Clapton (9 page)

Nineteen sixty-six turned out to be a momentous year. In March, John decided to throw a party for my twenty-first birthday at his house in Lee. This was the first time he had met any of my new friends from the Long Acre flat, and I was quite proud to show off these extraordinary people, who appeared to me to be the elite of intellectual society. The theme for the party was fancy dress.

My costumes were hired from Berman’s in Shaftesbury Avenue, the windows of which I used to gaze in on my many post-Marquee night walks, and consisted of one penguin suit, which had a beak you could open with a piece of string so that you could look out of it, and a gorilla suit. I started the evening as a gorilla, but when it got too hot I changed into the penguin suit.

For some reason, during the course of the evening, I remembered the saga of my grandmother and the cigarettes, so I got hold of a pack of twenty Benson & Hedges, which came in a gold box and were the trendy cigarette of the day, and lit one after the other till I had all twenty in my mouth simultaneously, and smoked the whole lot. (I carried on smoking for another thirty years, finally giving it up at the age of forty-eight, by which time I was smoking about three packs a day.) Finally, at the end of the night, I wound up in bed with a very pretty Chinese girl, who would later become a very good friend. When the party was over, I considered myself well and truly grown up, a man of the world, a bit rebellious and anarchistic, but most of all experienced. It felt like my life was really taking off. Looking back, it felt like I had closed the door on my past. I had little or no contact with my old friends from Ripley, and my family ties felt very weak. It was as if I was starting a brand-new life, where there was no room for any excess baggage. I was very confident of my capabilities and very aware that this was the key to my future. Hence I was extremely protective of my craft and ruthless in cutting away anything that stood in my path. It was not a path of ambition; I had no desire for fame or recognition. I just needed to be able to make the best music I could, with the tools that I had.

B
lues Breakers: John Mayall with Eric Clapton
was the breakthrough album that really brought my playing to people’s attention. It was made at a time when I really felt I’d found my niche, in a band where I could remain in the background yet at the same time develop my skills, driving the band in the direction I thought it ought to go. We went into the Decca studios in West Hampstead for three days in April and played exactly the set we did onstage, with the addition of a horn section on some of the tracks. The songs included “Parchman Farm,” a Mose Allison number on which John performed a harmonica solo, the Ray Charles song “What’d I Say,” featuring a drum solo by Hughie Flint, and “Ramblin’ on My Mind” by Robert Johnson, on which John insisted I do vocals. This was much against my better judgment, since most of the guys I longed to emulate were older and had deep voices, and I felt extremely uncomfortable singing in my high-pitched whine.

Because the album was recorded so quickly, it had a raw, edgy quality that made it special. It was almost like a live performance. I insisted on having the mike exactly where I wanted it to be during the recording, which was not too close to my amplifier, so that I could play through it and get the same sound that I had onstage. The result was the sound that came to be associated with me. It had really come about accidentally, when I was trying to emulate the sharp, thin sound that Freddy King got out of his Gibson Les Paul, and I ended up with something quite different, a sound that was a lot fatter than Freddy’s. The Les Paul has two pickups, one at the end of the neck, giving the guitar a kind of round jazz sound, and the other next to the bridge, giving you the treble, most often used for the thin, typically rock ’n’ roll sound.

What I would do was use the bridge pickup with all of the bass turned up, so the sound was very thick and on the edge of distortion. I also always used amps that would overload. I would have the amp on full, with the volume on the guitar also turned up full, so everything was on full volume and overloading. I would hit a note, hold it, and give it some vibrato with my fingers, until it sustained, and then the distortion would turn into feedback. It was all of these things, plus the distortion, that created what I suppose you could call my sound.

On the day they shot the photograph for the cover, I decided to be totally uncooperative since I hated having my picture taken. To annoy everybody, I bought a copy of Beano and read it grumpily while the photographer took the pictures. The resulting cover, showing the band sitting against a wall with me reading a comic, led to the album being dubbed “The Beano Album.”

