Clapton (30 page)

After getting some advice from a friend, we quickly got her to a sacro-cranial therapist, who, after some fairly traumatic realignment sessions, managed to get her back on track. But for the first three months of her life she suffered from dreadful colic, which, unbeknownst to us, was directly linked to this problem, and it was fairly normal for one of us to be carrying her around screaming in agony without thinking there was anything unusual about it. Gradually, in fact quite quickly after getting her treatment, she turned the corner and became the joy of our lives, and I wondered how I could have ever envisioned my life without this divine creature in it.

Once Julie arrived, we had to start arranging our lives to fit this new reality. We had no doubt that Hurtwood was the best place to begin raising children, but we hadn’t really decided on how to approach the family help situation. Melia began interviewing nannies, because although we wanted as much direct involvement as possible we would clearly need to have someone standing by if one of us got sick or if I had to go off to work. We had no idea how difficult this was going to be, or how complicated. We learned during one interview, for instance, that in an emergency, probably because of insurance requirements, a properly trained nanny would have responsibility priorities over both parents. A ridiculous scenario, and totally unacceptable even if legally, I suppose, understandable. We finally found a wonderful lady named Annie, who has been with us ever since, and to supplement the situation when necessary, Melia’s sister Maile has occasionally stepped in. In addition, we had one other source of help—a great book given to us by Lili Zanuck entitled
The Baby Whisperer
. Written by British child-care expert Tracy Hogg, it was really invaluable and helped us in every department, especially with sleep patterns, and I thoroughly recommend it to anybody who’s starting a family.

I had to work out the rest of the year on the road, coming back to Columbus when I could, and on one visit to New York, I went into a jeweler’s and bought a ring, a modern design by the Roman jewelery designers Buccellati. It was a spontaneous action, but I had obviously been subconsciously working up to it. When I got back to Columbus, I went round to see Melia’s dad and asked for her hand in marriage. It was an emotional scene, and he was very gracious, making me feel like I really belonged in his family. Half an hour later I was on one knee in front of Melia, asking if she would marry me. It was a fantastic moment in my life, and cynical old bastard though I am, I really believe that this is when it all began to change for me, as if the sun had finally decided to shine.

The final leg of the tour was in Japan, and Melia and Julie joined me for part of this. We really didn’t like being apart at this time, especially as we were both learning so much about being parents. Graham was a great help to us, as he has always been. He is tremendous around kids, firm but loving, and ours think the world of him. It was tough for me, trying to do both roles, and I knew it wasn’t a pattern I would want to repeat again too often, though of course we have done it since many times. Maybe it was just that Julie was so young and we were so green.

Halfway through the Japan tour, during a long stint at the Budokan, I got the news that George Harrison had died of cancer on November 29. I had been following his condition through one of our closest mutual friends, Brian Roylance, who had been spending more and more time with him as his health gradually failed. The last time I had seen him was in late 1999, shortly after he was attacked so brutally at Friar Park. The three of us had sat in his kitchen as he relived the night that the crazy guy, Michael Abram, had come after him with a knife, believing himself to be on a “mission from God” to kill him.

George was still very disturbed and didn’t seem to know where to go with his life. I could only use my own predicament with addiction as a reference, encouraging the possible use of some kind of support system, although maybe that’s how he saw us. I know that with Brian, he had the best friend a man could ever have. I only wish I could have been more help. We had an opportunity back in 1991, when Olivia and Brian had tried to rekindle his interest in performing live by having him join our show. We had put together a package, using all my existing touring paraphernalia, and toured Japan. It was a fine program, well rehearsed with great songs and tremendous musicianship, but I knew his heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t really seem to like playing live, so it did nothing for him, except maybe give him a chance to see how much he was loved, both by his fans and by us.

Back home from Japan in December, Melia and I arranged with Chris Elson, the Ripley parson, for Julie to be christened. We had also been talking to him about the different ways we could get married. It was really important for us to have as private a function as we could, since Julie’s birth had already made us a target for the paparazzi, so the normal wedding processes, putting up the banns and so on, were completely out of the question. Chris had an idea, which we both loved, even though it would take careful planning. We invited our closest family members and a select little group of friends to come to Julie’s christening service, and on New Year’s Day 2002, we gathered in the church of St. Mary Magdalen in Ripley, which already held so many memories for me, and baptized our six-month-old girl.

