Clapton (5 page)

As I worked to improve my playing, I was meeting more and more people who had the same respect and reverence for the music I loved. One particular blues fanatic was Clive Blewchamp—we met at Hollyfield and set out together on a fantastic voyage of discovery. It was Clive who first played me the Robert Johnson album. He really enjoyed finding the hard-core stuff, the more obscure the better. We were also neck and neck in our dress sense and spent a lot of time together in and out of school. We would go to blues clubs, too, later on, and it was only when I started working full-time in bands that we stopped hanging out together. I always felt that he was a little contemptuous of what I was trying to do musically, as if it weren’t the real thing. Of course he was right, but I was unstoppable by then. He finished his term at Kingston after I was thrown out, got his diploma, and finally moved to Canada, where he ran a small R&B magazine. We stayed in touch over the years, until, sadly, he died, about ten years ago.

It was exciting to find that there existed this fellowship of like-minded souls, and this is one of the things that determined my future path toward becoming a musician. I started to meet people who knew about Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and they had older friends, record collectors who would hold club nights, which is where I was first introduced to John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and Little Walter. These guys would get together in one of their houses and spend the whole evening listening to one album, like
The Best of Muddy Waters
, and then have excited discussions about what they’d heard. Clive and me would often go up to London to visit record stores, like Imhoff’s on New Oxford Street, the whole of whose basement was devoted to jazz, and Dobell’s on Shaftesbury Avenue, where they had a bin devoted to Folkways, which was the major label for folk, blues, and traditional music. If you were lucky, you’d meet a working musician in one of these stores, and if you told them that you liked Muddy Waters, they might say, “Well, then you’ve got to listen to Lightning Hopkins,” and you’d be off in a new direction.

Music began to take up so much of my life that it was no surprise that my work at art school began to suffer. It was my own fault that things went this way, because initially I had been really gripped by the experience of getting involved in a life in art. I was quite hooked by painting, and to a certain extent by design. I was a good draftsman, and when I enrolled at Kingston, they had offered me a place in their graphics department, which I accepted rather than going into fine art. But once I’d got into the graphics department, I knew that I was in the wrong place, and I dropped out. My motivation died. I’d go into the canteen at lunch and see all the students come in from fine art, long-haired, covered in paint, and looking completely detached. They were given almost total freedom, developing their talents as painters or sculptors, while I was set to do projects every day, designing a soap box, or coming up with an advertising campaign for a new product.

Apart from a short period when I managed to get into the glass department, where I learned engraving and sandblasting, and became quite interested in contemporary stained glass, I was bored to tears. Music was ten times more exciting, ten times more engaging, and as much as I loved art, I also felt that the people who were trying to teach me were coming from an academic direction that I just couldn’t identify with. It seemed to me that I was being prepared for a career in advertising, not art, where salesmanship would be just as important as creativity. Consequently, my interest, and my output, dwindled down to nothing.

I was still shocked, however, when I went for my assessment at the end of the first year and was told that they had decided not to keep me on. I knew my portfolio was a bit thin, but I really believed that the work I had done was good enough to get me through. To me it was much more creative and imaginative than most of the other students’ work. But they were judging by quantity, and they booted me and one other student out, just two of us out of fifty, which was not good. I was totally unprepared for it, but it threw me back into using the only other talent I had.

Being thrown out of art school was another rite of passage for me. I got brought up short by the sudden realization that all doors weren’t going to open up for me for the rest of my life, that the truth was that some of them were going to close. Emotionally and mentally, the shit hit the fan. When I finally found the courage to tell Rose and Jack, they were bitterly disappointed and ashamed, because they found out that I was a liar as well as a failure. Many times when I had told them I was at school, I was actually playing hooky, just wandering around playing the guitar or hanging out in a pub drinking. “You’ve had your chance, Rick,” Jack said to me, “and now you’ve chucked it away.” He made it quite clear that if I intended to stay living with them, I would be expected to work and bring money into the house. If I didn’t contribute, then I could get out.

