Clapton (23 page)

One of the features about Hazelden was their very good aftercare program. Before I even left my unit, they had contacted AA in the area where I lived and organized a sponsor to meet me. I was assigned a man who lived in Dorking, named David. It was recommended I stay with my first “given” sponsor until I had a little time under my belt, and then maybe choose another, based on what my requirements were. (It was widely pointed out, by the way, that I would be the last person to know what those requirements were.) It was also impressed upon me that it was not a good idea to make any great decisions or embark on any momentous voyages of work—for about a year. This was supposedly to allow time for my head to clear and also gradually be reintroduced to reality. I did the opposite, of course.

Before that, however, I had to face the problems of integrating myself with the people at home. I remember that I had a friend there, one of my drinking partners, whom I didn’t know that well, but every weekend he would come down from Chessington and we would go out boozing round the local pubs. It usually started at the Windmill on Saturday mornings. So the first Saturday I got back from America, he turned up as usual. He had no idea where I had been, and I realized that this would be one of the first times I was going to have to tell anybody about it.

I was naturally nervous, but I came out of the house and said to him, “Look, I’m afraid I can’t go up to the pub. I’ve stopped drinking.” He looked at me curiously for a minute and then said, “Well, fuck you!” and got into his car and drove off. I never saw him again. I don’t think for a minute there was any malevolence in his reaction. That was just a normal conversation for us, but in a way it prepared me for the kind of reaction I probably could expect from some quarters, especially old drinking buddies.

Most of the Ripleyites, like Guy Pullen, my oldest and truest friend, were proud of what I’d achieved, but this didn’t mean they were going to temper their drinking just to accommodate me. So I had to make some fairly tough choices. Certain people, places, and things were dangerous for me, and I needed to carefully identify what was safe and what wasn’t safe for my sobriety from a long list of past associations and haunts. But my judgment was useless, and my value system was completely upside down. What had previously been number one, two, and three on my list of life priorities—excitement, danger, and risk—now had no place there at all.

For a while I tried to associate only with people who would be good for me, but it was hard; I was angry and disagreeable, and I didn’t know what to do with all the time that I used to spend drinking. I went to twelve-step meetings, sometimes five or six a week, and would sit there thinking, “I’m not like these people. I don’t really belong here.” What I needed was someone to take an interest in me, but now I was just Eric the alcoholic, and I wasn’t too sure that I had totally accepted that.

Among the hardest things I had to face on my return from Hazelden was attempting to re-enter my relationship with Pattie. I came back from treatment with no real idea of how to open the door of intimacy again. It was not something we had covered in treatment, and I regret that now. Not that I think it would have made any difference for us, although that is debatable, but because it is a very real issue and ought to be included in all programs of this nature.

Suffice to say, we didn’t know what to do. It had been so long since I had done anything without booze, I just didn’t know where to start. It was heartbreaking, for both of us. Pattie had been so looking forward to having this clean young man coming home to her, and here I was, partially broken, like a Vietnam vet. I would go to bed with her and just curl up beside her in the fetal position. I was ashamed and didn’t want to talk about it, because for me the foundations of our relationship had been built on sex, and I’d just assumed that it would all just fall into place the minute I got home.

About this time I started to blame Pattie for everything—“After all, hadn’t I got sober for her? Where was her gratitude?” That was how I was beginning to think. She, meanwhile, was perfectly capable of drinking wine and doing coke in moderation, and to a certain extent wanted to carry on with our old lifestyle, and who could blame her? But I had to practice abstinence, and for me, sobriety was becoming a drudge. I missed drinking and was jealous of her for being able to do all that stuff in moderation. I still had not really accepted the truth about myself.

The cracks in our relationship caused me to withdraw into myself. I began to spend a lot of time fishing. Though for many years I had been a novice fisherman, fishing primarily for perch, carp, and pike in the waters round Ripley, Gary Brooker had recently taught me to cast a fly. Pike fishing is a cumbersome affair compared to trout fishing. There’s an awful lot of gear to cart around, baskets full of stuff, rod stands, and so on, and green thermal suits to wear, and then when you get out there, you don’t really do very much, just sit and wait, and I used to look at Gary with amusement, with his little bag with some flies in it and a rod and reel. I mean he could walk around with this kit so easily. One day he gave me a lesson in casting, on his lawn, and once I’d got the line to go straight out for more than ten feet, I began to think of it as a skill, one that maybe I could master.

