Clapton (24 page)

I was pretty scared when I went out to LA, being not quite sure what I was letting myself in for, but as soon as I met him, I got on with Jerry Williams like a house on fire. He was an incredible, larger-than-life character who looked like Jack Nicholson and sang like Stevie Wonder. The producers were Ted Templeman and Lenny Waronker, and they brought in what they called the “A team” of Jeff Porcaro on drums, Steve Luthaker on guitar, and Michael Omartian and Greg Phillinganes on synthesizers, all studio musicians who had been used on hit after hit.

We recorded these songs, and though I thought the material was pretty good, in the end I believe the original album was better because it was truer to what we had been trying to do. What I really got out of it was the sheer enjoyment of hanging out with Jerry Williams, though he was hardly the best influence I could have had at the time. He was staying up at Shangri-La, where I had recorded “No Reason to Cry,” and I went up and stayed there and played on some of his demos, and before I knew it I was off and running again, with prescription drugs and blow as well as alcohol.

Another piece of shocking news that reached me on my return from the Roger Waters tour was in a letter from Yvonne, who wrote to say that she was pregnant and that the baby was mine. She emphasized, however, that she wished to keep this news secret and that she didn’t have any expectations from me. She was married and had decided to try and raise the child within her existing marriage. She had told me that things were not good between her and her husband, and I presumed that she was hoping that the baby might save her marriage.

Considering my own behavior, I suppose I should not have been so surprised to find that, during my absence on the road with Roger, Pattie had begun an affair with a society photographer. The irony was that he was the brother of Roger’s wife, Carolyn, and I later found out from one of my crew, Peter Jackson, that this had been an open secret on the
Pros and Cons
tour. They had met socially while I was working on the album. I was devastated, but in many subsequent conversations with Pattie, it became clear that I had been totally blind to the things that had driven her away from me, namely my chauvinistic behavior and my drinking and depressions. I pleaded with her to come back to me, to no avail, and it was eventually decided that we should have a trial separation. I agreed to rent a flat for her in London, and she moved into an apartment in Devonshire Place. “I kept on thinking,” I wrote in my diary on October 2, 1984, “this can’t be happening to me.”

I was getting ready for an Australian tour, and I was falling to pieces. I spent the mornings in therapy, which helped me, and the afternoons working, which often knocked me back. “The problem is that the rehearsals,” I wrote, “contain all the songs I ever wrote about Pattie, and by the time we’re finished, I’m back where I started—jealous and rejected…” The evenings back at home were the worst, “sad, melancholy and negative,” I wrote. I could not stop brooding about her and her boyfriend, who I considered a complete wimp. One evening, after getting “further and further down in my pit…finally I got in the car and drove…with the intention of dragging her back, caveman style. She wasn’t there of course.”

Over the next few weeks, during which I was also rehearsing for the upcoming tour, my state of mind went steadily downhill. “I feel so lost and desperate,” I wrote on October 12, “…and miss her so much that I can’t see the way ahead.” A week later I experienced “the worst day yet! A complete relapse with all the fears and guilt of the old drinking days, the coke was the worst part of it—never again! The whole day I spent getting more and more suicidal, until finally the phone rang in the evening and it was Roger W., who just by being gentle brought me out of it. I stopped drinking, threw the coke away and drank glass after glass of water until finally I came back to a feeling of clarity and ease. I must never let this happen again…”

Two things helped me during this dark period. First and foremost was my music, the one thing that was always there for me. “I want to express all my pain in my music,” I wrote in one entry in my diary. “I don’t want to stifle it, I want it to reach others in pain so that they can know they are not alone.” I also started to see a brilliant therapist whom Roger Waters had recommended. “I saw Gordon today,” I wrote on October 16, “and he gave me some good insights on both me and the situation—it seems I must use my head to control my emotions or they will destroy me…he is giving me a good foot forward no matter how slow. I wrote and recorded ‘Behind the Sun’ at Phil’s house tonight. It’s rough, but it says it all…I intend giving it to Nell on Thursday.” This song, which consisted of me on guitar and vocals and Phil on synthesizer, expressed all my feelings of sadness over our breakup. I took the title from a line in “Louisiana Blues,” one of my favorite Muddy Waters songs, and it became the title track of the new album, released early in 1985.

