On his top half, anyway, David Clayton-Thomas is all Mr. Blood, Sweat & Tears, the singer who penned the songs ( Spinning Wheel, You've Made Me So Very Happy, And When I Die) that any boomer worth his vintage aviators could pull out of his head, as effortlessly as the time and place of his first date with weed.
Clayton-Thomas, who is promoting a new solo album, Aurora, his first in eight years, wears a black-leather jacket over his wrinkled shirt, and when he leans his balding head forward to think about something, the fingers of his thick, heavy hands clasp either side of his face, holding up the fleshy folds of almost 40 years of hard living.
"I don't know if it's ended," he says of the successful touring organization that employed a score of people as a greatest-hits act before he closed it down last year. "I'm just not going to go on the road this year, so if I don't go on the road, there's no Blood, Sweat & Tears," he says wearily, looking up with vivid blue eyes, clear as a spring sky, despite all the glorious ups and deep, deep downs of his storied 62-year-old life.
But on his bottom half, Clayton-Thomas is all Grampa Dave. On his feet, he wears big, white running shoes, the kind you see on tourists as they descend from their shiny aluminum buses. He says "my dear" a lot in conversation and is full of sage aphorisms. "I didn't get wise at the stroke of a magic wand," he says at one point, talking about how he carried his troubled adolescence with him for many years. "You get wise by knocking your head into a wall a few times."
"You've Made Me So Very Surprised," I feel like singing to him several times.
The man who left town in the late sixties in a blur of music, desperation and dreams has come home to live in his Toronto. When he was living in the Catskills in upstate New York, where he had a house for over 25 years, he would visit Toronto every year to see old acquaintances and family, he says. But now he is renting a waterfront condo in the downtown area while he scouts out neighbourhoods in the city where he might set up permanent residence. "I have my OHIP. I have my SIN [social-insurance]number. I have my Ontario driver's licence," he chirps happily.
His new jazz and blues album, co-produced with his long-time friend and fellow Canadian musician, Doug (Doc) Riley, and featuring drummer Terry Clarke, guitarists Robert Piltch and Jake Langley, and bassist George Koller, is the first of a three-record deal with Montreal's Justin Time Records. Clayton-Thomas has not recorded a solo album since he released Blue Plate Special in 1997. Produced in between touring gigs for Blood, Sweat & Tears last year, Aurora includes only a couple of new Clayton-Thomas songs, Mercy Lord Above and Wild Women & Po' Boys; the rest are standards, such as Jon Hendricks's Gimme That Wine, Joni Mitchell's River and Billie Holiday's Don't Explain. He is also working on The Sound of Philadelphia, a nostalgic trip back to the early sounds of R&B, that will be released by Warner Bros. out of New York this summer.
Clayton-Thomas is happy to be drying up the blood, sweat and tears of the touring life, he says. "The road had taken more out of me all the time. On one particular road trip to the West Coast, we travelled 26,000 miles in four days, and it just wore me down. My body collapsed. My system gave in and I ended up in the hospital. That was a major factor in saying, 'Hey, slow down.' It's very hard to accept that you're not 30 years old any more," he says, chuckling.
The stress of touring in a terror-panicked U.S. also took its toll. "You take your shoes off five times a day and you're constantly being body-searched by guys who flunked out of Burger King."
Oh yes, don't think Grampa Dave doesn't have some rough edges. He is cantankerous and sharp-tongued on many subjects.
" I have a lot of songs pent-up, because while Blood, Sweat & Tears was making billions of dollars, it was not a creative organization any more. For a songwriter, it was purgatory," he offers pleasantly enough over his club sandwich and mug of coffee. His next two albums for Justin Time Records will contain more original songs, which he is working on every day in his home studio, he says.
