Clapton (10 page)

I never discussed our musical direction with the others because I didn’t then know how to verbalize these concerns. So most of these conversations/arguments took place between Jack and Ginger, who were both writing their own material, in particular Jack, who was working a lot with lyricist and poet Peter Brown. Peter’s band was called the Battered Ornaments, and he had a knack of writing quirky song lyrics that Jack would put music to, songs with titles like “She Was Like a Bearded Rainbow” and “Deserted Cities of the Heart.” The only way I had to influence the direction of the group was in the way I played, and by suggesting new cover versions of old blues songs like Howlin’ Wolf’s “Sitting on Top of the World,” and “Outside Woman Blues” by Blind Joe Reynolds.

The dynamic of playing in a trio greatly influenced my style, in that I had to think of ways to make more sound. When I was playing in a quartet, with a keyboard, bass, and drums, I could just ride on top of the band, making musical comments, coming in and out at will. In a trio I had to provide a lot more of the sound, and I found that difficult because I didn’t really enjoy having to play so much. My technique altered quite a lot in that I started playing a lot more bar chords and hitting open strings to provide a kind of drone for my lead work.

Naturally, Stigwood was keen to get us the hit single that all bands strived for, so we had a few days in August recording at a studio in Chalk Farm, which produced one song, “Wrapping Paper,” written by Jack and Peter. It eventually found its way onto the A side of our first 45 rpm. But it was in September, in Ryemuse Studios, a tiny studio above a chemist’s shop on South Molton Street, when we finally recorded a song that gave an indication of our true potential as a band.

Another of Jack and Peter’s compositions, “I Feel Free,” was a faster, rockier song with a driving beat. Recorded on a single Ampex reel-to-reel recorder, Stigwood, assisted by the studio engineer, John Timperley, took credit as producer himself, though the truth is that it was an ensemble job. Because Stigwood saw this song as a potential single, he chose to leave it off our first album,
Fresh Cream
, and both were released simultaneously at the end of December.

When I left the Bluesbreakers, it was obvious that I could no longer go on living with John in Lee Green, so in the meantime I had been moving about, sometimes staying in Ripley, other times in Long Acre, or wherever I could find a bed or sofa. But now I had to find myself somewhere new to live. Salvation came in the form of three American girls whom I met after one of our shows. I got talking to one of them—her name was Betsy—and she asked if I’d like to go and stay with them. I ended up moving into the front room of their house in Ladbroke Square.

They were all doing internships of one kind or another and it was an entirely platonic relationship, but it made me feel incredibly grown up. I was living with the opposite sex, unattended. At the same time, I bought my first car. It was a 1938 right-hand-drive Cadillac Fleetwood that had been made for the London Motor Show, and I saw it in a garage on Seven Sisters Road. It was huge, in perfect condition, and cost only £750. Even though I couldn’t drive, I bought it anyway. The dealer delivered it and parked it right outside the house. It sat there, getting covered in leaves, and I used to just look at it out the window. A couple of times Ben Palmer drove me around in it, but he said it was a nightmare to drive because it was so big and had no power steering.

Almost exactly two months to the day after our debut at Windsor, on October 1, we were booked to play at the Central London Polytechnic on Regent Street. I was hanging about backstage with Jack, when Chas. Chandler, the bass player with the Animals, appeared, accompanied by a young black American guy whom he introduced as Jimi Hendrix. He informed us that Jimi was a brilliant guitarist, and he wanted to sit in with us on a couple of numbers. I thought he looked cool and that he probably knew what he was doing. We got to talking about music, and he liked the same bluesmen I liked, so I was all for it. Jack was cool about it, too, though I seem to remember that Ginger was a little bit hostile.

The song Jimi wanted to play was by Howlin’ Wolf, entitled “Killing Floor.” I thought it was incredible that he would know how to play this, as it was a tough one to get right. Of course Jimi played it exactly like it ought to be played, and he totally blew me away. When jamming with another band for the first time, most musicians will try to hold back, but Jimi just went for it. He played the guitar with his teeth, behind his head, lying on the floor, doing the splits, the whole business. It was amazing, and it was musically great, too, not just pyrotechnics.