On November 6, two days before leaving for Australia, I had one more meeting with Pattie. “I walked and talked with Nell this afternoon, she is lovelier than ever and I believe she wants to be left alone with her new man and her new life…she said that physically there was no attraction for me anymore and that she loved being with him, he’s a lucky man…and I am a fool, but I still believe that she loves me and that I can net her with patience. I can never stop loving her…I have hope and persistence on my side and I will never give in.” Owing to the turmoil I was in, I had avoided further complicating things by involving myself with any other women since my return from America, but the day I flew to Sydney, I went to bed with a girl I had been seeing on and off named Valentina. It released all kinds of feelings. “Valentina…made lunch and we made love. It felt so good to be cared for again, I’ve been so hungry for so long…but it still doesn’t stop the deeper yearning which I keep for my wife…but maybe that too will fade. I pray that she returns before it does…in another hour or so I shall be gone from here and all the ghosts.”

For me, the Australian tour was not a happy one. Not only was I on an emotional roller coaster, but I was not that happy with the sound we were getting onstage. “The rehearsal was very strange,” I recorded on November 12. “The sound was overpowering and I felt like I had dropped acid, my confidence is very low.” The problem was that Albert Lee was not with us this time around, and his place had been taken by Pete Robinson on synthesizer, an instrument I had got used to in the studio but had some difficulty adjusting to onstage. It seemed to make the show far too loud, which caused problems with my hearing. “I think the frequency of his synth playing could be what causes my deafness,” I noted on November 23, adding later, “the show was okay, for the most part, but toward the end it got too loud again…Deb said for her it was too loud from the word go…it would be great to do one show that was pleasing to everyone.” (Deb was short for Deborah Russell, a lady I had made friends with in Sydney, and a very fine painter.)

A week into the tour, we were in Sydney when Roger called me to tell me that Nigel Dempster had written up the story of our breakup in his column in the
Daily Mail
. This really hurt, because it hadn’t occurred to me up until that point that it was anyone else’s business. “Well it’s over,” I wrote. “I spoke to Nell about Divorce and she agrees to it. I have gone back into shock, God help me…. I called back in remorse and asked her to come with me to somewhere remote for a week just to talk it over.” Two days later I noted “…she has agreed to Florence for a week on the 7th, so I think that will decide it one way or another.”

I returned to England at the beginning of December 1984 feeling confused and depressed. “On mornings like this,” I wrote on my first day back at Hurtwood, “you really need someone to snuggle up to. It’s grey and dark and wet and cold. It’s England.” I decided not to press for a divorce, but to leave it to Pattie to ask for one if and when she decided to. I also wrote a letter to her lover in which I unequivocally stated my feelings. I told him that I hoped he was aware of just what he was doing, because Pattie had been the love of my life and he was succeeding in fucking over everyone.

That night, out of the blue, Alice called me from Paris, where she was now living, and “lifted my spirits, in fact snapped me out of it by saying that she always knew that Pattie would end up with a toff.” She suggested that I go to see her in Paris, which did not seem like a good idea. Instead, I pushed Pattie, who had been having second thoughts, into agreeing to the Florence trip, which turned into a three-day disaster. “The Florentine experiment proved to be a big letdown,” I wrote. “The most memorable part was the fact that she has proved, or established that she finds me sexually repulsive.” I was undeterred.

My resolve was soon strengthened by the news that my letter to the boyfriend appeared to have paid off and that he had backed off for a while. So after Christmas, which we spent apart, I decided to press even harder for a reconciliation. Pattie would never have considered this without first consulting “the committee,” as we called the group of close friends she hung out with. Also known as “the blond Mafia,” they were a formidable group of women who used to regularly lunch together and swap gossip. Much to my delight, they gave her the go-ahead, and we flew off together for a holiday in Eilat, Israel. It was just as unsuccessful as the trip to Florence. The problem was that I was convinced that if we could regain the intimate side of our relationship, then everything else would fall into place. So instead of just enjoying her company, I was always trying to push it to the next level. In spite of everything, I persuaded Pattie to give me another chance at making our marriage work, and on our return to England she came back to live at Hurtwood. Things did not improve. I had placed her on a pedestal, turning her into a person she could never aspire to be and that I would only abuse.