Though I was happy with the Bluesbreakers, I was also beginning to get restless, nurturing somewhere inside me thoughts of being a front man, which had been evolving ever since I had first seen Buddy Guy playing at the Marquee. Even though he was accompanied by only a bass player and a drummer, he created a huge, powerful sound, and it blew me away. It was almost as if he didn’t need anyone else. He could have played the whole set on his own. Visually, he was like a dancer with his guitar, playing with his feet, his tongue, and throwing it around the room. He made it look so easy, and as I was watching, I was thinking “I can do that,” and now that my confidence was high, I began to really believe that I could make that leap, and I was truly inspired. So when Ginger Baker, drummer from the Graham Bond Organisation, came to see me and talked about forming a new band, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

The Bluesbreakers were playing a gig in Oxford when Ginger first came to see me. I’d seen him at the Marquee and at the Richmond Jazz Festival, but I didn’t know much about him, or drumming, for that matter. I presumed he must be pretty good, as he was first choice with all the musicians I rated, so I was very flattered that he was interested in me. I was also rather frightened of him because he was an angry-looking guy, with a considerable reputation.

Ginger appeared to be physically very strong although extremely lean, with red hair and a constant expression of disbelief mixed with suspicion. He gave the impression that he was fearless and would take anybody on. Sometimes he’d arch one eyebrow as if to say, “Who the hell do you think you are?” His very dry sense of humor, which I didn’t really see until I got to know him, was also a surprising experience in itself, because in truth he is a very shy and gentle man, thoughtful and full of compassion.

That night, after the gig, he offered me a lift back to London. He had a new Rover 3000, which he drove like a maniac, and on the trip he told me he was thinking about forming a band and asked if I’d be interested in joining. I said I’d think about it, but that I’d only be interested if Jack Bruce was involved. He almost crashed the car. I knew that the two of them had played together with Graham Bond and had heard that there wasn’t much love lost between them, but at the time I didn’t know, and even now I don’t really know, what this was all about or if it was a particularly serious issue. I had actually seen them play together in Alexis Korner’s band, and they seemed perfect together, like a well-oiled machine, but that was the music, and sometimes the music alone isn’t enough.

Ginger was initially very reluctant to work with Jack again, and I could see that it was a huge obstacle for him, but when he realized it was the only way I would do it, he agreed to go away and think about it. He eventually came back and said that on reflection he would give it a go, but I could tell it was going to be a rough road. In fact, the very first time the three of us got together, in March 1966, in the front room of Ginger’s house in Neasden, they started arguing right away. It seemed like they just naturally rubbed one another the wrong way, both being very headstrong and natural leaders.

But when we started to play, it all just turned into magic. Maybe I was the necessary catalyst for them to get along. Temporarily it seemed that way. We played through some songs acoustically, including some of Jack’s new material, and it had a driving sound to it that felt really good. We all looked at each other and grinned.

The first time we rehearsed fully electric, however, I got mixed feelings, because I suddenly missed the keyboards that I had got used to in the Bluesbreakers. Having had in my mind the ideal of Buddy Guy, who had managed to make the sound of a trio seem so full, I realized that that was because of him and that, lacking his virtuosity and confidence, I wasn’t going to be able to carry off what he did. This would mean that the balance of power would rest much more with Jack and Ginger than it did with me. In truth, the band sounded a bit empty to me, as if we needed another player.

I had someone in mind from day one, Steve Winwood, whom I had seen play at the Twisted Wheel and other clubs, and who had really impressed me with his singing and playing. Most of all, he seemed to know his way around the genre. I think he was only fifteen at the time, but when he sang “Georgia,” if you closed your eyes, you would swear it was Ray Charles. Musically, he was like an old man in a boy’s skin. Touching on the subject with Jack and Ginger, they made it quite clear that they didn’t want anyone else in the band. They liked the setup as it was, although whenever we went into the studio to make records, we usually tracked and overdubbed, creating another player, with either Jack playing keyboards, or me playing first rhythm and then lead. We very rarely recorded just as a trio.

Over the next few months we continued to rehearse secretly, wherever and whenever we could, and we had an unspoken agreement that that was the way things should remain till we were ready to go public. After all, we were all contracted to other bands. Then Ginger let the cat out of the bag by giving an interview to Chris Welch of
Melody Maker
, and all hell broke loose. Jack was furious about it and almost came to blows with Ginger, and I had the unenviable task of explaining myself to John Mayall, who had been like a father to me.

It was not a happy experience. I told him I was leaving because I had come to a fork in the road and I wanted to form my own band. I was quite surprised by how upset he was, and though he wished me well, I was left in no doubt that he was pretty angry. I think he was sad, too, because I had helped take the Bluesbreakers to another level. When John had been running the band, it was much more jazz-oriented and more low-profile, and I had stirred it up and pushed it in a new direction. Having been rather straight, he was beginning to enjoy this transition, and everything that went with it, the girls and the lifestyle, and was beginning to be influenced by it. He was upset, I think, that I was jumping off the train just as it was beginning to gather speed.

