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NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 David Clayton-Thomas, the lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose husky, high-strung tenor on \u201cSpinning Wheel,\u201d \u201cAnd When I Die\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Spokesperson Eric Alper said that Clayton-Thomas died \u201cpeacefully\u201d Wednesday at St. Michael\u2019s Hospital in Toronto. Alper did not cite a specific cause.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cBlood, Sweat & Tears,\u201d which beat out the Beatles\u2019 \u201cAbbey Road\u201d for best album of 1969. Calling out amid a jazzy parade of horns, keyboards and percussion, Clayton-Thomas\u2019 urgent shout was a signature voice of the era, preaching love on the Motown cover \u201cYou\u2019ve Made Me So Very Happy,\u201d a lasting legacy on Laura Nyro\u2019s \u201cAnd When I Die\u201d and a cool head on his own \u201cSpinning Wheel.\u201d Meanwhile, Blood, Sweat & Tears helped inspire a wave of horn-led bands, among them Chicago, the Electric Flag and Ten Wheel Drive.<\/p>\n
\u201cA 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,\u201d Clayton-Thomas told bestclassicbands.com in 2023. \u201cI was just a blues player: give me three chords and I\u2019ve got a song.\u201d<\/p>\n
At its peak, Blood, Sweat & Tears\u2019 appeal was so broad it helped lead to the band\u2019s downfall.<\/p>\n
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 Clayton-Thomas and other band members denounced the Communist regimes on the other side of the Cold War, Rolling Stone\u2019s David Felton wrote that \u201cthe State Department got its money worth.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The band had practical reasons for going along with the government: 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 \u201cBlood, Sweat & Tears 3,\u201d their appeal soon faded. A burned out 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 Clayton-Thomas, who went on to release more than a dozen solo albums and tour on his own for decades.<\/p>\n
Clayton-Thomas was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1996. \u201cSpinning Wheel,\u201d covered by everyone from James Brown to TV star Barbara Eden, was voted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame a decade later.<\/p>\n
Clayton-Thomas is survived by his daughters, Ashleigh Clayton-Thomas and Christine Graham. 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Yonge Street music \u201cstrip,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cSings Like It Is\u201d and had a hit single with the anti-war rocker \u201cBrainwashed.\u201d He would also befriend a rising star, Joni Mitchell, whose childlike \u201cCircle Game\u201d helped inspire \u201cSpinning Wheel,\u201d and the venerable John Lee Hooker, who would indirectly contribute to Clayton-Thomas\u2019 breakthrough in the U.S. Hooker had encouraged 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 Clayton-Thomas.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I played him a couple songs on the guitar,\u201d Clayton-Thomas told bestclassicbands.com. \u201cHe said, \u2018Do you have a band?\u2019 I said, \u2018Sure,\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Around the same time, session man-producer Al Kooper was looking to form a 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 \u201cChild Is Father to the Man\u201d early in 1968. Although praised by Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner as \u201ca fine, exemplary group,\u201d members were torn between those allied with Kooper and those who thought his vocals too weak to attract a substantial audience.<\/p>\n By the end of the year, Kooper and others had departed, and the band was seeking a new singer. After Judy Collins saw Clayton-Thomas perform, she recommended him to Colomby.<\/p>\n \u201cI got home and just a couple of days later, Bobby Colomby called me up and said, \u2018Hey, Kooper\u2019s 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?\u201d\u2019 Clayton-Thomas told bestclassicbands.com. \u201dI said, \u2018You\u2019re damn right.\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 David Clayton-Thomas, the lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose husky, high-strung tenor on \u201cSpinning Wheel,\u201d \u201cAnd When I Die\u201d 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 Clayton-Thomas … Continue reading David Clayton-Thomas, powerhouse lead singer of Blood, Sweat & Tears, dies at 84<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":1518449,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1451],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1518448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-abc-entertainment-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":true,"date":"2026-06-27 16:01:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[0],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1518448"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1518451,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1518448\/revisions\/1518451"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1518449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1518448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1518448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1518448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nUp from the streets<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nAmerica beckons<\/strong><\/p>\n