Blood, Sweat and Tears

by David Clayton-Thomas

  So here’s a song just for you, for the girl I left behind

  Here’s one for the band and one for the man I might have been

  It’s only a song, just a candle in the night

  But it keeps me movin’ on, another town to maybe get it right

  It’s only a song, but it’s the best thing that I do

  Just remember when I’m gone, that I wrote this one for you

  Just remember when I’m gone girl, that I wrote this one for you

  Who’s gonna comfort you tonight

  Who’s gonna tell you things will be all right

  So here’s a song just for you, for the girl I left behind

  Here’s one for the road and one for the load I’m carrying

  Here’s one for the road and one for the load I’m carrying

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

  22

  STADTHALLES AND SYMPHONIES

  Istayed home for the first eighteen months of Ashleigh’s life, but sooner or later I had to get back to work. There wasn’t much work in Canada and Jen was probably going to kill me if I didn’t get out of the house soon. We talked it over and decided to go back to New York, where Jennifer could be closer to her family in Newport, Rhode Island, and I could get back into the New York music scene. I’d been there for nearly fifteen years and I knew my way around. I’d have no trouble finding work in New York. Even though Ashleigh was born in Canada, she had dual citizenship and Jennifer was insistent that she be raised as an American. The Canadian band had drifted away during my hiatus. Some of the guys had new families to care for and weren’t interested in going back on the road, and others had moved on to other gigs. Cassidy had returned to South Africa. Fred Heller was pretty much out of the music business by this time and was running his family’s fleet of cabs in Manhattan. Besides, I really didn’t want to start another Blood Sweat & Tears at this point in my life. I was forty-two years old and I figured if I didn’t take a shot at a solo career now I never would. We sold the farmhouse, and the Porsche Carrera would help us out one last time. I got a nice price for her and she helped finance the Clayton-Thomases’ move to the big city. Once again I had come full circle—I was back in New York.

  Jennifer and I rented a house in Rockland County. I knew Rockland well from the days of recording at Bobby Colomby’s studio in New City and it was a way to be close to Manhattan without having to raise Ashleigh on the mean streets of New York City. I contacted Sid Bernstein, the promoter who first brought the Beatles to New York. Sid was an old friend and had once booked BS&T into Madison Square Garden. He rounded up a few solo dates on the west coast and I put together a small band of session players in New York, rented a tour bus and took off for California.

  The bus driver was a guy named Larry Dorr. Larry was a taciturn red-haired Bostonian. He and I had a lot of time to talk as we bused out to the west coast and back, with Larry driving and me riding shotgun. I explained my present situation and told him that Blood Sweat & Tears was over and I was looking to move on. He said he understood where I was coming from and told me that he wasn’t just a bus driver. He was actually a tour manager with years of experience, and he’d like to get involved with my career. I was impressed with this guy. He handled himself well on the road and he knew the business inside and out. I liked him, and when the west-coast run was over I offered him a job as my manager. He would be my best friend and closest business associate for the next twenty years.

  My favourite Larry Dorr story occurred at the House of Blues in LA. I overheard him talking to some slick Hollywood promoter type. I caught just a snippet of their conversation. Larry was saying, “Look, I don’t play tennis, I don’t do lunch, frankly I don’t even like you—just sign the fuckin’ contract. I got a show to put on.” That was classic Larry Dorr, a tough, no-nonsense old-school road manager. He’d collect from a promoter with a baseball bat if necessary. He didn’t have a lot of formal education; he’d learned his trade on the road just like I did. We were both street cats and we understood each other. He was one of the best road managers in the business. He began his career at fifteen as a roadie on the James Brown band and had worked his way up through the ranks. Bus driver, road manager, stagehand, he’d done it all. He had been a tour director for Broadway shows, so he knew how to move a large touring company around the world effortlessly. He was a seasoned pro and just the kind of guy I needed to get started in New York again.