Melia’s mum and dad were there, and my auntie Sylvia, and the godmothers and godfathers. It was a simple, moving service, and at the end Chris announced, “At this point there is usually a closing prayer, but the parents have asked for something different,” and he started, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here together, to join the hand of this man, and this woman, in holy matrimony.” You can hear a pin drop anyway in that ancient old building, but this was like two thousand pins dropping. It was fantastic. I looked around at the shocked and stunned faces of my in-laws, family, and friends, and realized that they had no idea what was happening. We had succeeded in keeping it a complete secret. It was the perfect way to do it, and so romantic, we couldn’t have planned it better, and not a journalist in sight. After posing for Chip, a dear friend of ours who took our wedding photos outside the church, we drove home to Hurtwood and listened to Stevie Wonder singing “Bridge over Troubled Water,” and our new life began.

Several months before, a new man had come to work at Hurtwood, Cedric Paine. We had been friends for a very long time. Cedric had done odd jobs for me and quite a few other musicians over the years, and up until now he had been freelance. Then I heard a rumor that he was looking for a steady job, for one boss, and I snapped him up. He is a good man, and we needed somebody really trustworthy to take over the job of caretaker. The former one, Ron Mapstone, had expressed a desire for retirement, and he would be a hard man to replace. Ron had been with me since the seventies, having taken over from the original family, Arthur and Iris Eggby and their son Kevin. Throughout my career there has been a steady wave of “loonies” showing a fairly unhealthy interest in my private life, and the need to have someone with good resolve and a bit of authority up at the gatehouse is essential. Cedric more than fills the bill, having been a policeman in one of his incarnations. I don’t think he ever arrested anybody, but it gives him a bit of grit. All in all he is a lovely man, and a comforting presence to have around.

In the spring of 2002, Brian came around for dinner and we started talking about George. I wanted to know how it had been for him during his illness. Brian assured me that George was fully aware of his circumstances and had been calm and happy. I ventured the remark that it was sad that there would be no memorial for George, at least in a musical sense, and Brian said, “Not unless you do something.” So that trap was sprung, and I happily walked into it.

The program was a labor of love into which I threw myself. Over the next few months, Olivia and Brian and I planned the event, discussing who we would ask and what songs we would play. Olivia was the mastermind of the whole thing, and I simply assembled the rock part of the musical end. Ravi Shankar and his daughter Anoushka were writing music specially for the show, and it was decided that this was how it ought to begin. I thought the band that regularly played the New Year’s Eve gig would be ideal as a nucleus, and that was Henry Spinetti, Andy Fairweather Low, Dave Bronze, and Gary Brooker. Then we could ask people who had been special in George’s life to come and sing a song. All went well, and we managed to get the Albert Hall for the night of the twenty-ninth of November, a year to the day after George’s death. The only minor difficulty arose over who should sing “Something.” Olivia thought I should sing it. Paul McCartney had been doing it on the ukulele in his shows and wanted to do it that way, and I wanted Paul to sing “All Things Must Pass,” which I considered the key song of the whole event. In the end we compromised and Paul and I did “Something” as a duet, and later in the show he performed a brilliantly soulful version of “All Things.” It was a great night, and everybody who was there or has seen the DVD agrees that it was the perfect sendoff for a man we all loved, and who gave us over the years so much beautiful music.

During this year, Graham decided that he needed to be back in the States with his family, so we needed to find his replacement. He had helped me through a sticky patch, and although his days in the office were over, I knew that we would get together again soon. As long as I had been living in Chelsea, we had been doing quite a lot of business with the local Mercedes dealer, and had got to know their sales manager pretty well. His name was Cecil Offley, and the first time I actually met him, he had run from his office to help me push a Ferrari that had broken down. I knew from this little incident that he had a good heart, and with Graham’s blessing, I asked him on board. He has been with me ever since, and has proved to be an absolute godsend in every way imaginable.

