David Clayton-Thomas appears with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for two special concerts at Massey Hall on Feb. 12 and 13.
RENE JOHNSTON/TORONTO STAR
Blood, Sweat & Tears isn't just the band that made David Clayton-Thomas famous.
It's also the story of his life: a childhood runaway from an abusive home; a teenage jailbird held in some of the country's bleakest prisons; an angry young man who was homeless on the Yonge St. strip during its toughest days.
It might sound like a recipe for disaster rather than rock stardom, but only if you haven't met David Clayton-Thomas, who's uniting with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for two special concerts at Massey Hall on Feb. 12 and 13.
He's a big, burly guy and, even at the age of 68, his handshake is something you have to be ready for. Still, the eyes are gentle, the smile is warm and, as he reclines in an easy chair gazing from his penthouse apartment on Lake Ontario, he seems at one with himself and the world.
But that sure isn't how he started. Born David Henry Thomsett in England on Sept. 13, 1941, he was the son of a Canadian soldier and a young British woman whose father was a popular entertainer named Harry Bryan Smith.
Indeed, Clayton-Thomas makes it very clear that all the artistic impulse in his family came from his mother's side. "My father was about as artistic as a piece of Muskoka rock," he begins. "He would always say, `Put down that damn guitar and dig a hole in something.'"
The family moved from England to Willowdale when Clayton-Thomas was 3. He has no happy childhood memories. None. "Not to speak ill of the dead, but my father was a tough, brutal, bullying, controlling tyrant. I started running away from home at 11 to get away from the beatings."
By the time he was 14, Clayton-Thomas succeeded in breaking his ties with home because he was tossed into his first reformatory school, and that's pretty much how he would spend the next five years.
"I was called a habitual offender," he remembers. "So, even though none of the things I did was that bad – joyriding, vagrancy, kid stuff like that – I did them so often that they kept putting me in worse and worse holes."
He finally wound up at the bottom: in the Burwash Correctional Centre. Closed down in 1973, Clayton-Thomas recalls it as "Canada's answer to Devil's Island."
The one thing prison did for the young man was give him time to discover his singing gift, so when he finally was set free around 1960, he headed for the bars on the Yonge St. strip.
"I was a kid with no one to love him, which made me very violent, very tough. And I guess that was a good thing because those bars of Ronnie Hawkins' sure weren't for pussies."
Long story short, young David Thomsett gave himself a double-barrelled stage name, built up a big reputation with a variety of bands and soon headed down to the States, where he found himself as the new lead singer of a group about to break through into superstardom, with the name of Blood, Sweat & Tears.
Normally, this would be the cue for the "happily ever after" ending, but not with these guys. "The band that I walked into was already ripped apart by power struggles waged by guys who had massive egos," Clayton-Thomas recalls. "It was the reason BS&T rocketed to the top of the charts, and imploded just as dramatically."
Originally, Al Kooper put the group together, but it soon took on a life of its own, with Steve Katz and Bobby Colomby gaining equal prominence. There's an incident that took place shortly before his arrival that Clayton-Thomas tells to set the scene.
"They were scheduled to play the Fillmore East and, the day before the show, the marquee read `Blood, Sweat & Tears.' Kooper walked by, saw it and had the stagehands change it to `Al Kooper's Blood, Sweat & Tears.'
"Katz walked by, read it and raised s---. By dinner, it read `Al Kooper, Steve Katz and Blood, Sweat & Tears.' The next morning, Colomby saw it and exploded but (owner) Bill Graham said, `Forget it. I'm out of f---ing letters.' So they opened as `Blood, Sweat & Tears.'"
Clayton-Thomas roars with laughter at the rampant egos involved but, in the same breath, acknowledges the serious problem underneath. "You can't have nine superstars in one group. Mick and Keith, sure. John and Paul, fine. But not nine.
"They got rid of Kooper before I came and Katz always made sure I knew that he was the boss and I was his employee, even though I was making 10 times the money he was."
A lot of that was because Clayton-Thomas had also written some of the group's biggest hits of the period, including the classic "Spinning Wheel."
"What goes up must come down," were Clayton-Thomas's prophetic words and, despite gold records and Grammy Awards, the personality pressures caused him to split from the group in 1972.
He tried striking out as a solo act but soon found that, when he was announced, everyone thought they were going to hear BS&T. Finally, Colomby approached him. "We're not doing that well without you," Clayton-Thomas recalls him saying, before twisting the knife. "And you're not setting the world on fire without us."
By then, Katz had left the group and, since he had been the major reason for Clayton-Thomas's departure, the singer returned. "In some ways, the second time around had the better band, in the sense of world-class musicians," Clayton-Thomas says. "But they were hired guns and the spirit just wasn't there anymore."
Then things got even stranger. In 1976, Colomby was named a vice-president at CBS. He left the band but retained ownership of the name and control of all its activities.
"Blood, Sweat & Tears didn't go into a recording studio for 25 years," Clayton-Thomas notes sadly.
"(Colomby) wouldn't let us. He was a big executive and didn't want to be connected with the name but he had no trouble collecting millions of dollars from the money we made touring."
And, as usually happens when a band falls on unhappy times, some of its members sought ways of finding a more pleasant alternative reality. "Yeah, we acquired a reputation as a drug band," Clayton-Thomas concedes, noting that it probably reached a low point when Gregory Herbert died from a heroin overdose in 1979, although Clayton-Thomas maintains that, instead of a simple OD, his colleague had been sold strychnine by Moluccan terrorists bent on killing Americans abroad.
"I had a bit of a meltdown after that," he says, "but then, once my daughter was born in 1982, I got myself together again."
So, Blood, Sweat & Tears kept rolling along, "a multimillion-dollar road operation, but we finally had guys in the band who weren't even alive when we first hit."
That was when Clayton-Thomas decided to come home to Toronto. He quit the band for good in 2004 and set up residence in the city that "I always knew was my spiritual home.
"The kind of burning passion to succeed and overcome my early years has pretty much fizzled out now. I have no interest in doing 200 concerts a year on the road any more."
But he has to glance over his shoulder at his ghosts one more time. "I spent most of my life driven to prove something, to be accepted, because if you didn't make it, the alternative was back to Burwash. I was running like crazy from my past. But I've put all that behind me now."
