Clapton (21 page)

A couple of days later she flew to LA, where she went to stay with Rob Fraboni and his wife, Myel. At that point I did not give up Jenny, but went on tour to Ireland, where Jen came out to visit me. On March 17, Nell’s birthday, I recorded in my diary that “the gig was great and sweet Jen flew in to make the day perfect. We talked and talked about our respective wounds.” The entry finishes with the words, “I am a bad man and I think the world better roll on without me for a while anyway. All in love is fair.”

Ironically, it was Roger who saved the day for me and Nell. When I got home from Ireland, he told me over a game of pool at his house that I should be discreet in my meetings with Jenny, or we’d get snapped by a photographer and it would be all over the papers. I said that was rubbish and ended up drunkenly betting him the ridiculous sum of £10,000 that he couldn’t get my picture in the papers. The following morning, to my utter amazement and horror, Nigel Dempster’s column in the
Daily Mail
announced
ROCK STAR ERIC CLAPTON WILL MARRY PATTIE BOYD.

Roger had pulled a fast one. I jumped into my Ferrari and drove to his office, where I screamed at him that he had no right to make such huge decisions about my personal life. When I’d calmed down a bit, he asked me if it wasn’t time to decide whether or not I wanted to stay with Nell, or break with her forever. “How do I get her back?” I replied. He said that she wouldn’t have seen the story yet, and that I should call her and ask her to marry me. When I phoned Rob’s house in LA, Nell was out, down at the beach in Malibu. I told him to give her a simple message. “Please marry me.” When she called back later, I swore to her that I had given up Jenny, and proposed. She burst into tears and accepted.

The ceremony finally took place on March 27, 1979, at the Apostolic Assembly of Faith in Christ Church in Tucson, Arizona, the town where, the following day, we were due to play the first date of a major American tour. We had a Mexican preacher, the Rev. Daniel Sanchez, and a black organist who looked a bit like Billy Preston. The band and roadies all wore rented tuxedos, and my outfit consisted of a white tux with black edging around the jacket, a $200 white cowboy hat, and cowboy boots, while Nell wore a cream satin dress by Ozzie Clarke. Roger gave her away, and she was attended by two maids of honor, Myel Fraboni and Chris O’Dell. Rob Fraboni acted as my best man. The preacher read from the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, in which he praises love. The service was short and sweet, funky and soulful, which was just what we wanted.

When the ceremony was over, we all returned to our hotel, where they’d put aside a room for the reception. The table was dominated by the usual wedding cake, about five tiers tall, and Roger had hired a photographer to take pictures. Typically, after the cutting of the cake, when he came over to photograph me and Nell together, I threw a piece of cake at him, covering his beautiful Nikon camera. He obviously felt completely out of his depth, because he didn’t dare make a fuss, and then a food fight started. Soon everyone was covered in cake. We didn’t eat the cake, we just wore it. The following night we played our first show of a three-month tour at the Community Center in Tucson, and when we played “Wonderful Tonight,” I brought Nell up onstage so that I could sing it to her. The reception from the crowd was ecstatic.

H
owever much I might have thought I loved Pattie at the time, the truth is that the only thing that I couldn’t live without was alcohol. This really made my need or ability to commit to anything, even marriage, pretty inconsequential, and anyway it was only a matter of time before the “no women on the road” rule was invoked, and then I’d be off and running again. Pattie came with me to Albuquerque, New Mexico, then to El Paso, Texas, and from there to all the gigs till we got to San Antonio. At each show I would bring her up onstage and sing “Wonderful Tonight” to her. But after the San Antonio gig, I told her that she must go back to England. It was men-only time again; I had had enough of domestic bliss. She was not at all happy about this, and of course as soon as she was gone, it was back to business as usual.

One of the first things Pattie did when she got back to England was to start organizing a party for all our English friends to celebrate our wedding. It was set for Saturday, May 19, when there was a break in my tour schedule, and was to take place in the garden at Hurtwood, where a huge tent would be erected. Guests were instructed to turn up “about 3:00
P.M.
” and told that they didn’t have to bring presents if they didn’t want to. “If you are free,” we had printed on the invites, “try and make it, it’s bound to be a laugh.” There was no real form to the party. People were just expected to arrive whenever they wanted, wearing whatever they liked, and have a good time.

The first person I remember showing up was Lonnie Donegan, who came far too early, at about 10:00
A.M.
, followed closely by Georgie Fame. I didn’t have a clue what to do with them, and we ended up going upstairs to a small bedroom where Georgie began rolling joints. I stayed up there for most of the day getting stoned and becoming more and more paranoid as people were arriving. I really had no idea how to be a host and couldn’t cope, so instead of being around to greet everybody and offer them drinks, I hid. Eventually, sometime during the evening, I went downstairs to the tent to find this huge party going on, with hundreds of people, from all my famous musician friends to the grocer and the butcher and all the Ripleyites, milling around, chattering, eating and drinking, and making out in the bushes. It actually looked like the kind of party I would like to go to.

