Clapton (28 page)

The show was great. Andy Fairweather Low and I did quite a lot of bare acoustic work on the Robert Johnson and Broonzy material, and we performed “Tears in Heaven” and “Circus Left Town,” although I later vetoed “Circus” on the grounds that it was too shaky. I also enjoyed going back and playing the old stuff like “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” which was how it had all started back in Kingston so long ago.

Russ produced the album of the show and Roger was like an expectant father hovering over the project, while I was fairly dismissive, saying that I thought we ought to put it out as a limited edition. I just wasn’t that enamored with it, and as much as I’d enjoyed playing all the songs, I didn’t think it was that great to listen to. When it came out, it was the biggest-selling album of my entire career, which goes to show what I know about marketing. It was also the cheapest to produce and required the least amount of preparation and work. But if you want to know what it actually cost me, go to Ripley, and visit the grave of my son. I think that’s also why it was such a popular record; I believe people wanted to show their support for me, and those who couldn’t find any other way bought the album.

The American summer tour that year, however, threw this particular phenomenon back in my face. “Tears in Heaven” was high on the charts, and I was trying to open the show with it in front of crowds of people who were screaming their heads off, with the result that I couldn’t hear myself think, let alone play. I would come offstage every night heartbroken and angry that they weren’t listening. I felt I couldn’t do the song justice, and with no stagecraft to fall back on, I had absolutely no idea what to do about it. How do you tell twenty thousand people to “curb your enthusiasm”? It was a no-win situation, but I eventually got audiences to calm down. I found that moving the acoustic songs to the middle of the set gave the fans a chance to settle down before the big hit was launched on them.

The end of the year saw the birth of what has become an annual event for me—the New Year’s Eve sober dance at the Leisure Centre in Woking. It had started the year before as a disco party in Merrow, suggested by my friend Danny, as a recourse for people who didn’t want to drink on New Year’s Eve. It was a great success and marked my first ever attempt at sober dancing. But when we held the postmortem meeting the day after the dance, some bright spark asked why we couldn’t have live music in the future, seeing as how we had such an abundance of talent in the fellowship. The dance has been going strong ever since, and I play every year, except in emergencies. I always look forward to it because it’s fun, it’s very relaxed, and I can play anything I want. On top of that, I know that it has also kept a few people from drinking who otherwise would have succumbed to the pressure of the festivities.

Meanwhile, my dating life was going full strength, but I was trying to restrict my attentions to women in recovery, the theory being that they would be safer, or saner, than my previous girlfriends. I obviously still had a lot to learn. One woman in particular had a profound effect on me. She lived in New York and was quite self-possessed, enough not to be manipulated by me anyhow. This manifested itself in her views on smoking, or at least my smoking. I was not allowed to smoke in her apartment for one thing, and it made me very angry. But I liked her and thought it might be going somewhere, so at a dinner party a few months later, when I was introduced to a hypnotherapist named Charlie, I took the plunge. I had been smoking heavily ever since my twenty-first birthday party, and now I was smoking at least two packs a day, sometimes three.

I went to see Charlie on a Monday morning on my way to rehearsals and knew, deep down, that if I got to bed that night without a cigarette, then it was over. It was tough to begin with, and for the first month, from time to time, I did feel like I had taken some bad acid. Overall, however, I was beside myself with joy for having beaten such a disgusting addiction. I have spoken to hundreds of people since then about the way they gave up smoking and have been quite astonished at how many of them still miss it. For myself, stopping smoking was like giving up alcohol. I have never missed it, and not even in the darkest moments of my life have I ever felt like lighting up a cigarette, or taking a drink. Lucky fellow, you may say; but I really believe it is about spiritual application, no matter how poverty-stricken I feel my application may be.

Could it be, then, that without nicotine in my system, I was emotionally vulnerable to the next woman who came along? Without a shadow of a doubt. That, coupled with the fact that she was quite fond of drugs and booze, was very vivacious, and was totally unavailable made her probably the most dangerous woman I would ever meet. But it takes two, and I was in a very illusory period of my life. I was swollen with success and feeling very sure of myself, although just under the surface there were caverns of grief that weren’t really being dealt with at all. I was definitely heading for a fall.

