Clapton (11 page)

It was at the Speakeasy, several months before, that I had first met one of the great loves of my life, a very beautiful French model, Charlotte Martin. I was smitten with her from the very first moment I set eyes on her. She was very beautiful in an austere way, classically French, with long legs and an incredible figure, but it was her eyes that got me. They were slightly Asian with a downward slant, and a little bit sad. We started dating right away and soon moved in together into a flat in Regents Park belonging to Stigwood’s partner, David Shaw, who was the financial brains behind the organization.

Charlotte was an incredible girl, more interested in films, art, and literature than in modeling, and we had a great time together. One night down at “the Speak,” we were sitting with some friends at a table when we were joined by an Australian friend of hers, an artist named Martin Sharp. When he heard I was a musician, he told me he had written a poem that he thought would make good lyrics for a song. As it happened, I had in my mind at that moment an idea inspired by a favorite song of mine by the Lovin’ Spoonful called “Summer in the City,” so I asked him to show me the words. He wrote them down on a napkin and gave them to me. They began…

You thought the leaden winter would bring you down forever,

But you rode upon a steamer to the violence of the sun.

And the colors of the sea blind your eyes with trembling mermaids,

And you touch the distant beaches with tales of brave Ulysses.

These became the lyrics of the song “Tales of Brave Ulysses.” It was the start of a long friendship and a very fruitful collaboration.

The recording of “Tales of Brave Ulysses” and the other songs that made up the album
Disraeli Gears
took place in New York at the beginning of May. This was quite a different experience from our previous trip. We stayed at the Drake Hotel on Fifty-sixth Street, and Ahmet had two of his top people in the studio to record us: hot young producer Felix Pappalardi, and one of his most experienced engineers, Tom Dowd. We recorded the whole album in the space of a week. I was immediately impressed by the way Felix took what we had and polished it into something saleable.

On the very first night, he took home with him the tape we had previously recorded of “Lawdy Mama,” which was a standard twelve-bar blues, and came back the next day having transformed it into a kind of McCartneyesque pop song, complete with new lyrics and the title “Strange Brew.” I didn’t particularly like the song, but I respected the fact that he had created a pop song without completely destroying the original groove. In the end, he won my approval, by cleverly allowing me to include in it an Albert King–style guitar solo.

When we started recording, Tommy Dowd, who was to become a close friend and be very instrumental in my future projects, was thoroughly confused by the way we approached it. We were used to making albums as if they were live and did not expect to play songs over and over again, or to have to play instruments separately on different tracks. He wasn’t quite prepared for the noise levels, either, and I got word that we could be heard several blocks away. As for Ahmet, he was under the impression that Cream was my band and that, as the leader, I rather than Jack should be singing, and he kept pushing for me to do so. Finally, they both decided to let us get on in our own way. While we were recording, all kinds of famous musicians would drop by the Atlantic studios to voice their approval—Booker T., Otis Redding, Al Kooper, and Janis Joplin among them—and word was soon out that something extraordinary was in the making.

I will never forget returning to London after recording
Disraeli Gears
, with all of us excited by the fact that we had made what we considered to be a groundbreaking album, a magical combination of blues, rock, and jazz. Unfortunately for us, Jimi had just released
Are You Experienced?
, and that was all anyone wanted to listen to. He kicked everybody into touch, really, and was the flavor not just of the month but of the year. Everywhere you went it was wall-to-wall Jimi, and I felt really down. I thought we had made our definitive album, only to come home and find that nobody was interested.

It was the beginning of a disenchantment with England, where it seemed there wasn’t really room for more than one person to be popular at a time. What I loved about America was that it seemed such a broad breeding ground for different acts and talent, and different forms of music. You could be in a car and tune the radio to a country music station, a jazz station, a rock station, a blues station, or an oldies rock station. Even back then the categorization was so wide, there seemed to be room for anyone to make a living out of it and be at the forefront of what they were doing. When I came home, it seemed that if you weren’t scoring 10 out of 10 on the day, you were nowhere.

