Clapton (20 page)

Nell and I started to go and visit Ronnie and Kate in Wales. We’d just show up and blend in, and although there wasn’t a lot of room in the cottage, it didn’t seem to matter. I loved hanging out with Ronnie because we were both drinkers, and as we spent more time together, Ronnie’s musicality also began to rub off on me. Just like him, I was going through a very different period in my music. I’d been aware of J. J. Cale, and I was getting increasingly interested in country music and making music just for fun. I remember we once chartered a boat and sailed around the Med, and did a few shows off the boat in places like Ibiza and Barcelona. The band consisted of Ronnie and me, Charlie Hart on violin, Bruce Rowlands on drums, and Brian Belshaw on bass, and we’d sometimes set up on the quay and play like buskers while Nell and Kate would dress up in cancan outfits and dance. It was a complete fiasco and we certainly didn’t make any money, but it was a lot of fun. On another occasion, St. Valentine’s Day 1977, we played a secret gig at the Village Hall in Cranleigh, a village near Hurtwood, under the name of Eddie Earthquake and the Tremors. We did songs like “Alberta” and “Goodnight Irene,” and encouraged the audience of locals to dance and join in the singing.

What it was about, for me, was drinking and escaping my responsibilities as a bandleader, so I could just hang out and play for sheer enjoyment, and the music reflected this. Very homespun and mostly acoustic, it was in just this spirit that the song “Wonderful Tonight” was written. I wrote the words for this song one night at Hurtwood while I was waiting for Nell to get dressed to go out to dinner. We had a busy social life at that time, and Nell was invariably late getting ready. I was downstairs, waiting, playing the guitar to kill time. Eventually I got fed up and went upstairs to the bedroom, where she was still deciding what to wear.

I remember telling her, “Look, you look wonderful, okay? Please don’t change again. We must go or we’ll be late.” It was the classic domestic situation; I was ready and she wasn’t. I went back downstairs to my guitar, and the words of the song just came out very quickly. They were written in about ten minutes, and actually written in anger and frustration. I wasn’t that enamored with it as a song. It was just a ditty, as far as I was concerned, that I could just as easily have thrown away. The first time I played it was around the campfire up at Ronnie’s, when I was playing it for Nell, and playing it for Ronnie, too, and he liked it. I remember thinking, “I suppose I’d better keep this.”

“Wonderful Tonight” ended up on the album
Slowhand
, the first record I cut with Glyn Johns as producer, in the spring of 1977. Over the years the name “Slowhand” had stuck, and was especially popular with the American band members, maybe because it had a western ring to it. Glyn had a terrific track record. Best known in England for his work with the Stones, he had also worked with the Eagles and really understood American musicians. He was a disciplinarian who didn’t like people mucking about or wasting time. When we were in the studio he expected us to work, and he’d get frustrated if there was any goofing off. Even though we were all getting stoned and drunk, we responded to that quite well. He brought out the best in us, and as a result that album has great playing and a great atmosphere.

Nell and Dave Stewart and I designed the artwork for the album, which is credited to “El and Nell Ink.” Among the various snapshots pasted across the inside cover, including one of me and Nell kissing, is a photograph of a smashed-up Ferrari, a reminder of an incident that very nearly led to my premature demise. I collect Ferraris, an obsession that goes back to my friendship with George. One day in the late 1960s he arrived at my house in a dark blue Ferrari 365GTC. I’d never seen one in the flesh before, and my heart melted. At that point it was like seeing the most beautiful woman on earth, and I decided there and then that even though I couldn’t drive a car with a manual gearbox, I was going to have one, too. He gave me the number of the dealer, and I called them and got driven over to the showroom in Egham, where I ordered a new 365GTC like George’s, for the princely sum of four grand. They delivered it to Hurtwood and asked me if I’d like to test-drive it, to which I replied coolly, “No, I’m too busy. Just leave it, thank you very much.” So they left it in front of the house.

I had no license and had only driven an automatic, so I set about teaching myself to drive using a clutch, in that Ferrari on the drive at Hurtwood. I loved that car, and when I was in the Dominos, I toured in it, with Carl and me driving all over England. Then I bought a Daytona and a 275GTB, followed by a 250GT Lusso. In those days I had garage space for only two cars, so I would buy and sell and buy and sell.

