Clapton (12 page)

Our first American tour lasted seven weeks, culminating in a return to New York to play twelve nights at the Café Au Go Go and a couple at the Village Theater, where we shared the bill with one of Martin Sharp’s favorite artists, Tiny Tim. One night I had a call from Ahmet asking me to drop by Atlantic Studios the next day, as there was someone he wanted me to meet. So I went up there, and Aretha Franklin was in the control room with all her family, her sisters and her father. There was a powerful feeling in the room. Nesuhi Ertegun was there as well as Ahmet and Tom Dowd, and at least five guitar players were on the floor, including (I think) Joe South, Jimmy Johnson, and Bobby Womack, with Spooner Oldham, David Hood, and Roger Hawkins as the rhythm section. All these incredible musicians had come up from Muscle Shoals and Memphis to play on the album Aretha was making called
Lady Soul
.

Ahmet said to me, “I want you to go in there and play on this song,” and he pulled all these guitarists out of the room and put me in there on my own. I felt so nervous, because I couldn’t read music, and they were all playing from music sheets on stands. Aretha came in and sang “Be as Good to Me as I Am to You,” and I played lead guitar. I have to say that playing on that album for Ahmet and Aretha, with all of those talented artists, is still one of the highlights of my life.

Touring America is what made Cream as famous as we became. U.S. audiences really couldn’t get enough of us, and I think once Stigwood saw this, he saw dollar signs, not just for him but for us, too. Before we knew it, we were back on the road in the States, this time for a massive five months. Part of me loved these whistle-stop tours where we’d jump into the car after one gig to drive to the next. Musically we were flying high. The other great part for me was arriving in some faraway town and going off with my nose to the ground, to see what was happening.

I was really interested in American underground literature at the time. Two friends in London, Charlie and Diana Radcliffe, had turned me on to Kenneth Patchen and his book
The Journal of Albion Moonlight.
It had been my bible for a little while, and even though I had no real idea what it was about, it just felt great to read, like listening to avant-garde music. So I would seek out kindred spirits who looked like they’d be into the same kind of thing, and just go up and introduce myself, and then hang out with them and see where it led. Would I do it now? I’m not sure, but in this way I made a lot of friends all over America, and I met some incredibly interesting people.

I remember, for instance, playing somewhere on the East Coast, and as I was walking through the audience between sets, I smelt this very powerful smell of what turned out to be patchouli oil. The guy wearing it told me that his name was David and he lived in a tepee, and he asked me to come and visit him the following day. He was interested in Native American culture and had decided to try and live like them, in the old way. We became good friends and we still communicate occasionally, to this very day. I met people like him all over the country. Wherever I went I was always on a quest to find like-minded souls, eccentrics, musicians, or people I could maybe learn something from.

In LA, while hanging out with the guitarist and songwriter Stephen Stills, my career with Cream nearly came to an abrupt end. Stephen had asked me to visit his ranch in Topanga Canyon to watch his band, Buffalo Springfield, rehearse. I went there with a girl, Mary Hughes, who was the “it” girl in LA. We made ourselves comfortable while the band warmed up. It was a loud session, and a neighbor must have called the cops, who came knocking on the door. It didn’t take them long to cotton on to the fact that we were all smoking dope, as the smell was quite overpowering, and the next thing we knew, we were all being hauled off, first to the Malibu sheriff’s office and from there to the LA County jail. It was Friday night, and I was thrown into a cell with a group of black guys who I immediately concluded must be Black Panthers. I was wearing pink boots from Mr. Gohill in Chelsea and had hair down to my waist, and I thought, “I’m in trouble here.” Luckily for me, word of my predicament had somehow reached Ahmet, and he bailed me out. I then had to go to court and swear on the Bible that I had no idea what marijuana was. I was English, after all, and we didn’t do things like that in England. I walked out of there without a blemish on my character, but it really shook me up. It was a scary enough experience being locked up in LA’s county jail for the weekend, but a drug conviction would have put an instant end to Cream’s American career, and the future of mine, too.

The five months we spent touring were a time of deep political unrest in America, with antiwar demonstrations taking place on campuses all over the country and racial tension simmering in the cities. Having never been interested in politics, I was deliberately oblivious to it all, taking no interest in what was happening. From time to time I ran into people on the underground circuit who were politically very active, and I would go out of my way to avoid them if at all possible.

The closest we came to trouble was in Boston on April 4, the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. James Brown was playing in the theater opposite us, and we had to be smuggled out of our venue through the back door because the people coming out of the James Brown show were trashing everything they could get their hands on. That night anybody white was in danger, and over the next few weeks, playing in places like Detroit and Philadelphia, we could really feel the tension.