I chose to work, and accepted a job working for Jack as his “mate” at fifteen pounds a week, which was a good wage. Jack was a master plasterer, a master bricklayer, and a master carpenter. In layman’s terms, this means he had “mastered” all of these trades and was entitled to the wages and respect this commanded. Working for someone as elevated as this was no laughing matter, of course. It meant mixing up lots of plaster, mortar, and cement and getting it to him quickly, so that he could lay bricks and put up plaster without taking his eyes off the job. One of the first big jobs we did together was at a primary school in Chobham, and the most demanding work for me was carrying semiliquid mortar in a hod up a ladder and onto a scaffold as quickly as my body would allow so that Jack could lay a true line of bricks.

I got extremely fit, and I really did love the work, probably because I knew it would not last forever. My grandfather really was brilliant with his hands, and watching him plaster an entire wall in minutes was exhilarating. It turned out to be a valuable experience, even though it seemed he was being extra-tough on me, which I’m sure was because he wanted no suspicion of nepotism. I learned that he worked, and lived, from a very strong set of principles, which he tried to pass on to me. In those days, there were two schools of thought on a building site. The first was that you did as little as you could, but got away with it by making the foreman think you were really busy when you were in fact skiving. This seemed to be the norm. The second, as personified by Jack, was that you worked consistently to a rhythm and did a good job until you had finished it. He had no time for skivers, and so, to a certain extent, like me in later years, he was slightly unpopular and a bit of an outcast. His legacy to me was that I should always try to do my best, and always finish what I started.

All the time, I was working on my playing, sometimes almost driving my family mad with the repetitiveness of my practicing. I was addicted to music, and by now I also had a record collection. Listening to Chuck Berry, B. B. King, and Muddy Waters had turned me on in a big way to electric blues, and somehow I had managed to persuade my grandparents to buy me an electric guitar. This happened after I had been up to London to see Alexis Korner playing at the Marquee on Oxford Street, a jazz club that had occasional blues nights. Alexis had the first real R&B band in the country, with a fantastic harmonica player named Cyril Davies. Watching Alexis play for the first time made me think that there was no reason why an electric guitar shouldn’t be available to me.

Another good reason why I so desperately needed a new guitar was that my Washburn was broken beyond repair. Before I started working for Jack, Rose had decided to take me to visit my mum for a few days. She was then living on an air force base near Bremen, Germany, where her husband, Frank, or “Mac” as I called him, was stationed. She now had three children; a second daughter, Heather, was born in 1958. Almost as soon as I arrived, Mac told me that I would have to get my hair cut before I could go into the mess. I was horrified by this request, since my hair was not even particularly long by the standards of the day, but it seemed that the offensive part was that you couldn’t see the top of my ears. I looked to the younger generation, in the form of my three half siblings, for support, but found none there. One by one they came after me, too. I was adamant about not doing it, until Rose also joined their ranks, which broke my heart, because up until then she had always been my staunchest defender, whatever the situation. I gave in, but it made me very angry, as it seemed like I no longer had anyone on my side. They gave me a crew cut and I felt alone and humiliated.

I moped around a lot for the remainder of my stay, but things only got worse. One day I was sulking on my bed in the spare room when my half brother Brian came in and sat down on the bed without looking. He sat down right on top of my beloved Washburn guitar, which was lying there, and broke the neck clean in half. I could see immediately that it was beyond repair, and I was gutted. He was the sweetest kid, totally in awe of me, and it was an accident, but there and then I vowed internally that Pat and her entire family could go to hell. I didn’t lose my temper. I just withdrew. Not only had my identity been ripped away, but my most treasured possession had been destroyed. I went inside of myself and decided that from then on, I would trust nobody.

