Clapton (17 page)

On the night of the show, January 13, 1973, Alice and I, stoned out of our heads, turned up late to find Pete and Stigwood tearing their hair out. The reason for our lateness was that Alice had to let out the waist of the trousers of my white suit because I had taken to eating so much chocolate of late, I couldn’t get them on anymore. Ahmet was in the audience, along with George and Ringo, Jimmy Page, Elton John, and Joe Cocker, among others, while onstage the band, which we called the Palpitations, included Pete, Steve, Jim Karstine, Jim Capaldi, and Rick Grech.

We opened with “Layla,” and included songs like “Badge,” “Bottle of Red Wine,” “Bell Bottom Blues,” and “In the Presence of the Lord,” and having such a great band pushed me to the limits of my playing in the state I was in. Though it wasn’t bad, listening to the tapes later made me realize that I was still miles off course. It sounded just like the charity benefit that it really was. I had a great time doing it, however, and the incredible welcome I was given by the audience was very moving. After the Rainbow concert, I went back into hiding, and even though I understood that Pete cared for me and wanted to help by getting me back into the music scene, I just wasn’t ready.

In the time that immediately followed I sank to new lows, with Alice following close behind. I was soon taking vast quantities of heroin every day, and my cravings became so powerful that Alice was giving me virtually everything she was able to score, and compensating for the heroin she was missing by drinking large quantities of neat vodka, up to two bottles a day. She too had now become a recluse, unwilling to connect with anyone who might obstruct us. The doors remained closed, the post went unopened, and we existed on a diet of chocolate and junk food, so I soon became not only overweight, but spotty and generally unfit. Heroin also completely took away my libido, so we had no sexual activity of any kind, and I became chronically constipated.

The cost of our lifestyle was not just high in human terms, it was beginning to cripple me financially. Each week I was spending about £1,000 on heroin, the equivalent of £8,000 today. For a period of time I managed to hide from Stigwood the true amount, but eventually he cottoned on to what was going on, and I received a message from the office saying that funds were running low and I would soon have to start selling things to pay for my habit.

If that gave me something to think about, then so did a letter I received from David in which he told me in no uncertain terms that he would be quite happy to turn us both in to the police if I wasn’t prepared to stop what I was doing to myself and, more important, to his daughter. His letter was quite ruthless, but compassionate at the same time. “I love you both so much,” he wrote, “that I cannot bear to see what you are doing to yourselves. For all that you can do and all you can have in your lives, please let me help you.” He finished off by saying, “I will probably never know how much courage it will take, dear Eric, but for your own sake, please do it.”

It was clear that he meant business, and I knew deep down that I was inflicting serious damage on an unsuspecting innocent, somebody I had no right to meddle with. I realized that I had to put the brakes on, if not for my sake, then for hers. Finally the light went on and I called him and said, “You’re right. We need help, but what can we do?” He then told me he had come across an extraordinary woman, Dr. Meg Patterson, a Scottish neurosurgeon who had worked for years in Hong Kong, where she had developed a method of treating opiate-withdrawal symptoms using a form of electrical acupuncture she called NeuroElectric Therapy. She had recently returned to Britain and set up a clinic on Harley Street with her husband, George. They had already had a meeting with David Harlech and put together a program for Alice and me.

I knew I had to go through with this. I had total faith in David’s reasoning and insight, and I realized that this was not a step he had taken lightly. We agreed to go for an interview with the Pattersons at their Harley Street home and, as usual, arrived stoned. I took to Meg straightaway. She was very charismatic, petite and attractive with auburn hair and a pretty face, and she had a motherly kind of personality, very loving and concerned. She struck me as a good person. Her stories of living and working in Hong Kong and China among the street addicts were fascinating, and she seemed very confident that she could help me. George was interesting, too, having spent a lot of time in Tibet getting to know the guerrillas who were fighting back against the Chinese.

