Clapton (31 page)

Cream rehearsals began in May and went on for almost a month. We needed a lot of preparation because we were reaching a long way back, and also Jack had just recovered from major surgery and complications, and was still convalescing. Ginger was also suffering from back problems, but for the moment I was in good health, and gloating. For the first couple of days we would only play two or three songs, trying to find our feet, but as the days went by we quickly found our pace again and started to sound really good. I was tremendously relieved, but I wasn’t sure how it would go, as I knew that some of the old resentments were right there under the surface waiting to be rekindled. But after a minor skirmish right at the beginning, we all got on very well, and actually started to have fun. It was great, because it took me straight back to the times when being in Cream really was a fantastic place to be.

As luck would have it, the day before the first gig at the Albert, I came down with a serious flu virus, and for the first three shows I was completely out of it. So much for my gloating. I started on antibiotics, and thank God recovered enough to be present for the last couple of shows. It was a great experience, and I’m really glad we did it. I’ll never forget the standing ovation we got when we first walked onstage. It went on and on, and on, for at least two or three minutes. It was tremendously moving and made it all worthwhile. If only we’d left it there.

I had recently bought a house in the south of France, and with the shows over, I drove down there with my dear friend Brian Roylance, who was going through a rough time with his marriage and needed a break. There we met Melia and the kids and my in-laws, Mac and Laurie, and spent a few days getting ready before getting on the boat in Cannes. I had booked it for the whole of June, which was a huge gamble, not knowing whether the girls would like it or if they would get seasick, and if that were the case I had no contingency plan whatever. Thank goodness everyone loved the boat right away, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Only on a couple of occasions, when the weather was quite rough, did the kids experience any ill effects, so on the whole it was a great success, and we were set for a fantastic holiday.

Our captain Nick Line had put together a fairly flexible plan to sail around Corsica and Sardinia, with the option of going on to Sicily, depending on weather and whatever preferences developed as the trip went on. At first we weren’t really sure what we wanted from our cruise, but there were lots of options in terms of things to see, and it quickly transpired that soft, sandy beaches were the simplest solution for the kids. I personally loved Corsica. The landscape and rugged architecture were magnificent, so were the beaches, and every port we sailed into had a different charm. I had never been there before and fell in love at first sight. It being early summer, the weather was still quite cool with strong winds, which made the water almost too cold to swim in, so we kept moving and sailed down to Sardinia where, though the weather was warmer, the atmosphere was drastically different. From the sea, all the buildings looked like they belonged in a Flintstones movie. They were like caricatures of ancient buildings, obviously built quite recently from flimsy materials, and were, to my eye, very silly looking. I couldn’t wait to sail back to Corsica.

Melia’s folks left after a week, and Richard and Chris Steele took their places, with Brian staying on for a few more days. During the trip I spoke to the captain only occasionally, usually to discuss our sailing plans, but I noticed that Richard was spending a lot of time up on the bridge and kept coming back to us with little snippets of inside information. A couple of days into their stay, he came back looking very excited and, with a curious gleam in his eye, broke the news that the ship was for sale. “You can’t be serious?” I said, but he was not to be put off, and kept coming back with more and more news. Finally I gave in to my curiosity and broached the subject directly with the skipper.

Yes, it was for sale, and for a price that seemed quite reasonable. I asked around a lot and spoke to my business manager, Michael Eaton, who to my surprise was very encouraging, unlike most of the other people I spoke to, who were fairly negative about the whole business. Funnily enough, the people whose advice I normally value the most leaned to the positive side, their general attitude being, “You can’t take it with you.” So, after not much deliberation, I took the plunge and made an offer. What I said to the captain, and anybody else who needed to know, was that I was not really interested in buying a boat as such, but I wanted this boat. It is a seriously beautiful craft, and leagues ahead of anything else I have seen on the water.