A stage had been set up in the tent, the idea being that the band would consist of anyone who felt like getting up and playing. A succession of great musicians joined in the jam session that took place later in the evening, including Georgie and Lonnie, Jeff Beck, Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Jack Bruce, and Denny Laine. I remember Denny’s wife, Jo Jo, getting up to sing, and then we couldn’t get her off, so whoever was at the mixing board had to keep switching off whichever mike she was using, and she would just move to another one.

George, Paul, and Ringo also played, only missing John, who later phoned me to say he would have been there too if he had known about it. How that came about, I’ll never know; suffice to say I had little to do with the invitations; but a great opportunity was lost for the Beatles to reform for one last performance. Pattie had also made the mistake of giving our bedroom to Mick Jagger, who was in the early stages of his romance with Jerry Hall, so we couldn’t go to bed, which I thought was completely ridiculous. So I decided to target a friend of Pattie’s named Belinda, who I was convinced was going to make herself available to me at any moment. I hid in a cupboard, with the intention of pouncing on her at some point, but instead I fell asleep and woke up later that day to find a mess that was to take two weeks to clean up.

Among the guests at this wonderful party was my mother Pat, who had become part of my life again after the death of my half brother, Brian. Her loss had put a lot of strain on her marriage to Mac, which had gradually started to erode. To get away from it all, she came back to Ripley, where, as she slowly rekindled all her childhood friendships, she eventually decided to stay. At first she lived with Rose, until I bought her a little house on the village high street, right next to a restaurant called the Toby Jug. Initially, I was rather frightened of Pat. She had a quick temper, and our relationship was inclined to be tempestuous. I’d seen so little of her in my life that most of what I knew about her had come from outside sources, and I was never really sure just what the truth was.

At that stage in my life, however, I made the decision that this didn’t really matter, and that instead of constantly stirring things up, I should just learn to get on with her and have fun. I liked the surface that I saw, because she was very like me, particularly in the things that made us laugh, so I decided that we should use Ripley and its social scene as a way of getting reacquainted. She enjoyed a drink, so we went out to pubs to drink and socialize and use the company of others to get to know one another again. It may not have been a very direct approach to the relationship, because I didn’t spend much time alone with her, but it worked very well, and the fact is that, as an alcoholic, I wasn’t well enough to know how to deal with deeper things.

Soon after her return, Pat struck up a friendship with her childhood friend Sid Perrin, a charismatic man, handsome, not in the Errol Flynn mold but rather more like W. C. Fields. Sid was extremely popular and well loved, and a kind of hero in Ripley through his achievements as a good cricketer and footballer, but most of all as a singer. He had a tenor voice in the style of Mario Lanza that was a bit melodramatic, almost a caricature of a voice, but he could actually carry a song very well with a great deal of emotion. He was very gregarious and loved the spotlight, though only on a small scale, because given the opportunity to step onto a stage, which I gave him from time to time—for instance when we played local gigs, like the Guildford Civic Hall—he would blanch with fear. In his own environment, however, in the village pub or the cricket club, he shone, and Pat adored him. This made me happy, too, as I had always hero-worshiped him, and I hung out with them a lot.

My developing relationship with my mum was also greatly helped by the fact that she and Pattie got on really well and had become firm friends. They also shared an irreverent sense of humor, as I did, which could be sarcastic and cruel at times, though without any real malice. This form of humor was a Ripley trait, and a number of my boyhood friends, like Guy, Gordon, and Stuart, were all fast-witted in this area. Their repartee was fast and cutting, with a lot of teasing involved, and if you could handle yourself in those situations, then you were in.

Since I had begun to develop a bit of a home life with Pattie and the Ripleyites, my English humor was in full flow, and unfortunately it was the one area in which I did not gel with my band. They all came from Oklahoma, and their humor was very different. Though it too was very dry, it was parochial and rather cowboy-oriented, having to do with events and things taking place in their neck of the woods, whereas ours was more music hall stuff and silly gags. There was little cross-fertilization in the days before Monty Python took off in America. All this struck home at the beginning of 1979, when, owing to prior commitments, George Terry left the band and I hired an English guitarist, Albert Lee.

Albert was a great guitar player I had known since the John Mayall days, when he played in Chris Farlowe’s band. My take on him then had been that he was a brilliant player, but that he came from a more jazz or rockabilly direction, so I could admire him without thinking of him as a rival. He went on to play with Head, Hands & Feet, and over the years we became good friends and would, if one of us had to drop out of a gig for some reason, occasionally stand in for one another. Then he moved to America, where he was in great demand as a session musician. When George left, Roger Forrester suggested that I should bring an English guitarist into the band, instead of always playing with Americans, and recommended Albert as a possible replacement. I thought this was a great idea, though knowing Roger, he’d probably had it all worked out for ages.