Their cure was a form of acupuncture using an electrical stimulator made in China, which Meg had bought in Hong Kong. This took the form of a small black box, with wires radiating out of it attached to small clips holding tiny needles that were applied to various points within the contour of the ear. The treatment involved three hourlong sessions a day and would necessitate the Pattersons’ coming to live with us at Hurtwood for at least the first week. Cautiously, we agreed.

At first, things were very difficult. George was a committed Christian and came on quite strong about God and Christianity and Jesus, and I found this a little overwhelming because I felt so vulnerable. To a certain extent I felt he was taking advantage of my situation, so I was a little guarded around both of them. Though I had certainly looked at religion, I have always been resistant to doctrine, and any spirituality I had experienced thus far in my life had been much more abstract and not aligned with any recognized religion. For me, the most trustworthy vehicle for spirituality had always proven to be music. It cannot be manipulated, or politicized, and when it is, that becomes immediately obvious. But of course, I could not explain that to them back then, although I’m sure I tried, so I thought the best thing to do was to give it a try and see what would happen.

The first thing that Meg explained to us was that we were not allowed to touch any heroin from day one. This really did come as a shock, as I had somehow thought we would be weaned slowly off it. She set up her apparatus in the room we used as a den, next to our sitting room. The clips were put on my ears, like clip-on earrings, the needles were inserted in various pressure points in my earlobes, and when the machine was switched on, it would pass a very mild electric current through the needles. A knob turned the current up to the point where it started to get tingly, and turned it down till you could only just feel it.

It eventually produced a state of euphoria, and a patient can actually end up going into a kind of half sleep. They talk about heroin as “the nod,” because it does send you into a stupor, and the black box was supposed to have the same effect. So the treatment was really comprised of trying to wean you off heroin both psychologically and emotionally while the box physically reduced the withdrawal symptoms. Theoretically, as you progressed in the treatment, the amount of time you spent plugged into the box would decrease.

After about five days, Meg told me that the treatment was not going to work unless Alice and I were treated separately. The nights were the problem, because neither of us could sleep, and this was wearing us all down. I was also having serious misgivings. At first I had felt like we were being given a demonstration of what this thing could do, but now it was dawning on me that this was really it. This was all we were going to get, and I was panicking. They decided that, to make things more manageable, I should go and live with them on Harley Street while Alice was to go to a clinic elsewhere. Her problems were compounded by the fact that she was also drinking heavily. I didn’t like it that they were splitting us up at all and wondered why, if one of us had to be shipped off to some strange nursing home, it should be Alice and not me. I still feel quite puzzled about them in this respect. Could it have been that they saw me as a golden opportunity, a high-profile patient with whom they might have success? This would undoubtedly give a boost to their clinic, which I think had been quite slow in getting off the ground.

It was unnerving going to live on my own with a strange, completely straight family, but I knew I had to accept everything being offered. Looking back on it, I suppose the idea was that “the cure” was a purely physical technique coupled with lots of tender loving care and dietary supervision, with George’s Christian ethic added to the mix. They also had what appeared to be a very strong family unit on display, two sons and a daughter, who were shining examples of how good kids could be. It was as if they were saying, “Look how it can be when everyone’s in harmony.” But this just made it all the more difficult.

I remember one time they let me out on my own, and I went to see some friends and got my hands on some Viseptone, which is a methadone syrup used to wean people off heroin. I smuggled it back to Meg’s house and hid it in some clothes. What I didn’t realize was that she was going through my things. The next day at lunch, in front of the children, she produced the bottle and told me that I had betrayed her and that my behavior was disgusting. She then poured it down the sink. I have never seen eye-to-eye with shaming people, no matter the justification, and I couldn’t understand how it could be part of their program. It didn’t work, and it was humiliating. It was at this point that I inwardly decided to have nothing to do with them, and quietly shut down.

