I had always been a voracious reader. In the joint I had devoured the prison library: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky. I had read most of the classics and was delighted to find myself among people who shared my love of literature. I was exposed to innovative thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller and George Orwell. I loved hanging out all night in the coffee houses discussing philosophy, politics, music and art. But the simmering rage that had allowed me to survive the brutal prisons and the tough bars still ran just beneath the surface and I was not one to be provoked. Old habits die hard. I was still capable of lashing out with incredible fury if I felt threatened. It would be years before I learned to control the wicked temper I had inherited from my father, but Yorkville was a good start.
Brainwashed
I woke up one mornin’ and I took a look around
Found myself sleepin’ in the city dog pound
I told myself this just can’t be
In the home of the brave and the land of the free
I finally found my voice and I began to shout
I gotta, gotta tell ya what it’s all about
I been brainwashed, brainwashed, brainwashed
Now it pours from my paper and from my radio
Tellin’ me what to do and which way to go
White knight chargin’ down on me with a lance
Giants in the valley, I don’t stand me a chance
Stamp out overpopulation, take a walk in outer space
I gotta, gotta, tell ya what we got to face
We been brainwashed, brainwashed, brainwashed
Down with the hangman, I’d rather fight than switch
Public insulation, don’t know which is which
We won ourselves a victory, the casualties were light
Judgin’ by the news machine it ain’t much of a fight
Sixty million people readin’ all about Vietnam
And eighty-five percent of them don’t give a [bleep]
They been brainwashed, brainwashed, brainwashed
Lyrics by David Clayton-Thomas. Copyright © Clayton-Thomas Music Publishing Inc., 1964.
6
THE BQSSMEN
It was Doc Riley who originally turned me on to the world of jazz. I was drawn to the incredible musical prowess of local players like Oscar Peterson, Lenny Breau and Moe Koffman. International jazz and blues artists like Joe Williams, Jimmy Witherspoon and Lonnie Johnson played regularly in Yorkville. I became friends with a jazz pianist named Tony Collacott. Tony was a young genius who had played with Sarah Vaughan at Carnegie Hall when he was fourteen, and now, in his early twenties, he was a hopelessly burned-out heroin junkie playing the jazz clubs in Yorkville. He was a total wreck, a chain-smoking, pill-popping outpatient at the psychiatric hospital on Queen Street. He was under constant doctors’ supervision, self-destructive, suicidal and brilliant. A talent like his wasn’t meant to last. It burned so fiercely that it was bound to destroy anyone who was cursed with it. Tony and I would sit up all night long talking about revolutionary new concepts in music. He was obsessed with the fire and energy of rock & roll. Why couldn’t conservatory graduates play this music? Look what George Martin was doing with the Beatles—jazz and symphonic concepts applied to rock & roll. Miles Davis was experimenting with using funk and rock grooves in jazz. The barriers between different styles of music were breaking down and it was a whole new world to explore.
Tony Collacott and I gradually evolved an idea. I would write some new songs and he would arrange them using his considerable jazz chops. We put together a band based on this concept. We were called “the Bossmen”—three electric guitars arranged like a jazz horn section and a rock rhythm section built around Tony’s madly inventive piano playing, described as something between Bach, Thelonious Monk and Jelly Roll Morton. I contacted Duff Roman and tried to explain what we were up to. I don’t think he really understood where we were going with this idea. Then again, neither did we. This was uncharted territory. Duff’s record company was just about broke by this time but he believed in me and borrowed two thousand bucks to pay for some studio time.
The result was “Brainwashed,” an absolutely insane mix of heavy rock guitars orchestrated by Tony and featuring his outrageous jazz piano. The lyrics were an anti-war primal scream of refusal and outrage. I was influenced by the politically charged lyrics of the anti-war writers—Dylan, Jim Morrison, John Lennon—but underneath my songs was a strong undercurrent of raw blues. Collacott, a conservatory-trained jazz musician, gave the song an edgy avant-garde flavour that was totally unique. No one had ever heard anything like it. It was absolute musical madness, and it became the number-one record across Canada, knocking the Beatles and the Stones off the charts and dominating national radio for an unheard-of sixteen weeks. Even that couldn’t save Duff’s label, Roman Records. He folded the company. “Brainwashed” was our last release. It was 1966 and anti-war songs were still not fashionable in the States, and without a US release Duff’s company couldn’t survive. Duff went on to be president of CHUM Radio and founder of FACTOR, a government-backed organization to support Canadian talent. He is a dear friend to this day.