For the first time in my life I had to borrow money to pay for something, and I wasn’t very comfortable with that. Throughout my life I had always bought everything outright, probably a reaction to my childhood, where everything was paid for in installments, “the never-never” as it was known back then. Luckily, I had a tour coming up, which we had named the “tour to end all tours,” as it covered the world, and which would establish, for a little while at any rate, some semblance of solvency. The tour would start in April 2006 and go until April 2007, and I was quietly quite excited about it. It had been a long time since I had toured at that level, and it would probably be the last time, too.

Toward the end of our holiday, Brian came back on board for a few more days, and it was great to see him relaxing and having fun. We were sailing around the south coast of Corsica and had fallen in love with the port of Bonifacio, and every other day we would go shopping for clothes in the local boutique, buying trendy things that were much too young for us. Also, little Ella had fallen in love with Brian, calling him “my friend Frian,” and for that short, sweet time they became very close. It was a magical time for all of us. Sicily never saw us. It had no beaches apparently, so for the rest of our holiday we lurked around Corsica until it was time to go back to port in Cannes. On the way there we stopped off on Elba, where crowds of Italian holidaymakers would gather in the evening on the quay and stare at our boat, sometimes ten people deep. I knew how they felt. It was dream-inspiring, and soon it would be mine.

Through the summer of this year, we started making preparations for Vivien’s retirement. This was a big one. She had been with me for fifteen years, was always supportive, totally loyal, and one of my closest friends. Vivien probably knew me better than anyone else on earth, and had never turned away from me, even at my worst. Cecil had recommended a previous workmate of his named Nici, and after a couple of short meetings, I knew she was as good as we could hope to get. Replacing Vivi’ was not going to be easy. After a couple of months of overlapping, with Vivi’ coaching Nici in the niceties of what is an extremely difficult job, she finally left, with plans to set up home in France. I shall miss her.

I fished in Iceland for the first week in July, as I do every year if possible, and then after another week at home set off for the States, where I was due to start recording with John “J. J.” Cale. He had sent me a collection of songs for my approval, and initially three of them jumped out. The more I listened, however, the more I liked them all, and I knew that we would have to use them because, with all that was going on in my life, I had had no time to write anything myself. Once we got to America, Melia and the girls set up camp in Columbus, Ohio, and I went on to LA. We had bought a house near Melia’s parents in Columbus the year before, so that we could visit them and yet still have some space of our own. I really liked it there, too. It was very countrified and exactly the way I imagined the Midwest to be, plus, I could tool around in my hot rod without getting a second look; the ideal situation, in fact—quiet and anonymous. It was also going to be our home base while I was touring the following year. We needed to get Julie started in full-time school, and it made more sense for Melia and the girls to be near her folks while I was away, although we planned to visit one another whenever we could.

I moved in with J. J. for a week, before we ever went into the studio, to go over the material and get to know one another. He has a modest little house in the hills just outside Escondido, and we had a great time listening to music, talking about the old days, and just generally hanging out. Not a lot of work got done, but that wasn’t the point. We were getting ready to play. His idea was to bring in a lot of musicians and try to record as much “live” as we could, overdubbing only when we needed to. This was fine with me—that’s the way I like to work, too—but I thought we might have a problem now and then capturing the groove that I’d heard on his demos, which is usually created with drum machines and the like and is such an important part of his sound.

I had decided to change my band lineup for the forthcoming tour and wanted to use the Cale sessions as a “get to know you” process with the new rhythm section, and with Derek Trucks, guitarist nephew of the Allman Brothers Band drummer Butch Trucks, whom I had asked to join the front line with me and Doyle. I had met drummer Steve Jordan many years ago, when I had sat in with the David Letterman house band and he was their drummer. We had also played together back in 1986 on the Chuck Berry tribute “Hail, Hail Rock and Roll,” and I liked him a lot. He can play the way drummers played on early blues and R&B records, and is clearly a student of the real history of rock ’n’ roll. Aside from that, he plays from the heart, a real “feel” player. I didn’t think I’d ever met Willie Weeks, but he claims we met on one of George Harrison’s sessions, and I’m sure he’s right. I was probably so drunk, I just don’t remember it. Willie is one of the superheroes of rock. His legendary work with Donny Hathaway set the standard for everyone who followed, and hearing them play together on the J. J. sessions was a delight.

