Clapton (8 page)

It was exciting to go to different parts of the country. Girls were everywhere, which meant I was having a pretty extraordinary sex life, dating and picking up anyone I could get my hands on. Most of the time it was just innocent groping, and only rarely did it go all the way. In those days you hardly ever had a dressing room, like bands do today; you just got on and off the stage from the audience. So she might be a girl I’d met while walking about before the show, or someone I’d noticed while onstage, and I’d just get talking to her and then go off with her.

I remember that I’d always meet a particular girl in Basingstoke. The band would do two sets, with a half-hour interval, and I’d see this girl after the first set and go off with her somewhere backstage, and come back onstage with the knees of my jeans covered in dust from the floor. This was quite normal, part of the geography of touring: Bishop’s Stortford, Sheffield, Windsor, Birmingham. For us it wasn’t a girl in every port, it was a girl at every gig, and the girls themselves seemed to be quite happy to have that kind of relationship, seeing me only occasionally. I can’t say I blame them.

We also loved to travel around England because we knew that was as far as we were going to get. No one would ever have thought of sending us to Ireland or Scotland, because they weren’t going to pay for hotels, so we had to get back home after the gig. Though it’s difficult to imagine it now, going to Newcastle then was for me like going to New York. It seemed like another world. I didn’t understand a word people said, and the women were really fast and quite scary. A not untypical night might involve traveling up to Sheffield to play the evening gig at eight o’clock, then heading off to Manchester to play the all-nighter, followed by driving back to London and being dropped off at Charing Cross station at six in the morning.

We traveled in John’s Ford Transit. Back in the sixties, a lot of rank was attached to the kind of van a band had. A Bedford Dormobile, ugly and clunky and with sliding doors, denoted lowly standing, but owning a Transit showed that you were at the top of the pile. They had powerful engines and really zipped along, meaning you could do a fair amount of mileage in them, and they were big inside and comfortable. The multitalented John, also a bit of an inventor, had tailor made the interior of the Transit to his own design.

This entailed making a special space to carry his Hammond B3 organ, which was rigged up so it could be carried on two poles, like a sedan chair. Then, in the space between the organ and the roof of the van he had built himself a bunk bed, so on return trips from faraway places like Manchester or Sheffield, we’d all be sitting in the front of the van on the bench seats while he’d be in the back, asleep in his bed. Apart from once or twice, we never stayed in a bed and breakfast or a hotel. The most we could hope for was, if we were playing in Manchester, where John’s family came from, he might invite us to stay in one of the family homes. I did this once and it was pretty lugubrious, although it was better than sitting up all night in the van.

It was an incredible life, and at times I didn’t believe it was happening. One night, for example, Mike Vernon, who owned Blue Horizon records, asked me to go down to a studio to do some session work, and I found myself playing with Muddy Waters and Otis Spann, two of my all-time heroes. I was absolutely terrified, but not because I felt that I couldn’t carry my weight musically. I just didn’t know how to behave around these guys. They were incredible. They had these beautiful baggy silk suits on, and were so sharp. And, they were men. And here I was, a skinny young white boy. But it was fine. We cut a song called “Pretty Girls Everywhere I Go,” and I played lead over Muddy’s rhythm while Otis sang and played piano. I was in heaven, and they seemed pretty happy with what I did.

At this point people began to talk about me as if I were some kind of genius, and I heard that someone had written the slogan “Clapton is God” on the wall of Islington underground station. Then it started to spring up all over London, like graffiti. I was a bit mystified by this, and part of me ran a mile from it. I didn’t really want that kind of notoriety. I knew it would bring some kind of trouble. Another part of me really liked the idea, that what I had been fostering all these years was finally getting some recognition. The fact is, of course, that through my playing people were being exposed to a kind of music that was new to them, and I was getting all the credit for it, as if I had invented the blues.

As for technique, tons of white American guitar players were better than me. Apart from the famous blues guys, there were a lot of white players too. Reggie Young, for example, a Memphis session player, was one of the best guitarists I had ever heard. I had seen him playing with the Bill Black Combo on the Ronettes package tour. Don Peake, who I saw play with the Everly Brothers, and James Burton, who played on Ricky Nelson’s records, were two others. English guitarists I had seen who had knocked me out were Bernie Watson and Albert Lee. They both played with Screaming Lord Sutch’s band, the Savages. Bernie, and Sutch’s pianist Andy Wren, were supreme musicians, far ahead of everyone else at the time. I remember hearing them play “Worried Life Blues,” the Big Maceo song, and Bernie was bending notes, which he had been doing long before anybody. Though I rated Jeff Beck, and also Jimmy Page, their roots were in rockabilly, while mine were in the blues. I loved what they did, and there was no competitiveness between us; we just played different styles.