The woman in question was an Italian named Francesca. She was a fine-looking girl, with dark hair and a slim but at the same time voluptuous figure, with a face slightly reminiscent of Sophia Loren. Her mother worked for Giorgio Armani. Giorgio and I had become friends over the last few years, and I was seeing quite a lot of him, going to his shows and socializing. I think he’s an amazing man and a great designer, and I felt very proud and flattered that he would want to get to know me. When, through him, I was introduced to this young girl, I had no inkling of how much she would come to mean to me. I just thought she was interesting and refreshingly bright, that’s all. Within months I was on my knees.

Our affair lasted three years, but at no time did we actually live together. I think it’s important to acknowledge this, because it should serve to illustrate how temporary and shaky the whole thing was. It would wobble along for a few days and then the wheels would fall off, and it would be back to square one again. Francesca was a Gemini, totally unpredictable and prone to violent outbursts of temper. On the other hand, she could be as sweet as honey and totally beguiling. The problem was, you never knew which one you were going to get. I think we broke up nine or ten times in that whole period, and I was addicted to her throughout.

Unhappy though I was and despite the warnings of my friends, who could see no future for me in this relationship, I went crawling back for more, time after time. One day, while I was entertaining my friends Chris and Richard Steele in Antigua, I confided in them about my troubles and showed Chris a letter I had written to Francesca to get her opinion. She looked at me as if I had landed from another planet. “Why are you giving this woman all your power?” she asked. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was intrigued. Chris was at that time director of the alcohol and addiction unit of the Priory Psychiatric Clinic in Roehampton, but I had heard that she also conducted one-on-one, private counseling sessions. I asked if she would see me, and she said yes. For a while I didn’t really know what I was getting into. I thought that I could pick her brains to find ways to control Francesca, but I was to find myself going in a very different direction altogether.

Chris’s first question to me, at our very first session, was, “Tell me who you are,” a very simple question you would think, but I felt the blood rush up to my face and wanted to yell at her, “How dare you! Don’t you know who I am?” Of course, I had no idea who I was, and I was ashamed to admit it. I wanted to appear that I was ten years sober and fully mature, when in fact I was only ten years old, emotionally speaking, and starting from scratch. Her attitude to the relationship was pretty novel, too. While everyone was saying get out and that the girl was no good for me, her view was that my troubles had nothing to do with Francesca. In fact, she liked her. What I needed to address, according to Chris, was what I was doing there in the first place. In short, her counsel was that I should stay there until either I’d had enough or learned whatever it was I needed to learn.

The essence of this period of my life was that the recovery work I was doing balanced the chaos in my personal life. The crazier it got with Francesca, the deeper I delved into recovery, especially therapy. Along with Paul Wassif, a friend I had met through Francesca, I began doing peer support work at the Priory, which involved taking a short training course and, among other things, allowed us to sit in on group therapy sessions with clients at the beginning of their day. I loved it. It gave me a sense of real responsibility, and at times it was like living theater; you never knew what would happen next, and the results could be extremely positive, sometimes miraculous. I also began working with a therapist who specialized in John Bradshaw’s methods, in particular looking at family history as a guide to undoing present dysfunctional behavior. My mum and my uncle were definitely suitable cases for treatment, and my past was riddled with weird scenarios. No wonder I was living it all out again in the present.

As much as I was engaged on a voyage of personal self-discovery, I was also rediscovering my roots. Having opened the door to my true musical tastes with
Unplugged
, I decided it was time to say thank you to the blues, and to the players and singers who had inspired me so much throughout my life, people like Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Jimmie Rodgers, and Robert Johnson. I went into the studio with the approach that everything would be recorded live, and having chosen the songs, we would play them as much like the original versions as possible, even down to the key they were played in. It was great fun, and I loved every minute of it. It was what I had always wanted to do. Unfortunately, Roger didn’t agree. I think he felt that having scored so strongly with
Unplugged
, I was squandering a golden opportunity. I don’t know what else he had in mind—I was too busy marching to my own drummer—but it marked the beginning of the end for us.

My absorption with the blues project also blinded me to the whole revolution that was taking place in the English music scene. Britpop and DJs, jungle and drum and bass, it was all going on and I had no idea. Plus, from what I could gather from Francesca, who was deep into all of this, the culture was heavily fueled by Ecstasy and various other “designer” drugs. I felt very much the same as when punk had burst onto the scene in the eighties, scared and threatened, because even though I didn’t view myself as “the establishment,” I was fully aware that the punkers did.