Even though I had already seen Buddy Guy and knew that a lot of black players could do this kind of stuff, it’s still pretty amazing when you’re standing right next to it. The audience was completely gobsmacked by what they saw and heard, too. They loved it, and I loved it, too, but I remember thinking that here was a force to be reckoned with. It scared me, because he was clearly going to be a huge star, and just as we were finding our own speed, here was the real thing.

The single of “I Feel Free” was released in America on the Atco label, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records, which was headed by Turkish-born New Yorker Ahmet Ertegun, a legendary figure in the world of black music. He had masterminded the careers of artists such as Ray Charles, the Drifters, and Aretha Franklin and produced many of their records. He had taken an interest in me since being on a trip to London, early in 1966, to see Wilson Pickett, one of his artists, playing at the Astoria Theatre in Finsbury Park. After the show, he had thrown a party at the Scotch of St. James’s, a fashionable club in Mayfair, and had been impressed by my playing during a jam session with Pickett’s band. Cream was signed up by Atlantic not long after this, and when our first album,
Fresh Cream
, was about to be released in the States, Ahmet persuaded Stigwood that it was vital that we come over to promote it.

We were all so excited. To me America was the land of promise. When I was eight or nine years old, I had been given a prize at school for neatness and tidiness. It was a book on America, filled with pictures of skyscrapers, cowboys and Indians, cars, and all sorts of other stuff, and what I did first when I knew we were going was to make a short list of all the things I had fantasized about doing if I ever went there. I was going to buy a fringed cowboy jacket, for example, and some cowboy boots. I was going to have a milk shake and a hamburger. Stigwood had booked us into a hotel on West Fifty-fifth Street in New York called the Gorham, a real fleapit, from which we emerged daily to perform in the show for which we had flown all this way, the
Murray “the K” Show.

Murray “the K” Kaufman was the most successful radio DJ in New York, and he was running a series of shows at the RKO theater on Fifty-eighth Street called Music in the Fifth Dimension. Never having had a hit record, we were at the bottom of the bill of a pretty good lineup, which included Wilson Pickett, the Young Rascals, Simon and Garfunkel, Mitch Ryder, and the Who. There were five shows a day, and each artist, except for the headliners, was expected to play for no longer than five minutes. The shows started at 10:30 in the morning and went on till 8:30 at night.

Murray’s wife, Jackie, was head of the chorus line, and her girls, go-go girls really, would perform a routine called “Jackie and the K Girls’ Wild Fashion Show” between acts. Murray ran the show like a sergeant-major, giving strict instructions that on no account were musicians allowed to leave the theater between sets, ensuring that boredom soon set in, which led to all manner of pranks like flooded dressing rooms, and flour and smoke bombs. He kept telling us to make our set shorter and shorter, and even when we were doing just one song, “I Feel Free,” he said it was still too long. The whole thing was absolutely chaotic.

On the first day, while I was sitting in the theater during rehearsals, watching the various acts do their turn, a very beautiful blond girl came and sat next to me. We struck up a conversation, and at some point she asked if I would like to stay with her while I was in town. She was gorgeous, and seeming to sense my shyness with women, did her best to put me at ease. Her name was Kathy, and she took care of me the whole time I was in New York.

She had her own apartment, and I moved in with her. She showed me around, taking me to the various places where I could tick off the list of things I wanted to experience. I remember her taking me to various coffee bars in the Village, and we went to one or two music stores, like Manny’s on Forty-eighth Street. She also took me to a big saddler’s called Kauffman’s, which sold western gear, where I bought my first cowboy boots, and with this beautiful girl on my arm, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Because Murray the K kept us on such a tight leash, we had very little time on this trip to really explore New York, though not all my after-hours time was wasted. I hung out a lot with Al Kooper, keyboard player and guitarist with the Blues Project, who were also appearing on the show. The music scene in the Village was flourishing at the time, and loads of clubs and bars were really taking off.

One night Al took me to the Café Au Go Go on Bleecker Street to see a new band he had formed called Blood, Sweat and Tears. On another night when we went down there, I met B. B. King for the first time, and the two of us ended up jamming after the show. We just sat on the stage and played with what was left of the house band for a couple of hours. It was fantastic. On return visits to New York, I used to go down to the Village with Jimi Hendrix, and we’d go from one club to another, just the two of us, and play with whoever was onstage that night. We’d get up and jam and just wipe everybody out.