I had never really understood, or been directly affected by, racial conflict. I suppose being a musician helped me to transcend the physical side of that issue. When I listened to music I was fairly disinterested in where the players came from, or what color their skin was. Interesting, then, that ten years later I would be labeled a racist, for making drunken remarks about Enoch Powell onstage in Birmingham, England. Since then I have learned to keep my opinions to myself, even though that was never meant to be a racial statement. It was more of an attack against the then government policies on cheap labor, and the cultural confusion and overcrowding that resulted from what was clearly a greed-based policy. I had been in Jamaica just before, and had seen countless commercials on TV that were advertising a “new life” in Great Britain; and then at Heathrow, I had witnessed whole families of West Indians being harassed and humiliated by the immigration people, who had no intention of letting them in. It was appalling. Of course it might have also had something to do with the fact that Pattie had just been leered at by a member of the Saudi royal family—a combination of the two perhaps.

Whistle-stop touring in America was the beginning of the end for Cream, because once we started constantly working in such an intense way, it became impossible to keep the music afloat, and we began to drown. It seems that everybody has always believed that the demise of Cream was predominantly due to the clash of our personalities. True though it may have been that Jack and Ginger were often at each other’s throats, this was only a tiny part of the picture.

When you are playing night after night on a punishing schedule, often not because you want to but because you are contractually obligated to, it is only too easy to forget the ideals that once brought you together. There were times, too, when, playing to audiences who were only too happy to worship us, complacency set in. I began to be quite ashamed of being in Cream, because I thought it was a con. It wasn’t really developing from where we were. As we made our voyage across America, we were being exposed to extremely strong and powerful influences, with jazz and rock ’n’ roll that was growing up around us, and it seemed that we weren’t learning from it.

What brought me up short more than anything else was being introduced to the music of The Band by a friend of mine, Alan Pariser, an entrepreneur from LA who knew just about everybody in the music business and could connect you with anyone you wanted to meet. He had tapes of their first album, called
Music from Big Pink
, and it was fantastic. It stopped me in my tracks, and it also highlighted all of the problems I thought we had.

Here was a band that was really doing it right, incorporating influences from country music, blues, jazz, and rock, and writing great songs. I couldn’t help but compare them to us, which was stupid and futile, but I was frantically looking for a yardstick, and here it was. Listening to that album, as great as it was, just made me feel that we were stuck, and I wanted out. Stigwood began to get regular calls from me after gigs, telling him, “I’ve gotta go home, I can’t do this, you gotta get me out of here.” To which he would reply, “Just do one more week.”

W
hen we returned to England in the early summer of 1968, commercially speaking we were in very good shape. We could have sold out concert halls wherever we went twice over.
Disraeli Gears
was a bestselling album in the States, and we had a hit single there with “Sunshine of Your Love.” As far as I was concerned, all this counted for nothing because we had lost our direction. Musically I was fed up with the virtuoso thing. Our gigs had become nothing more than an excuse for us to show off as individuals, and any sense of unity we might have had when we started seemed to have gone out the window.

We were also suffering from an inability to get along. We would just run away from one another. We never socialized together and never really shared ideas anymore. We just got together onstage and played and then went our separate ways. In the end this was the undoing of the music. I think if we had been able to listen to each other, and care for one another more, then Cream might have had a chance of further life, but at that point it was beyond our grasp as individuals. We were immature and incapable of putting aside our differences. Maybe, too, a little rest now and then might have helped.

Our decision to go our separate ways may have upset Robert Stigwood, but it was certainly no surprise to him. He’d been the recipient of too many increasingly desperate phone calls from America for that. He had told us from the very beginning that he had all our interests at heart, but as time went by I came to believe that it was me that he was starting to pin his hopes on. In the meantime we struck a deal agreeing to do two more albums, one of which we had partially recorded before leaving the States, a farewell tour of America in the autumn, and two last shows in London on our return.

It was great to be back at the Pheasantry, where Litvinoff was in an excitable mood, having been employed as dialogue coach and technical adviser on a film,
Performance
, being shot in Chelsea by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. The particular expertise for which he had been hired was his knowledge of the underworld, as the movie, which was basically a star vehicle for Mick Jagger, playing a faded rock idol, was set in the world of London gangsters. He was full of ideas about how he felt the story should develop, and every day he would come and tell me about all the goings-on on set and fill me in on whatever was going to be happening next day. One night he brought around the director, Donald Cammell, who managed to stage a power cut in the flat and then tried to grope my girlfriend Charlotte in the dark. A peculiar chap.