I did make a kind of recovery while I was there, and they did help a great deal in fact by encouraging me to listen to and play music again. By doing this, I got back in touch with my feelings, and they came back in a flood. Looking back, I honestly believe that Meg and George did the best they could with what they had. But it wasn’t enough. Because for all the good they may have done in getting me off heroin, to then let me loose without any real aftercare was uninformed and dangerous. They seemed to have had no knowledge of or interest in any of the twelve-step programs like AA or NA, which have been active and flourishing in London and throughout England since the mid-1940s. After my treatments, their idea of rehabilitation, planned with the help of David, was to send me to live on a farm outside Oswestry run by David’s youngest son, Frank Ormsby-Gore. The plan was that I should get physically well and sort myself out. The reality was, the minute I got up to the farm, I simply traded one abusable substance for another.

F
rank Gore was nine years younger than me, age twenty, when I went to work on the family farm in Shropshire early in 1974. Though I had known him since he was fourteen, it was only as Alice’s little brother, and now we hit it off right away. I drove up from Hurtwood in a car that I had been given by George Harrison, a Mini Cooper Radford, a deluxe custom-built Mini that he had had painted with Tantric Indian symbols by a coach-painter. I took with me an acoustic guitar and some of my record collection, and since Frank turned out to be a huge music fan, that immediately gave us something in common. He was a great person to listen to music with and bounce ideas off of, and he became my sounding board as to how I was going to get back into playing. We were living in a tiny cottage with a couple of bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. It was pretty funky, but Frank was a great cook and we lived mostly in the kitchen.

Since I was so unfit after three years of doing little more than lying in a nod on a couch in front of the TV, the agreement was that, to begin with, I would work according to my condition. There was a lot of work to be done. Frank was running a farm that barely broke even, and doing it virtually single-handed. A friend of his, Mike Crunchie, and another man called Dai’ were the only farmhands I met, and it was Crunchie who showed me the ropes. I was soon up at dawn, working like a maniac, baling hay, chopping logs, sawing trees, and mucking out the cows. It was the kind of manual labor I hadn’t done since working with my grandfather on a building site, and I really loved it. I was soon getting very fit, and even though it was winter, I was getting brown, too, from windburn. In the meantime, Frank was swanning around buying and selling trucks and other heavy vehicles. He fancied himself a trader and loved to talk about the massive deals he was into for lorries and tractors and the like.

At around five or six, he would pick me up and we’d go into Oswestry and hit the pubs, where we’d listen to the jukebox and drink until we could hardly stand up. Sometimes we’d make complete asses of ourselves, but we were doing it in public, in an outward manner, and after the reclusive way I’d been living, that seemed very healthy. Then we’d go back to the cottage and Frank would fix some dinner, and we’d drink some more. I was having the best time I’d had for a long time. Frank did something very important for me. He made me feel good about myself again. When I was around the Pattersons, I always felt slightly ashamed of myself, as if I were a rehabilitating criminal, but when I was with him, although a good deal of it was fueled by alcohol, I felt confident and funny, as if I were finally coming out of my shell. He was very loving and kind to me, and best of all he seemed to have no agenda. I think he truly liked my company and just accepted me for who I was.

All the time I stayed with Frank, I began to collect songs and ideas for a new album. I was listening to all kinds of different music and even trying to write the odd line or two. Needless to say, the blues featured high in my priorities, and I was getting quite excited about starting on something soon. Going from a very isolated existence to a very gregarious one had a lot to do with me wanting to make music again, and for this I am truly indebted to David and the Pattersons, for this was the one area in which they were absolutely right to focus my energies. Apart from the material I had in mind, a possible band was also waiting in the wings. Carl Radle had sent me some tapes of a combo he was playing with in Tulsa, along with a note saying, “You should listen to this. I think you’d like working with these guys.” With Carl on bass, Dick Sims on keyboards, and Jamie Oldaker on drums, they sounded great, and I could tell they were really gifted.