At home it was a period of settled domestic bliss for me and Melia, made even happier by the arrival of a second daughter, Ella Mae, born on January 14, 2003. I was now determined to stay at home and learn how to be a father. I had picked up a little from my experience with Ruth, but she had already been semi-raised by the time we met. As for Conor, I never really had a chance, and now I wanted to start from scratch. I honestly don’t believe I could have been a proper father before. I just didn’t have the wherewithal. It has taken twenty years of nonstop sobriety for me to acquire any kind of maturity, and to be able to enjoy wearing the mantle of responsibility that parenthood requires.

A lot of the time in my day-to-day relationship with the kids, I have had to learn just to stay in the background and support Melia, even if I don’t agree with what’s going on, because I have invariably found, on reflection, that she is usually right, and also I have had very little experience of a healthy family life. My wife’s intuitive knowledge often astounds me, and in the occasional difficult family situation that arises, just being there and staying there is sometimes all that’s required of me, and that in itself is big.

A
fter a while it was time to start on another album, and I knew I needed to write about the great things that were going on in my life. It is not an easy thing to do, writing songs about happiness, but I wanted to bear witness to how radically my life had changed. To begin with I addressed the basics, and started dropping around at Simon Climie’s house every day for a couple of hours, and we would experiment with different rhythmic ideas, trying to lay foundations for me to write on. It was slow, arduous work, and the lyrics just weren’t coming, but I knew there was no sense in trying to force it. They would come when the time was right. We did have studio time booked, however, and the usual suspects were standing by—Andy Fairweather Low, Billy Preston, Steve Gadd, Doyle Bramhall, and Nathan East.

When the day arrived to begin recording, however, it was clear to everyone that we didn’t have enough material to work with and, with our musicians’ level of proficiency, we would soon run out of things to do. So I came up with the idea that whenever there was a lull, instead of getting frustrated or trying to force something through, we would play a Robert Johnson song to relieve the tension and just have some fun. I had no RJ agenda in place as such, but for some reason his influence had resurfaced in my consciousness. I also wanted to see what players like Billy Preston and Steve Gadd would make of his music and how they would interpret it. As usual, I tried not to steer the proceedings, and just let everybody play the way they felt it. It was amazing. Within two weeks we had a complete Robert Johnson tribute album,
Me and Mr. Johnson
, without ever having had any intention to do anything of the kind. It just grew out of necessity, from nothing.

My whole life I had intended to make this album, but until now, just like with my children, I had not been ready. It was a good record, I thought, with great work from everybody, and I really loved doing it. It was representational but not derivative, and the songs came to life because of the way they were played. Tom Whalley, the head of my record company, Reprise, seemed happy with it, too. Over the years my relationship with Warner Bros., with whom I had been for so long, had become pretty disjointed as one executive after another either left or was fired. I had originally signed with Mo Ostin back in the seventies, and the team they had in place back then was pretty awe inspiring: Lenny Waronker, Ted Templeman, and, of course, Russ Titleman. But everything had changed, and some of those guys, along with Robbie Robertson, had gone to DreamWorks.

Today, what has evolved from my original agreement is that I deal with Tom over projects and ideas, while I retain Rich Fitzgerald, who over the years had been my “inside man” at Warner, as a sort of independent record man who monitors what is going on with the record company on a day-to-day basis. Over the years he has become a good friend, and in an industry that abounds with hustlers and faceless corporate entities, he stands out as a decent, honest man who has a passion for music and boundless energy. Rich really cares about what he is doing. I wish there were more like him.

With the completion and delivery of the Robert Johnson record, the other compositional album was put on hold, to give me time to come up with more songs and try to make a decent record of what was going on in my life, without rushing it. I asked Hiroshi Fujiwara if he would be interested in directing a video for the Robert Johnson project, more for fun than to promote it. He liked the idea, but asked to bring in a friend of his who had more experience with this kind of thing: Stephen Schible, coproducer of
Lost in Translation
, a film I really loved. As soon as these two came on board, the whole project quickly transformed into something else, and what started out as a simple video quickly became a fully fledged documentary.