The crash in the picture took place soon after we got back from touring Australia. I had been drinking on the flight, all the way home, and it was still in my system. As soon as I was home, I got into the Ferrari and had probably hit about ninety miles an hour in a very short time when a laundry van appeared, and I drove straight into it. I turned the van right over. My skid marks were in a straight line, and they found me with my head hanging through a side window. They had to cut me out of the car, and I was badly concussed and had a pierced eardrum. I didn’t know where I was for two weeks afterward. It was a very close shave.

My drinking was getting worse all the time, and I was starting to get into trouble at the Windmill, usually just verbal, but sometimes becoming physical. Then I would get into the car and crash it into the fence between the pub and the house, a distance of about three hundred yards. Drink was also affecting my performance. During one London concert, in April 1977, I just walked off the stage after about forty-five minutes. It was at the end of a British tour, and we’d added on one last show, at the Rainbow, and my system just couldn’t take it.

Halfway through the set I started to feel pretty strange, and it got worse and worse and I thought, “Well, if I don’t walk off now, I’m going to fall over,” so I stumbled off. Roger took me outside for some fresh air, telling me, “You don’t have to go back on, boy, you don’t have to go back on. Don’t worry about it, if you’re not feeling all right, we’ll call it a day.” I sat in the dressing room for a while, then Pete Townshend, who was guesting with the band, came in and said quite angrily, “Is this what you call show business?” The result was that I made it back on after Pete and got through the rest of the performance by literally miming his playing and singing.

Looking back, I can’t believe the ways I endangered my life. Returning from Japan in the autumn of 1977, we stopped off to do a couple of shows in Honolulu. On one of the nights, I happened to know that my drummer, Jamie Oldaker, had pulled a girl and taken her back to his room, and I decided that I would spoil it and also give him a fright. I had a ceremonial samurai sword with me, a tourist souvenir rather than a real one, so I got myself dressed up in a pair of pajama bottoms, into which I somehow tucked the sword and, naked apart from that, climbed out onto the balcony of my hotel room. Then, edging myself round the ledge that protruded from the wall of the hotel and connected the balconies, I climbed from balcony to balcony to the room where I knew Jamie was sleeping. When I finally climbed through his window, he was furious. We were thirty floors up and I was drunk, and the poor girl was freaked out of her mind. I was a bit disappointed and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. It was supposed to be a brilliant joke. Worse was to come.

We were startled by a knock at the door, and when Jamie opened it, two guys with guns were outside, pointing them at our door from a crouch position. Someone had spotted me out on the ledge and thought I was some kind of an assassin and called the police. When they realized it was just a drunken idiot making a fool of himself, they begrudgingly let me go, but it took a lot of sweet talk from Roger, who was getting quite good at this. Unfortunately, such behavior did little for my reputation, and when, in November 1978, Roger had to cancel a show in Frankfurt for technical reasons, the headlines of one of the big national papers screamed
ERIC CLAPTON—TOO DRUNK TO PLAY
.

The tour in question was a little jaunt dreamed up by Roger, both to promote our new album and to be the subject of a candid documentary film about life on the road, to be called
Eric Clapton’s Rolling Hotel.
The idea was that the band would tour Europe by rail, aboard not an ordinary train but three coaches that had once been part of Hermann Göring’s own private train, which Roger had tracked down somewhere in Europe. They consisted of a drawing room coach, a restaurant coach, and a sleeping car, and they would be hooked up to trains that happened to be going in the direction we wanted. Roger thought this would be great fun for one and all. I thought so, too, and went along with it. After all, I loved trains, and would be able to drink and lord it up without offending members of the public. Maybe that’s why Roger dreamed it up in the first place, to keep me out of harm’s way.

The film, by BBC producer Rex Pyke, famous for his documentary
Akenfield
, was luckily never released. It showed me in an extremely unflattering light, as I was intoxicated and deranged in most of the footage. It includes a sequence shot in Paris, during a visit to one of the shows by Stigwood, in which, fueled by drink, I grabbed the camera, aimed it at him, and started to aggressively question him on the subject of an old chestnut of mine, namely my suspicion that he had “creamed” off most of the profits from Cream to finance his other acts like the Bee Gees. Robert remained quite unfazed by this and quietly replied, in his phony posh English accent, “This is not the right time to speak about this. We should talk about this another time,” while I shouted manically, “This is my film, and I want it in.”