  There really was no Blood Sweat & Tears anymore. All the original guys were long gone, and there had been several editions of the band since. Heller was out of the business, Colomby was in LA and I felt it was time to stand on my own. So I put together a small five-piece band in New York, and Larry Dorr began booking David Clayton-Thomas dates. Larry didn’t actually travel with the band much. We needed a home base, and Larry was much more effective booking the band from his office in Boston. He’d come out on the road every so often to see that everything was running smoothly, but most of the time he was home manning the phones. We were driving from gig to gig, the band in a fifteen-passenger van pulling their gear in a U-Haul trailer and me in my ’84 BMW, playing as many as twenty-five club dates a month from coast to coast. We put over 150,000 miles on the vehicles in one year. We had a couple of roadies and soundmen taking care of business on the road. The gigs were mostly club dates and we didn’t expect to get the same money that I got with BS&T, but what the hell—it was a start.

  We immediately ran into an impossible situation. I started out with no intention of using the BS&T name. A promoter would book us into a club. Our contract specifically spelled out the billing, absolutely forbidding the use of the name Blood Sweat & Tears. But once out there on the road we were at the mercy of the local promoter. I would show up for the gig with my five-piece band and on the marquee there it was: “Tonight, Blood Sweat & Tears.” These scumbags were paying a fraction of the price they would have had to pay for BS&T and had used the name anyway. I had no choice but to go ahead and play the show. Refusing to perform could be disastrous, especially in some of the redneck roadhouses we were playing.

  Jennifer and Ashleigh were alone and somewhat isolated in suburban New York, and in spite of my best efforts I was seldom there. Jennifer and I went for weeks on end without seeing each other. The only had contact we had was by phone. We had a nice house in Suffern, New York, but Jennifer was miserable and I wasn’t happy out there playing honky-tonks across America twenty-five days a month. She felt abandoned and alone in Suffern, and I felt she didn’t appreciate what I was going through to pay the bills every month. We argued on the phone constantly. Finally Jennifer had had enough of raising our daughter by herself and took Ashleigh up to Newport to be closer to her family. It was heartbreaking for me, but I knew Jen was doing the right thing. Ashleigh was growing up quickly, and in Newport she would have her grandmother and aunts and uncles around her—a good support group for Jennifer and a solid family environment for Ashleigh—and no matter where they lived I’d still only see them for a couple of days a month anyway. I was having a difficult time touring without the BS&T name, the gigs weren’t paying a lot of money and we had to do a lot of them to make ends meet. Jennifer knew that the music business had finally won out over the marriage. Maybe she had always known it would. Our daughter was our most important consideration, so we quietly dissolved the marriage with a minimum of legal hassles and agreed to joint custody of Ashleigh. Over the years Jennifer and I have remained friends and we were always supportive of each other in raising Ash. I dumped the rental house in Rockland County and went back to living on the road. Story of my life … no home, nice luggage.

  I found myself in joints that could never afford BS&T, playing for money that would have been a joke two years earlier. I fought with the club owners every night about the billing and eventually I just gave up. This solo-career idea wasn’t working out too well. We may have been playing my songs and it may have been my voice on those reco
rds, but the name on the Grammy Awards was Blood Sweat & Tears. That’s what the promoters wanted, and they were going to use it whether I liked it or not. I soon realized that the conspiracy went far beyond the local club owner. Everybody from Larry Dorr to the agents and the local promoter was winking at the terms of the contract. They needed to keep the act working to generate money and they weren’t going to allow a technicality like the billing to stand in the way. There were constant threats of lawsuits from Bobby Colomby, but even he knew it was out of my hands. Everybody knew we couldn’t file a lawsuit against every funky roadhouse that infringed on the BS&T name, so the club owners would simply ignore the contract. “Hey, David Clayton-Thomas is Blood Sweat & Tears … Everybody knows that.” These gigs were humiliating for me and damaging to BS&T’s reputation. It soon became obvious that we would have to make a deal with Bobby Colomby for the use of the BS&T name.

