RIP DCT
David Clayton-Thomas was a kind man with one of the world's greatest voices!
DCT photo by Don Dixon / Asylum Artists
David Clayton-Thomas died last Wednesday night at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. Eighty four years old. Peacefully, they said, which is the word they always use and which I choose to believe this time, because he earned a peaceful exit after living a life that was anything but.
I was a kid when I first saw him. Ed Sullivan, Blood Sweat and Tears behind him, that voice coming out of a body built like a man who had been in a few fights, which he had. Later it was the Tom Jones Show and the Midnight Special, and I remember being a kid in North Bay with strong opinions about who should and shouldn’t be allowed to sing the blues. White guys, I had decided, should not. Then David Clayton-Thomas opened his mouth and that theory died on the spot. (Later Don Francks and John Finley drove that point home.) Best education I ever got and nobody handed me a report card for it.
He was born David Henry Thomsett in Surrey, England, raised mostly around Toronto, and came up the hard way through Yonge Street and Yorkville with bands called the Shays and the Bossmen before Judy Collins heard him in a club and told her drummer friend Bobby Colomby about the kid with the voice. That’s how he ended up fronting Blood Sweat and Tears, the band that turned brass into rock and roll and sold ten million copies doing it. Spinning Wheel. And When I Die. You’ve Made Me So Very Happy. Three songs that all stalled at number two on the charts because apparently the number one spot just wasn’t available that year. The album beat the Beatles’ Abbey Road for Album of the Year at the Grammys. Let that sit for a second. He beat the Beatles!
Robi Botos, Molly Johnson, Nikki Yanofsky, Frank Zappa, Kenny Marco, Ronnie Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, BS&T!
I met him backstage after a show, the way you meet your heroes if you’re lucky and if the universe is in a generous mood. I expected the thing you brace for with guys who’ve lived that big. The cool distance. The practiced charm that’s really just a wall with good lighting. Instead I got a guy who was warm and direct and looked at you like you were the only other person in the room, which is the rarest trick in show business and the one thing you can’t fake for long. I’d seen plenty of legends get approached by superfans and treat it like a tax. DCT treated it like a conversation. That told me everything I needed to know about him before I knew anything else.
Dozens of albums - Here’s a bunch!
When I started my show at JAZZ.FM91 I made sure David Clayton-Thomas was in the rotation, regular as a heartbeat. Blood Sweat and Tears records, sure, but just as often the solo stuff, the records people forget exist because one song called Spinning Wheel ate the whole conversation for fifty years. I wanted my listeners to hear the rest of the man. Early stuff like “Brainwashed” and later stuff from “Combo”, “Canadiana”, “Mobius” and especially, “In Concert: A Musical Biography” from a show I witnessed at The Opera House in Toronto. (Available on Justin The Records!)
A recent photo with Gigi and I - then other shots including some musicians: George Koller, Michael Shand, Ben Wittman and Eric St-Laurent.
The first Jazz Lives concert at Convocation Hall is where I introduced him to Geneviève Marentette. I watched two people become friends in real time, the way you sometimes get to if you’re the one who set the table. He made it clear early and often that they were platonic, that he loved her like family, and he meant it the way men of a certain generation mean things when they say them plainly and don’t repeat themselves. Years later I booked him for another Jazz Lives show at Koerner Hall, and that’s the night he brought up his old friend John Finley and the two of them did a duet that blew the roof off the place. (Koerner Hall has very high ceilings.)
A short Clip of DCT and GIGI. Of course you can suf YouTube for hours seeing more stuff. Be sure to see him live on The Tom Jones Show, etc…and THIS from 2006 in Montreal!
He went back to Koerner one more time, for a benefit for Peacebuilders Canada, a charity about giving young people a second chance instead of a record, which mattered to him because he’d lived both sides of that equation. Geneviève caught up with him on that stage too, more duets, more proof that whatever they had was the real thing and not a performance of friendship for an audience. Gigi had her own sold out show there in 2024 where she sang some of the songs he made famous. I will never forget it. Here is a gorgeous version of “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” produced ny Jono Grant and featuring Drew Jurecka on strings:
DCT and GIGI at Koerner Hall before their benefit concert for PeaceBuilders.ca
There was a plan, at one point, for her to open for him on tour. He decided against touring again. Decided to retire instead. But he told her to keep recording, to keep releasing music, and he meant that the way he meant everything, which is to say he backed it up. Her debut album, produced by Jono Grant for Vesuvius Music, is full of DCT’s favourite musicians, and it includes a version of “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy”, a song he made famous, handed forward, not guarded. That’s the difference between a star and an artist.
I heard secondhand, more than once, that he called me a close friend to other people. That kind of thing means more than it should, hearing it from someone instead of him directly. I went to visit him plenty at his place down at Harbourfront, that penthouse with the view that made you understand why he never wanted to leave Toronto for good. We argued. Often. Both of us stubborn, both of us animated, both of us absolutely certain about the music industry and absolutely certain we were right about different things. None of it ever touched the friendship. That’s how you know a friendship is built on rock and not sand. The arguments don’t crack the foundation, they just rattle the windows a little.
His MD’s over the years: Doug Riley, Bruce Cassidy, George Koller and Lou Pomanti…the guy had great taste! Lou recorded a duet with DCT and his old friend, soul singer John Finley of the song “Your Mind Is on Vacation”. You can find it online.
I watched him soften as he got older. His friendship with Gigi did that. So did his dog Maggie (that Gigi bought for him). The man mellowed in a way that surprised people who only knew the legend and not the guy, and it shouldn’t have surprised anyone, because underneath it he was always a gentleman. Every woman I ever brought around to his place said the same thing afterward, unprompted, every time. He was kind to them. Not performing kindness. Just being it.
DCT with Avery Raquel and his sweet dog, Maggie!
We started seeing each other more in those last years. One of my favorite memories is a birthday party that Gigi and I threw for him in Chris and Susan Climo’s backyard, where I cracked open a bottle of McAllan Replica 1884, a fifteen hundred dollar bottle of whisky (gifted to mea month earlier), and poured it for him and the few of us lucky enough to be standing invited.
He told me stories that night and other nights that I genuinely had trouble believing, the kind of stories that sound like a man embellishing his own legend until you find out they’re not embellished at all. Then I saw the documentary, “What the Hell Happened to Blood Sweat and Tears”, and every single thing he’d told me checked out. All of it. A life that most people couldn’t dream up if you gave them a week and a typewriter, and he lived every bit of it and somehow still had time to be a decent man to the people around him at the end.
That’s the part I want people to remember. Not just the voice, though God knows that voice deserves every word already written about it. The man underneath it. The one who sat across from me in his own living room and fought with me about the music business and then poured me another drink and asked about my mother and father. The one who told a kid from North Bay, without knowing he was doing it, that talent doesn’t ask permission from anybody’s idea of who’s allowed to have it.
DCT was not a fan of Trump…and was pleased with Mark Carney, Mike Myers, Charlie Angus and anyone who would go Elbows Up. He wrote a few politically charged songs in his later hears, most notably “The Circus". My pal Bill King wrote a great piece about the political side of DCT in his Substack Column (I recommend signing up for it!)
Rest easy, David. The world will always be grateful for your talent. Next year there will be a huge event, a celebration of life for you - with proceeds going to PeaceBuilders of Course.
Speaking of Peace Builders, I wrote a piece on this important organization last month:
I want to leave you with one more video of DCT - a recent performance!
Joel Goldberg s just wrapping up a documentary about me! He directed this video. The code to watch this: JGP
That God Bless the Child clip at the end is my best musical experience in ages!