Carl himself was a fascinating character. A Tulsa musician of German descent, he was quite European-looking. He always wore pebble-shaped glasses in front of hair balding at the front and long and straggly in back. Though only three years older than me, he had an age to him and a great deal of experience and wisdom. He was a natural philosopher as well as a musicologist and had a wide taste in music from all over the world. We could talk for hours about anything from movies to hunting dogs, and he was a real soul mate for me. But of course, more than anything, he was a brilliant bass player, with a minimal and melodic style that really swung.

During the Dominos period I had become very close with Carl, and he had held on to the idea that he would like to work with me again. He could see through all my nonsense and knew what I was capable of. As much as I had been moved by David’s intervention to help me, I was much more motivated by this approach of Carl’s, because as a musician who really had aspirations to be in America, to be holed up in the middle of nowhere in England was hell for me. All my heroes were in the States, and Carl’s message that “We’re waiting for you” was a real incentive to resurface. The memory of this little outfit stayed with me, and when I started piecing together the ingredients for this new album, up at Frank’s, this was the band that I pictured playing with.

When I am trying to write songs, I like to leave things as unfinished as I can, so that whoever I am going to play the song with has a chance to influence, by the way they play it, the way the song will end up. What I was doing in my mind, in this case, was preparing small groups of ideas that I could take to Carl, Jamie, and Dick, and say, “Let’s work on this.” Then, hopefully, when we actually came to play it, the song would almost finish itself. One of the songs I had started was coming along quite well, and I was very proud of my inventiveness in the verse. This was “Let It Grow,” and it was several years before I realized that I had totally ripped off “Stairway to Heaven,” the famous Zeppelin anthem, a cruel justice seeing as how I’d always been such a severe critic of theirs.

One day while I was at the farm, I had a call from Pete Townshend asking me if I would like to make a cameo appearance in the movie version of
Tommy
, being filmed at Pinewood Studios. He wanted me to play an old Sonny Boy Williamson song, “Eyesight to the Blind,” and I was to do this in the character of a preacher in a church that worshiped Marilyn Monroe. Even though I thought the whole idea sounded like a load of bollocks, I couldn’t resist the idea of trying it, of getting back into the work of playing and singing a song and recording a track. They sent a car for me at the farm and drove me to the studios for the day. It was a surreal experience, as I spent the whole time getting drunk with Keith Moon, and seeing him in full flight made me feel like I didn’t have a problem at all. Compared to him, I viewed myself as a lightweight.

Halfway through my time at Frank’s, Alice came up to join me, having been released from the clinic. It was a tense, edgy visit, as we were under strict instructions from Meg not to share a room or get involved in any way, the theory being that it might cause a relapse. This actually suited me quite well because, as my senses began to come back to life, so did thoughts of Pattie, which had been dormant the past three years. They were rekindled when George and Pattie turned up in Wales, quite out of the blue, to see how I was getting on. Touched though I was by their friendship, I remember thinking that I would rather Pattie had come on her own. We all went to a pub for a drink and, though they looked like they were still a couple, I got the distinct impression that she was looking at me with more than just friendly concern. All the old feelings came flooding back.

When I left Frank’s, I was fit, clean, and buzzing with excitement at all the possibilities ahead of me. In a moment of gratitude to Meg, I sent her my 24-carat-gold coke spoon, along with a handwritten note that read, “Thanks, Meg. I won’t be needing this anymore.” I was feeling good, because life was starting to look good again. I was conscious of the fact that I had never stopped listening to music and playing, and even at my lowest ebb I had managed to maintain some kind of craft. I did have a job to go back to. I also made the painful decision to split with Alice for good, a move that Meg had always recommended, for fear that we would end up destroying each other. The only thing left in that relationship was dependence, and now my thoughts were only of Pattie.

Throughout the course of my addiction, Stigwood had always believed I would come through. Even though it was an enormous gamble for him, he stuck by me, and one of the first things I did on my return was to arrange a meeting with him.

“What do you want to do?” he asked. “Because I know what I want you to do.”

I said, “Well, I’ve got all these ideas, and I think I want to make a record.”

“Well that’s great,” he said, “because that’s exactly what I had in mind. Here are your tickets to Miami, and the studio’s already booked, with Tom Dowd to produce it and engineer it, if you want him.”

