The David Clayton-Thomas Interview

Exist Within the Fabric by David Clayton-Thomas ​As a country, in Canada we were never formed out of a Revolutionary War. We basically negotiated our separation from England. We were the end of the Underground Railroad after the American Civil War. A lot of the black people in the South fled to Canada, and we actually have a large black population up here. Most of them are now third- and fourth-generation Canadians. ​The roots of American culture go all the way back to slavery, and it’s still there today in isolated pockets all over the country. You can still find many people that are angry that a black man was in the White House. That attitude doesn’t exist up here. We’ve always been a nice country that gets along with everybody else. We were a very multicultural country right from the very beginning. We were divided into French and English, and then the Scots came in and a huge Jewish population after World War II. We allow cultures to exist within the fabric of our country. ​We have a little area up here in Toronto called Yorkville. A new culture was developing there of artists who were writing their own music. It was people like Neil Young, Gordon Lighfoot, Joni Mitchell, John Kay. I started gravitating more and more to that scene, away from the strip, which was more RnB oriented. ​I had already been to New York. We had had three no. 1 records in Canada and I was still working in the same club. It didn’t make any real difference, because there was no real record industry here in the mid-60s, so I couldn’t really maintain a band. ​I used to play solo a lot. I was always a big fan of Mississippi Delta blues. I loved that music and played it on guitar. Between sets at my gig, I used to go across the street and sit in with John Lee Hooker. ​One night he told me he was playing Cafe au Go Go in New York the following week. I said “Take me with you. I’ll play backup guitar for you.” Having grown up in the very Deep South he was functionally illiterate, so he couldn’t get a drivers license. He promised, “If you drive me to New York, I’ll get you a gig when we get there.” That was it. I went down and played Cafe au Go Go behind John Lee Hooker. ​Another time I was asked by Paul Anka to come down and play on his TV show Hullabaloo. That was the first NBC/Network musical show. Paul and I were the first Canadians to ever be on it. I went down there and spent about three days filming the show. In the evenings, I would go down and hang out in Greenwich Village. I got to know musicians like Richie Havens and Jimi Hendrix, James Taylor and Carole King. They were all working little clubs down there. A lot of the artists who played Greenwich Village would come up and play in Yorkville. There was tremendous interchange between Toronto and New York.