Clapton (18 page)

One day George Terry came in with an album called
Burnin’
by Bob Marley and the Wailers, a band I’d never heard of. When he played it, I was mesmerized. He especially liked the track “I Shot the Sheriff” and kept saying to me, “You ought to cut this, you ought to cut this. We could make it sound great,” but it was hard-core reggae and I wasn’t sure we could do it justice. We did a version of it anyway, and although I didn’t say so at the time, I wasn’t that enamored with it. Ska, bluebeat, and reggae were familiar mediums to me. I had grown up hearing them in the clubs and on the radio because of England’s growing communities of West Indians, but it was quite new to the Americans, and they weren’t as finicky as I was about the way it should be played. Not that I knew myself how to play it, I just knew we weren’t doing it right.

When we got to the end of the sessions and started to collate the songs we had, I told them I didn’t think “Sheriff” should be included, as it didn’t do the Wailers’ version justice. But everyone said, “No, no. Honestly, this is a hit.” And sure enough, when the album was released and the record company chose it as a single, to my utter astonishment it went straight to number one. Though I didn’t meet Bob Marley till much later, he did call me up when the single came out and seemed pretty happy with it. I tried to ask him what the song was all about, but couldn’t understand much of his reply. I was just relieved that he liked what we had done.

The album
461 Ocean Boulevard
was recorded in a month, after which I returned to England, where I decided to make another move on Pattie. I knew through go-betweens that things were bad between her and George, and that they were living in virtual open warfare at Friar Park, with him flying the “Om” flag at one end of the house and her flying a Jolly Roger at the other, but the general advice from my friends was, “Bide your time and she’ll leave him.” One night I was in the studio with Pete Townshend to complete the recording work I had done on
Tommy
, and when we finished I suddenly had this urge to go and see Pattie. I managed to persuade Pete to drive me to Henley under the pretext that George was very keen to meet him and that we didn’t have to stay too long. In fact, we were just marauders. When we got there, George took Pete into his studio to show it off and play him some of the songs he’d been working on while I spent the time canoodling with Pattie and trying to talk her into finally leaving George. I eventually left, without her making a decision, but it turned out to be a seminal moment in our relationship.

I went to see Robert Stigwood, who at that time was as heavily involved with other projects as he was with me. Onstage he had
Jesus Christ Superstar
,
Oh! Calcutta!
, and
Hair
, he was producing the film of
Tommy
, and he was managing the Bee Gees, so he appointed someone full-time to give me the time and attention he felt I deserved. The guy he chose was Roger Forrester, a sharp, humorous northerner who had been working at his company, RSO, for some time as a booking agent. I knew Roger, as he’d organized some of my tours, and with his big, tinted, TV-shaped glasses, natty suits, kipper ties, and comb-over haircut, I’d always regarded him as a bit of a character.

Jack and Ginger were always trying to make his life misery—Ginger, for example, loved to take his dogs into his office and encourage them to chew the place up—but they rarely got the better of Roger, who could always see them off with his sharp patter and witty one-liners. He was no novice in the world of show business, having started his career promoting wrestling matches in workingmen’s clubs before going on to work with pop groups like the Honeycombs and Pickety Witch. It is extraordinary that he ended up with me, as we were such different people, poles apart really. I was into fairly esoteric things, art, cinema, and street fashion, while he liked to portray himself as a central-casting working-class lad living on a diet of bangers and mash. Somehow we met in the middle and got on very well.

With the huge success of “I Shot the Sheriff” and the subsequent release of the album
461 Ocean Boulevard
in July 1974, it was time to go out on the road again, and Stigwood had planned a massive six-week, twenty-eight-city tour of North American stadiums, a decision that the newly appointed Roger apparently profoundly disagreed with. He felt that I should be brought back slowly and gently, with a shorter tour playing in smaller venues. For whatever reason, the Stigwood plan held and we were off again, big-time.

During his pre-Stigwood career, Roger had made some interesting connections in the East End, including Laurie O’Leary, who had managed Esmeralda’s Barn for the Krays before taking over the Speakeasy. He brought in Laurie’s brother Alphi to work for me as my personal assistant and bodyguard. Alphi was an unforgettable character, a huge, powerfully built man with permed hair who stood at least six-foot-four. He had a strange kind of neck movement, as if he’d broken it at some time, and because he could hardly move his head, when he turned to look at you, he had to move the entire top half of his torso, which gave him rather a sinister air. Menacing though he may have looked, it was all a front, because he was in fact an extremely deep and gentle man. But as my minder, he often had to do things that would be morally difficult for anyone, like forcibly ejecting people from situations where they were not wanted. This would make him suffer dreadful remorse for days, but he would swallow it and continue to put on a fierce front. In truth, he was the definitive gentle giant.