On the plus side, even if the record wasn’t selling as well as I’d hoped, I was having a great time. I had moved from Regents Park to the Kings Road, Chelsea, to share a studio with Martin Sharp, with whom I had become good friends. Martin was a very gentle man who had an insatiable appetite for life and new experiences. At the same time, he was very considerate and sensitive to others. An admirer of Max Ernst, who inspired a lot of his work, he was and still is a great painter. When I met him he had just started writing verse. Our apartment was on the attic floor of the Pheasantry, a historic eighteenth-century building, so called because pheasants had once been reared there for the Royal household. We had a large kitchen, three bedrooms, a huge living room with beautiful wooden floors, and great views from the dormer windows. I decorated my room in bright red and gilt, a perfect reflection of the times.

Quite a community of people was living in the Pheasantry. Martin and I had two of the rooms, which we shared with our respective girlfriends, Eija and Charlotte. The third room was taken by another painter, Philippe Mora, and his girlfriend Freya. The ground floor was a massive studio owned or leased by portrait painter Timothy Widbourne, who was busy painting the queen’s portrait while we were upstairs, quietly getting out of our skulls. But the most colorful character in our midst, if not the most powerful, was David Litvinoff.

Litvinoff was one of the most extraordinary men I’ve ever met, a fast-talking East End Jew with a stupendous intellect who appeared not to give a shit what anyone thought of him, even though I know he really did, and sometimes painfully so. He talked ten to the dozen, usually jumping from one subject to another. He had piercing blue eyes set in a sharply chiseled face, which had a huge scar right across it. This, he said, was the result of an altercation he had had with the Krays. I never found out the exact reason for this, and I didn’t feel comfortable asking him about it, although he seemed to wear the scar with pride.

Litvinoff told me that he had once worked on Fleet Street, helping to put together the William Hickey gossip column on the
Daily Express
, a job that got him into all kinds of dodgy situations, often connected with people paying him backhanders to keep them out of the column. He had a huge knowledge of music, which gave us a lot in common, and he was very funny, with his humor usually directed toward himself. I remember walking with him once in the Kings Road and making some comment about the shirt he was wearing. “Oh, this fucking thing?” he said, and he ripped it off from under his jacket. We would sit in the local café, the Picasso, and he would character-assassinate everybody who came in. He’d go up to people he’d never met before and launch into a diatribe about them, pointing a finger in their face and telling them what they did, where they’d come from, and where they were going wrong. Then somehow he’d turn the whole thing back on himself, as if to redeem the person he’d been attacking. He was absolutely extraordinary, and I loved him to bits.

One day I happened to mention to Litvinoff that my favorite play was
The Caretaker
, and that I’d seen the film hundreds of times. When he heard this, he hinted that he knew the man on whom Pinter had based the character of the tramp, Davies. The next thing I knew, he turned up with this guy, whose name was John Ivor Golding. He was a full-blown tramp, wearing pinstriped trousers and a sort of worn-out frock coat over layers and layers of clothing. He was very eloquent but quite mad, and, just like Davies did in the play, he moved in and took over, manipulating us with his charm. Then we couldn’t get rid of him, and as far as I can remember, he was still there after I moved out.

The Pheasantry was a fantastic place to live in 1967. Being right in the middle of the Kings Road, there was always a lot of street activity, and it was within strolling distance of all the places where I used to hang out. I was dressing in a mixture of antique and secondhand clothes and also new stuff, bought from places like the Chelsea Antique Market, Hung on You, and Granny Takes a Trip. Often accompanied by Litvinoff, I would work my way down to the World’s End from the Picasso, look in at Granny’s, and then wander back up to the Pheasantry, where people would drop in for a cup of tea and a joint. The number of different faces that would drop by throughout the course of the afternoon was astonishing, and our “tea parties” invariably evolved into whole evenings listening to music. Whether it was the first pirated disc of Dylan’s
Basement Tapes
, which I remember Litvinoff once playing, or an acetate of a new Beatles song, or just me sitting in the corner playing guitar, there was always something going on.