But, another part of me thought the “Clapton is God” thing was really quite nice. I’d been ousted from the Yardbirds, and they’d brought in Jeff Beck. They immediately had a string of hits, and I was quite put out by that, so any kind of accolade that came from just playing, without selling myself or promoting myself on TV, was welcome. There’s something about word-of-mouth that you cannot undo. In truth, I felt grateful about it because it gave me status, and, even better, it was the kind of status nobody could tamper with. After all, you can’t muck around with graffiti. It comes from the street.

By the early summer of 1965, though I was still living in John’s house in Lee Green, I was spending a lot of time with a group of friends hanging out in a flat in Long Acre, Covent Garden, owned by a woman named Clarissa, who was the girlfriend of Ted Milton. Ted was the most extraordinary man. A poet and visionary, whom I had first met at Ben Palmer’s, he was the first person I ever saw physically interpreting music. We were at home at Ben’s house, and after dinner he put on a Howlin’ Wolf record and began to enact it with his entire being, dancing and employing facial expressions to interpret what he was hearing. Watching him, I understood for the first time how you could really live music, how you could listen to it completely and make it come alive, so that it was part of your life. It was a real awakening. Ted and Clarissa lived in a second-floor flat, which consisted of several rooms opening off a long corridor and a big kitchen, and it was the center of our lives for a while.

The cast of characters included John Bailey, known to us as “Dapper Dan” for his suave good looks and natty sense of dress, who was studying anthropology; Bernie Greenwood, a doctor with a clinic in Notting Hill, who was also a great saxophone player; Micko Milligan, a jeweler and part-time hairdresser; Peter Jenner and Andrew King, who lived in the flat opposite and were just starting to manage Pink Floyd; and my old friend June Child, who now had a job working for them as their secretary. Looking back on it, we had the time of our lives, drinking, smoking massive quantities of dope, and believing that everything we were doing was totally original (and sometimes it was), while poor old Clarissa went out to work to pay for it all.

Bit by bit this scene began to take up more and more of my spare time. It was outrageous really. We’d just spend hours and hours listening to music and drinking Mateus rosé, real headache material, which I absolutely loved. Sometimes we’d get into spontaneous laughing jags, brought on by God knows what, where we’d latch on to a particular word or phrase, or on something we’d seen, and we’d just start laughing hysterically, and it would become unstoppable. We could literally laugh for hours at a time. Laughing was also part of another pastime, where we’d listen to one song over and over for a whole day—a favorite was “Shotgun” by Junior Walker—before passing out, and then start again when we came round.

In the middle of the summer of ’65, six of us spontaneously decided to get a band together and drive round the world, financing the trip by playing gigs along the route. We called ourselves the Glands. John Bailey would be the vocalist, with Bernie Greenwood on sax. Ted’s brother Jake would play drums, Ben Palmer was lured back to the piano, and on bass we had Bob Rae. Bernie’s car, an MGA, was traded in for an American Ford Galaxy station wagon to serve as our transport, while I had a few hundred quid in wages saved up with which I bought an amplifier and a couple of guitars. Considering that I was supposedly the draw of the Bluesbreakers, I suppose you could say it was a tad irresponsible of me to just take off like this. If I mentioned it to John at all, it was only to say that I was going off for a little while. I really did leave him in the lurch, and he had to trawl through several different guitarists to fill the gap while I was away.

With six of us squashed into the Ford Galaxy, we set off in August, driving through France and Belgium, our plan being to just keep going until we found somewhere to play. We really hadn’t a clue what we were doing, trusting that some good fortune would come our way. The trip almost ended as soon as it began. We arrived in Munich at the same time as the famous beer festival was under way, and we were in one of the beer tents when Bob Rae chose to light his cigarette with a five-pound note. This led to a serious altercation between him and another member of the band over the blasphemous extravagance of such a gesture, a fight that ended with all the gear being unloaded from the car and a general decision to go back home.

