Blood, Sweat and Tears Read online

  Blood,

  Sweat

  and

  Tears

  DAVID

  CLAYTON-

  THOMAS

  Blood,

  Sweat

  and

  Tears

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2010

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Antoinette Music Prod Inc., 2010

  Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

  94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

  “Lucretia MacEvil”

  Words and Music by David Clayton Thomas

  © 1970 (Renewed 1998) EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. and BAY MUSIC LTD.

  All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC.

  All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured Used by Permission

  Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

  “Go Down Gamblin”’

  Words and Music by David Clayton Thomas and Fred Lipsius

  © 1971 (Renewed 1999) EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. and MINNESINGERS

  PUBLISHING LTD.

  All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC.

  All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured Used by Permission

  Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

  “Redemption”

  Words and Music by David Clayton Thomas, Richard Halligan and Steven Katz

  © 1971 (Renewed 1999) EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC.

  All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured Used by Permission

  Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

  “Spinning Wheel”

  Words and Music by David Clayton Thomas

  © 1968 (Renewed 1996) EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC. and BAY MUSIC LTD.

  All Rights Controlled and Administered by EMI BLACKWOOD MUSIC INC.

  All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured Used by Permission

  Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Clayton-Thomas, David, 1941–

  Blood, Sweat and Tears / David Clayton-Thomas.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-0-670-06469-4

  1. Clayton-Thomas, David, 1941–. 2. Singers—Canada—Biography.

  3. Blood, Sweat & Tears (Musical group). I. Title.

  ML420.C622A3 2010 782.42164092 C2010-904487-8

  * * *

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477 or 2474

  Dedicated to the memory of Doug Riley, 1945–2007

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Willowdale

  2 Guelph Reformatory.

  3 Burwash

  4 Rompin’ Ronnie

  5 Yorkville and the Bluenote

  6 The Bossmen

  7 Joni and John Lee

  8 Greenwich Village

  9 Colomby and Katz

  10 The Original BS&T

  11 Woodstock and Miles

  12 Grammys and Groupies

  13 Eastern Europe

  14 San Francisco

  15 Vegas and Sammy

  16 Elvis and Earthquakes

  17 The Split

  18 BS&T Part Two

  19 Amsterdam

  20 The Canadian BS&T

  21 Ashleigh’s Song

  22 Stadthalles and Symphonies

  23 Pomona

  24 Into the Digital Age

  25 9/11

  26 I Am Gold

  27 Justin Time

  28 Fred’s Memorial

  29 The Evergreens

  30 A Blues for Doc

  31 Spinning Wheel

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Introduction

  It’s ironic that I should have joined a band called Blood Sweat & Tears. It’s a phrase that has followed me through life, beginning with Winston Churchill’s famous speech during the war that brought me into this world and later as the name of the band that catapulted me to international fame. Those three words say so much about my journey.

  Blood means passion and sacrifice. You must be willing to put your life on the line for what you want. It’s been said that my story is courageous. I don’t see it that way. Courage is selfless sacrifice—this is just a story of raw survival. When you come from less than nothing, you’ll do almost anything to be somebody. Blood was shed in prison, where I learned to fight for respect. Blood means practicing until your fingers bleed. Blood gave me the gift of music, which I inherited from my mother. Blood is life and what a life it has been.

  Sweat represents the work it takes—swinging a ten-pound hammer on a prison work gang, working eight-hour shifts in a factory so you can afford to play music for free, playing on street corners for spare change, grinding out five shows a night in funky bars, driving through the night with no sleep to make a gig. Sweat means giving every ounce of yourself to a performance even when no one shows up. Sweat means hard work and nothing happens without it.

  Tears signify not only my darkest moments but the pain I brought to those who loved me—tears cried by those who were caught up in my obsessive drive to succeed, tears shed in moments of triumph and at times of tragedy. There are tears of joy and tears of grief in this story, tears of rage and tears of absolute despair. Tears mean you care, that you can feel. Tears mean you’re alive.

  Blood Sweat & Tears, a rock band born of power politics and massive egos. A band that rocketed to the very top of the music world then imploded just as spectacularly. Blood, sweat and tears—the basic elements of life. It’s the story of my life and there could be no better title for this book.

