Clapton (7 page)

I think Giorgio had an agenda from day one. What he had missed out on with the Rolling Stones, he would make up for with the Yardbirds. He would take us up a notch, make us bigger than the Stones. Early in 1964 he got us signed up to Columbia Records, and into a recording studio, a tiny place in New Malden called R. G. Jones, to record a cover of a song called “I Wish You Would” by Billy Boy Arnold. It was a simple, very catchy song, but though I thought it was great, I was in two minds about making records. I was developing a very purist attitude toward music, and thought that it really ought to be just live. My theory was that making records, first and foremost, was always going to be a commercial enterprise and therefore was not pure. It was a ridiculously pompous attitude, considering that all the music I was learning from was on records. In truth, I was just embarrassed because, in the studio, my own personal inadequacy was there for all to see. But it wasn’t just me, and as exciting as it was to be actually making a record, when we listened back and compared it to the stuff we were supposedly modeling ourselves on, it sounded pretty lame. We just sounded young and white, and even though our second single, a cover of a rock version of “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,” sounded much better, I still felt that we were falling far short of the mark in some way. This was not something I felt just about the Yardbirds, but about other bands that I admired, like Manfred Mann, the Moody Blues, and the Animals, all of whom were far better live than they were on recordings.

We too were much better live, a fact borne out by the release of our first LP,
Five Live Yardbirds
, which, in the absence of many other live albums, proved to be quite a groundbreaking record. It had a much rawer sound, which I was happier with. What singled us out from most other bands was the way we were experimenting with band dynamics, a direction we were taken in by Paul Samwell-Smith. We became quite well known for the way in which we improvised, for example, taking the frame of a blues standard, like Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man,” and embellishing it by jamming in the middle, usually with a staccato bass line, which would get louder and louder, rising to a crescendo before coming back down again to the body of the song.

While most other bands were playing three-minute songs, we were taking three-minute numbers and stretching them out to five or six minutes, during which time the audience would go crazy, shaking their heads around manically and dancing in various outlandish ways. On my guitar I used light-gauge guitar strings, with a very thin first string, which made it easier to bend the notes, and it was not uncommon during the most frenetic bits of playing for me to break at least one string. During the pause while I was changing my string, the frenzied audience would often break into a slow handclap, inspiring Giorgio to dream up the nickname of “Slow hand” Clapton.

Giorgio worked us incredibly hard. With Keith Relf’s father, Bill, as our roadie and driver, we were out on the road most nights, touring the Ricky Tick circuit and other venues in the south of England, with a trip to Abergavenny and a couple of gigs at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester thrown in for good measure. To add to our earnings, and his, he once even hired us out to an advertising company to promote shirts on TV. We had our photograph taken wearing white business shirts while a jingle announced “Raelbrook Toplin, the shirt you don’t iron!” Even then, I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable about promoting something that had nothing to do with the music, but these were the days in which musicians still had little say in what went on in their careers, and did what their managers told them.

By the time we played the fourth Richmond Jazz and Blues Festival, on August 9, 1964, it was our 136th gig of the year. The opening act of the weekend had been the Rolling Stones, and we closed things on Sunday night. Giorgio now pulled a bit of a fast one, a not unusual occurrence. He told us that we badly needed a holiday, and we should pack our things, as we were off the next day for two glorious weeks in Lugano, the Swiss town on Lake Maggiore where he had once lived.

So off we went, in a couple of Ford Transit vans, one of which was filled with a gaggle of female fans, girls who really loved us and would come to the CrawDaddy every week to see us, only to find that when we finally arrived at the hotel after a hair-raising journey over the Alps, it wasn’t even properly built. There was nothing on the floor, just bare concrete, and we were all staying in one room. On the second day Giorgio announced that Bill was on his way with all the equipment and that we were going to play by the pool. It was now quite clear that our “holiday” was just part of some dubious deal that he had pulled off with the hotel owner to provide cheap entertainment for the nonexistent guests, and we ended up playing to a sprinkling of locals and our fans who had come out from England.