  Larry Dorr contacted Colomby, now living in Los Angeles, and made arrangements to once again rent the name. Bobby had distanced himself from the group after the tragedy in Amsterdam and my own personal train wreck, and I no longer had any direct contact with him. I can’t blame him. He was a corporate vicepresident now. He couldn’t afford to be associated with any bad publicity, and it seemed like I had a talent for generating bad press. My name was well-known, but the joints we were playing weren’t exactly prestigious and I could be a target for any smalltown lawman who wanted to get his name in the paper. My prison record still followed me everywhere I went. Any contact with the law whatsoever and I was automatically a criminal. A simple traffic stop could mean being taken away in handcuffs while some redneck sheriff had me checked out. After Amsterdam, BS&T carried the taint of being a drug band and even though the band was now completely clean that reputation still followed us. Bobby Colomby wanted nothing more to do with me or Blood Sweat & Tears, but he was willing to rent the use of the name to Larry Dorr. This allowed him to still make money from our activities without appearing to be directly connected to me or the band. Larry and I agreed to rent the name for a year or two—just long enough to get us out of these low-life joints we’d been playing and back into the concert halls where we belonged.

  Once we had the right to use the name, we signed the act to a major LA-based agency and I set about the task of putting together a horn band in New York that could play the BS&T repertoire. Overnight our price soared and the quality of the venues went right back to where it had always been. Inside of a month we went from bars and roadhouses to festivals and concert halls. Such is the power of a name in this business. Ironically, higher-priced gigs meant we weren’t playing six nights a week anymore. The big concerts were mostly on weekends and we were flying to most of them, so my days of driving 150,000 miles a year were over. Had Jen and I stuck it out for a few more months we might have saved our marriage. But it was too late now—we had both moved on. The divorce was final, Jennifer had a new boyfriend and I had my career back on track.

  I met a fine trumpet player and arranger in New York named Steve Guttman. Steve would be the musical director for the new Blood Sweat & Tears. He organized the charts and began recruiting musicians. There was no shortage of great musicians in New York. By now the music schools were spitting out young players who had grown up with the music of BS&T. Most of the major universities were teaching the music of Blood Sweat & Tears as part of their curriculum. This band was much different from the previous editions of BS&T. This wasn’t a group, and it wasn’t meant to be. It was a rotating team of top New York City session musicians. Each player in the band had a sub who could step in at a moment’s notice. I didn’t want personal friendships in this band. I got along well with these guys, maybe even more so now because I was “the boss” and everybody knew where they stood. Musicians came and went weekly and I had no interest in getting involved in band politics. That was Steve Guttman’s job. Larry Dorr booked the dates and organized the road crew. He assembled a crack team of top soundmen and tour managers. Promoters were always blown away by the professionalism and efficiency of the BS&T operation.

  There was a lucrative market opening up with the Indianreservation casinos that were cropping up everywhere. They all paid good money. Some had decent showrooms, some didn’t. They ranged from luxurious multi-million-dollar establishments like Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun to joints out in Middle America that had been truck stops before the local tribe got a gaming licence. Their clientele was mostly an older crowd, so they booked “oldies” acts, and BS&T now fit solidly into that category. I had guys in the band who weren’t even born when BS&T had its first hits. The audience was getting older and the band was getting younger every year.

  I once walked through a casino in Las Vegas with Larry Dorr and we saw a great singer who had several big hits in the sixties playing in the lounge to twenty people, vainly trying to be heard above the din of the slot machines and cash registers. It was sad. I remember saying to Larry, “If I ever get to this, just shoot me, okay?” Well, we hadn’t quite “got to this” but some of these joints were close. Fortunately, we had maintained a level of musicianship that could play other venues. We played major international jazz festivals and first-rate concert halls with our lineup of topnotch New York City jazz musicians. The level of musicianship in the band was still superb. The music demanded it. Your everyday lounge musician couldn’t really play this repertoire. The music created by the original band was just too challenging, and it required the best musicians in the business.