We couldn’t possibly make a living in Yorkville with a six-piece band. The clubs were just too small. One-nighters were few and far between around Toronto, and the bars downtown wanted no part of this edgy, outrageous band with their hippie clothes, long hair and junkie piano player. Even with the number-one record in the country, this band was just too “far out” for the Strip. So we embarked on an absolutely crazy venture—we booked a driving tour across Canada. It had never been done before. The distance between gigs alone was daunting, and even in summer the North Country could be hostile and unforgiving. Breaking down north of Thunder Bay could be disastrous. We planned to start out in Toronto and make our way up through northern Ontario, across the Canadian prairies and out to Edmonton. I sold the old Cadillac from the New York trip and we bought a used cab-over bakery van. We built makeshift bunks in the back, loaded up our amps and drums, and headed out.
Our agency in those days was the Bigland Agency, run by a guy named Ron Scribner. I guess they figured if we were crazy enough to attempt a 3,500-mile drive in a bakery van, they would book the dates. No one had ever tried it before, they got their 10 per cent anyway and who knows … we just might make it. We played shows every night, heading north up through Ontario. Barrie, North Bay, Sudbury, Thunder Bay. With the shitty money we were making, most of the profits were going into the gas tank or on food, but we kept going. There was a carrot at the end of this stick: a big gig waiting for us in Edmonton, a full week at the Klondike Days fair for $2,500. That was big money in those days—in Toronto we worked five shows a night for $1,000 a week, split six ways after expenses and commissions.
The agency had booked the tour with no consideration for sleep or routing. We played every night in a different town and drove hundreds of miles through the night in shifts to make the next gig on time. By the second week we made it to Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, a minor miracle considering we had driven a thousand miles across some of the most hostile country in the world. In the “Soo” the shit hit the fan.
We were booked in to a quonset-style arena, a big, boomy tin-roofed joint meant for hockey, not concerts. Of course calling what we were doing “concerts” was a euphemism. The promoters booked everything from junior hockey to professional wrestling and bingo. The place was filled with beer-drunk hosers who came mostly to get laid or get in a fight. Since they had zero chance of getting laid, the show usually ended in a brawl. If any of the local lovelies so much as batted their eyes at the band they’d incite a riot, so we avoided the local talent. The show was about half over when the arena was invaded by a gang of toughs, motorcycle guys from across the line in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. One of them must have put the moves on a local girl (that’s usually how these things got started) and a pier-six brawl broke out. Security consisted of one aging Canadian Legion veteran and he was hiding some
where. The promoter grabbed the money from the till and ran. The fight was out of control and boiling up over the stage. It had nothing to do with us. We just wanted to get the hell out of there.
We were trying get our gear off the stage and make our escape when I saw little Tony Collacott, trying to protect his electric piano, go down under a whole gang of fist-swinging goons. I waded into them, cold-cocked one of them with the butt end of a microphone stand and dragged Tony, dazed and bleeding, out of harm’s way. Now we were in for it! The buddies of the guy I had whacked with the mic stand wanted me. We backed up to the loading ramp, trying to escape. I was guarding the band’s retreat with the mic stand as they loaded our equipment out the back door and into the truck, but I was fighting a losing battle. There were just too many of them. Somebody winged a beer bottle at me. It clipped me over the eye and opened up an inch-long gash. I looked desperately into the arena manager’s office, hoping to find a way out of there, and standing against the wall behind his desk was a twelve-gauge shotgun. I didn’t know if it was loaded or not, but then neither did they, so I grabbed it and, with blood streaming down my face, I yelled at the top of my lungs, “All right, you motherfuckers, who wants some of this!” The fight stopped immediately and the goons began backing away down the ramp, then turned and ran back into the arena to find easier prey. Under the unblinking eyes of the double-barrelled shotgun, we loaded up the truck. In the parking lot I popped the twelve-gauge open. It wasn’t loaded. I tossed it into the woods and we headed into the night.