By the end of 1964, after playing well over two hundred gigs, we were getting a bigger and bigger following and playing on package tours with big American stars like Jerry Lee Lewis and the Ronettes. Ronnie Ronette made a move on me one night. I couldn’t believe that out of all the men on the tour, she should single out me to seduce, but it was just a momentary flirtation, and she confessed to me later that I reminded her of her husband, Phil Spector! Needless to say, I became besotted and fell head over heels in love. She was the most sexual creature I had ever laid eyes on, and I was determined to make the most of it. At the end of the tour, I hung around their hotel in London, and was utterly heartbroken when I saw her and one of the other girls in the group come out on the arms of Mick and Keith. Unlucky in love again. At the end of December, we were invited to perform as a support act to the Beatles in their twenty-night series of Christmas shows at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. These were a curious mixture of music, pantomime, and comedy in which we shared the support bill with pop groups like Freddie and the Dreamers, solo artists such as Billy J. Kramer and Elkie Brooks, and the R&B group Sounds Incorporated. The Beatles appeared in a comedy sketch with England’s best-known DJ, Jimmy Savile, and generally hammed it up throughout, before playing a half-hour set at the end.

Giorgio decided that we needed a uniform for the gigs. Knowing how important my image was to me, and that I would fight tooth and nail to wear exactly what I wanted, he gave me the job of designing it. What I came up with were black suits, with jackets that had, instead of a standard lapel, something more like a shirt lapel, which buttoned almost up to the top. We had them made up, in black and in beige mohair, in a workshop somewhere on Berwick Street, Soho. They were actually really nice.

Even though we were quite low on the bill, playing these shows was fine for us. It was quite local, and all our followers from the CrawDaddy would come and see us, so we had our own fans to play to, and they actually listened to our music. It was different for the Beatles. One night I went to the back of the auditorium to watch them, and you couldn’t hear the music at all because of the screaming. Most of their fans were young girls around the age of twelve to fifteen, who had no intention of listening. I felt sorry for the band, and I think they were already quite sick of it, too.

Hanging out backstage at the Odeon was where I had my first meeting with the Beatles. Paul played the ambassador, coming out to meet us and saying hello. I remember him playing us the tune of “Yesterday,” which was half written, and asking everyone what they thought. He didn’t have the words yet. He was calling it “Scrambled Eggs,” and singing “Scrambled eggs…Everybody calls me scrambled eggs.” George and I hit it off right away. He seemed to like what I did, and we talked shop a lot. He showed me his collection of Gretsch guitars, and I showed him my light-gauge strings, which I always bought from a shop called Clifford Essex on Earlham Street. I gave him some, and this was the start of what was to eventually become a long friendship; though not for a while, since the Beatles were then in another world to us. They were stars and climbing fast.

My meeting with John was a little different. One night I was on the tube, traveling to Hammersmith for one of the shows, and I got talking to an elderly American woman. She was lost and asking me for directions. She asked me what I did and where I was going, and I told her I was going to play guitar in a concert with the Beatles. “The Beatles?” she said, astonished, and then asked, “Can I come along?”

“If you want to, I’ll try and get you in,” I replied. When we arrived at the Odeon, I told the stage manager she was a friend of mine, and took her over to the Beatles’ dressing room, which was on the same level as the stage. They were getting ready to go on, but they took a moment and were really friendly and polite to her. But when we got to John, and I introduced her, he made a face of mock boredom and started doing wanking movements inside his coat. I was really shocked, and quite offended, because I felt responsible for this harmless little old lady, and in a sense, of course, he was insulting me. I got to know John quite well later in our lives, and we were friends I suppose, but I was always aware that he was capable of doing some pretty weird stuff.

Though the Yardbirds weren’t yet in the big-money league, we were making enough for me to buy my first really serious guitar, a cherry red Gibson ES-335, the instrument of my dreams, of which the Kay had been but a poor imitation. Throughout my life I chose a lot of my guitars because of the other people who played them, and this was like the one Freddy King played. It was the first of a new era of guitars, which were thin and semi-acoustic. They were both a “rock guitar” and a “blues guitar,” which you could play, if necessary, without amplification and still hear them.

I had seen the Gibson in a shop on either Charing Cross Road or Denmark Street, where several music stores had electric guitars in the windows. To me they were just like sweet shops. I would stand outside staring at these things for hours on end, especially at night when the windows would remain lit up, and after a trip to the Marquee, I would walk around all night looking and dreaming. When I finally bought the Gibson, I just couldn’t believe how shiny and beautiful it was. At last, I felt like a real musician.

The truth is, I was taking myself far too seriously and becoming very critical and judgmental of anybody in music who wasn’t playing just pure blues. This attitude was probably part of my intellectual phase. I was reading translations of Baudelaire, and discovering the American underground writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg while simultaneously watching as much French and Japanese cinema as I could. I began to develop a real contempt for pop music in general, and to feel genuinely uncomfortable about being in the Yardbirds.

