Clapton (16 page)

What I didn’t realize then was—after his experiences not just with Ray but with other people in the jazz world who had gone down the drugs road and ended up dead—just how scared Ahmet was of what might happen to me. He was just doing his best to dissuade me from carrying on. Drugs were the beginning of the end for the band. We couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t work. We couldn’t agree. We were paralyzed, and this led to hostility growing among us. We attempted to make another album, but it just fell to pieces. The final straw came when Jim Gordon and I had a huge row and I stormed out of the studio in a rage. The band never played together again. Disillusioned, I retired to Hurtwood.

This was the beginning of a period of serious decline in my life, triggered, I think, by several events. The first of these was the death of Jimi Hendrix, on September 18, 1970. Over the years, when time allowed it, Jimi and I had become good friends, spending time together in London, but particularly in New York, where we used to play a lot together in the clubs. What I found refreshing about him was his intensely self-critical attitude toward his music. He had this enormous gift and a fantastic technique, like that of someone who spent all day playing and practicing, yet he didn’t seem that aware of it. I also got to see the playboy in him. He loved to spend all night hanging out, getting drunk or stoned, and when he did pick up the guitar, it was very throwaway to him, as if he didn’t take himself too seriously.

Though Jimi was left-handed, he always played right-handed guitars upside down, a tradition in which he was not unique. Albert King used this style, as does Doyle Bramhall II, who plays with my current band. One afternoon I was browsing through some instrument shops in the West End when I saw this white, left-handed Stratocaster, and I bought it on impulse to give to Jimi. The scene was so small then that I knew I would be seeing him that night, as I was going to a Sly and the Family Stone concert at the Lyceum and Jimi was bound to be there. I took the guitar with me to the show so that I could give it to him afterward, but he never turned up. Then the next day I heard that he had died. He had passed out, stoned on a mixture of booze and drugs, and choked on his own vomit. It was the first time the death of another musician really affected me. We had all felt obliterated when Buddy Holly died, but this was much more personal. I was incredibly upset and very angry, and was filled with a feeling of terrible loneliness.

Six weeks later, while touring the States with the Dominos, I had a call from Stigwood telling me that my grandfather had been taken into the hospital in Guildford with suspected cancer. I flew home to see him. He was a sad figure in his hospital bed, diminished both by his illness and by a stroke he had suffered the previous year, which had left him paralyzed down one side. I felt stricken with guilt. In my arrogance, I believed that I had somehow contributed to his decline by having bought him a house and given him enough money to take early retirement. I felt that I had offended his pride by depriving him of his way of life. Of course, in reality, I was just doing what any grateful child would do, trying to pay back the love and support I had always received from him. But nevertheless, I couldn’t help feeling that I was to blame for it all. It never occurred to me that perhaps I wasn’t responsible for everything that happened in the world.

Finally, there was my unrequited love for Pattie. I had convinced myself that when she heard the completed
Layla
album, with all its references to our situation, she would be so overcome by my cry of love that she would finally leave George and come away with me for good. So I called her up one afternoon and asked her if she’d like to come over for tea and listen to the new record. Of course, it was blatant emotional blackmail and doomed to failure. By this time I’d already applied quite a lot of pressure, and this was just more of the same. Having said that, the quality of the music was pure, and I really did need to share that with someone, and who better than her? Anyhow, she came over and listened, and I think she was deeply touched by the fact that I had written all these songs about her, but at the same time the intensity of it all probably scared the living daylights out of her. Needless to say, it didn’t work, and I was back at square one.

Over the next few months I blindly kept on trying to persuade Pattie to leave George and come and live with me, but I was getting nowhere. Until one day, after another session of fruitless pleading, I told her that if she didn’t leave him, I would start taking heroin full-time. In truth, of course, I had been taking it almost full-time for quite a while. She smiled sadly at me, and I knew the game was over. Apart from one brief meeting at the London airport, that was the last time I saw her for several years.

T
hreatening Pattie was futile and childish, but it was all bluff and had nothing to do with me actually becoming a heroin addict. It just doesn’t work that way. I have known and met many people who took just as many drugs and drank just as much booze as I did, but who never became addicted to anything. It’s a mysterious phenomenon. Besides that, I would never have deliberately set about going down this road because, since my days with Cream, I had had a healthy regard for the perils of smack. Ginger had often lectured me like an older brother, threatening that if he ever found out I was using heroin, he would have my balls, and I believed him.

I just assumed I was in some way immune to it and that I wouldn’t get hooked. But addiction doesn’t negotiate, and it gradually crept up on me, like a fog. For a year or so I thoroughly enjoyed it, taking it pretty infrequently, while indulging in lots of coke and other drugs as well as drinking. Then suddenly, from taking it every two weeks, it was once, then twice or three times a week, then once a day. It was so insidious, it took over my life without my really noticing.