Roger may have had misgivings about my going on tour, but I didn’t. I had buried myself away for quite long enough. Anyway, I was too drunk most of the time to notice whether or not the tour was doing me any harm. Drink turned me into the worst kind of prankster. For example, Stigwood decided that rehearsals for the tour should take place in Barbados, so he rented us a large villa on the beach. I remember arriving there to find that the staff had prepared a delicious dinner of spaghetti Bolognese in our honor. I had scarcely sat down before I picked up my plate and threw it all over somebody. Soon food was flying around the room, leaving the walls and furniture dripping with pasta and meat sauce.

Some of the best times I ever had in my drinking years were when I was surrounded by Stigwood and Co. We loved high-stakes pranking, with virtually no limit, and it could get quite rough, until there would eventually have to be some kind of truce in order to keep someone from getting hurt. Stiggy liked to play the role of the indignant victim who, pushed too far, would suddenly lash out in furious self-defense, and he always gave as good as he got. It sounds pretty childish, and it was, but we had great fun. Apart from me, two of Stiggy’s most vicious tormentors were Ahmet, and Earl McGrath, who ran the Rolling Stones’ record company. I once heard that they stripped him to his underpants in the middle of an airport and emptied the contents of his briefcase all over the floor.

One Christmas I had a full-size stuffed camel delivered to his house, and in return three dairy cows were delivered to Hurtwood, and so on it would go. Once in Barbados, Ahmet, Earl, and I went to visit him in his rented villa, where we set about totally trashing the whole place while he sat in a hammock outside, crying and whimpering, “How dare you? I’ve never been so humiliated in my whole life.” We were like kids, and if one of us switched sides and went to Stiggy’s aid, then there would be an immediate change of power and the victim would become the aggressor. On reflection, it required a lot of love and trust to play games like this on a large scale, and that was definitely there for all of us, drunk or sober.

The
461 Ocean Boulevard
tour opened on June 28, 1974, at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut, playing to a capacity crowd of seventy thousand. The band had the same members who played on the album—Carl Radle, Jamie Oldaker, Dick Sims, George Terry, and Yvonne Elliman—but the set also included songs such as “Badge” and “Crossroads” from my Cream days, “In the Presence of the Lord” from Blind Faith, and “Layla” and “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?” from the Dominos’ repertoire. This was, after all, supposed to be my comeback tour.

It was a flamboyant show, and we went out with Legs Larry Smith as our opening act. He was the drummer with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and would often wear a tutu and come out from behind the drums to do a tap dance. On our tour, his act was to come onstage dressed as a Roman centurion and mime to the Who song “My Generation” with a ukelele. We made his life a misery. We would all stand at the side of the stage and throw things at him—fruit, bread rolls, or whatever came to hand. Sometimes we used to fill up his ukelele with soup just before he went on. It was quite an extraordinary act. The audience had no idea how to take it, and he would invariably be booed off, feigning terrible grief and humiliation, which was also part of the act.

Legs and I became good friends and drinking buddies. He liked to wear very warm clothes in hot climates. For instance, in New Orleans in the middle of July, I remember him wearing a three-piece Harris tweed suit with an overcoat folded over his arm. He also had a beautifully tailored suit made from Holiday Inn towels. He was extremely stylish, and his taste in clothes began to rub off on me. My standard outfit became a pair of worn-out Lee bib overalls that I’d bought in a secondhand store, with a plastic see-through mac over the top adorned with hundreds of badges.

I wasn’t too concerned about what people thought; I was drunk most of the time and having fun, fooling around and playing with the guys. Brandy was my drink of choice, but I couldn’t drink it neat. Like most alcoholics I have met since, I didn’t like the taste of alcohol, so I would mix it with something sweet, like ginger ale or Seven-Up. I drank round the clock, and it didn’t matter to me whether or not there was a show that night, because I was always convinced I could handle it. Many times, of course, I couldn’t, in which case I’d just wander off the stage and somebody, usually Roger, would have to try and persuade me to go back on.