No longer were we going in the direction I wanted, mainly because, seeing the runaway success of the Beatles, Giorgio and some of the guys had become obsessed with getting on TV and having a number one record. It’s quite possible that Giorgio was still smarting from having lost the Stones, but what was clear was that we weren’t moving upward fast enough, so each of us was told to go out there and find a hit song. Actually I had no problem with having a hit, as long as it was a song we could be proud of. Funnily enough, Giorgio had played me a song by Otis Redding called “Your One and Only Man” several months before. It was a catchy song, which I felt we could do a version of without selling ourselves short. Then Paul Samwell-Smith came up with a song called “For Your Love,” by Graham Gouldman, later of 10cc, which was clearly a number one. I balked, but the others all loved it, and that was that.

When the Yardbirds decided to record “For Your Love,” I knew it was the beginning of the end for me, as I didn’t see how we could make a record like that and stay as we were. It felt to me that we had completely sold out. I played on it, though my contribution was limited to a very short blues riff in the middle 8 section, and as a consolation they gave me the B side, an instrumental called “Got to Hurry,” which was based on a tune hummed by Giorgio, who gave himself the writing credit under the pseudonym O. Rasputin.

By then I was a pretty grizzled and discontented individual. I deliberately made myself as unpopular as I could by being constantly argumentative and dogmatic about everything that came up. Eventually Giorgio called me to his office in Soho and told me that it was quite clear that I was no longer happy in the band, and that if I wanted to leave, then he wouldn’t stand in my way. He didn’t exactly fire me. He just invited me to resign. Totally disillusioned, I was at that point ready to quit the music business altogether.

I
nitially I was distraught after leaving the Yardbirds. I felt much as I did when I was thrown out of art school and the reality finally kicked in. But in a short time my equilibrium came back, and I was able to pat myself on the back for sticking to my principles, even though I wasn’t really sure quite what my principles were. “For Your Love” was a huge hit, and nobody on the outside could understand why I had chosen such a moment to quit, when the band was on the up. But the truth is, I felt it was a dreadful waste of what had potentially been a good rock blues band. For a time I returned to live in Ripley, feeling shy, frightened, and disheartened by a business in which everyone seemed to be on the make and selling out rather than being in it for the music. For a while I stayed with Rose and Jack, who were both very supportive of me. By then, I think they knew I was serious about what I was doing and had decided to stand behind me.

I had a West Indian girlfriend around this time, Maggie, who was a dancer on
Top of the Pops
, and one night she and I went down to Ronnie Scott’s club in Soho to meet up with a friend of mine, Tony Garland. Tony was a fellow music fan I used to hang out with at the Marquee, and in the early days he was the first person I ever saw wearing flared trousers. He had made them himself by sewing triangular inserts into his Levi’s. On that particular night he was with a great-looking girl, June Child, who was obviously smart as a whip and very, very funny. She and I got talking and laughing, and she was taking the mickey out of Tony, whom she kept referring to as “Wanker Garland,” and I started to join in. This was much to the annoyance of Maggie, who was more accustomed to getting all the attention, and the result was that by the end of the evening we had swapped partners.

I left the club with June, who instantly became one of my best friends. We did not become lovers, however; I really enjoyed her company as a friend and didn’t want to spoil it. I’m pretty sure she wanted to go down that road, but at that point I hadn’t figured out that it was possible to fancy a girl and also be friends with her. Sex was still a matter of conquest rather than the result of a loving relationship. The idea simply never occurred to me that you could have an intelligent conversation with a girl and then sleep with her. Retrospectively I kind of regret that we never got it together, as I’m sure we would have had a great time.

June not only became my pal, she also, since I couldn’t drive, became my voluntary chauffeur. One day I asked her to take me to Oxford to visit Ben Palmer, the keyboard player with the Roosters. Ben was an incredibly charismatic man, very funny, very intelligent, and very worldly and wise, with strong, angular, rather aristocratic features that made him look as if he came from the eighteenth century. He was a creative man of great depth, who could turn his skill in any direction.

He was then living in a studio above some stables, where he had taught himself woodcarving, and when we arrived he was putting the finishing touches on a Tang horse. He said he had given up the piano completely. Ben was the only other person I knew who was as fanatically purist about the blues as I was, and I tried to talk him into doing something with me. I thought maybe we could produce a guitar-and-piano blues record, but he steadfastly refused. To begin with I felt very depressed, and for a few weeks Ben looked after me like an older brother, keeping an eye on me and cooking me delicious meals. He also introduced me to
The Lord of the Rings
, which I spent hours reading.