All the time I was taking heroin, I thought I knew exactly what I was doing. In no way was I the helpless victim. I did it mostly because I loved the high, but on reflection, also partly to forget both the pain of my love for Pattie and the death of my grandfather. I also thought I was endorsing the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. In spite of Ahmet’s warnings, I enjoyed the mythology surrounding the lives of the great jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and Ray Charles, and bluesmen like Robert Johnson, and I had a romantic notion of living the kind of life that had led them to create their music. I also wanted to prove that I could do it and come out the other side alive. I was very determined and wanted no help from anybody.

I remember George coming to see me one night, and he had Leon with him, who got very angry when he saw the state I was in and demanded to know what the hell I was up to. I told him that I was on a journey into the darkness and that I had to see it through, to find out what was on the other side. I can’t begin to imagine how they must have felt hearing that. These were people I knew well and who loved me. But my addiction had cut me off from the feelings of other people. The concerns of others meant nothing to me because I was feeling great, and I would continue to feel great as long as I had the powder.

The stuff I was using was pretty strong. It came from Gerard Street in Soho and was raw and pure. The first time I realized I was completely hooked was when I had promised Alice that I would drive up to see her in Wales. It suddenly occurred to me that driving stoned two hundred miles in a Ferrari would be impossible. I told her I would come in about three days, because I knew that was the amount of time it would take to come off the drug.

I remember the first twenty-four hours of “cold turkey” as being absolute hell. It was as if I had been poisoned. Every nerve and muscle in my body went into cramp spasms, I curled up in the fetal position, and howled with agony. I had never known pain like it, not even when I was a kid and had scarlet fever. There was no comparison. It took all of three days, and not a wink of sleep in that time. And the worst thing was, being drug-free and clean felt terrible. My skin felt raw, my nerves all stood on end, and I couldn’t wait to take some more, to slip back into comfort. But I had promised Alice, and I was still this side of gone, where I could hold on to the rational world and make some decisions I could commit to.

On that occasion I managed to come off and move back into life, but from then on, and as my frequency of using began to increase again, I didn’t come off very often. It was just too difficult and painful. Alice came back to live with me, and once she became part of the picture, she started using, too, and took the role of runner, going to score for us. We soon figured out that the trick was to always overlap our supply so that we never got to the point where we’d run out. This was never a problem when we were at home, but anytime I had to travel, I ran into difficulties.

In the summer of 1971, over a year into my self-imposed exile, George called me one day to ask if I’d fly to New York to play in a show he was putting on at the beginning of August at Madison Square Garden to raise money for the victims of the Bangladesh famine. He was only too aware of my drug problems and may have seen this as some kind of rescue mission. Whatever the reason, I told him I could go only if he could guarantee that they could keep me supplied. Since the initial schedule was about a week’s rehearsal followed by the show, he was pretty certain he could take care of it. The consensus was that finding stuff in New York would not be a problem, and if there were any difficulties, apparently people who knew some people would be able to sort me out.

The journey got off to a very bad start. When Alice and I got to the airport, Pattie was there to see me off. I can’t remember how this came about, but it was wonderful and disastrous all at the same time. Alice was furious and came to the conclusion that I was secretly still seeing Pattie, which wasn’t true, but who could blame her for thinking that? I was in such a haze most of the time that situations like this were commonplace. I could make arrangements to meet someone somewhere and then forget about it two minutes later. The result was, fantasy and reality were sharing the same space in my head, which became a labyrinth of half-formed plans and ideas, none of which I could seriously commit to. Emotionally and spiritually, though, I was bankrupt, and therefore unconcerned, but this sort of situation did not worry me too much. As long as I had enough stuff to get me through the flight, I was happy.

By the time we got to the hotel in New York, the drugs were starting to wear off. As promised, however, there was a good supply waiting in my room. I tried some, but nothing happened. It turned out that what they had scored for me was street-cut, with a very low amount of actual heroin in it and cut with something nasty, like strychnine, so that it was about a tenth as strong as what I was used to. The result was that I went cold turkey for the first two or three days and missed all the rehearsals. I just lay on the bed in our hotel room, shaking and mumbling like a madman, apologizing to anybody who came to check on me, while Alice ran around town tirelessly trying to find me the real thing.

Luckily for me, Allen Klein, the Beatles’ manager at the time, who was helping George produce the show at the Garden, heard that I was in trouble and offered me some medication he was taking for his ulcers. I took some and, amazingly, at the eleventh hour, it made me feel okay. At the last minute I got to the sound check and quickly ran through some of the things I was supposed to do, and although I have a vague memory of this, and then of playing the show, the truth is I wasn’t really there, and I felt ashamed. No matter how I’ve tried to rationalize it to myself over the years, I let a lot of people down that night, most of all myself. I’ve seen the concert only once on film, but if I ever want a reminder of what I might be missing from the “good old days,” this would be the film to watch.