I remember we had a great promoter on the tour, a Danish guy named Erik Thomsen, who was a friend of Roger’s and in Stiggy’s league when it came to pulling pranks. He would bait me or Roger, hurling pathetic insults at us in a very strong Danish accent, until we would finally have to do something about it. Usually it would be something fairly mild, like throwing his shoe out the window of a traveling coach or running over his precious aluminum briefcase with a truck. But on one occasion we went too far, cutting off all his hair, painting his head with blue ink, cutting the legs off his trousers, and throwing him off the train in Hamburg in the middle of the night with no money, knowing full well that he was supposed to have a business meeting with Sammy Davis Jr. the following morning. Sadly, he is no longer with us. He passed away quite recently and I miss him. He was a great character and an incredible sport, and we will not see his like again.

The album we were promoting on this tour was the follow-up to
Slowhand
, which we had named
Backless
, a title suggested after we played a gig with Dylan at Blackbushe Airport. It referred to the fact that I thought he had eyes in the back of his head and knew exactly what was going on around him all the time. It had been a difficult album to cut, with drugs and alcohol taking center stage, which Glyn found hard to cope with, and there was bad blood building up everywhere. The only song on the album that I really rated was “Golden Ring,” written about the situation between me, Nell, and George. It referred in part to her response to the news that George was getting married again. She took it quite hard, and I, in my arrogance, found that hard to understand. So I wrote this song about the peculiarity of our triangle, which finishes with the words

If I gave to you a golden ring,

Would I make you happy, would I make you sing?

The fact is that at this time, for whatever reason, Nell and I were not particularly happy. My diary for September 6, 1978, reads, “Sex life is pretty barren at the moment, we don’t seem to be getting on too well, there’s nothing in particular to blame, unless it’s the stars, we just seem to be heading in different directions.” Nor did my often chauvinistic behavior improve the situation. For example, I noted on October 16, “In the evening Nell…was giving advice to Simon’s ex-girlfriend in the kitchen for two hours, so my dinner was taken out of the oven and popped back in again, by the time I got it, it was burnt and dried up, so I shouted at her good loud and long, but she didn’t seem very repentant, and I got a sore throat.”

I was also picking up girls for sex as soon as I got on the road, aided and abetted by Roger. “Roger started to wind me up,” I wrote in Madrid on November 5, “about some incredible looking bird who he says has turned up at the gig.” Later that day I continued, “I have got a hundred quid bet with Roger that he can’t pull a nice clean normal bird for me…. He had better, cause there was nothing under fifty years old in sight.” Then when, on November 19, Nell finally came to visit me in Brussels for a couple of days, I noted, “I went to sleep with all my clothes on. I just can’t get it on with Nell now that she is here; it’s so sad for us, but the road is the road and home is home and never the twix should mix.”

Coming to visit me on tour was a rarity for Nell, as Roger and I had long ago come to a strict agreement that there should be no women on tour. This was a rule that applied to everybody, from the bandleader downward. And it was completely transparent. Everyone knew what it was really about. Nell, of course, was not too happy about this, which she considered very chauvinistic, and it became a frequent source of friction between us. She often told me she felt isolated and lonely. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that whenever I was on the road, I was being constantly unfaithful. I’d tell her all about it, on the basis that if I was honest with her and confessed to what I had been doing, then it would somehow make it okay. She would rail at me occasionally, but I think her main concern was to try somehow to preserve the status quo, in the hope that things would change. What was her alternative? To leave and start again with someone else?

Everything finally came to a head when I found myself falling in love with one of these girls, or at least thinking I was falling in love. “No more tequila for me boy,” I wrote in the diary on November 28. “Woke up with all the clobber on—I am in love again and it hurts.” The woman in question was a young girl named Jenny Mclean, and the unforgivable thing I did was to allow Nell, sometime early in the following year, to catch us together at Hurtwood. She left the house in a flood of tears, having packed her bags and phoned her sister Jenny to come and collect her.