In the meantime, June had given Ben’s number to John Mayall, a blues musician with a credible reputation, and leader of his own band, the Bluesbreakers. He called and asked if I might be interested in joining his outfit. I knew who he was from the Marquee, and I admired him because he was then doing exactly what I always thought we could have done with the Yardbirds. He had found his niche and was staying there, touring good clubs and making the odd record, without ever really going for broke. The fact that I didn’t really like the two singles he’d made, “Crawling Up a Hill” and “Crocodile Walk,” which to me were like pop R&B, was immaterial, because what I saw was a frame that I could fit into.

I wasn’t sure about the way he sang, or the way he presented himself, but I was very grateful that someone saw my worth, and my thinking was that maybe I would be able to steer the band toward Chicago blues instead of the sort of jazz blues that the band was currently playing. He seemed happy to go along with this. I think that until I came along, he had been quite isolated in his musical tastes, and now he’d found someone just as serious about the blues as he was.

I joined the Bluesbreakers in April 1965 and went to live with John in his house in Lee Green, which he shared with his wife, Pamela, and their children. Twelve years older than me, with long curly hair and a beard, which gave him a look not unlike Jesus, he had the air of a favorite schoolmaster who still manages to be cool. He didn’t drink and was a health-food fanatic, the first proper vegetarian I had ever met. Trained as a graphic artist, John made a good living as an illustrator of things like science fiction books, and he worked as well for advertising agencies, but his real passion was music. He played piano, organ, and rhythm guitar, and he had the most incredible collection of records I had ever seen, with rare singles of songs you otherwise find only on compilation albums. Many of these were ordered through
Blues Unlimited
, a specialist magazine run by blues fan Mike Leadbetter. I had a tiny little cupboard room at the top of John’s house, barely big enough for a narrow single bed, and over the better part of a year, when I had any spare time, I would sit in this room listening to records and playing along with them, honing my craft.

Modern Chicago blues became my new Mecca. It was a tough electric sound, spearheaded by people like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker, who had come up from the Delta to record for labels like Chess. The leading guitar players of this genre were Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Elmore James, Hubert Sumlin, and Earl Hooker, to name a few. It perfectly suited our lineup of guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard. John played piano, Hammond organ, and rhythm guitar. On drums we had Hughie Flint, who would go on to form a band with Tom McGuinness called McGuinness-Flint. I played lead guitar, and the bass player was John McVie, who later formed Fleetwood Mac with Mick Fleetwood. Not only was he a brilliant bass guitarist, but he was an incredibly funny man with a very dark, cynical sense of humor. At that time the two Johns and myself were obsessed with the Harold Pinter play
The Caretaker
. I had seen the film, with Donald Pleasance as the tramp Davies, as many times as I could, and I had also bought the script, a lot of which I knew by heart. We would spend hours acting out scenes from the play, swapping roles, so that sometimes I would play the character of Aston, other times Davies or Mick, and we would piss ourselves with laughter.

To begin with, since Mayall was that much older than the rest of us, and was to our minds a respectable middle-class man living with a wife and kids in suburbia, the dynamics of the band were very much “him and us.” We saw him in the role of schoolmaster, with us as the naughty boys. He was tolerant up to a point, but we knew there was a limit and we did our best to push him to it. We would take the mickey out of him behind his back, telling him he couldn’t sing, and giggling when he went out onstage bare to the waist. He was a well-built man, and more than a little vain, and we liked to see just how far we could go before he lost his temper. John didn’t like alcohol around when we were working, and unfortunately, McVie, who was our spokesman, liked to drink a lot. This would often lead to some form of confrontation, and one of them would lose it. Lovable though McVie was, there were often times when his drinking made him aggressive, and he would either be left behind or, as on one occasion when we were returning from a gig up north, actually turfed out of the van.