We were battered and exhausted and sometime that night our guitar player drove the van into the ditch on a desolate stretch of highway in northern Ontario somewhere between Sault Ste Marie and Winnipeg. The radiator was cracked, the front axle was broken and the van was finished. There we were, huddled in the wrecked van, shivering in the cold night air by the side of the deserted highway, a million miles from nowhere. At dawn a trucker came by and we flagged him down. He took a couple of us to some little town where we signed the title to the van over to a local who picked up the remaining guys, loaded our gear into a U-Haul trailer and drove us the four hundred miles to Winnipeg.
We tried to check in to a hotel but we looked like hell. We hadn’t slept, bathed or changed our clothes for three days. We were bruised and battered by the brawl in Sault Ste Marie, banged up from the truck wreck and were with Tony Collacott, a junkie who looked like one. The desk clerk called the cops. The Mounties arrived and we told them our tale of woe. They were sympathetic until Collacott was frisked and they found the contents of a small pharmacy on him. We were detained for hours while Tony had to prove that he actually had prescriptions for the cocktail of drugs they found on him. Percodan, Demerol, methadone—just a part of Tony’s daily diet. Then they checked my driver’s licence. I still hadn’t legally changed my name yet so my licence still read “Thomsett.” A quick check and it was discovered that “Thomsett” was an ex-con. That didn’t help matters either. They weren’t impressed that we had the number-one rock record in the country.
They finally let us go and drove us back to the hotel, where I tried to contact our agency in Toronto. They were not taking our calls. “I’m sorry, Mr. Scribner is in a meeting. May I take your number?” Apparently the story had gotten back to Toronto and was totally blown out of proportion. The agency had been told by the promoter in Sault Ste Marie—who hadn’t paid us yet and didn’t intend to now—that I had fired a shotgun into the audience (“It’s a miracle someone wasn’t killed!”) and that the band had been busted for drugs in Winnipeg. Neither story was true, but the agency had disowned us and cancelled the rest of the tour. We had money enough for maybe two nights at the hotel, no transportation and no gig in Winnipeg. That too had been cancelled by the agency. Then an angel came to our rescue. I called the Edmonton radio station that was promoting the Klondike Days show. I told them about our predicament and they sent us airfare to Edmonton. We played a solid week at Klondike Days, got paid and they flew us back to Toronto. God bless that little AM radio station in Edmonton, Alberta. They saved our lives.
When I arrived home, in my front hall was a box of promotional photos from the Bigland Agency, which were supposed to have been delivered before the tour began, along with an invoice for two hundred bucks. I took the subway up to the agency’s office. When I walked in the receptionist tipped off the agents that I was there and they all fled out the back door or locked themselves in the washrooms. I dumped the photos all over Ron Scribner’s desk and walked back to Yorkville.
That was the end of the Bossmen. By this time Tony Collacott was deteriorating rapidly. We had to sign him out of the psychiatric hospital for gigs and bring him back afterwards. His brilliant mind was burning out fast and the years of drug abuse were taking their toll on his body. Every time I saw him I was surprised that he was still alive. The Bossmen were doomed to fail. The band was very much a product of Tony Collacott’s mad genius and without him it could not exist. The group disbanded, still with the number-one record in the country, and I went back to playing the coffee houses in Yorkville.