From the Cradle
, my new album, did very well, going to the top of the charts in the States, which was pretty good for a no-frills blues record. I toured on the strength of this for nearly two years, playing nothing but the blues all over the world, blissfully unaware of the way the music industry was changing. While I was on the American leg of this tour, I got the call from Francesca telling me she had gone back to her old boyfriend and that it was finally over between us. I was devastated, and poured my heart out to anyone who would listen, and by this time that list had got quite short. In fact, the whole weary business dragged on for another year, but the real heart had gone out of it, for both of us. To give her credit, like Carla several years earlier, Francesca had tried to make it clear right from the start that she didn’t really want a full-time relationship. I just didn’t want to hear her.

The end of the affair, when it finally came, coincided with an electrical fire in my London house, which seemed like an omen. I also saw it as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and start again from scratch, so I emptied the house, sold all the contents, and began again. Now that Francesca was out of my life, I started to investigate the culture that she was so much a part of. I listened to everything I could get my hands on, and I woke up to what was happening with street fashion, too. It was weird, because a lot of it tied in with the old fifties and sixties street look that I had worn in the Yardbirds—Levi’s and windbreakers, hoods and sneakers, but there was a new angle on it. I started looking at graffiti art and began collecting it. It was like a whole new world was opening up to me; the only problem was, I felt I was too old to be getting into it. I hated the idea that I was this old guy trying to come across as a hip young street dude, but the culture was drawing me in, it was powerful, and I felt I understood it. What could I do? I was hooked again.

I began designing things. I knew that if I was accepted as a designer, my age would be of next to no consequence. I met a couple of ex-skaters named Simon and William who had a head shop called Fly on Kings Road, and we started a label called Choke. With me sharing most of the design duties, we made some very nice apparel for a couple of years, until the business end of it became unmanageable. Then, through Simon and his friend Michael Koppleman, I met Hiroshi Fujiwara, who had become a very close friend over the last few years. Hiroshi is a great designer, among other things, and a large influence in modern street culture. When I first met him, he was involved with the Goodenough label and starting some others. I also became very close to the graffiti writer Crash and bought a lot of his work. So Francesca, for all her obstreperousness, indirectly turned me on to a whole new lifestyle, and also, accidentally, was involved in the founding of Crossroads Antigua. Not bad for someone whom I literally wanted to strangle every time I saw her.

O
ne day during the summer of 1994, I got word from her family that Alice, who had disappeared for a while in France, had shown up again in England and was seriously ill in a hospital in Shrewsbury. This didn’t come as a great surprise to me, since over the years I had heard that she was still getting pretty messed up. Now that I knew where she was and that she appeared to have hit rock bottom, it occurred to me that it might be the right time to try and get her some help. I talked to Chris and Richard about her, knowing how good they were at dealing with situations like this, and they very kindly went up to see her and talked her into coming back to the Priory with them.

Because of our past together, it was considered ethically inappropriate for me to work with Alice in group therapy, but at one point Chris called me in to tell me that Alice still had a lot of anger as a result of our relationship. They needed to address this in order for her to move on and had come to the conclusion that it would be beneficial for her to confront me with these feelings. They warned me that it could be quite a traumatic experience, but there would be a counselor present, and I felt I could handle it. When the day came, she ranted at me for about an hour without stopping, regurgitating all the scenarios from our fractured past with absolute clarity. It was terrifying to realize the damage I had done to this poor girl, but I had to stay silent and just absorb it. It was a humbling experience, and at times I could hardly believe the things she said that I had done. It was as if she were talking about somebody else. The saddest part for me was knowing that she had held on to all this poisonous stuff for over twenty years in order to fuel her need for oblivion.

Alice stayed in the Priory for the entire course of treatment, and on a couple of occasions I bumped into her and asked how she was doing. “It’s going great,” she would say, so I was fairly hopeful. I knew it would take a long time once she got out of the clinic, and that she would have to find some employment or activity in order to regain her self-esteem, but the fact that she had stayed put was, in itself, a fantastic achievement. Next, I heard that she had gone into a halfway house in Bournemouth, a facility I’d visited once and remembered as being a really good place, so I was confident that she was making progress and anticipated that she would soon be on the road to a full and complete recovery.