  There were some wild and wonderful European tours in the eighties and nineties. My favourites were the Stadthalle tours, German for “standing hall.” We would assemble a band of our A-team players in New York and fly them into Munich with a skeleton crew consisting of our sound tech and road manager. In Germany we would take on a European crew of stagehands, roadies and even our own caterer. We’d charter a large doubledecker luxury coach and take off across Europe—Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland, playing nearly every night in a different town. The Stadthalles would be packed with fans, up to 2,000 young people, shoulder to shoulder, jammed right up against the edge of the stage. The audiences were wild. They cheered and screamed and fired the band up every night. We stayed at beautiful four-star hotels in the big cities—Milan, Vienna, Berlin and Geneva—or in scenic chalet-style inns in the smaller towns. By day we were out on the Autobahns, cruising along at 120 kilometres an hour over the mountains of Bavaria, across the Alps and through the magnificent northern Italian countryside. The coaches had an upper deck with panoramic windows. The band would gather up there, playing backgammon, reading or just watching the lovely European landscape roll by. Ancient castles dotted the slopes of the Bavarian Alps, and fans would follow the bus, waving out the windows of their cars, stopping when we stopped for lunch at the Mövenpick rest areas. Beautiful Euro-babes would attach themselves to the tour, following us from city to city in their BMWs or riding in the tour coach with the band. It was a big rolling party, the bus loaded with beer and babes. We would play as many as twenty concerts in three weeks. Then we’d return to Munich for the final show, exhausted and happy, and the promoters would throw a big send-off party before we returned to New York. Through the late eighties and early nineties, we were in Europe several times a year.

  We also began playing concerts with major symphony orchestras. This was Steve Guttman’s brainchild. He expanded the BS&T charts to full symphony scores and we appeared with some of the top orchestras in the country. The symphony concerts presented an opportunity to congregate with other musicians. The orchestras were full of conservatory graduates who had studied the music of BS&T in college. Their brass sections were loaded with players who had gone to school with our horn players, and the BS&T name commanded respect wherever we went. “Pops” concerts are often tolerated by orchestras as a fundraising necessity, but when BS&T came to town they knew they were in for a treat. Our symphony book contained elements of Bartók, Prokofiev, Ellington, Basie, Aaron Copeland. Guttman’s scores were beautifully wr
itten, and you would see smiles break out in the orchestra as soon as they opened the book. Our symphony scores didn’t just use the orchestra as accompaniment, as many pop acts do, but fully included them in the program, with an ambitious overture and original movements written for the orchestra alone and featuring their soloists. Steve Guttman commanded immediate respect as a conductor, and the conservatory-trained musicians in our band could hold their own in any symphony orchestra. Performing with fine orchestras like the Buffalo Philharmonic and the San Antonio and the Long Beach symphonies was a special treat. Hearing a seventy-piece orchestra strike up the intro to “God Bless the Child” always gave me chills.

  One of our first orchestra concerts was with the Baton Rouge Symphony, and it was a joy. A large orchestra can be somewhat ponderous compared to the snap and precision of a jazz combo. Doc Riley once described it as “like trying to steer an ocean liner.” Classical musicians don’t always understand the rhythmic feel of funk and jazz. In addition, symphony musicians have a reputation for being somewhat stuffy and formal. Not so for the wonderful BRSO. This orchestra rocked. Half the string bass players played jazz down in New Orleans, and the brass section was well versed in jazz and the blues. We played an absolutely delightful outdoor concert in the park with the sixty-piece orchestra. They were fun, they were lively and the band loved playing with them. Immediately after the concert the orchestra’s resident conductor said to us, “Gentlemen, don’t go away. We have a surprise for you.” He led us to a large barnlike building behind the stage. Cajun music was booming from the speakers, and piled on a long table were tubs of steaming-hot peppered crawfish, vats of gumbo and kegs of ice-cold beer. The concertmaster greeted us with a big smile and said, “Dig in, boys. Welcome to Loosiana.” There was the entire Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, the men stripped down to their undershirts, the ladies in T-shirts and jeans. On the dance floor they were dancing to Clifton Chenier and Dr. John. We partied late into the night, our faces greasy with “crawdad” juice. We had a ball, and all our preconceived notions about classical musicians were blown forever.