  Putting your story down on paper brings new perspective to your life. It’s a difficult exercise, one that requires absolute honesty and painful self-examination. In order to survive we compartmentalize our failures and unpleasant episodes and push them to the furthest recesses of our minds. It’s the only way we could possibly move beyond the calamities and foolish decisions that must inevitably come to us all. In writing your autobiography you must first make a decision: are you going to sugar-coat the story, make yourself th
e hero and blame everyone else for your mistakes, or are you ready to dredge those dark corners of your life and tell it like it was? There’s no in between … it’s all or nothing.

  My friends and family already know the truth and they wouldn’t be happy with a self-serving story. They’d expect me to get it right. Everything is connected in the play that is your life. So what I am writing is as nakedly honest as I can possibly make it.

  There are no good guys or bad guys in this story. I’m sure that the recollections of some of the people I write about will differ from mine and that’s just how it is. I’ve learned that very few of us are one thing or another. We are all heroes and villains in the play of our lives—it all depends on which act we are watching and who is writing the script. This is my story.

  Blood,

  Sweat

  and

  Tears

  Blackberry Wine

  Linda came from Willowdale

  The sun shone out of her face

  At the time she was my world

  My world was such a simpler place

  And the legend lives on, and the truth somehow fades

  That’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it is today

  If I could just go back in time, I’d be with Linda in the meadow

  With a beatin’ heart and blackberry wine

  What a time it was for us

  We would live forever it seemed

  If we knew what we know now

  The way we turned out, who woulda dreamed

  And the mystery’s gone, and the memory fades

  That’s the way it’s aways been, that’s the way it is today

  If I could just go back in time, I’d be with Linda in the meadow

  With a beatin’ heart and blackberry wine

  Lyrics by David Clayton-Thomas. Copyright © Clayton-Thomas Music Publishing Inc., 2007.

  1

  WILLOWDALE

  Freda May Smith was just seventeen when she met Fred Thomsett in war-torn England in 1940. She was a pretty, petite music student, an only child from a loving British family. Her father made his living working at the local waterworks in Surrey. By night he was a music-hall entertainer, a song-and-dance man who performed popular songs of the day like “Knees Up Mother Brown” and “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts.” He was a gentle, caring man who ran a hand-puppet show for the kids in local hospitals and doted on his daughter, Freda. His wife was a typical British mum, a housewife and mother who kept their little cottage in Walton-on-Thames tidy and had a traditional British rockery—a garden of coloured stones, seashells and flowers—in their tiny backyard.

  Freda was studying the piano when the war broke out and, following the family tradition of community service, she began playing for the troops in a London hospital. There she met a genuine Canadian war hero. His name was Fred Thomsett and he was one the most highly decorated soldiers of World War II. He had taken a shrapnel wound in North Africa and had been sent to England for medical care. She instantly fell in love with the handsome young Canadian, and when Fred was released from the hospital for rehabilitation they began dating. In the urgency of the war years their relationship progressed rapidly. Before Fred shipped out to return to the front they were married, and in this chaotic time I was conceived.

  Freda continued to live with her parents in Walton-on-Thames, in Surrey, carrying her baby while the battle of Britain raged around them. Bombs rained down on the English countryside. When her due date arrived Freda was taken down to the underground hospital. Three times that night, traumatized by the constant shelling and unable to give birth, she was returned to the house. The last time she was carried up from the bomb shelter the house was gone, as was most of the block. It had taken a direct hit by a V-2 rocket. Freda was taken back to the shelter and thirty-six hours later, in the midst of earth-shaking bomb blasts, I arrived. David Henry Thomsett was born.

  Fred, a motorcycle dispatch rider with the Royal Canadian Signal Corps, was again in the thick of the fighting with Montgomery in North Africa. It was a dangerous job with a high mortality rate—three out of five dispatch riders were killed. Riding through enemy lines on a motorcycle with a dispatch pouch and a Sten gun, dispatch riders often found themselves in hand-to-hand combat. He was wounded again, this time taking a machine-gun bullet in his hip, and was returned to England, where his young son had just been born. He spent a few short months with his new family and again returned to the front. This time he was slogging through the mud of Italy, participating in some of the most brutal battles of the war—Sicily, Monte Cassino. When I was three years old my mother and I left England and immigrated to Canada to live with Fred’s family in Willowdale, Ontario, and waited for the war to end.