When I got together with Albert, we immediately bonded in our humor, sharing a love of Python and Spike Milligan. To a certain extent music became incidental, because the kind we made, blues and R&B, came from such a strong source that it would never be threatened by the difference in our influences. We formed ourselves into a mock duo called the Duck Brothers and spent our spare time on the road entertaining ourselves by playing tunes on a couple of rare Acme Bakelite duck whistles we had found and which had a great tone. Unfortunately, this didn’t go down at all well with the Americans, who just didn’t get it, and things were not helped by the fact that Albert and I were boozers, while Carl, Jamie, and Dick were doing drugs of a more isolationist variety. It was the beginning of a rift that began to form between me and Albert and the rest of the guys.

By the spring and early summer of 1979, when we were touring the States promoting our latest album,
Backless
, this division had grown into marked bad feeling. A lot of paranoia was in the air, reminiscent of the days of the breakup of the Dominos, and we were not spending enough time with one another in a clearheaded way for us to overcome these feelings. It just became accepted that I was going down one road with Albert, having the kind of fun we were having, while the others were doing their own thing.

It got to the point where we were even keeping different timetables. When we were onstage, it was all okay, but everything else was suffering. Unbeknownst to me, Carl Radle had become a serious heroin addict, and my condition was going downhill, too. I was drinking at least two bottles a day of anything I could get my hands on. By the time the tour ended, in June, things had got to such a bad state that I knew there had to be a change, so with great trepidation, I instructed Roger to get rid of the band. He fired them all by telegram while I looked the other way.

Over the next two years, my drinking brought me to rock bottom. It infiltrated everything I did. Even my new band was born in a pub. Gary Brooker was an old friend from the Yardbirds days, when he had been keyboard player for the Paramounts. We had toured together and got on very well, and over the years I would bump into him occasionally, when he was with Procol Harum, and we developed a friendship and mutual respect. Then in the mid-seventies he started playing in a pub not far from Hurtwood, the Parrot Inn in Forest Green, two or three times a week, and when I was at home I would sometimes go over and jam. This had become more frequent since Pattie and I had married, and Joe Cocker’s brilliant keyboard player Chris Stainton had also become involved. Gradually we began to put together a new outfit, consisting of me, Gary, Chris, Albert, Dave Markee on bass guitar, and Henry Spinetti on drums.

After trying ourselves out on a local audience in Cranleigh Village Hall, we went out on the road, around Europe and the Far East, and the concerts in Budokan, Tokyo, were recorded for our first album together, which was released in May under the title
Just One Night.
But I missed Carl, and I was riddled with guilt because he had saved my neck at one point, by sending me that tape, and I’d turned my back on him. I never saw him again. In May 1980 the news reached me that he had died of kidney failure, brought on by the effects of alcohol and narcotics, and deep down I felt partly responsible for it.

When I heard about Carl, we had just completed a UK tour, our first for eighteen months, so I was at home for a prolonged period. I became depressed and lost myself in drinking. My normal day became just sitting in front of the TV and responding very aggressively to anybody who came to the door or wanted me to do any work. I became very negative about everything. I just wanted to stay at home and get drunk, with Pattie as a slave cum partner. I was drinking copious amounts of Special Brew, which I was secretly topping up with vodka, so that it looked like I was only drinking beer. Then I would take coke on top of this, which was the only time when Pattie would join me, as she liked to do cocaine without the booze, so this became our meeting place.

At some point in the day we would go off to the pub together, either to the Windmill, where we’d hang out with the landlord, or to the Ship to meet the Ripleyites. Nor did Pattie’s presence get in the way of my trying to get something going with one of the barmaids, or indeed any woman who walked in the door. Then I would round people up and invite them back home, often complete strangers. My favorite thing was to pick up derelicts, or “men of the road” as I preferred to call them, my thinking being that these were “real” people. I’d see one walking along the road and stop the car and pick him up. They were often barking mad and talking gibberish, but I’d take them home and Pattie would have to cook dinner for them. It wasn’t long before she was having to tell people not to offer me drinks if we were out, because she could see I was getting worse.

I couldn’t get Carl out of my mind. The band did a short tour of Scandinavia in September and October, during which the coroner’s report into his death was published. The next day I wrote the following entry in my diary: “I have written (unwittingly) a song for Carl Dean, and as a result I am drinking too much and wallowing in the glory of being the one who had the strings of altrering [
sic
] his destiny, so they say…doesn’t it occur to anyone that I was in the front line with him? I haven’t even read the report so why should I be so hurt and angry? I will tell you why—I loved and left the man and there will never be a day go by when he doesn’t enter my heart…. If I am guilty, then God alone will cut me down, and all will be forgiven, even those who calm me and tell me it’s all a bad dream…. We cut the song beautifully and it shall be called ‘e.c..c.d.’”