Oh Angelina
I’ve seen some towns I hope I’ll never see again
I’ve known some people who I used to call my friend
I’ve done some things I know I’d like to do again
And I ain’t seen Angelina since I can’t remember when
Sun in the mornin’, moon at night
Long as I get my lovin’ everything’s goin’ be all right
Oh … Angelina, say when you comin’ down from Montreal
I just can’t wait …
Oh Angelina I’m only passin’ time until you call
Oh yes I am …
Just when I’m gettin’ used to bein’ on my own
I hear your voice and baby I just can’t … be alone
Sometimes I don’t know why I do the things I do
Sometimes I just don’t care but somethin’ gets me through
Sometimes a piece of me’s the best that I can do
And it’s the things I never say that mean the most to you
Sun in the mornin’, moon at night
Long as I get my lovin’ everything’s goin’ be all right
Oh … Angelina, say when you comin’ down from Montreal
I just can’t wait …
Oh Angelina I’m only passin’ time until you call
Oh yes I am …
Just when I get to thinkin’ baby it’s been too long
I hear your voice and it’s like you’ve never … been gone
Lyrics by David Clayton-Thomas. Copyright © Clayton-Thomas Music Publishing Inc., 2007.
7
JONI AND JOHN LEE
After the abortive Bossmen tour I found I had gained a reputation in the Canadian music industry. Now I was rock’s bad boy. The story about the shotgun and the mic stand was told and retold and grew with every telling. There were stories swirling around Toronto about how I had single-handedly cleared out a bar on the Strip. Not true, but that didn’t matter—people just loved to recount these juicy tales. My prison record, which I had kept pretty much hidden, now became public knowledge. The angry lyrics of “Brainwashed” fuelled my bad-boy image even more. My abilities as a songwriter were completely overshadowed by my tough-guy reputation. Now I was more than famous. I was infamous. My reputation as a badass followed me everywhere and I couldn’t fight it. Eventually I gave up trying. Fuck it … You want a badass, you got one.
I put together a four-piece band called the David Clayton-Thomas Combine. We played the heavy rock clubs around Yorkville, joints like Café El Patio and the Devil’s Den. The bass player was a guy named Bruce Palmer who later teamed up with Stephen Stills in LA and formed Buffalo Springfield. The band was loud and aggressive. We played everything from “Brainwashed” to Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon. I lived in rented rooms with nothing to my name except my Telecaster and my amp. I had a few offers to play the lucrative bars downtown but I had gone too far to turn back no
w. There was no way I could go back to mohair suits and top-forty music. My band wore ripped T-shirts and leather pants. Our hair was long, our attitude was tough and cocky, and our music was fierce and rebellious. We smoked dope and chugged whisky onstage. We made the Rolling Stones look like choirboys.
There was one night, and I remember it well. It was the last time we would play El Patio. The club owner came back to the dressing room between sets and told us to “turn it down.” The waitresses couldn’t hear the drink orders and the customers were complaining. We told him to go fuck himself and pushed him out the door. He came back a few minutes later with the bouncer. “Throw them out,” he ordered. The bouncer knew me and he knew my band. “Fuck you,” he told the club owner. “You throw them out, I quit.” Like I said, it was the last time we played El Patio.
In those days I had a huge crush on Joni Mitchell. I used to jump the fence behind the Devil’s Den on Avenue Road, slip in the back door of the Riverboat and stand in the kitchen to worship her from afar, but she paid me no mind. After her show she would sweep past me in her flowing, diaphanous gowns, surrounded by her adoring fans, and I was tongue-tied. I never even spoke to her. I was not worthy. I was a leather-jacketed, Telecaster-playing thug who played in a thunderously loud rock & roll band, and she was this flaxen-haired goddess from the west coast who played an acoustic guitar and sang her delicate melodies in a clear, silvery voice. Her lyrics were pure genius, her songs were beautifully crafted and she was drop-dead gorgeous. I’m sure some nights she could hear my band all the way into the Riverboat, rattling the glasses on the tables and disturbing her raptly attentive audience. We weren’t subtle, baby. We were loud and we were rude.
In later years, our common love for jazz brought us closer together. Joni and I had a couple of musician friends in common, Don Alias and Jaco Pastorius. They both played in her band and with me in BS&T. I was so completely smitten by her that I borrowed a phrase from her song “The Circle Game,” the line about “painted ponies,” and used it in my song “Spinning Wheel.” In 2007 both songs were inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame and I confessed my plagiarism to her. She said she had never even noticed. Maybe she was just being polite but I was crushed. She didn’t notice me then and she doesn’t notice me now. Ah well, Joni … Life goes on.
Blood, Sweat and Tears Page 6