  Willowdale in the 1950s was a small rural town north of Toronto, consisting of a few service stations, small family-owned businesses and farms, with a scattering of postwar subdivisions. Divided right down the middle by the northern stretches of Yonge Street, it was mostly blue-collar. Italian and British to the east and predominately Jewish to the west—a mixture of homegrown Canucks and immigrants who came to Canada following World War II. It was still mostly farm country in the fifties, with rolling cornfields and dairy farms. There were large wooded areas for a youngster to play in and creeks and ponds for swimming. Facing north from the city limits of Toronto in those days you looked out over miles of rolling farmland, the skyline of Willowdale dominated by the two-storey Dempsey’s hardware store.

  My mother and her parents raised me until I was three, when we sailed for Canada, after which we lived with Fred’s sister for nearly a year. Then my father came home. A big, rough man, six feet tall, 200 pounds, with a vicious temper hardened by the horrors of war, he was the complete opposite of my gentle grandfather with his funny songs and his puppet shows, and he terrified me. This enraged Fred. After all, he had given everything for his country, endured unspeakable hardships, and now he couldn’t understand why his young son recoiled from him. The problem was that the boy’s mother and maternal grandfather had been too soft on him. The army had taught Fred that discipline was the answer to everything. He’d toughen the youngster up. And the beatings began. In later years I realized how traumatized and psychologically damaged my father was by the war. The horrors he saw changed him forever and he never truly recovered. He became as brutal as the war that he relived for the rest of his life.

  The war was not the only contributing factor to Fred’s violent nature. He was a brutal and controlling tyrant from a long line of tyrants. His father had raised his family by the old-world code that “children are to be seen, not heard,” and his children lived in absolute terror of him. A word spoken out of turn by a child at Grandpa’s dinner table sent that child, spitting blood and teeth, flying across the room from a deadly accurate backhand. Tyrannical patriarchs like the Thomsetts were a throwback to another age.

  My mother was helpless in the face of Fred’s temper. A gentle, artistic girl barely out of her teens and a long way from home, she had her own way of dealing with my father’s rages. She would never confront him directly. His temper would flare and then soon burn out. He’d become contrite and then she would get her way. She loved Fred unconditionally and always believed he would mellow as time passed.

  In 1947 Freda gave birth to their second child, my brother, John. Now there were two boys who were the targets of their father’s uncontrollable temper. My earliest memories were of the beatings. They came in many forms, from a razor strop across the buttocks in the basement to sudden vicious attacks with boots and fists for the slightest infraction of Fred Thomsett’s rules. The two boys reacted differently to the beatings. My brother, John, would curl up in a ball on the floor and cry, “I love you, Dad, I’ll never do it again, I’m sorry, I’m sorry …” My brother wasn’t a bad guy—he was a victim too. He learned early on how to con his way out of the beatings, and that was his way of dealing with things his whole life. John became a hustler, always just a few days away from his next b
ig score. He was constantly in and out of jail. He was never a big-time criminal—he just always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people. He died a hopeless alcoholic, a broken man. But the damage had been done years before. He was broken as a child by our father, and he went to his grave early, still desperately seeking the old man’s approval. I never really got to know John. When I left home at fifteen he was still a kid, and over the years I had almost no contact with him. He was either in jail or kissing up to the old man, and I wanted no part of either of them. John and I were very different. He was slim and blond-haired, a good-looking boy who could charm his way out of anything. I was stocky and dark-haired with a bad attitude. I’d defy Fred at every opportunity. Even as a youngster I wouldn’t take the beatings lying down. I refused to drop my pants and bend over obediently for a whipping. Fred would have to drag me to the basement for punishment, biting, kicking and screaming.

  My father was a big man and tough as nails, a rugged outdoorsman with years of military training. A ten-year-old didn’t stand a chance against him. I took the worst of the beatings. I was six years older than John. Unlike John I wouldn’t submit passively and plead, “I love you, Dad, don’t hit me.” That got John off easy. He’d take a few licks and it was over. Besides, he was still just a kid and I was getting old enough to challenge the old man. The ultimate sin in Fred’s world was to challenge his authority. “So you think you’re a man, eh! You think you’re big enough to take me?” BAM!

  He’d knock me clear across the room for some breach of his rules, and I would come up off the floor and charge at him, flailing away with my little fists and taking bloody beatings. My mother would plead with me, “Don’t fight him, you’ll only make it worse.” I hated this man with a passion and would often cry myself to sleep at night wishing he were dead. I took my suppressed rage out at school. I was a big strong kid and met the slightest perceived insult with flying fists. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was becoming just like the father I hated.