Clapton (13 page)

After a few months of living at Hurtwood in a very spartan way, I decided it was time for a change. Around this time in London, a new group of people came on the scene, aristocratic “hippies” of the upper classes, who had dropped out and were living a kind of gypsy life. The leaders of this set were Sir Mark Palmer, who ran the English Boys modeling agency, Christopher Gibbs, an antique dealer who had designed the sets for
Performance
, and Jane, Julian, and Victoria Ormsby-Gore, the elder children of David Harlech, British ambassador to Washington during the Kennedy era. Stylish in dress and leaders of fashion, they were surrounded by artistic and interesting people and used to hang out in a lot of the places I frequented, like Granny’s, the Chelsea Antique Market, and the Picasso. We had a mutual friend in Ian Dallas, whom I had met at the Pheasantry and who was very interested in Sufism. One night he took me down to the Baghdad House, an Arab restaurant on Fulham Road, the basement of which was decked out like an oriental bazaar and was an ultracool hangout, often frequented by various Stones and Beatles. There I was introduced to an up-and-coming young interior decorator named David Mlinaric. His nickname was “Monster.”

At my request, Monster, who had done a lot of work for Mick Jagger, came down to take a look at Hurtwood, which I had been trying to furnish. I wanted it to have a Spanish or Italian feel and had been buying furniture from antique shops in Chelsea and Fulham, eighteenth-and nineteenth-century pieces, but without good advice I was being ripped off right, left, and center. The house had central heating, so the furniture would warp and crack and began to fall to bits. I also had some Arab furniture, some Indian carved chairs, and a big old refectory table in the hall, so there was a funny mixture of bits and pieces. Monster called in Christopher Gibbs to help, and, bit by bit, they turned it into something nice. They put some woven carpet in the front room, which made it more comfortable, and a lovely old four-poster in the bedroom, and lots of Persian and Moroccan hangings, and gradually it started to take shape.

I was so pleased with the way Hurtwood was coming together that I wanted to create something like that for my grandparents. I found a beautiful cottage in Shamley Green and took Rose and Jack to look at it. They were delighted—at least Rose was; I’m not so sure about Jack. We had become a little distant from one another, and maybe he was a bit jealous. Rose was always so excited about the way my life was unfolding, but I don’t think he really understood what was so special about it all. He was a proud man, and although I would try to think of things to say when I saw him, when the time came, the moment would slip by without either one of us being able to express anything. It was such a shame. Nevertheless, Rose and Jack had many happy years together in that cottage, and for a good long time things were good.

I was seeing more and more of George Harrison during this period, especially since we were now virtually neighbors. George and his wife, Pattie, lived on a residential estate in Esher, about a half an hour’s drive away, in a sprawling bungalow called Kinfauns. It had round windows and a huge fireplace decorated by the Fool, the Dutch artists who had also painted murals everywhere. We started to hang out a lot together. Sometimes he and Pattie would come over to Hurtwood to show me a new car or to have dinner and listen to music. It was in the early days at Hurtwood that George wrote one of his most beautiful songs, “Here Comes the Sun.” It was a beautiful spring morning and we were sitting at the top of a big field at the bottom of the garden. We had our guitars and were just strumming away when he started singing “de da de de, it’s been a long cold lonely winter,” and bit by bit he fleshed it out, until it was time for lunch. Other times I used to go over to their place, to play guitar with George or just hang out. I remember them also indulging in a bit of matchmaking, trying to set me up with different pretty ladies. I wasn’t really interested, however, because something else quite unexpected was happening: I was falling in love with Pattie.

I think initially I was motivated by a mixture of lust and envy, but it all changed once I got to know her. I had first set eyes on Pattie backstage at the Saville Theatre in London after a Cream concert, and had thought then that she was unusually beautiful. This impression was strengthened by spending time with her. I remember thinking that her beauty was also internal. It wasn’t just the way she looked, although she was definitely the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. It was deeper. It came from within her, too. It was just the way she was, and that captivated me. I had never met a woman who was so complete, and I was overwhelmed. I realized that I would have to stop seeing her and George, or give in to my emotions and tell her how I felt. The overflow from all these feelings finally put paid to my relationship with Charlotte. We had been together for over two years, and I loved her as much as I was capable of really loving anyone, but she was in the way of someone else, who, even though I couldn’t have her, was commanding my every thought. She went back to Paris for a while and eventually began a long-lasting affair with Jimmy Page. I didn’t see her again for a long time.