That first summer of my recovery was one of the most beautiful I can remember, perhaps because I was healthy and clean, and I began to rent some trout-fishing days for myself, mostly on stretches of water in the neighborhood that had been specially stocked for local fishermen. I fished on the Clandon estate and on the lakes at Willinghurst, and at Whitley Farm near Dunsfold. Fishing is an absorbing pastime and has a Zen quality to it. It’s an ideal pursuit for anyone who wants to think a lot and get things in perspective. It was also a perfect way of getting physically fit again, involving as it does a great deal of walking. I would go out at the crack of dawn and often stay out till nighttime, sometimes proudly returning with a bag of fish that I would present to Pattie to clean and cook. For once I was actually becoming good at something that had nothing to do with guitar playing or music. For the first time in a long time, I was doing something very normal and fairly mundane, and it was really important to me. However, the fact that it was increasing Pattie’s sense of isolation passed me by.

Believing that work would be one of my greatest therapies, I went on tour with my English band within four months of coming out of Hazelden. It was totally against what the counselors had recommended, and I imagine they’re used to that, but it was a rash decision. The fact is, I wasn’t yet ready for work. The first time I stood onstage, at the Paramount Theater in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, I thought to myself, “This sounds awful,” and I didn’t really know why. Like my problem with sex, I hadn’t played sober for a long time and had been used to hearing everything through a veil of alcohol and drug distortion, and I just couldn’t get used to the sound without it. I went all around America without really knowing what I was doing, but I did go to meetings. At the last show, in Miami, Muddy Waters made a guest appearance and we played “Blow Wind Blow” together. It was the last time I got to play with him, as he died in April the following year.

On our return from this tour, we went into Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas to cut tracks for a new album. The songs had a pub rock feel to them, and to me this was a continuation of what I’d been involved in with Ronnie Lane. In the beginning I was happy playing with these guys. We were doing it for fun and companionship and the love of music, all of which seemed to me to be the right reasons. But Roger wasn’t too sure, and neither was Tom, who was producing again, and to be fair to them, after two weeks of this, we’d hardly completed one track. An atmosphere of apprehension spread over the studio, and it looked like we might not make the album at all. Also, Gary Brooker and I had become very close, and as a result he was having a lot of input into the way the band worked, which, for whatever reason, was not popular with management and production.

After a couple of weeks, Tom Dowd came to me and laid it on the line that nothing was going to happen with this new album unless we had a radical change of musicians. He recommended that I fire the current band, with the exception of Albert Lee, and that we start again from scratch. He added that he could get legendary session musicians Donald “Duck” Dunn and Roger Hawkins to come and stand in, and even told me that Ry Cooder was interested in coming down. He said if I wasn’t prepared to do the firing myself, then he would do it for me. I was excited by the names he’d mentioned, people I’d held in high esteem for years, and I decided to take this fork in the road.

In my drinking days, I would have got Roger to do my dirty work, but I had learned from my time at Hazelden that I needed to start taking responsibility in these matters. That night I had dinner with the band members and told them, “I’m very sorry, but I’ve got bad news. This just isn’t working, and it’s been suggested to me that I try something else. So I’m asking you all to go home, and I’ll let any of you know if I want you to come back to play on tour.” A stunned silence fell over us when I told them.

Sacking the band was a huge thing for me to do and very painful. For Henry Spinetti and Gary Brooker, the wounds took a long time to mend, and I’ve never seen Dave Markee since. As for Chris Stainton, he was the lucky one who got rehired and has been at my side ever since. Firing them personally had a positive effect on me, in that it established my ability to take control over my working life, which previously had been totally in the hands of Roger. It also triggered a mini-breakdown. The pressure to complete this album, my first since emerging from alcoholism, was enormous, and it had to be good. We had one more song to complete, and at some point I just broke down with Tom, sobbing my heart out in front of him.

I think, as much as anything else, I was grieving the loss of my relationship with alcohol, which was very powerful and an emotion I had not hitherto sufficiently acknowledged. It had been my first relationship and subsequently played a hugely significant part in my life. I called the album
Money and Cigarettes
, because that’s all that I saw myself having left. When we had the playback party, with Tom, Roger, Pattie, and a few other people, what would normally be, I suppose, for most artists a joyous celebration seemed more like a wake. There was definitely something forced about the album, and when we went on the road with it through most of 1983, it was a bit of an anticlimax.

