{"id":762166,"date":"2026-06-26T09:31:13","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T09:31:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/762166\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T09:31:13","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T09:31:13","slug":"blood-sweat-tears-singer-david-clayton-thomas-had-a-rocky-road-to-stardom-music-saved-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/762166\/","title":{"rendered":"Blood, Sweat & Tears singer David Clayton-Thomas had a rocky road to stardom: \u2018Music saved me\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

David Clayton-Thomas, the burly-voiced Toronto-raised singer who died Wednesday at 84, didn\u2019t 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\u2019ve Made Me So Very Happy were cover songs. <\/p>\n

Clayton-Thomas<\/a> did pen Spinning Wheel, though. He not only wrote the summer-of-\u201969 single about life\u2019s ups, downs and personal revolutions, he lived it \u2212 he rode the painted pony. <\/p>\n

The son of a Canadian soldier and a British music student was a homeless, brawling petty thief by the time he was 14. \u201cI would go into used-car lots at night and find one with the door open and sleep in the parked car overnight,\u201d the singer told The Globe and Mail in 1997. \u201cThen steal doughnuts from out front of the restaurants in the morning to eat, steal clothes off the rack outside of Honest Ed\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 clich\u00e9 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<\/a> he wrote for The Globe and Mail three years later. <\/p>\n

\u201cMusic saved me,\u201d he recalled in 2013. \u201cIt was a crazy fluke that I ever discovered my talent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others discovered that talent in time. Ronnie Hawkins, the musical king of Toronto\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

In his 1974 memoir Clive: Inside the Record Business, music executive Clive Davis, who died June 22<\/a>, described his impression of seeing Clayton-Thomas sing at the Caf\u00e9 Au Go Go: \u201cHe 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\u2019s somewhat cerebral appeal. He was almost animalistic.\u201d <\/p>\n

(Hawkins, who saw Clayton-Thomas as a pure blues singer, later wrote off the jazz-rocking Blood Sweat & Tears as \u201csmart-ass, big-city music.\u201d)<\/p>\n

On the strength of three Top 5 singles, including Spinning Wheel (which Clayton-Thomas had brought with him from Toronto), the band\u2019s self-titled 1969 LP was a blockbuster sales success that earned a Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1970. The group\u2019s big, brassy aesthetic was briefly in vogue; Chicago and Toronto\u2019s Lighthouse were other rockestras whose boldly trippy (yet radio-friendly) rock is evocative of a far-out era. <\/p>\n

Spinning Wheel was partly inspired by Joni Mitchell\u2019s The Circle Game, which shares a title with a 1964 book of poetry by Margaret Atwood and was a response song to Neil Young\u2019s Sugar Mountain. Clayton-Thomas later admitted to having appropriated Mitchell\u2019s line about carousel \u201cpainted ponies\u201d for Spinning Wheel.<\/p>\n

While all three songs are thoughtful realizations by young musicians recognizing life\u2019s changes, Clayton-Thomas\u2019s wisdom was harder won: \u201cGot no money, got no home; spinning wheel, all alone\u201d was autobiographical. <\/p>\n

And the line \u201cWhat goes up must come down\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

In 2007, Spinning Wheel was enshrined in the Canadian Songwriter\u2019s Hall of Fame. <\/p>\n

The article Clayton-Thomas contributed to The Globe was written in response to the results of a 2013 coroner\u2019s inquest into the jailhouse death of Ashley Smith<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not an expert in the criminal justice system \u2212 just a product of it,\u201d Clayton-Thomas wrote. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Louis Armstrong, left, presents a Grammy Award to David Clayton-Thomas, lead singer of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":762167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[271510,49,48,75,341,2922],"class_list":["post-762166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-appreciation","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-noastack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=762166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/762166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/762167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=762166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=762166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=762166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}