Ginger wanted to bring in the manager of the Graham Bond Organisation, Robert Stigwood, to handle us, a suggestion Jack railed against on the grounds that it would compromise our independence, and that it would be better for us to manage ourselves. He was finally persuaded, and came with us to meet “Stigboot,” as Ginger called him, in his office on New Cavendish Street. By the time we met, the Robert Stigwood organization had had some measure of success, but mostly with pop singers like John Leyton, Mike Berry, and Mike Sarne, and a new singer called “Oscar” (in reality, Paul Beuselinck).

Robert was an extraordinary character, a flamboyant Australian who liked to pass himself off as a wealthy Englishman. He would usually wear a blazer and gray slacks with a pale blue shirt and a smattering of gold, and was the epitome of a man of leisure. Seated behind an ornate desk, he launched into a very confident monologue, telling us all the things he could do for us and how wonderful our lives were going to be. Although it sounded like a lot of flannel to me, I was struck by his obvious artistic flair and thought he had a unique and interesting vision of life. He also seemed to be genuinely keen on what we were trying to do, and I thinkin some ways he truly understood us. It took me a while to tumble to the fact that he was partial to good-looking guys, but I had no problem with that, and in fact it made him appear rather vulnerable and very human to me.

Musically, we didn’t really have a plan. In my mind, when I had fantasized about it, I had seen myself as Buddy Guy, heading a blues trio with a very good rhythm section. I didn’t know how Ginger and Jack saw it in their heads, except I’m sure that our style would have leaned more toward jazz. Since Stigwood probably had no idea what we were doing, either, it is clear that the whole project was a colossal gamble. The very idea that a guitar, bass, and drum trio could make any headway in the era of the pop group was pretty outrageous. Our next step was to think of a name for the band, and I came up with Cream, for the very simple reason that in all our minds we were the cream of the crop, the elite in our respective domains. I defined the music we would play as “blues, ancient and modern.”

In the summer of 1966 the whole of England, bar us, was in the throes of World Cup fever, and it just so happened that our first proper gig, at my old stamping ground, the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, was on July 29, the night before the final. I had persuaded Ben Palmer to come out of retirement, not to play piano but to act as our roadie, and he drove us up north in a black Austin Westminster that Stigwood had bought for us. This was a pretty swanky car, a cut above the Ford Transit I was used to.

I remember Ben being horrified when we arrived to find out that the word “roadie” did not just mean “driver,” and that he was expected to lug all our equipment around. He was on a learning curve just as we were. The club was pretty quiet that night, as we were a last-minute unannounced addition to the bill, replacing Joe Tex, who had called off, but the show, consisting of predominantly blues covers like “Spoonful,” “Crossroads,” and “I’m So Glad,” was merely a warm-up for the real debut that Stigwood had planned for us, two nights later, at the sixth National Jazz and Blues Festival at Windsor Racecourse.

I wore a special outfit for that gig, a dance-band jacket I had bought from Cecil Gee on Charing Cross Road. It was black, with grosgrain lapels and gold woven thread all over it, like flocked wallpaper. It’s funny to think of now, but we were all so nervous. We were an unknown band topping the bill, closing the last night’s session. After playing mostly in clubs, we were now performing outside to fifteen thousand people. We had a tiny amount of equipment, and being only a trio, we didn’t seem to have any power. It all sounded so small, especially playing after the group then known as the world’s loudest rock band, the Who. The weather was abysmal. It poured with rain, and we only played three songs before we ran out and Ginger had to make the announcement, “Sorry, there are no more numbers.” I think we played a couple of them again, but nobody seemed to care. Then we just jammed, and the audience went crazy. The music press went crazy, describing us as the first “supergroup.”

Cream took a while to really take off. From the huge audience of the Windsor Jazz Festival, we were straightaway back on the ballroom and club circuit, starting on August 2 at Klooks Kleek, an R&B club in West Hampstead, London. We were still finding our direction, as we worked hard to persuade audiences that a trio could be every bit as good as a loud four-piece pop group. We felt we needed to play material that was recognizable, but that would also push the boundaries of what the audience would approve. In the end, the solution was often just to jam.