Life soon settled into the old routine, with people dropping in for tea and musical soirées. A regular visitor was George Harrison, whom I had known since I was in the Yardbirds. Not being the kind of guy, in those days, to instigate a friendship, I had just considered him a fellow musician. He used to drop by on the way home from his office in Savile Row to his bungalow in Esher, often bringing with him acetates of records the Beatles were working on.

Sometimes I would go down to George’s house in Esher and we’d play our guitars and take acid, and bit by bit a friendship began to form. One day, early in September, George drove me over to Abbey Road Studios, where he was recording. When we arrived, he told me they were going to record one of his songs and asked me to play guitar on it. I was quite taken aback by this and considered it a funny thing to ask, since he was the Beatles’ guitar player and had always done great work on their records. I was also quite flattered, thinking that not many people get asked to play on a Beatles record. I hadn’t even brought my guitar with me, so I had to borrow his.

My reading of the situation was that Paul and John were quite disparaging about both George’s and Ringo’s contributions to the group. George would put songs forward on every project only to find them pushed into the background. I think that he felt our friendship would give him some support, and that having me there to play might stabilize his position and maybe even earn him some respect. I was a little nervous because John and Paul were pretty fast on their feet, and I was an outsider, but it went well. The song was “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” We did just one take, and I thought it sounded fantastic. John and Paul were fairly noncommittal, but I knew George was happy because he listened to it over and over in the control room, and after adding some effects and doing a rough mix, the other guys played some of the other songs they had already recorded. I felt like I had been brought into their inner sanctum.

A couple of weeks later George dropped by the Pheasantry and left me acetates of the double album on which the song was going to appear. This was “The White Album,” the long-awaited successor to
Sgt. Pepper
. When I left the following month to go to America on Cream’s farewell tour, I took these with me. While I was in LA, I had been playing some of the songs on the album to various friends when I got a phone call from George. Word had got back to him that I was playing the album around town, and he was furious and gave me a huge bollocking. I remember being incredibly hurt because I thought I’d been doing a grand job of promoting their music to really discriminating people. It brought me down to earth with a bang, and it was a good lesson to learn about boundaries, and not making assumptions, but it stung like hell. For a little while I steered clear of him, but in time we became friends again, although after that, I was always a little wary of letting my guard down around him.

On November 26, 1968, Cream played its final two shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Before the gig started, I just wanted to get it over with, but once I was up onstage, I became quite excited. I thought it was great that we could do this and keep our heads high, and walk away from the whole thing with a fair amount of good grace. It also meant a lot to me knowing that out there in the audience were not just fans, but musician friends, and people on the scene who had all come to say their good-byes. My overwhelming emotion, however, was that we had done the right thing. I think we all knew that. At the end of the second show there were no parties, no speeches. We just went our separate ways.

For a while I was quite happy just to be a sideman. I would play with anybody and I loved it. One of the first gigs like this, only two weeks after the Albert Hall shows, was with the Rolling Stones. It was bizarre. I had a call from Mick asking me to come up to a studio in Wembley, where the Stones were recording a TV special called “The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus.” I was intrigued because he told me that another of the contributing artists was Taj Mahal, an American blues musician whom I really wanted to see. It was certainly an amazing lineup and included, as well as Taj, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jethro Tull, Marianne Faithfull, and the Who.

It was an interesting gig. Mick played “the ringmaster,” complete with top hat and tails, and introduced the different acts. Jesse Ed Davis, who played guitar with Taj Mahal, was brilliant, and there was a curious duet between Yoko Ono and Ivry Gitlis, a classical violinist. I played guitar with John Lennon on “Yer Blues,” in a band put together for the night that also featured Keith Richards on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums, and Gitlis on violin, and which went by the name of Winston Legthigh and the Dirty Macs. Yoko added vocals. Unfortunately, the whole project was unhinged by the fact that the Stones were in pretty poor shape at the time. Brian, as good as sacked from the band, was clearly under a lot of pressure, and I could tell that they were all a bit depressed. The result was that their performance was lackluster and out of tune, and apparently when Mick saw the finished tapes, he made the decision not to release the show.