The electric guitar I chose was one I had had my eye on in the window of Bell’s, where we had got the Hoyer. It was the same guitar I had seen Alexis Korner playing, a double-cutaway semi-acoustic Kay, which at the time was quite an advanced instrument, although essentially, as I later learned, it was still only a copy of the best guitar of the day, the Gibson ES-335. It was cut away on both sides of the neck to allow easy access up the neck to the higher frets. You could play it acoustically, or plug it in and play electric. The Gibson would have cost over a hundred pounds then I think, well beyond our reach, while the Kay cost only ten pounds, but still seemed quite exotic. It captured my heart. The only thing that wasn’t quite right with it was the color. Though advertised as Sunburst, which would have been a golden orange going to dark red at the edges, it was more yellowy, going to a sort of pink, so as soon as I got it home, I covered it with black Fablon.

Much as I loved this guitar, I soon found out that it wasn’t that good. It was just as hard to play as the Hoyer, because again, the strings were too high off the fingerboard, and, because there was no truss rod, the neck was weak. So after a few months’ hard playing, it began to bow, something I had to adapt to, not having a second instrument. Something more profound also happened when I got this guitar. As soon as I got it, I suddenly didn’t want it anymore. This phenomenon was to rear its head throughout my life and cause many difficulties.

We hadn’t bought an amplifier, so I could only play it acoustically and fantasize about what it would sound like, but it didn’t matter. I was teaching myself new stuff all the time. Most of the time I was trying to play like Chuck Berry or Jimmy Reed, electric stuff, then I sort of worked backward into country blues. This was instigated by Clive, when out of the blue he gave me an album to listen to called
King of the Delta Blues Singers
, a collection of seventeen songs recorded by bluesman Robert Johnson in the 1930s. I read in the sleeve notes that when Johnson was auditioning for the sessions in a hotel room in San Antonio, he played facing into the corner of the room because he was so shy. Having been paralyzed with shyness as a kid, I immediately identified with this.

At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense, and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play. It was hard-core, more than anything I had ever heard. After a few listenings I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man’s example would be my life’s work. I was totally spellbound by the beauty and eloquence of songs like “Kindhearted Woman,” while the raw pain expressed in “Hellhound on My Trail” seemed to echo things I had always felt.

I tried to copy Johnson, but his style of simultaneously playing a disjointed bass line on the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings, and lead on the treble strings while singing at the same time was impossible to even imagine. I put his album to one side for a while and began listening again to other players, trying to form a style. I knew I could never reach the standards of the original guys, but I thought that if I kept trying, something would evolve. It was just a question of time and faith. I began to play things I had heard on the record, but to add my own touches. I would take the bits that I could copy from a combination of the electric blues players I liked, like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and Chuck Berry, and the acoustic players like Big Bill Broonzy, and amalgamate them into one, trying to find a phraseology that would encompass all these different artists. It was an extremely ambitious undertaking, but I was in no hurry and was convinced I was on the right track, and that eventually it would come.

One night in January 1963, I arranged to meet a guy named Tom McGuinness at the Prince of Wales pub in New Malden. He was playing in a blues band called the Roosters, which apparently had originally been formed by Paul Jones, with Brian Jones on guitar. When Paul and Brian left, Tom’s girlfriend Jenny, who had been a fellow student of mine at Kingston School of Art, had recommended me as a possible guitarist. The lineup then consisted of Tom McGuinness on guitar, Ben Palmer on keyboards, Robin Mason on drums, and Terry Brennan on vocals. There was no bass player. Terry was a fantastic guy, a genuine, full-blown Teddy Boy. He had a pompadour haircut with a quiff about six inches high in front, and wore a fingertip jacket with a velvet collar, drainpipe jeans, and “brothel-creepers,” which were suede winkle-picker crepe-soled shoes. Unlike most Teds, however, who had a reputation for being hard men, and who only listened to Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis, he was incredibly gentle, and he really loved the blues. He had a great voice, too, and it was my admiration for him and Ben, the keyboard player, that made me want to play with them. I knew Ben would be a big part of my life the minute I heard him play. He was an absolute purist, with a love for the blues that more than matched my own. I played a short audition and they immediately asked me to join the band.