I went off on tour to America, and the next time I saw Alice was at my grandmother’s funeral. Though Rose had been ill for some years with emphysema, it was cancer that took her in the end. Her death, just before Christmas 1994, was a great blow to me. She had always been the one constant figure in my life, encouraging me in all my endeavors and loving me unconditionally to the very end. Her house was always a refuge, and at weekends, when I was home, it had become a tradition to go there for delicious Sunday lunches. Until my drinking kept us apart, we had had a wonderful life and some very funny times together. All in all, up until that point, she had been the single most influential person in my life.

In the last few years, encouraged by Chris in my counseling sessions, I had spent a lot more time with both Rose and my mother in the hope that we could heal the wounds that had for so long prevailed in our collective relationship. My mother in particular was quite sick and had become fairly dependent on prescription drugs. She became very jealous, even of me, which made life very complicated. At one point she and Rose had a dreadful rivalry going in which they would use my visits against one another. So when it came to calling on them, I would have to take turns as to who I would see first: one week my mother, the next week my grandmother, and so on. It was exhausting, and so when Rose died, as much as I really missed her and grieved for her, I found a certain relief in that I didn’t have to play that awful game anymore.

Four months after Rose’s death I heard that Alice had also died. She had checked herself out of the Bournemouth halfway house and moved into a studio apartment, where at some point she had injected herself with a massive dose of heroin. The postmortem also revealed that she had been drinking heavily. She died alone, and her body was not discovered for several days. I was gutted and could scarcely take it in. I really had thought that she had a chance, and then something that Chris had told me came back to me. When Alice was still in the Priory, she had said to Chris that she couldn’t stand the pain of being sober. That only emphasized to me how fortunate I was in that, through all my years of drinking and drugging, I still had music. It had always been my salvation. It made me want to live. Even if I wasn’t playing, just listening would pull me through.

My own work in the Priory, and my relationship with Chris, now led to one of the most significant periods of my life. On recent trips to my house on Galleon Beach in Antigua, I had become increasingly disillusioned by the number of addicts and drunks who were springing up, or maybe it was just that I was noticing them more now. There were, for instance, a couple of places I liked to hang out in English Harbour, in particular a bar owned by a friend named Dougie. I used to go in there to play pool, and sometimes just people-watch, but when I came out I’d get hit on by some of these guys, who were quite frightening, and it began to wear me out.

Coming home from one trip there, I confided in Chris and Richard about this dilemma, saying that I was thinking of selling and not going back again, and they both said, “Well, why don’t you take the program to Antigua?” I asked how I would do that, and Chris said, with a twinkle in her eye, “You’ve got the money; build a treatment center.” She also said that if I were to do that, then she would advise me on running it. My immediate reply was, “Well, I’ll build a treatment center if you
come
and run it.” This was not such a crazy idea, as I knew that Chris was experiencing some difficulties at the Priory. But it was the way she ran the rehab that impressed me. I really believed in her philosophy of treatment and how it could be applied collectively and individually. It really hinged on the need to always come back to focusing on the individual, so the scheduling had to be flexible in order to achieve that aim. A tall order, but that was the ideal I wanted the new clinic to be founded on.

I was introduced to the head of the Priory group from America, who turned out to be a music fan, and I told him what I had in mind. To my surprise he seemed quite interested in the idea. In fact, he was so enthusiastic that I felt vaguely suspicious. My intuition was telling me that things were not what they seemed. Nevertheless I forged ahead, explaining that I was happy to provide much of the finance and the experience I had of recovery, but that I would need help in creating an infrastructure, and that was where the Priory group would come in.

The object would be to build the clinic in Antigua, with a view to servicing the entire Caribbean area. It was accepted that few clients would initially come in from the local communities, and that we would need to promote the center elsewhere, drawing on people from America and Europe who would pay to come there and thus fund scholarship beds for the locals who couldn’t afford it. It was a Robin Hood scheme really; take from the rich to feed the poor. Finally, we had to headhunt somebody to be the chief clinician, and the person we found was Anne Vance, from the Betty Ford Clinic in California.

The more I considered it, the more excited I became by the project, to which we gave the name the Crossroads Centre. It seemed like the perfect antidote to the toxicity of my love life, and I was excited by the idea of doing something to pay back for all the good times and spiritual healing I’d got in Antigua. It really has been one of the only places on earth I’ve found where I can completely discard the pressures of my life and blend into the landscape.