When Cream played the seventh Windsor Jazz Festival at the beginning of the third week of August, just over a year to the day of our debut, it did not escape our attention how little we had really progressed. In terms of record sales we were still way behind the Beatles and the Stones, and even below Hendrix. Our touring around the same old circuit had been patchy, and we felt disappointed that Stigwood had not allowed us to play the Monterey Pop Festival, especially having seen the incredible success that Hendrix and the Who had had there.

Even though we had been champing at the bit to go there, Stigwood, in his wisdom, had decided that if we were going to conquer America, then we should do it by going in the back door, not by performing at a huge outdoor event at which we would be lost among the hundreds of other performers. We bowed to what we assumed was his experience. Now at least our spirits were raised by the fact that, with the release of
Disraeli Gears
set for November, we were leaving for California within a week.

I was actually pretty contemptuous of the West Coast rock ’n’ roll scene as exemplified by the new bands like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Grateful Dead. At the time, I just didn’t understand what they were doing and thought they sounded pretty second-rate. I liked the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, and I had heard a great album by a San Francisco band called Moby Grape, but I had never seen them play live. Basically, I thought most of the so-called psychedelic stuff that people were talking about was pretty dull.

Bill Graham, who had invited us to play in San Francisco, was the entrepreneur and visionary who opened the Fillmore Auditorium as a rock venue at the beginning of 1966. Formerly the Majestic Academy of Dancing, it stood on the corner of Fillmore and Geary Streets and had already become one of San Francisco’s institutions. Bill loved the idea of free expression and fostering new talent, and his vision had been to start a venue where people could come and, under minimum supervision, do what they wanted.

San Francisco was, in those days, home of the drug culture, and I think he pretty well turned a blind eye to drug using; so long as no one was endangering anyone else, they were free to trip out or smoke pot. In many ways he was like a father figure to all the bands and a lot of the other creative people who inhabited the city, like the artists who designed all the posters, and he was very well respected and loved by everyone who worked with him. There were those who intimated that he was involved with some shady characters and was “connected,” but I never saw any evidence of that.

We were told by Bill that we could play anything we liked for as long as we liked, even if this meant playing till dawn, and this is where we started openly exploring our potential. Anywhere else, our concerns might have been on our presentation, but playing at the Fillmore, we soon realized that no one could see us because they were projecting light shows onto the band, so that we were actually in the light show. It was very liberating. We could just play our hearts out, without inhibition, knowing that the audience was more into whatever scenery was being projected onto the screen behind us. I’m sure a good deal of them were out of their heads, half of them maybe, but it didn’t matter. They were
listening
, and that encouraged us to go places we’d never been before. We started doing extended solos, and were soon playing fewer and fewer songs but for much longer. We’d go off in our own directions, then hit these coincidental points in the music when we would all arrive at the same conclusion, be it a riff or a chord or just an idea, and we would jam on it for a little while and then go back into our own thing. I had never experienced anything like it. It had nothing to do with lyrics or ideas; it was much deeper, purely musical. We were at our peak during that period.

It was an incredible time for me, and I met some amazing people, like Terry the Tramp, head of the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels; Addison Smith, who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito and lived the pure hippie life that most people could only pretend to; and Owsley, the chemist who made most of the acid we were all taking. We were staying in a great little hotel called the Sausalito Inn, which at one time had been a bordello, hanging out with musicians like Mike Bloomfield and David Crosby, smoking pot, and dropping a lot of acid. At times I was actually playing on acid. I don’t really know how I got through it, because I didn’t know if my hands were working, what the guitar was that I was playing, or even what it was made of. On one trip it was in my head that I could turn the audience into angels or devils according to which note I played.