A post-psychedelia drunkenness seemed to sweep over everybody in the entertainment business during the early seventies. To be onstage, you were almost expected to be drunk. I remember doing one entire show lying down on the stage with the microphone stand lying beside me, and nobody batted an eyelid. Not too many complaints came back, either, probably because the audience was as drunk as I was. Of course, a few shining lights were on the road at that time, artists with high ethical and professional standards such as Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and B. B. King. And if I had had the courage or the clarity of mind to understand the example they were setting, maybe I would have started to address my steady decline. But this is alcoholism we’re talking about, and I was already in deep denial about the direction my life was taking.

Private concern over my condition was building, but without proper information. The only thing the people in my immediate circle knew how to do was preserve the status quo, and Roger became part of that. Apparently his brief from Stiggy had been to keep everything working and functioning, and so he became my enabler, making sure I had everything that I wanted, encouraging me just enough, playing the party animal with me and making me laugh. We became incredibly close, and I began to look upon him as a father figure. He traveled everywhere with me, and all the time he kept an eye on me, asking everybody, “Where’s Eric? What’s he up to? Is he all right? Give me a report.” I, in the meantime, was in a happy alcoholic haze, failing to notice that everybody who worked for me now worked for Roger, and that the balance of power had shifted.

Roger’s real coup, and the thing that really cemented our relationship, was to produce Pattie. It was the first time he really waved his magic wand, and the fact that it made a long-held wish come true left me totally under his spell. Roger had heard through the grapevine that Pattie had actually left George and gone to stay in LA with her sister Jenny, who was married to Mick Fleetwood. He suggested that I call her up and get her to come and join me on the tour.

This all came quite out of the blue, but I summoned up the courage to ring and she said yes. It was a lot to take in considering how little I’d seen of her during the previous three years. She joined us in Buffalo on July 6, where we were playing to a crowd of forty-five thousand at the War Memorial Stadium. It was not an auspicious start. I was almost blind from a severe bout of conjunctivitis caught from Yvonne Elliman, with whom I was still carrying on, and so drunk from nerves that I managed to crash into a huge potted plant on the stage. But that night, when I played “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?,” the words had a very special meaning.

M
y relationship with Pattie, now that we could actually be together, was not the incredibly romantic affair it has been portrayed as being. Rather than being a mature, grounded relationship, it was built on drunken forays into the unknown. With what I know now about my condition, I don’t know if we ever really had a chance for anything better, even if we had been together earlier, because my addiction was always in the way. Having said that, we really were in love and having a lot of fun, but we were on the road, and although it was great to finally be together without having to hide, reality would have to be faced sooner or later.

Part of my denial about our relationship encompassed the way I needed to identify Pattie. Calling her Pattie meant acknowledging that she was still George’s wife, so as a kind of subconscious sidestep, I nicknamed her “Nell,” or “Nelly,” sometimes “Nello.” She didn’t seem to mind, even though it meant becoming known by this moniker to everyone involved in her new life. I suppose I may have been paying homage to my favorite great aunt, or just trying to relegate her to a sort of barmaid status so that I wasn’t so much in awe of her. Difficult to say. Back then my thoughts and actions were never easy to interpret, even for me. But it suited her, and it stuck.

The
Ocean Boulevard
tour continued throughout most of 1974. We played forty-nine sold-out shows in the United States, Japan, and Europe, almost all of them in huge stadiums, and much of that time is a blackout. Looking back on it, however, I think that Roger was probably right to have been worried about sending me out to play in these vast arenas. After having been out in the cold for so long, I was nervous and rusty onstage, and so tended to avoid playing the solos that fans had paid to come and hear. My live guitar playing didn’t really pick up until we started playing smaller venues in the U.S. the following year. Nell stayed till the end of the first leg of the American tour and then went home.

The minute she left, I was off having one-night stands and behaving outrageously with any woman who happened to come my way, so my moral health was in appalling condition and only likely to get worse, while my drinking was steadily increasing. It seemed like I was already trying to sabotage my relationship with Pattie, as if now that I had her, I didn’t want her anymore. Only a couple of other people were inclined to keep up with me, Legs Larry and, to a certain extent, Carl, but a lot of the others would try to avoid us. Occasionally Roger would tell me to slow up, and I might think about it for a while before pouring myself another drink to drown the idea, or I would get angry and tell him to mind his own business.

When the tour was over, because of the success of “I Shot the Sheriff,” Tom and Roger thought it would be good to head down to the Caribbean to follow up the reggae thing, and they arranged a trip to record in Jamaica, where they felt we might dig around and get some roots influence. Tom was a great believer in tapping the source, and I was happy to go along with this since it would mean that Pattie and I would also be able to have a kind of honeymoon. Kingston was a great place to work. Wherever we went, there was music in the air. Everyone was singing all the time, even the maids in the hotel, and it really got into my blood, but recording with the Jamaicans was something else.