The villa we had built in English Harbour, however, had become a bit of a tourist landmark, so I asked Leo to find something a bit more remote. He showed me a piece of land jutting out into the sea, just around the coast from Falmouth, that was absolutely beautiful. I bought it on the spot and eventually extended back until I owned almost the whole peninsula, then I set about building a house on the very end of it. As for the treatment center, the next step was to make it all legal, so hundreds of documents were drawn up, and the wrangling between Roger and the Americans began. It got a bit heated from time to time and I wondered every now and then if we were all in it for the same reason, but it was early in the process and I had nothing to guide me but my intuition.

Of course, we also had to sell the idea to the Antiguan government, and that’s where it got really funny. The Cabinet of the day invited us to show them what we had in mind, and at the end of our presentation, during which I gave a shortened version of my drinking and recovery history, the health minister asked if it would be okay for him to visit the center sometimes—whenever he felt he needed to lose some weight. They obviously had no idea of what we had been talking about, and it dawned on me then that we would face similar responses in every direction we turned. There was absolutely no notion of what recovery was in the Caribbean. Alcoholism was still regarded as immoral or sinful behavior there, with jail time and social ostracism being the only practiced solutions. In order to set up a treatment center here, we were going to have to educate and to a certain extent emancipate the entire community.

At this point I asked myself some very deep, soul-searching questions: What business was this of mine? What right did I have to try and bring these kinds of changes to a community that, on the face of it, just wanted to be left alone? The answer was always the same. In order to keep what I had, I had to give it away. In order to stay sober, I had to help others get sober. This is the main principle that still governs my life today, and I had to apply it to this situation. I was in no doubt, however, that if I was wrong, or if it was simply not meant to be, I would soon find out when the whole thing came crashing down around my ears.

Even though it was quite clear that many locals simply didn’t get it, we decided to go ahead anyway. Then, about a third of the way into the building, I got word from Roger that the head of the Priory conglomerate in America had decided to sell his share of the Crossroads project to another health care corporation that had no interest in building a rehab unit in Antigua. They were either going to scrap it or sell it to me. Roger wasted no time in telling me to cut and run, because the alternative was picking up the whole thing myself, which would cost an enormous amount of money that I would probably never see again.

While I knew there was no choice but for me to go ahead, I don’t think Roger ever really understood the kind of commitment I felt for this. To start with, I had given my word, if only to myself, that I would finish what I had started. If I abandoned this, it would probably mean that I would never be able to return to Antigua, and by this time we had cleared ground and were already starting to lay foundations. In fact, we’d got quite a long way into the construction, and the word was out. The other thing was, I really believed in this project. I had seen enough people who were, on the face of it, hopeless cases turned round to start new lives as happy human beings. I knew that it would pay off, and my reasoning was that if only one person came out of there sober, and managed to stay sober, then the whole thing would have been worth it.

I turned away from Roger and in one fell swoop became sole owner of a half-built treatment center that nobody but me wanted. A lot of money had already been spent, and it looked like quite a lot more would follow, when we found out that the contractor had cut corners with the building and not laid the foundations correctly. Even though it wasn’t completely built, walls were cracking and doorways were warping, so I called in Leo, who was helping me build my house in Indian Creek, and asked him to have a look at it. He gave me a full report and said it was shockingly done, but not beyond hope, so we set him up as the building manager and gave him the job of putting it back in shape.

I felt let down by Roger, which was symptomatic of a general decline in our relationship. Over the course of a year we had disagreed on just about everything, a lot of it being to do with my growing need to take responsibility for myself. Now that I was actually a thinking human being again, with a modicum of self-respect and pride in what I was able to do, I wanted to become more involved in the decision-making process of my business, and the more this became clear, the more it set Roger and me at odds. A perfect example of this, which happened while we were in the middle of all the problems in Antigua, was when I got a direct call on my home phone from Luciano Pavarotti, asking me if I would play at his annual concert in Modena to benefit children affected by war. I said I’d love to and thanked him for asking me.

Speaking to him directly was wonderful and a brand-new thing for me, because for so long I’d been kept away from any kind of contact like that. I then called Roger and told him that I had been asked, and had accepted the invitation, to play at Pavarotti’s event. I passed on the phone number of Pavarotti’s agent, asking if he would attend to the business end of things. It seemed like a reasonable request to me, but I could feel a bristling at the other end of the line. This was not the way he wanted to work it.