I think subconsciously part of me was rebelling, telling me that all I really wanted to do was play music I loved with people I loved and cared for. This really struck home when I became involved in the ARMS (Action Research into Multiple Sclerosis) concerts at the end of the year. This was a series of charity concerts organized by Glyn Johns to benefit research into MS, a disease that had recently struck down Ronnie Lane. Over the years that I had stayed with Ronnie in Wales, I had noticed that his playing style was becoming more and more erratic, until he was almost just strumming the air in front of the guitar without actually hitting the strings. I had no idea what that was all about, until now, when it all suddenly made sense.

Ronnie had found somebody who could give him hyperbaric treatments, which involved being put into a decompression chamber, and this would alleviate his symptoms and make life bearable for him for quite long periods of time. It was expensive, however, so Glyn had come up with the idea of gathering together a group of his musician friends and holding a concert to raise money for him. Steve Winwood, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, Kenny Jones, and Andy Fairweather Low all rallied to the cause, and after a few days of practice at Glyn’s house, we put on a show at the Royal Albert Hall.

It was a fantastic success with a terrific atmosphere. We were all playing together for the first time, and because we were doing it for Ronnie, rather than for money, we left our egos at the door and it was a blast. In fact, we enjoyed ourselves so much that it was decided that if everyone would agree, we should take the show on the road to try to make a lot of money for ARMS. The result was a successful tour of America, playing twenty-thousand-seat arenas in Dallas, San Francisco, LA, and New York, with all of us having a thoroughly great time.

R
eflecting on the years after I came out of Hazelden, I now realize that there was no reason for me to be making records at all. A more intelligent approach to rebuilding my life would have been to leave recording for a while to try something else, and spend a few years finding out what it was that I really wanted to do rather than just step back into the accepted pattern from the past. But that was not to be. Whether the pressures were contractual or habitual is irrelevant, as I was back on the treadmill looking for another formula for a successful album.

Roger’s suggestion was a collaboration with Phil Collins, who was riding high at the time. Though I wasn’t a fan of Genesis, Phil and I had become good friends over the years, a friendship strengthened during the breakup of his marriage to his first wife, Andrea, when he used to come over to Hurtwood and pour his heart out to Pattie and me. I had even played guitar on “If Leaving Me Is Easy,” a track on his first album,
Face Value.
Though at first Roger’s plan just seemed like a pretty obvious marketing ploy, in the end I decided it wasn’t such a bad idea. It did mean, however, that I would have to come up with some new material when I wasn’t really ready to.

While considering the best way to go about this, I remembered a trip I had made to Wales many years before, when I had gone there alone with my dog and stayed in the Borders for a couple of weeks and had the time of my life. It seemed like that might be a good place to return to, so I got Nigel Carroll to go and find me a cottage in the area. He rented a place near Beulah, in the Brecon Beacons, and I went up there with some recording equipment and started writing. Actually, I spent most of my time chopping wood, as all the hot water and the central heating system came from a back boiler heated by the fire. The cottage was miles from anywhere and I hardly ever spoke to anyone. I’d go to the pub and have a lemonade and a cheese sandwich, and nobody even looked at me. It was very odd.

Until I started trying to write this new material, I had no idea how difficult it was going to be to shift myself away from writing just for me. I would complete a song and play it back and feel happy with it, and then I’d be out in my car and one of Phil’s hits would come on the radio, and I’d think, “My God, I’m nowhere near this kind of stuff.” It was hard trying to fit into his mold. On my return from Wales, I called Phil and told him I had a few new songs, and we decided to go and work on them in George Martin’s Air Studios in Montserrat, in the Caribbean. The idea was to jam a little, try out my songs, see if we could write something together, and maybe do some covers. “Knock on Wood” was one I was keen to try.

I had the same band, except that Jamie Oldaker had replaced Roger Hawkins on drums, and Phil had also brought in Peter Robinson to play synthesizer, a new direction for me. We were soon having a great time, and the plan was working. “Between now (twelve midnight) and yesterday,” I wrote in my diary on March 12, 1984, “we’ve got five great tracks…. Phil is so great to work with, you get so much done but it doesn’t feel like hard work at all…. Peter Robinson is a genius and a great bloke too! In fact the whole thing is going so great, I hope it never stops!” I was amazed by how much we were achieving, and I thought the sound was incredible. “Good old Phil,” I wrote the following day, “he’s a diamond alright.”