With Derek and Doyle and Billy Preston, I knew we were in good shape for the tour. Derek Trucks’s playing was stunning, like nothing I had ever heard before. He has clearly grown up listening to many different forms of music, and all of them come through in his expression. He seems to have no limit. The other guys on the sessions were for the most part old friends of J. J.’s, great players all of them, even though many of them were now in retirement, enjoying a laid-back life. My guys were Doyle and Billy. Both these men had become indispensable to me now, and I totally trusted their musical intuition in any situation.

The album
The Road to Escondido
was “done and dusted” within the month, but it had changed shape. Rather than just another E.C. record with J. J. producing, it was now a duet album owing to the fact that I wanted J. J.’s contribution to be larger. Overall, I thought it improved the album and, if nothing else, made it more memorable for me. My friend Simon Climie was on board as an associate producer, and it was really good to see him behind the glass along with our other team member, Alan Douglas, who was in charge of the engineering. Mixing it all would spin out over the next six months, but as long as J. J. had the last say, I felt confident that it would remain pure.

We clambered back onto the boat in September for a last-minute cruise, this time around the Greek islands and Turkey. Hiroshi and his girlfriend Ayumi, plus his business associate Nobu Yoshida, joined us for the first week, and Michael Eaton and his wife, Ally, came for the second. I thought it was important for Michael to see where all the money was going, and I couldn’t wait to show off my new toy to Hiroshi. Now that the boat was actually mine, it really did feel different. It was strange. I couldn’t quite believe it and kept mentally pinching myself, as if I were dreaming.

Did I really have the right to own something like this? A toe-rag from Ripley, with no idea how to make money, and no real respect for it, either, cruising around in a 150-foot floating palace? It seemed unbelievable. I was on cloud nine and had to keep telling myself, “Yes, you do deserve this.” Our brief to the skipper had now become quite fixed: soft, sandy beaches, no sight-seeing. My excuse was the little ones, who love to play in the sand and were also just getting used to being near the water, but in fact this was what I wanted, too. I liked nothing more than sitting in a beach chair, watching the children play in the shallows, and occasionally glancing out across the water to where our beautiful boat was anchored. It really was like a dream.

While we were on the beach one day, I got a call from Cathy Roylance, telling me that Brian, her father, had died from a heart attack. It felt like someone punched me in the stomach. I had no idea it was coming. When he had been on the boat only a month earlier, he had looked better than I had seen him in a long time. Now he was gone, at least from this world. He was my closest friend and had done more to help me get sober, and stay sober, than anybody I had known. I was devastated. Looking back, I realized it had been ten years since he had had a quadruple heart bypass. I confess I experienced feelings of anger and guilt, that maybe he hadn’t been looking after himself properly of late and that I should have done more to keep an eye on him, but really I think that was just self-pity for my own loss. In truth, I had lost track of the intricacies of Brian’s private life in the last couple of years, owing to the growing needs in mine. All things must pass, and I had to let him go, but it was difficult. For well over twenty years we had watched each other’s back, and now it was over.

The pheasant season began, and for a while it took my mind off my loss. I was invited to join Jamie’s syndicate and began driving down to Dorset every weekend to shoot on one of the most difficult preserves in the country. The lay of the land, the wind direction, and the skillful management of very high pheasants all conspire to make it very exciting and demanding. The interesting thing about these situations for me is that the people I am with have little or no grasp of what I do for a living. Consequently, I am starting out on the ground floor, and that makes me try even harder and is good for my humility.

In October, I caught a plane to New York, where Cream had agreed to perform three shows at Madison Square Garden. In many ways, I wish we had left it at the Albert Hall, but the offer we were made was too good to refuse. We walked into a rehearsal room the day before the first show and did a meager two-hour run-through without breaking a sweat. Of course, we didn’t need to practice too much. We were above that. In that short amount of time our mind-set had gone back to the sixties, and once again we were flying high on our egos.