For most of 1985, apart from August and September, I was out on the road promoting
Behind the Sun
. In the early part of that summer I got a phone call from Pete Townshend asking if I would play in a charity event being organized by Bob Geldof to raise money for the victims of famine in Ethiopia. It was to be called Live Aid and to consist of two concerts, to be played simultaneously in London and Philadelphia on July 13 and broadcast live on TV across the world. As it happened, on that date we were to be in the middle of a North American tour. We were booked to play Las Vegas the night before, with shows in Denver on either side, so there were some pretty big leaps involved. I told Roger to cancel the Las Vegas show and called Pete to say we’d do it. Thank God we were in good shape, with the band playing really well, because had we just started our tour, I might have had second thoughts otherwise.

Landing in Philadelphia the day before the show, one couldn’t help but get swept up in the atmosphere. The place was just buzzing. The moment we landed, you could feel music everywhere. We checked into the Four Seasons Hotel, every room of which was filled with musicians. It was Music City, and like most people I was awake most of the night before the concert. I couldn’t sleep with nerves. We were due to go onstage in the evening, and I sat watching the performances of the other acts on TV during most of the day, which was probably a psychological mistake, as seeing all these great artists giving their best made me a hundred times more psyched up than I would have been for a regular gig. How could I ever match the performance of a band like the Four Tops, with their fantastic big Motown orchestra combined with all their energy?

By the time we got out to the stadium, I was in such a state of nerves that I was literally tongue-tied. It was also boiling hot, and the whole band felt faint. In fact, Duck Dunn and I later confessed to each other that we’d been close to passing out. The tunnel that we had to walk through from the dressing rooms to the stage was crowded with security, which was unnerving in itself, and things weren’t helped by the fact that we had been given different guitar amps from those specified by my roadie, who was subsequently screaming blue murder as we reached the stage. To say the whole band was jumpy would be an understatement. As I climbed onstage, I luckily saw the reassuring presence of my old mentor, Ahmet Ertegun, standing in the wings, smiling broadly at me, and giving me a big thumbs-up sign.

Things got off to a shaky start. When I moved up to the microphone to sing the first line of “White Room,” I got a great big shock off it, further unnerving me, and meaning that I had to sing the rest of the show with my mouth not quite touching the mike, but still close enough to hear myself, since the monitors weren’t very good. We played two more songs, “She’s Waiting,” a song from
Behind the Sun
, and “Layla,” and then we were off and it was all over. Phil Collins came on, followed by Led Zeppelin, then Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. After that I remember very little other than being herded back onstage at the end to join in the finale, singing “We Are the World.” I think I was just in a state of shock.

The autumn of 1985 found us touring Italy. From my initial visit there a few years earlier, when I was first exposed to its architecture, fashion, cars, and food, I had had a fascination with the country and its lifestyle in general, but I had never dated an Italian woman. I was telling this to the Italian promoter, who told me that he knew a really interesting girl and that he would introduce us. We were playing a couple of shows in Milan, and after one of them, at dinner, he brought along a strikingly attractive girl named Lori del Santo. Born in Verona, Lori was the second daughter of a poor Catholic family. When her father died young, she was sent to a convent school to be educated while her mother worked all hours to make ends meet.

As soon as she left school, she made the decision that she would never be poor again. She went to Rome with the intention of making a career in modeling and TV, and by the age of twenty had got parts in various films and sitcoms, and had become the girlfriend of the international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. By the time I met her, seven years later, she was famous throughout Italy as the star of a popular weekly TV show called
Drive-In
, which was the Italian equivalent of
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
. With her long, rich, dark curly hair, strong bone structure, and voluptuous figure, she was a real southern Italian–style beauty, and I was immediately smitten.