After the war ended, the family moved to Canada, settling in Willowdale, a Toronto suburb. In his 2010 memoir, “Blood, Sweat and Tears,” Mr. Clayton-Thomas wrote that his father, a violent alcoholic, beat him with fists, boots and razor straps, and his mother did not intervene.
He left home at 15, sleeping in deserted buildings, stealing food and clothing, and brawling in the street. He wound up spending time in reformatories and labor camps, and was eventually sentenced to short stints in prison.
“I was called a habitual offender,” he told The Star. “So even though none of the things I did was that bad — joyriding, vagrancy, kid stuff like that — I did them so often that they kept putting me in worse and worse holes.”
At Millbrook prison in Ontario, he learned guitar on a battered instrument and developed an instant “kinship” with folk and blues music — songs by men who were “dirt-poor working-class hobos with nothing to their name,” he wrote in his memoir.
When he left the institution, at 21, he changed his surname to Clayton-Thomas, to avoid trouble with the police, and began to haunt Yonge Street, a rowdy, club-filled strip in Toronto. A self-described “leather-clad, Telecaster-playing thug,” Mr. Clayton-Thomas sat in with Ronnie Hawkins’s band, the Hawks, which later morphed into Bob Dylan’s backing group, the Band.