I really couldn’t keep up with their intake of ganja, which was massive. If I had tried to spark up as much or as often, I would either have passed out or started having hallucinations. We were working at Dynamic Sound Studios in Kingston, and people were coming in and out all the time, toasting these huge “trumpet” joints and making so much smoke in the room that I couldn’t see who was there and who wasn’t. We were doing a couple of songs with Peter Tosh, who looked like he was unconscious a lot of the time, just slumped in a chair. Then he’d get up and play brilliantly while we were cutting the track, playing his
wah-wah
reggae chop, but as soon as we stopped, he would just go back into a trance.

I was seriously interested in reggae, but having already got acquainted with Bob Marley and the Wailers, I wasn’t sure where to go next. On reflection, Toots and the Maytals would have been ideal; they are now one of my all-time favorite bands, but back then we hadn’t made that connection. The problem was, in my drunkenness, I was being led around quite a lot by Tom, and even Roger, with them making assumptive artistic choices on my behalf, sometimes disastrously so. Just going to Jamaica was not going to be enough, and trying to make a bridge between reggae and rock music without having some kind of plan was not going to be easy. It had happened, in a very naïve way, with “I Shot the Sheriff,” but we had done that without really thinking about it, and when we did start to think about it, it was already too late. We found ourselves either playing full reggae or rock ’n’ roll. We did one song on the album called “Don’t Blame Me,” written by George Terry, a sort of sequel to “I Shot the Sheriff,” but it didn’t sit well. It felt like we were milking a formula, which in effect was what we were doing, and that almost always backfires. Though there was a lot of stuff in the can, the album we ended up with, which I called
There’s One in Every Crowd
, released in March 1975, was just another rock ’n’ roll record that owed little to Jamaican music or reggae.

The fact is, I was trying to find my way. I was also beginning to discover, during this period, that the more I heard great musicians and singers, the more I wanted to step back. For example, we brought in Marcy Levy, a beautiful singer from Detroit who had sung with Delaney & Bonnie and Leon Russell, to work on this album, and in order to give her more opportunity to sing, I began to minimize my output. I found I liked playing the role of sideman, and was happy to push the others to the front. It was my band, after all, so there was no doubt as to who was the leader. I ended up asking her to join the band full-time, apparently much to the dismay of Leon, who had already accused me of “stealing” two other young musicians with whom he had been playing, Jamie Oldaker and Dick Sims. So far as they were concerned, however, it was probably a much more attractive proposition to come and work with me and tour the world.

The “honeymoon” that Nell and I had planned proved short-lived. She flew out to join me in Ocho Rios where, after a few days, I broke my toe trying to kick down the door of the bathroom, in which she had locked herself after a playful fight, and I had to be taken to Kingston Hospital to have it strapped up. This was followed by the news that my half brother Brian had been killed in a motorcycle accident in Canada. Though I hadn’t seen much of him since we were teenagers and we were hardly close, the news still saddened me because I had liked him a lot.

I asked Nell to accompany me to the funeral, but I don’t remember much about the journey there. It was a grand excuse for me to got blitzed. But it was a tough event for her. She had never met my family, and I had seen very little of my mother over the years. I recall that the funeral service was a Catholic one and that I had no idea what was going on, never having attended a Catholic ceremony before. The other thing I remember was being unable to feel my own grief, maybe because my mother’s was so strong. She was seriously devastated by Brian’s sudden death, and I was too numb to properly console her.

For the first year of our life together, Nell and I were constantly on the move. I had made so much money from the
Ocean Boulevard
tour that Roger insisted we move to the Bahamas for a year to save us from what would have been a punitive income tax. This was to be our real honeymoon. We rented an estate on Paradise Island, a beautiful, tiny island at the northeast end of Nassau that is connected to the main island by a bridge. Richard Harris had a house at one end while at the other was a large hotel complex. Smack in the middle, going right across the island, was an estate that belonged to a man named, coincidentally, Sam Clapp, a partner of the international financier Bernie Cornfeld, and it consisted of a big Miami-style house and another Polynesian-style one. It was all beautifully done and quite modern, and I loved it because the music system extended to every room. Having never seen anything like this, it all seemed quite revolutionary.