I also coveted Pattie because she belonged to a powerful man who seemed to have everything I wanted—amazing cars, an incredible career, and a beautiful wife. This emotion was not new to me. I remember that when my mum came home with her new family, I wanted my half brother’s toys because they seemed more expensive and better than mine. It was a feeling that had never gone away, and it was definitely part of the way I felt toward Pattie. But for the time being I kept all these emotions strictly under lock and key, and buried myself in trying to sort out what I was going to do next musically.

When Cream broke up, it wasn’t like the Yardbirds, when I had another band to go to. I didn’t have anything else set up, and for a while I was in a vacuum, just playing here and there. Sitting alone at Hurtwood, I had been thinking a lot about Steve Winwood, who I heard had left Traffic. It was a logical conclusion to see Steve, because when I was having my first doubts about Cream, it used to cross my mind that he was the only person I knew with the musicianship and the power to keep the band together. If the others had shared my interest and let him in, then Cream could have evolved into a quartet, with Steve as the front man, a role for which I lacked not the capability but the confidence.

Steve had a cottage at Aston Tirrold, in a remote part of the Berkshire Downs, where Traffic had written a lot of the
Mr. Fantasy
album, so I called him and started going over there. We’d drink and smoke and talk a lot, and play our guitars. I played him a song I had written about finding Hurtwood, “Presence of the Lord,” the second verse of which has the line “I have finally found a place to live just like I never could before.” For most of the time it was just the two of us hanging out, and we walked round the idea of forming a band without actually getting into a discussion about it. We were deliberately killing time, just having fun and getting to know one another.

One night Steve and I were at the cottage, smoking joints and jamming, when we were surprised by a knock at the door. It was Ginger. Somehow he had got wind of what we were doing and had tracked us down in spite of the fact that Steve’s cottage was way off the beaten track, surrounded by furrowed fields. Steve’s face lit up when he saw Ginger, while my heart sank, because up till that moment we were just having fun, with no agenda. I had been very cautious about not springing anything on Steve, just intending to let things evolve and see where we would go. Ginger’s appearance frightened me because I felt that all of a sudden we’d be a band, and with that would come the whole Stigwood machine and all the hype that had surrounded Cream. I remember thinking, “Oh no. Whatever’s going to happen now, I know it’s all going to go wrong.”

All these feelings I kept to myself, because I still hadn’t really found my voice. When things were going well, it was easy to go with the flow, but when things became difficult or disagreeable, I would feel a certain amount of resentment about what the flow was rather than try and do something about it, and then when I’d had enough I would just pull out or disappear without actually speaking up. Despite my concerns about Ginger, I was so keen to work with Steve that I compromised my intuition, thinking everything would turn out all right because he would see it through. I invested in his vision and, rather than stick my heels in, made the decision to just go along and see where we went.

As we began to give birth to a new band, an extraordinary girl brought down to Hurtwood by Monster came into my life. Her name was Alice Ormsby-Gore, the youngest daughter of David Harlech. Barely sixteen, she was hauntingly beautiful, with thick curly brown hair, huge eyes, an enigmatic smile, and a wonderfully infectious giggle. I thought she was astonishing, and though I was very taken with her, it never occurred to me then that anything could come from it. The age gap seemed enormous, and she seemed very fragile and slightly otherworldly. She asked me to go to a party in London with her, which kind of surprised me. I went and she completely ignored me all evening, even though, apart from Monster and Ian Dallas, I didn’t know a soul there.