Less than a month after I joined the Bluesbreakers, John asked me to go down to a studio to play on some tracks he had been asked to work on with Bob Dylan. He was very excited about this, as Dylan, who was over to tour England, had specially asked to meet him after hearing his song “Crawling Up a Hill.” My feelings about Dylan at the time were rather ambivalent, colored by the fact that Paul Samwell-Smith had been a big fan of his, and anything Paul liked, I didn’t. So I went down to the studio where the session was taking place and was introduced to Bob and his producer, Tom Wilson.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t open to any of it at the time. I hadn’t really listened to any of Bob’s stuff and was developing a healthy prejudice toward him, based, I suppose, on what I thought of the people who did like him. As far as I was concerned, Dylan was a folkie. I couldn’t understand all the fuss, and it seemed like everyone around him was patronizing him to death. However, one person in his entourage whom I did take to instantly was Bobby Neuwirth. I think he was a painter, or a poet. It seemed like he was Dylan’s pal, but he took the time to talk to me and tried to clue me in on what was going on. I’m not sure it did any good. I was like “Mr. Jones” in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” but it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. I don’t remember Dylan talking to anybody; maybe he was shy like me. As for the session, I don’t remember much about it. I don’t think any of the songs got finished, and then Bob suddenly disappeared. When somebody asked where he was, we were told, “Oh, he’s gone to Madrid.” I didn’t think much about Bob Dylan for a while, and then I heard “Blonde on Blonde,” and thank goodness, I finally got it.

The moment I said yes to John, I joined a working schedule the likes of which I had never experienced. If there had been eight nights a week, we’d have played them, as well as two shows on Sunday. Our bookings were handled by two brothers, Rick and Johnny Gunnell, who owned the Flamingo Club on Wardour Street, a tiny basement club that was the most authentic soul music venue in London. Both edgy and cliquey, it catered to tough, mostly black audiences who were hard-core R&B, blues, and jazz followers. The Gunnells represented a lot of the bands who played the London nightlife circuit, people like Georgie Fame, Chris Farlowe, Albert Lee, and Geno Washington. Rick and Johnny were a couple of lovable rogues who represented the soft side of the London underworld at the time, enjoying good relations with the police so they could keep their club open till 6:00
A.M.
They had their own territory and were treated with respect by gangland figures, like the Krays. John, the younger of the two and very good-looking, had a big scar across his face from where he’d presumably been bottled. His elder brother Rick used to get very drunk and would walk in and demand of the entire club, “Why aren’t the band playing?” Though undoubtedly tough guys, they were music lovers, too, and always very kind to me, possibly because they realized how seriously I took the music.

Another club I used to hang out in was the Scene, in Windmill Yard, run by Ronan O’Rahilly, who went on to set up Radio Caroline, England’s first pirate radio station. I used to watch and finally made friends with a small group of guys who hung out there and had a big influence on how I wanted to look at the time. They wore a hybrid of American Ivy League and the Italian look, as personified by Marcello Mastroianni, so on one day they might be wearing sweatshirts with baggy trousers and loafers, on another maybe linen suits. An interesting bunch, because they seemed to be miles ahead of anyone else in terms of style, I found them fascinating. This group, all from the East End, included Laurie Allen, a jazz drummer; Jimmy West and Dave Foley, who were tailors and went on to start a business making suits for people like me, called the Workshop, on Berwick Street; and Ralph Berenson, a natural comedian and mimic. I would sometimes play at the Scene, and one night I was approached and asked to go and play a gig at another club called Esmeralda’s Barn, a nightclub in Mayfair owned by the Kray brothers. It was a weird evening because I played with the resident band, and there was no one else in the club except the Krays, sitting at a table right at the back, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing there. It felt like an audition.

We were paid thirty-five pounds a week to play with the Bluesbreakers, which we used to collect from the Gunnells’ office in Soho. It was a set wage no matter how much work we did, and though there may have been a ruckus from time to time from other members of the band about trying to get an increase, I don’t remember really caring about it, because my expenses were very small. I was usually on the cadge, rarely paying for anything and living free. We certainly earned our money. The idea was that we would play a gig, and when we were done, we might have to play again that night.

Every Saturday they had an all-nighter at the Flamingo, at which we were regulars, which was fine if we were playing Oxford or somewhere not too far away, but quite grueling if the earlier show was in Birmingham, which necessitated making an exhausting trip back down the MI. Traveling to these, what seemed to us then, faraway places was important, as there was only so much work in the Home Counties, and it was essential for bands to play in the better-known clubs in the north in order to get recognition and consolidate their following. To name a few, there was the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, the Club a Go-Go in Newcastle, the Boathouse in Nottingham, the Starlight in Redcar, and the Mojo in Sheffield, where Peter Stringfellow was DJ. The concept of paying someone to play records in a club until the band came on was then entirely new, and he was one of the original DJs, playing really good sounds, mostly blues and R&B.