To begin with, life on Paradise Island was idyllic. We soaked up the sun, the sea, and the sand, and basked in the pleasure of being alone and together. My drinking ceased to be abusive or solitary and was restricted to enjoying a few beers throughout the day. It was a way of life that didn’t last long, however, because as I got used to Paradise, and I was brown and healthy, my tendency became more and more to live indoors in the air-conditioning. I couldn’t take the outside anymore. I just withdrew and started to drink, mostly brandy and vodka. Because drink was dirt-cheap there, hard drinking was a way of life for the residents. Virtually overnight my drinking escalated, and within the space of that year I became a 100 percent, full-blown alcoholic.

From Paradise Island I embarked with the band on a tour of Australia, where my drunkenness seemed to fit in, as if one was encouraged to behave like that. I remember that one of the forms it took was an obsession I developed with arm-wrestling. I’d pick on guys in bars and challenge them. They could always beat me on my right arm, but no one, even huge men, could defeat me on my left arm, which is very strong. This was pretty harmless, but every now and then I would go over the top and do things in public in front of Nell that were totally inappropriate.

I remember getting into trouble one night at a big dinner, when I loudly asked the wife of the host if she’d like to take a bath with me. This may have seemed funny to me at the time, but it wasn’t for Nell or any of the other people directly affected. I always had this madman inside of me trying to get out, and drink gave him permission. A diary entry of mine from the mid-seventies, written while on holiday on a yacht in Greece, reads, “I am sitting here drinking vodka and lemonade, having a party of my own. I am very sad and pissed…. I’ve been dreaming about what I would do to the first customs man who questions me about my guitar, or who, worse still, just touches it.”

It was my normal thing when I was angry to contest authority, so a customs official, or a policeman, or a concierge, or anyone else with a uniform would get the sharp end of my tongue, and then it would be left up to someone like Roger or Alphi to clean up the mess, or bail me out, make apologies, pay the bill, or do whatever it might take to redress the situation. Sometimes I’d invent mock dramas in order to pick a fight. I’d say, “You’ve insulted my wife,” and use that as a reason to launch into an indignant shouting match against some innocent person I’d taken a dislike to.

A notorious incident of this kind took place during the time we were living on Paradise Island, when I was invited to go to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to perform in a jam to celebrate the anniversary of Cain’s Ballroom, a very famous dance hall that had been open since the days of vaudeville and that was a popular venue for bands. Because of my connection with all the Tulsa musicians, I decided to go. I flew to Miami and from there to Tulsa, but by the time I got there I was so drunk I was warlike. I had got in some kind of altercation on the plane and they had called ahead to the Tulsa police, who were waiting for me when the plane landed, and I was arrested.

When we got to the county jail, one of the cops involved used my middle name when charging me, saying, “Are you Eric Patrick Clapton?” I replied to this, “Nobody calls me Patrick. You don’t have the right to call me that,” and then I went into a tirade against him. As a result of this, I was thrown in the drunk tank. I kept trying to tell them who I was, but they refused to believe me, so I said go and find a guitar and I would prove who I was by playing. They did this, and then they let me out. The following morning, a large photograph of me staring out from behind the bars of the tank was on the front page of the local newspaper, the
Tulsa Tribune
.

Flying off to jam with other artists was a good excuse to get away from Paradise Island. I played twice with the Stones, in New York and LA, as part of their Tour of the Americas, and in August I flew to New York for a session with Dylan, who was working on the album that was to become
Desire
. I remember feeling very elated that I had been asked to play, but when I arrived, it turned out to be a very odd situation. Two or three bands were already waiting to go into the studio with him, including an English band called Kokomo, and every now and then a bunch of players would come out, and everyone would ask, “Well, what was it like?” It was not unlike being in a doctor’s waiting room. I was one of five guitarists present, and when I went in, Dylan wasn’t particularly communicative. It was one of those awkward times when I didn’t really know what was expected of me. There was no question of a rehearsal. He played the song once or twice and then moved on to the next one.

I’d say twenty-four musicians were in the studio that night, all playing these incredibly incongruous instruments like accordion and violin, and it sounded great, but I had no idea what was going on. I felt like “Mr. Jones” again, and remembered the first time we had met in London. I felt no closer to understanding him this time than I did then. I played along as best I could, but it was very hard to keep up, as he was racing from song to song. Then suddenly it was over and he left. I couldn’t wait to get out for some fresh air. Later he told me that he had recut all the songs again with just a drummer and a bass, and that those were the tracks he was going to use.