inspired by Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game, which shares a title with a 1964 book of poetry by Margaret Atwood and was a response song to Neil Young’s Sugar Mountain. Clayton-Thomas later admitted to having appropriated Mitchell’s line about carousel “painted ponies” for Spinning Wheel.
While all three songs are thoughtful realizations by young musicians recognizing life’s changes, Clayton-Thomas’s wisdom was harder won: “Got no money, got no home; spinning wheel, all alone” was autobiographical.
And the line “What goes up must come down” would prove to be prophetic. Though a world-famous rock star, his relationship with his bandmates in the fractious Blood, Sweat & Tears was anything but easygoing. Fed up with the turmoil and non-stop touring schedule, Clayton-Thomas left the group in 1972. As a solo artist, he failed to repeat the success of Blood, Sweat & Tears.
In 2007, Spinning Wheel was enshrined in the Canadian Songwriter’s Hall of Fame.
The article Clayton-Thomas contributed to The Globe was written in response to the results of a 2013 coroner’s inquest into the jailhouse death of Ashley Smith in 2007. The teenager was first imprisoned in 2003 after breaching probation for throwing crab apples at a postal worker. The ruling that followed a probe into her death at Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener, Ont., was seen as a condemnation of how poorly the correctional system handles mentally ill inmates.
“I’m not an expert in the criminal justice system − just a product of it,” Clayton-Thomas wrote. “The story of Ashley Smith, the teenager who strangled herself in her prison cell as guards watched, has prompted me to speak out. But for fortune, that could have been me.”