The following morning we all made up, loaded the equipment back into the Ford, and set off again on the road. Driving through Yugoslavia, on a cobbled road between Zagreb and Belgrade, the car shook so much that it came apart. The body actually left the chassis. We had to get a piece of rope and tie it around and underneath the car. So now six people and all their equipment were traveling in a car being held together by a piece of rope. It was a shambles. When we finally got as far as Greece, to Thessalonica, we were so hungry, because we hadn’t eaten anything for days, that we ate raw meat at the butcher’s! Eventually, when we reached Athens, we got a job playing at a club called the Igloo.

The Igloo Club was so called because it was designed to look like the inside of an igloo, with everything rounded. It had a resident band called the Juniors, and their manager needed another band to support them, because their set started at seven and the club would stay open until two or three in the morning. John Bailey talked this guy into hiring us. We found a place to stay, in a room on the top floor of a house that was run by an old Egyptian colonel. I loved it there and was soon having the time of my life. The gig consisted of us playing three sets a night, alongside the Juniors, who were doing songs by the Beatles and the Kinks. Since they didn’t know these very well, we were also helping them out a little bit.

Two nights after we got this gig, the Juniors were involved in a car crash, and two of them were killed outright. The following morning we were having coffee at the club when the manager came in and started screaming the name of Thanos, the keyboard player, whom he was apparently in love with and who was one of the guys who had died. “Thanos! Thanos! Thanos!” he screamed, and then he started throwing glasses at the mirror behind the bar. Someone said we had better get out, so we all left and he smashed the club to bits. It was closed for two days, and we were advised to stay put because something would be sorted out.

They repaired the club, and someone who represented the heartbroken manager approached me and told me that they needed to get things up and running again, and they wanted me to play with the Juniors. So the next thing I knew, I found myself playing a set with them, then a set with my band, another set with them, followed by a set with my band, and so on until I had played a six-hour stretch without stopping. After a few days of this, the Juniors suddenly took off. I knew all the songs they wanted to play, and I seemed to have put a new sound into the band, and the next thing I knew we were doing gigs in Piraeus playing to ten thousand people. I was thrilled to be able to help the Juniors get to a bigger audience, but it all smacked of the pop world I had tried to put behind me. It was like déjà vu. Meanwhile, the Glands had had enough and were itching to move on.

When I told the drummer in the Juniors that I was thinking of leaving, he said, “You’d better not. The manager will come after you if you try to leave, and he’ll cut your hands off.” I got the impression he wasn’t joking, so we planned to do a runner. Ben secretly organized train tickets while the band members packed up their stuff. I turned up as usual one afternoon for a Juniors rehearsal, but we had a car waiting on the other side of the building. At a given signal, I said I was going to the toilet and walked out the front door, got into the car, and went straight to the station where Ben and I caught a train back to London, leaving the Juniors high and dry. The drummer with the Juniors was our inside man, and basically I owe him my hands. “Thanks, man, I can never repay you enough.” I left behind a beautiful Gibson Les Paul and a Marshall amp. The rest of the boys continued on their way round the world, though God knows what they sounded like without a guitar and piano.

Returning to England in late October 1965, I found that my place in the Bluesbreakers had been filled by a brilliant guitarist, Peter Green, later of Fleetwood Mac, who had aggressively pestered John to employ him, often turning up at gigs and shouting from the audience that he was much better than whoever was playing that night. Though I barely knew him, I got the impression that here was a real Turk, a strong, confident musician who knew exactly what he wanted and where he was going, but who played his cards close to his chest. Most important, he was a phenomenal player, with a great tone. He was not happy to see me, as it meant rather a sudden end to what had obviously been a good gig for him. One change that didn’t particularly surprise me was that McVie had finally been given the boot, and had been replaced by Jack Bruce, the bass player from the Graham Bond Organisation, whom I had seen play at the Marquee. Jack stayed for just a few weeks before moving on to join Manfred Mann, during which time we toured the club circuit in the south of England, but doing those few gigs, we had a chance to take stock of one another. Musically he was the most forceful bass player I had ever played with. He approached the gig almost as if the bass were a lead instrument, but not to the point where it got in the way, and his understanding of time was phenomenal. All this was reflected in his personality, fiery and quick witted. I’m glad to say it seemed like a mutual admiration, and we fit together brilliantly, a taste of things to come.