Stephen and Hiroshi thought we ought to examine my preoccupation with Robert Johnson and explain if possible what it was that had kept his music fresh for me and brought it back into the forefront of my life time after time, while I saw it as an opportunity to finally express my gratitude to this great musician. It was also pretty interesting to watch these two guys, who on the face of it were quite modern men, quickly fall under the spell of Johnson’s music and also be equally captivated by the mystery surrounding his life and death, just as I had been all those years ago. It helped confirm what I and many others had always believed about Robert Johnson. He really was the one.
Sessions for Robert J
became a DVD and included interviews and decent live versions of some of the songs from the album, plus solo performances of me playing “Crossroads” and “Love in Vain.” All in all a very worthy effort, I think, and I finally felt like my debt to Robert was paid.

The album was released in March 2004, and at the end of the year I finally went into the studio to finish the “family” album. I had written four songs that talked directly about my new role as a family man, “So Tired,” “Run Home,” “One Tracked Mind,” and “Back Home,” and I was very proud of them. I also wanted to pay tribute to Syreeta Wright, who had passed away in July, with “Going Left,” and to George with “Love Comes to Everyone,” which I had originally played on. I recorded a couple of Doyle Bramhall’s songs, too, “Lost and Found” and “Piece of My Heart,” and did a cover of a Detroit Spinners song I had always loved called “Love Don’t Love Nobody.” I called the album
Back Home
, and the title song summed up exactly how I felt about my new life. It felt like a good album, and I couldn’t wait to play it on the road.

Another thing I’d always wanted to do was put on a music festival. Maybe it was to make up for the fact that through being drunk, I had missed the first one I ever attended, at the ripe old age of fourteen. That summer of 2004, I put this to rights by staging the Crossroads Guitar Festival in Dallas. With the help of Michael Eaton, Peter Jackson, and Scooter Weintraub, plus the rest of my domestic and road crew, we put together a two-day event and invited a fantastic array of musicians to play, including B. B. King, Buddy Guy, Carlos Santana, Jimmie Vaughan, and J. J. Cale, all of whom graciously donated their instruments for a second auction that Christie’s was to hold in New York.

In order to try and reduce logistical problems, we combined the festival with the beginning of an American tour. I thought the family would enjoy being there, so we all flew into Dallas at the beginning of June for rehearsals, only to find that we had landed smack in the middle of a series of electrical storms. For the next week, while we struggled to assemble the festival, storms raged all around, sending down sheet lightning and rain like I had never seen before. Strangely enough, my sweet little girls slept soundly each night through the most savage conditions while I was quaking with fear, on my knees, praying for the weather to move on and spare our festival.

The day before the first show, the rain stopped, and the event was a great success. I spent the whole day welcoming and listening to all of my favorite musicians. I was like a kid in a sweet shop. At some point in the proceedings I asked J. J. Cale if he would consider making an album with me. In fact, what I asked was for him to produce my next album. I have always been a huge fan of his recorded sound. He has a unique approach to recording and I wanted to avail myself of that. He kindly said yes, and we made a plan to meet up in a year’s time and do it. If nothing else came from the festival but that, I would have been happy, but in fact it was a tremendous experience, and the subsequent auction raised a lot of money for the Centre.

This was when I finally parted with Blackie, and the cherry red Gibson ES-335 that I had owned since the Yardbirds. It was the first serious guitar I had ever owned, and the day before the festival I went to see them both on display and bid them farewell. It was hard. We had traveled a lot of miles together, and I knew I would never find another instrument that could take the place of either of these. The sums they fetched defied belief. Blackie went for $959,500, creating a world auction record for a guitar, while the “cherry red” brought in $847,500, the highest price ever for a Gibson. Altogether, eighty-eight guitars were sold, raising $7,438,624 for Crossroads.

The tour of America took me through to the autumn, and then on my return to England, I delved into a new hobby that was to equal fishing as an obsession in the years to come. My friend Phillip Walford, who is the river keeper on the stretch of the river Test that I fish, had always said that I should take up game shooting, if only for the logical reason that the shooting season starts when fishing season ends. I had always avoided the subject, simply because I intuitively knew that shooting was an intensely social pastime as opposed to fly-fishing, which is almost entirely solitary. To balance up the amount of time my business requires me to be in the public eye, I have always steered toward activities that allow me a certain amount of solitude, and fly-fishing has always provided me with that.