And that was it. It had all been prearranged, and they were just waiting for me. I remember thinking how great his foresight was in putting together a deal I could just step into. He’d also rented us a house, 461 Ocean Boulevard, a luxury home right on the seafront in Miami Beach, and I flew there at once.

When I arrived, I was greeted by Carl, who then drove me from the airport to meet Jamie and Dick. They were very feisty young guys, bright and confident and not in the least impressed by me. They made me feel old, and I was only twenty-nine! The idea was that we should play as a quartet, augmented in the studio by other artists, and I instinctively understood that the success of the record depended entirely on the kind of chemistry we developed. The first and most important task for me was to find a way to restore my playing ability in the company of proper musicians. We ended up finding a compromise in which they played minimally to my capabilities. This gave the music a certain charm, in that it was very basic.

One of the extra musicians whom Stigwood had brought in to join us was Yvonne Elliman, a brilliant young singer who had played the part of Mary Magdalene both on Broadway and in the movie for
Jesus Christ Superstar.
Of Irish and Hawaiian descent, she was incredibly pretty and exotic looking, with long dark hair, and Stiggy was very keen that we should collaborate. Since I had had virtually no sex life in the last few years, it is not hard to imagine what happened in the heady atmosphere of recording in Miami. Yvonne and I fell in lust with each other and were soon flirting and mucking around and enjoying a passionate affair. She really liked to have fun and drink and do dope and generally hang out with the guys, and we became good friends. I was also impressed by her terrific voice, and it wasn’t long before I asked her to join the band.

The guitar I chose to use for my return to recording was one I had built myself, a black Fender Stratocaster I had nicknamed “Blackie.” In the early days, in spite of my admiration for both Buddy Holly and Buddy Guy, both Strat players, I had predominantly played a Gibson Les Paul, but one day while on tour with the Dominos, I saw Steve Winwood with a white Strat and, inspired by him, I went into Sho-Bud in Nashville, and they had a stack of Strats in the back of the shop. They were completely out of fashion at the time, and I bought six of them for a song, no more than about a hundred dollars each. These vintage instruments would be worth about a hundred times that today. When I got home, I gave one to Steve, one to Pete Townshend, and another to George Harrison, and kept the rest. I then took the other three and made one guitar out of them, using the best components of each.

Having come from the Dominos, who were hard-playing musicians, very full-on and loud and strong, it was a very different experience to jam with such a laid-back attitude, and I enjoyed it for hours on end. But, listening to these guys, I realized that I was miles behind and needed to catch up, and fast. After hibernating for years and being completely out of touch, I wanted to know what everyone was listening to and what was going on in the world of music. I knew I could still play from the heart, and no matter how primitive or sloppy it sounded, it would be real, and that was my strength. Also, I was tired of the “guitar hero” thing. I wanted to just blend into the band and play more rhythm. I was starting to follow the example of J. J. Cale, whom Delaney had turned me on to in the late sixties, and these guys actually knew him; Carl had even played on some of his records. It all seemed to fit that my return should be with minimalist players, since that’s exactly where I wanted to go.

Apart from “Let It Grow,” which I had finished on my own, most of the material for this album was cover versions of songs like “Willie and the Hand Jive,” “Steady Rollin’ Man,” and “I Can’t Hold Out,” which had been rolling around in my head for a long time, waiting for the opportunity to pop out. “Get Ready” was written for what was happening, and the way I felt about Yvonne, and “Mainline Florida” was written by George Terry, a local musician, who had mysteriously joined our happy throng. He was a friend of Albhy Galuten, another local player I had met and hung out with during the recording of
Layla.
“Give Me Strength” was a song I had first heard in London during the early sixties, while I was living on Fulham Road with Charlie and Diana Radcliffe. It seemed to perfectly fit the occasion and also gave me the unforgettable opportunity of playing with Al Jackson, drummer of the MG’s and a legend among players.