That he should have such fondness for Toronto as a creative wellspring is surprising, given not only his comments about its creative timidity, but also his troubled history here. Born during the Second World War in London, where his father was a Canadian soldier, and his mother, who was British, interrupted her musical education to play piano for army troops in a London hospital, Clayton-Thomas later moved to Willowdale, Ont., a suburb of Toronto, with his family. He ran away from home at 14. He slept in parked cars and stole food from local stores to eat.
Because his parents didn't know what to do with him?
"Oh, my father knew what to do with me, all right," he says grimly, implying that it was a difficult relationship. Clayton-Thomas ended up in a series of reformatory institutions throughout Ontario, including a maximum-security prison, as he tumbled into a spiral of crime. "I beat up a lot of people and I got beat up a lot, okay?" he says, as if telling me a bedtime story he wants to bring to a happy conclusion.
Along the way, he picked up a guitar and found salvation. He hung out on Yonge Street and in the coffee houses of Yorkville, during its heyday in the late sixties, alongside legends-to-be Ronnie Hawkins, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, among others. He started a band, The Shays, later known as The Bossmen, and made up a new surname for himself. Thomsett changed to Thomas to avoid routine pickup by the cops and later, he added Clayton when he discovered a mean-looking 6-foot-4 black man also named David Thomas. "He was too big to argue with," he laughs. "So I added Clayton to be different and I thought it sounded bluesy."
But for all its bohemian richness, Toronto was still a wasteland of opportunity, he says. He wrote most of his greatest hits -- Spinning Wheel, Lucretia MacEvil and Go Down Gamblin' among them -- in Toronto, but he couldn't sell them. "I recorded these songs in Toronto in a to-be-unnamed record company, and when I played them for them, they were horrified. They said, 'It sounds like jazz! What happened to that three-chord rock 'n' roll?' " recalls Clayton-Thomas with obvious disgust. "So I duped the songs and threw them in my suitcase and took them to New York."
It would be Clayton-Thomas's moment of unthinkable being. He was about to go from a life at the bottom of society to acclaim at the top of the charts.
Blood, Sweat & Tears had been formed in 1967 by Al Kooper. Its debut album, Child Is the Father to the Man, never found commercial success, although it was a critical curiosity. Invited to try out for the group, Clayton-Thomas joined just as disagreements forced Kooper and others out. Its self-titled 1969 album, the first with Clayton-Thomas, sold 10-million copies, spawned three gold singles, all songs written by Clayton-Thomas in Toronto, and won an unprecedented five Grammys, including album of the year and best performance by a male vocalist. Five successive gold albums followed and, by 1972, Blood, Sweat & Tears was flowing through everyone's veins.
It never lasts, of course, and especially for this particularly disparate group of musicians. "Blood, Sweat & Tears was never a group," explains Clayton-Thomas. "It was always a loosely strung [together]collection of New York City studio musicians. It was a jazz band, and that's how jazz musicians are. Mike Stern played in Blood, Sweat & Tears and he also played with Miles Davis. It was always populated by jazz musicians who came and went."
Clayton-Thomas left and returned a couple of times, too. By 1981, the band called it quits, and Clayton-Thomas left to write commercial jingles and then, in 1983, he considered and later rejected an idea to make a country album. His life was at another nadir. Three marriages had failed and he was near bankruptcy. The touring version of Blood, Sweat & Tears re-emerged in 1985. It has been Clayton-Thomas's livelihood until now.
While working on his recently released album, he stayed with a childhood friend in Aurora, Ont. "I didn't have a title for the album, so I thought, well, hell, I'm going to call it Aurora. It could be a girl's name. It could be aurora borealis [northern lights] It could mean a new dawn, a new beginning," he muses, sounding all soft and cozy.
Oh, so a born-again David Clayton-Thomas, I wonder, wanting to sing a new set of made-up lyrics -- "You've Made Me So Very Weary."
"Naw, you kidding?" he says, snapping back into leather-clad bad-boy mode. "As a matter of fact, I think I might call the next album Thornhill and really mess with your mind."