In fact, it was pigeons roosting in the eaves of our house, cooing in the evenings and waking the kids up at five in the morning, that tipped the balance. I went out and bought a shotgun, and one thing just led to another. I am a deep-end person, and in just a short time I was ordering braces of fine English guns and driving all over the country to shoot on different estates, gradually improving my skill and having the time of my life.

Ethically it was never a problem for me, and it is the same with fishing. My family and I eat what I catch and shoot. It is fresh and healthy and we love it. I am a hunter; it is in my genes, and I am quite comfortable with that. I also support a lot of other countryside pursuits, quite simply because I believe they are an important part of our culture and heritage, and need protecting, usually from people, or movements of people, who have little understanding of the delicate economic balance of countryside communities and who have watched too many Disney movies.

I soon began to bump into old friends who had also taken up the sport, like Paul Cummins, who had been the comanager of Dire Straits. He introduced me to Jamie Lee, who manages a shoot called Rushmoor, in Dorset. Jamie is said to be one of the best game shots in the world, though it’s usually him that’s saying it, and his shoot, a private syndicate, is the best run I have ever been on. In addition, the guys in the syndicate are some of the most interesting people you could ever hope to meet, even though one or two of them are definitely psychotic. Gary Brooker, Steve Winwood, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Mark Knopfler are also keen shots, so it’s almost like coming full circle, meeting up again with all my old chums from the sixties music world in another, completely different sphere.

During the time that I wasn’t shooting, I was hatching a plot for the following year. For some time I had been thinking about having a reunion of Cream. It had been almost forty years since the creation of the band, and given the fact that we were all still capable of playing together, I thought it would be fitting to pay tribute to ourselves while we still could. I was also very aware that I had always been the reluctant one on this score, so, cap in hand, I made some delicate inquiries as to whether Jack and Ginger would be interested.

They came back with a fairly positive response, and we decided to put on a week of shows at the Albert Hall, which of course was where we played our farewell concert. The dates were set for May of 2005, with a month of rehearsals preceding. Realizing that it was likely to be an experience I’d need to recover from, I also chartered a motor yacht to take Melia and the kids on a cruise through the Aegean when it was all over. She had never been to Greece, and the idea was dreamed up when we were watching the Athens Olympics on TV and I was regaling her with the whole story of my escapades with the Glands all those years ago.

On February 1, 2005, my fourth daughter, Sophie, was born. I had given up hoping for a son by this time. In fact, I had been quietly hoping for another girl, because so far my girls had all been such wonderful, loving creatures, and I was dreading the possibility of a boy coming into our midst and causing guaranteed havoc. Sophie was born with bright red hair, and just like the other two girls before her with Melia, was constantly sick with one thing or another, and whatever it was, I would catch it, as would the other girls. But her spirit shone through, and because she is the youngest, she is probably the toughest and most assertive. I love all my girls equally, but it amazes me how different their characters are, and how, in turn, I respond to their various needs and manipulations. With the pace at home increased a notch, we soon realized that as well as Annie, we needed another pair of hands, and my friend Jane Ormsby-Gore, Alice’s older sister, suggested that we offer the post to her daughter, and my goddaughter, Ramona. It seemed like a splendid idea, and she spent the next year with us.

I turned sixty this year, and to celebrate, Melia organized a massive bash at the Banqueting House in Whitehall. We invited just about everyone I have ever known, even the members of the Glands band, some of whom I hadn’t seen in forty years. It was a fantastic bash. Jimmie Vaughan flew in to play, along with Robert Randolph and Steve Winwood, and I had the time of my life. The highlight of the evening for me was listening to my plucky wife make an impromptu speech about me, which brought tears to my eyes. A few other people had wanted to get to the microphone to say something, but she fought them off to have her say, and I loved her for it. It was truly a great night, and I felt very happy and proud.