Not long afterward, I had a visit from Ginger at the Pheasantry. He told me that I had to get out of town, as I was on “Pilcher’s list.” Detective-Sergeant Norman Pilcher, a notorious London copper, had made a name for himself on the drug squad by busting a number of famous rock stars, including Donovan, John Lennon, George Harrison, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger. Ginger said he had a tip-off from someone he knew in the police force to the effect that I was next on the list. I immediately called Stigwood, who had a pile in North London, the Old Barn, Stanford, to ask him what I should do, and he told me to come and stay with him for a few days. That first night that I spent at Stigwood’s, the Pheasantry was raided by the police, who planted hash everywhere. I felt terrible because they busted Martin and Philippe and I had not warned them, thinking that Pilcher would be interested only in me. I will never forgive myself for that.

The bust at the Pheasantry was the harbinger of another warning, because a few days later Ginger told me he had heard on the grapevine that Pilcher wanted to pitch a kind of deal to me, which was, if I got out of town and moved away from his patch—his territory—he wouldn’t bother me. In fact, I felt quite ready to move, and as for the first time in my life I actually had some money, I realized that I could use it to buy a house. Up until that point I hadn’t really thought much about earnings. Rather than pass through our hands, it went straight to management, and we were paid a weekly salary. Things like rent were paid directly from the office. On a day-to-day basis I really didn’t spend that much, and most of what I had went for clothes at Granny Takes a Trip. So I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on with our money until I made the decision to move out of town.

The panic to get out of Chelsea was a catalyst to go out and buy some property magazines. I knew that if I was going to live in the country, I wanted to be somewhere near Ripley. So I went to look at a few houses near Box Hill and places like that, in nice countryside that had views of the Surrey Hills. One day I was looking through
Country Life
and I stopped at a photograph of what looked like an Italian villa, complete with a tiled terrace and a balcony. I rang the agent and arranged to meet him there.

When I drove there for the first time, my initial impression as I approached the house down the drive was how perfectly situated it was, perched on the side of a hill and surrounded by beautiful woodland, with a beautiful view looking out toward the south coast. I remember going in the front door and it still had a few furnishings and the odd curtains from the previous owner. It was all rotting and musty, but I just fell in love with it. As soon as I walked in, I had the most incredible feeling of coming home.

The house, called Hurtwood Edge, was rumored to have been designed by the great Victorian architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, planner of the imperial capital of New Delhi. This turned out to be false, the real architect having been Robert Bolton. The front door had a little porch attached to it, to stop drafts from coming in, and from there you could look straight into the living room, which had windows on three sides, one looking out over a terrace and the others with views across the hills. When I walked around the garden, I was amazed to find five or six fully grown redwoods there, which I imagined must have been hundreds of years old and planted long before the house was built. A palm tree and poplars also graced the property, giving the whole place a Mediterranean feel. The agent told me, falsely again, that the garden had been designed by the celebrated horticulturist Gertrude Jekyll. I wanted to buy Hurtwood there and then and move in right away. When I returned a second time to see if my initial favorable impression had been sound, I surprised the agent and his girlfriend sunbathing naked on the terrace. It turned out they were actually living in the house, which had been empty for two years, no one before me having shown any interest in it. I think it gave them a bit of a shock to realize they’d have to move out.

The price was £30,000, at that time by far the biggest amount of money I had ever heard of. I knew nothing about doing business, let alone buying a house, so I went to see Stigwood for help. He clearly didn’t think that thirty grand was that much and said I should buy it. Next thing I knew, the deal was done and the house was mine. It was an extraordinary feeling. I’d never owned my own home. All my life I’d been bumming around, from the first day I’d left Ripley, spending the night on stations or sleeping in the park, or staying on the couch at friends’ houses, and then going back to Ripley. The most I’d had was the lease at the Pheasantry, and now I had Hurtwood, and the satisfaction of having a place in which I could do anything I pleased.

What I liked most about Hurtwood was the solitariness and the peace. I also loved the road that led to it, which went from Shere to Ewhurst and at one point, in a place called “The Cut,” became single-lane and looked like a riverbed dug down between sheer, high rock walls. It appeared to be thousands of years old, and I heard all kinds of myths about it having been a smugglers’ route. In the winter, when snow clung to the overhanging trees, it was like being in a white tunnel. When I drove down there, I felt like I was entering Hobbit land. I decided very quickly that this was the place where I would live for the rest of my life. I was absolutely sure of that.

I moved in very quickly, with my guitars, a couple of armchairs in the living room, and a bed upstairs. I also had a 1912 Douglas motorbike, which I had bought at a shop in Ripley. It didn’t actually work. I just pushed it around, and eventually I stood it in the middle of the living room like a sculpture. I gave myself one other expensive present, a pair of huge six-foot-high cinema loudspeakers, made by Altec Lansing, called The Voice of the Theatre. Made of wood, each one had a metal trumpet on top, and they gave my music system a great sound.