The last day’s gig on the
Murray “the K” Show
took place on Easter Sunday and coincided with the first ever New York “be-in,” a gathering of twenty thousand hippies that took place on the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. We managed to slip out of the theater to join in with these incredible long-haired loons, who were all singing and dancing, smoking joints, and dropping acid. Jack ended up having his first trip after eating some spiked popcorn. When we got back to the RKO to play our last show, stoned out of our heads, we devised a plan to pelt Jackie K and her girls with eggs and flour when they went onstage for their fashion show. Unfortunately, Murray got wind of what was going on and put an end to it. We threw it all around the dressing rooms instead. We couldn’t wait to get out of the place.

On the following day, our last before returning home, Stigwood had arranged with Ahmet Ertegun that we go to Atlantic Studios to record some material for a possible new album. To be introduced to Ahmet and his brother Nesuhi, and be accepted into that particular musical family, was a fantastic piece of good fortune for us. Because our visas were about to expire, we had only one day spare. We laid down one track, a song called “Lawdy Mama,” which I had heard on an album called
Hoodoo Man Blues
by Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. It was the only song we completed before we had to leave, but we were booked to return the following month.

London in 1967 was buzzing. It was an extraordinary melting pot of fashion, music, art, and intellect, a movement of young people all concerned in some way or another with the evolution of their art. There was an underground, too, where you would get these seminal influences suddenly showing up out of nowhere, like they had come out of the woodwork. The Fool were a good example of this—two Dutch artists, Simon and Marijke, who had come over to London from Amsterdam in 1966 and set up a studio designing clothes, posters, and album covers. They painted mystical themes in fantastic, vibrant colors and had been taken up by the Beatles, for whom they had created a vast three-story mural on the wall of their Apple Boutique on Baker Street. They had also painted John Lennon’s Rolls-Royce in lurid psychedelic colors. I asked them to decorate one of my guitars, a Gibson Les Paul, which they turned into a psychedelic fantasy, painting not just the front and back of the body, but the neck and fretboard, too.

I used to hang out a lot at a club called the Speakeasy, on Margaret Street. This was a musicians’ club run by Laurie O’Leary, who had previously managed Esmeralda’s Barn for the Krays, and his brother Alphi. Everybody went there and jammed with whoever was the resident band that night. It was at the Speakeasy, around this time, that I had my first LSD trip. I was in the club with my girlfriend Charlotte when the Beatles came in with an acetate of their new album,
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. Shortly after, the Monkees wandered in, and one of them started handing out these pills, which he said were called STP. I had no idea what that was, but somebody explained that it was a superstrong acid, which would last for several days. We all took it, except for Charlotte, who we both agreed should stay straight in case of any emergency, and shortly after that, George gave the DJ the acetate to play. Even though I was not overawed in the least by the Beatles, I was aware that this was a very special moment in time for anyone that was there. Their music had been gradually evolving over the years, and this album was expected by everybody to be their masterpiece. It was also supposedly written under the influence of acid, so it was an amazing experience to be listening to it in the condition we were in. They had also begun to explore Indian mysticism, perhaps as a result of George’s influence, and at some point the chanting of “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare” began to be heard in the club. The acid gradually took effect, and soon we were all dancing to the sounds of “Lucy in the Sky” and “A Day in the Life.” I have to admit I was pretty moved by the whole thing.

At about six in the morning we piled out into the street, where a huge gathering of policemen was waiting on the other side of the road. There seemed to be hundreds of them. Maybe someone had tipped them off that the Beatles were inside getting stoned, who knows. The point was, they seemed frozen, unable to move. John Lennon came out of the Speakeasy with Lulu on his arm and, as he did so, his beautiful hand-painted Rolls-Royce came around the corner. It pulled up outside the club, and as he got into it, he gave the police the V-sign, and it was as if there was a force field all around them. They just stood there paralyzed, and we all just took off. I stayed high for three more days. I couldn’t sleep and was seeing the most extraordinary things. Without Charlotte’s guidance I probably would have gone mad. Most of my vision seemed to be through a glass screen with hieroglyphics and mathematical equations painted on it, and I remember I couldn’t eat meat because it looked just like the animal. For a time I was a bit concerned about whether it was ever going to wear off.