Only one thing jarred. There seemed to be a kind of conspiracy to keep me from knowing that all the guys were boozing and doing a lot of blow. It was happening in secret, and it was as if they didn’t trust me to handle it. I became very angry. “Somebody’s been holding out on me,” I told them. “I’m not a kid. I want to know everything that’s going on.” But when I voiced my disquiet, they just kind of shouted at me in a joking way and said, “But you don’t do it anymore!”

Before I left home, my attendance at twelve-step meetings had dropped, and I had neglected to find out if there were any where I was going. On my arrival, I had noticed that in the kitchen of the chalet I was staying in was a courtesy gift of a bottle of local rum on the sideboard, but instead of picking it up and deliberately pouring it all down the drain, I just put it away in a cupboard, thinking, “I’m not going to overreact to this by throwing it down the sink. I’ll just put it somewhere where I can’t see it.” But one night, soon after my row with the band, I went to a club on the far side of the island where I convinced myself that it would be all right to have a couple of drinks. I then went back to my chalet and polished off the bottle of rum in one sitting.

As a celebration, the next day I set about seducing the manager of the studio, Yvonne, a beautiful lady from Doncaster whose father was a Montserratian guitar player. She was very witty and funny, a dark-haired flirtatious beauty who seemed to be interested, and next thing I knew we were embarked on a very passionate and reckless affair, taking no precautions whatsoever. Like the drinking, my rationale was, “Nobody will know, we’re miles away from anywhere.” At the same time, it’s as if I wanted to get caught doing something that would rock the domestic boat at home. My disillusionment with my marriage was touched on in some of the songs I had written for the new album, like “She’s Waiting,” “Just Like a Prisoner,” and “Same Old Blues,” all very personal numbers about the relationship between Pattie and me.

For some time I had been finding it increasingly difficult to find a place to exist in my marriage and, at the same time, have a practicing sober life. The two things weren’t really jiving very well; I was going to a lot of meetings and also trying to fit in with our social life. But it was difficult going to dinners because I felt like I was under a microscope, and it was hard too for our friends, who were having to moderate their behavior and act in a way they hadn’t had to before. On my return from Montserrat, I chose to hide the fact that I had relapsed by not drinking, and though I managed to do this to begin with, the strain soon became too great.

I was doing a lot of fishing, which helped keep me calm, and one evening I was driving home from the river when I saw a pub by the side of the road. It was just getting dark and I could see through the windows a throng of people drinking and having fun, and at that moment I had no resistance. My selective memory of what drinking was like told me that standing at the bar in a pub on a summer’s evening with a long, tall glass of lager and lime was heaven, and I chose not to remember the nights on which I had sat with a bottle of vodka, a gram of coke, and a shotgun, contemplating suicide.

Suddenly I was at the bar ordering a beer, and it did exactly what I thought it would do. Because I hadn’t had a drink in a while, it made me quite tipsy, and I drove back to Hurtwood with some difficulty. When I got there, I decided I would tell Pattie what I had done and present it as good news, my thinking being that our marriage wasn’t working because I was sober, but if I could find a way back into a moderate drinking situation and become a social drinker again, like she was, then all of our problems would be solved and she would be happy. I went to find her and I said, “I’ve got something to tell you. I had a drink on the way home and it felt really good, and I think I can control it.” Her face fell, and even though I saw the anxiety and disappointment in her expression, I’d already made up my mind that this was the plan.

Part of her disappointment was bound up with the fact that a few months previously, Pattie and I had visited a fertility clinic after she had told me she was desperate to have a child. Pattie’s problems in getting pregnant stemmed from a blockage in her fallopian tubes, which had made conceiving a child difficult if not impossible during her marriage to George, in the days before IVF.

During the first years of our marriage it was not discussed, as we were too busy racing through life at breakneck speed. Then on February 8, 1984, I noted in my diary, “Nell showed me all the bumph she got from the fertility Doctor…it seems she is suddenly quite keen to have a child…” I had realized that having children was the last thing we had to pursue to hold us together, but I was secretly hoping that it wouldn’t work, because as much as I loved her, I was feeling the need to roam again. I had kind of lost heart.