When we returned home, we retreated to Hurtwood and closed the door. For a long time I didn’t go out at all, leaving Alice to do all the shopping and cooking and, most important, the scoring. She developed a relationship with a guy named Alex who lived in Notting Hill. As well as being a dealer, he was a writer and also a registered drug addict, which meant that every day he would get a prescription for his fix. It came in pill form, and we would buy it from him if he was unable to score the street stuff. We preferred the real thing, because it was raw and much more powerful, whereas the pharmaceutical imitation tended to be pretty tame.

The best heroin looked like brown sugar. It was in little nuggets the color and consistency of rock candy, and it came in clear plastic bags with a red paper label that had Chinese writing and a little white elephant on it. We’d get a pestle and mortar and grind it up, leaving us with about an ounce, which ought to last us about a week. But we were wasteful junkies and chose to snort it like cocaine rather than inject it, mainly because I was terrified of needles, a fear that went back to primary school.

One day, without warning, we were all herded from the classroom and taken to the village hall in Ripley for our diphtheria jabs. It was a horrible experience, frightening and painful, and I can still remember the smell of the chemicals they were cooking the needles in. But as a result I have never injected drugs, and for that I am very, very grateful. But that meant we went through copious quantities of heroin, about five or ten times what a person injecting it would use. Not only that, but within minutes of taking our initial snort, I would think “I need some more” and top up, even though the effect of what I had originally snorted would last at least another five or six hours. It was a very expensive way of getting stoned.

During those lost years I scarcely saw my family. I was no support to Rose, who of course was deep in mourning for my grandfather and who certainly must have suspected that something was going on, even if she wasn’t aware that it was drugs. I later learned that she decided to stand back, hoping and praying that whatever was wrong would eventually run its course, and that everything would come out all right in the end. I also avoided even my oldest friends. The front gates of Hurtwood were always left open, so from time to time people would come and visit me, knock on the door, and then leave when there was no reply.

When Ben Palmer drove down all the way from Wales to see me one day, I hid upstairs and watched him from the top window sitting in his car, waiting for him to go away. Ginger even came once with a plan to kidnap me and take me off to the Sahara Desert in his Land Rover, reasoning that that was one place where I really wouldn’t be able to score. The phone went unanswered. Inside, I would sleep most of the day and get up in the late afternoon. I played the guitar for hours, recording songs onto cassettes, most of which were pretty dreadful. I never labeled the cassettes, so a great deal of time was passed playing through them on the tape recorder to find whichever song I was last working on. I also drew a lot, making Escher-like renderings with a Rapidograph. My only other pastime was building model airplanes and cars.

One of the few people I did see at this time was Pete Townshend, whom, during a rare period of my wanting to work, I had asked over to help me finish off some tracks I had recorded with Derek and the Dominos. By the time he arrived, however, I had lost interest in the project, and in an effort to explain my total inertia, I confessed to him that I had a problem. I was horrified when he told me that he had known for some time. It turned out that, though I had not seen him personally, he had been to the house several times to talk to Alice. I felt embarrassed when he told me that he was keen to help me, because I’d begun to hate myself for dragging Alice down with me. It may have been a bit late to start developing a moral conscience, but nevertheless it was there, and I felt confused and ashamed by people being concerned about me.

One day Pete told me that he and Alice’s father had devised a plan to help me get back on my feet. It was to be a comeback concert, with all my friends playing. Alice’s father, David Harlech, was an extraordinary figure. Tall, with a prominent nose and a rather languid voice, he had been the best friend of President Kennedy and acted as British ambassador to Washington throughout his presidency. From the moment I met him we got on very well, and my relationship with him was very loving and respectful. He was very understanding and became a kind of stepfather to me.

I think one of the reasons we got on so well was our shared love of music. He told me that during his time in London as a young man, and later in Washington, he had got to know and befriend a number of well-known jazz musicians, and we used to talk a lot about them. He also seemed to like what I was doing musically, and because of that, and because I respected him, it served to heighten my sense of shame about what was going on with me and Alice. But we were prisoners by then and could not break the spell. It really was time for someone like him to step in.

The plan was for me to join a band put together by Pete to play at a concert at the Rainbow Theatre in London as part of “Fanfare for Europe,” celebrating Britain’s entry into the Common Market. David saw a return to the public arena as a way of giving me the incentive to break my habit. Though this was something that I would never have managed to do on my own, because it was Pete, I went along with it, and I had a good time doing it. All the time I had shut myself away I had been listening to music and playing the guitar, but to fully develop your craft you need to interact with other people, and since the concert for Bangladesh, I hadn’t actually played with any other musicians.

When we got into rehearsals, over at Ronnie Wood’s house, I made a real attempt to practice, play, and compose, if on a limited level. Thank God that Steve was there to give me confidence, since it must have been quite clear to the others that there was something seriously lacking in my playing. Fortunately, I knew in my head what I wanted to do as well as what was required of me. It was just the problem of communicating that energy to my fingers.