For some reason in spite of myself, for we didn’t seem remotely compatible, I found her completely compelling. With her wistful quality and the Arab clothes she used to dress in, she was straight out of a fairy story. This fantasy was encouraged by Ian Dallas, who told me the tale of Layla and Manjun, a romantic Persian love story in which a young man, Manjun, falls passionately in love with the beautiful Layla, but is forbidden by her father to marry her and goes crazy with desire. Ian was forever saying that Alice was the perfect Layla, and while he thought Steve should be her Manjun, I had other ideas. I have no idea what she saw in me; maybe it was because I was an outsider to her group and she saw me as a means to spite them, who knows, but after a few days of clumsy courting, she moved in with me, and the madness began.

From the beginning it was a very stiff, uncomfortable situation. I wasn’t in love with Alice; my heart, and a good deal of everything else, being with Pattie. I also felt very ill at ease about the age difference, especially since she had told me she was still a virgin. In fact, sex played very little part in our lives. We were more like brother and sister, although I was hoping that eventually it would blossom into a normal relationship. Her father was a serious jazz enthusiast, and she had inherited a love of music from him, so we listened to a lot of records, and we smoked a lot of dope.

Another extraordinary thing struck me later on. When I was a kid on the playground, age seven or eight, my friend Guy and I had a game in which we would fall about laughing over the most ridiculous names we could think of, and the silliest name we came up with was Ormsby-Gore. When things began to go badly wrong between me and Alice, I had a terrible fear that getting attached to an upper-class girl like her was part of a childhood resentment, connected to my feelings about my mother, to bring down women, and that deep inside I was thinking, “Here’s an Ormsby-Gore, and I’m going to make her suffer.”

Steve came over to Hurtwood in the first few weeks after Alice arrived, and we spent hours playing together. I had set up the front room as a music room cum living room, with a table and chairs and a large couch as well as a drum set, keyboards, and amps for the guitars. Equipment was everywhere, with tape recorders and microphones for recording and cables running down the hall. It was a semistudio, really, and we would jam and jam and record and record, all the time testing the air. During those first days we worked with a little drum machine, until Steve said that he wanted to ask Ginger to join us. So Ginger came to stay, too, and once we had a drummer, we started to look around for a bass player. I was still very reluctant to go through my Cream experience with Ginger again, but I felt that if Steve was happy with him, then I should at least try to make a go of it. As for a bass player, I knew Rick Grech, who played with the group Family, from the Speakeasy. We were good mates, and he was a great guy, so he just kind of fell in with us.

All the early rehearsals of the new band took place at Hurtwood. We would start work at about midday and jam late into the night. We had a lot of good fun, but it soon got out of hand in that we were just wandering around musically without ever getting anywhere. Once we got into the studio, however, it started to take shape. I had already written “Presence of the Lord,” and I also came up with the idea of doing a cover of the Buddy Holly song “Well…Alright.” Steve had a few songs, too, like “Sea of Joy” and “Can’t Find My Way Home,” but we were basically still a jam band and didn’t really care what we were doing.

Eventually someone came up with the bright idea of bringing in the brilliant young producer Jimmy Miller, to try to give the music some focus and cut some tracks for a possible album. Jimmy had worked with Steve on the Traffic albums, and it seemed the most logical way forward. Soon, however, word leaked out in the music press that I was playing again with Ginger, and that Steve, a big star himself, was involved. For the first time, as far as I am aware, the dreaded word “supergroup” reared its head. That’s when I saw the red light, but I decided to go through with all of this and see where it was leading, because Steve was involved and because I had nothing else interesting going on. Subliminally, perhaps, my ambition was to re-create The Band in England, an idea that I knew was a huge gamble, which is probably why I named the new band Blind Faith.

We started our professional career on June 7, 1969, with a free concert in Hyde Park. This was the first ever rock show in the park, and an audience of over one hundred thousand people turned up. We all met at Stigwood’s office before the show, and as soon as I saw Ginger, my heart sank. Over the years, on and off, Ginger had had sporadic clashes with heroin. He would go through periods when he was using and then he would be clean for a while. His using often seemed to be triggered by stressful situations, first nights, unfamiliar social situations, and the like, but we had been jamming and rehearsing for a good long while and he had seemed pretty happy. But that day I took one look at his eyes and was sure he was back on it. It made me so angry, and gave me the same feeling I had had on the night he knocked on Steve’s door. I felt that I was stepping back into the nightmare that had been part of Cream.