I now set off on a path of attempting controlled social drinking in the way I saw other people do it. I studied them, and for a while my life consisted of going up to the Windmill for lunch and having one or two lagers, and then in the evening maybe a glass of wine with dinner or a scotch after eating. The reality was that, as much as I may have been trying to establish some kind of normal day like other people, what it really amounted to was these two drinking sessions with me desperately trying to kill the time in between them, often by sleeping all through the afternoon. This schedule was purely alcoholic in its development and focus, and our life just crumbled as a result.

On our return from Montserrat, with most of the songs recorded and mixed, Roger, who was happy with the material, sent it off to the record company, Warner Bros., while I set about working on a film score for a new John Hurt movie,
The Hit.
One of the musicians who helped me with this and played on it was Roger Waters, whom I had known from my youth and whose wife, Carolyn, was a close friend of Pattie’s. He played me a cassette of a new album he was working on, called
The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking
. It had some great players on it, and since I enjoyed his company so much and hanging out with him, I ended up going into the studio with him and working on the album. It was a lot of fun, and at one point I said jokingly, “You should really take this on the road.” He then asked me if I’d go with him, and since it was the perfect excuse to run away from my problems at home, I said yes.

Roger Forrester was not happy about this, since he didn’t like the idea of me being a sideman to anybody, but he reluctantly agreed to let Roger have me on loan. I was after all Forrester’s property, and I would have to be given back after the tour. The situation between these two was quite funny in that Roger Waters was very suspicious of Roger Forrester, who in turn thought he had Roger Waters figured out, so there was always a lot of sporting banter bouncing back and forth between them, which I think they quite enjoyed.

The tour took place in Europe and America during June and July. Roger was working very much to a format, which was multimedia, a combination of visuals and music, both meant to emphasize the story he was telling. I had to wear headphones, as a lot of the music had to be in sync with video on the screen, so I needed to follow a click track, which I’d never done before onstage. I thought it was all pretty interesting, although from where I was standing, I never actually saw any of the video stuff. Probably just as well, as from what I gathered, some very weird stuff was being shown up there. The first night was in Stockholm, on June 16. “The gig was great,” I noted in my diary, “no bad mistakes and though my own playing could have been better, it wasn’t bad at all. Roger was great in front of an audience, quite an eye opener…I am back to using Blackie again, it just seems to have that extra bite for stage work, although it’s definitely harder to play, perhaps that’s what makes it preferable?” The show was like presenting a package, but I became really friendly with the musicians and we all made the most of it, and as usual I got involved in some pretty crazy sexual liaisons, ménages à trois and the like, with some scary women, which was all rather sordid.

While we were in Canada, playing at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, I hit a rock bottom, one of a series that would eventually lead me back to Hazelden. I had been drinking very heavily throughout the tour and had suffered one or two alcoholic breakdowns, like mini-seizures. On this particular occasion I had bought a couple of six-packs of beer, which I drank very quickly, and then I just hit a wall of desperation. It was like a moment of clarity when I saw the absolute squalidness of my life at that moment. I began to write a song called “Holy Mother,” in which I asked for help from a divine source, a female that I couldn’t even begin to identify. I still love that song, because I recognize that it came from deep in my heart as a sincere cry for help.

A number of shocks awaited me on my return to England after the
Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking
tour. The first was that Warner Bros. had sent back the Montserrat tapes, saying the songs weren’t strong enough. There weren’t enough potential hit singles among them, and we could either rerecord the album, removing some of the songs and adding new ones, or find another record company. I was incredibly upset, as this was the first time I had ever been rejected as a musician. At one point I even equated it with being sober, because one of the first things that had happened to me when I got back from Hazelden was that I got stopped by the police in my car and was Breathalyzed, something that had never happened to me while I was drinking. Suddenly, getting a rejection from my record company was just another reflection of all the nastiness one had to face when sober.

After my anger subsided, I had the presence of mind to sit down quietly and think what might be the proper action to take. I was partly motivated in this by having heard that Warner had recently dropped Van Morrison, and it occurred to me that if they could drop him, then they could certainly let go of me, and then where would I go? I decided to talk to Roger about it, who had often made sensible decisions in difficult situations, and we both agreed that we should find out what the record company thought hit single material was. They sent me three songs written by a Texas songwriter they represented named Jerry Lynn Williams—“Forever Man,” “Something’s Happening,” and “See What Love Can Do”—and they were good. I loved the way he sang, and I sent back a message to say I would do it, on the condition that they produced the songs and provided the musicians. I think it was, professionally, the first time I’d ever had to back down.