Eric Clapton
In this autobiography, Eric Clapton very transparently shares his love of music, addiction to alcohol, drugs, and women, finally bringing him to a place of utter hopelessness. Amazingly, he has an encounter with God, albeit rather late in life, causing a dramatic turnaround in his personal life and bringing him to a life of peace, family and complete sobriety.
He was born March 30, 1945 in Ripley, Surry, England. “The truth I eventually discovered was that Mum and Dad, Rose and Jack Clapp, were in fact my grandparents, Adrian was my uncle, and Rose’s daughter, Patricia, from an earlier marriage, was my real mother and had given me the name Clapton.”
“School for me began when I was five, at Ripley Church of England Primary School, which was situated in a flint building next to the village church. Opposite was the village hall, where I attended Sunday school, and where I first heard a lot of the old, beautiful English hymns, my favorite of which was ‘Jesus Bids us Shine.’”
“Most of the music I was introduced to from an early age came from the radio, which was permanently switched on in the house. I feel blessed to have been born in that period because, musically, it was very rich in its diversity…We would hear the whole spectrum of music- opera, classical, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and pop- so typically there might be something like Guy Mitchell singing ‘She Wears Red Feathers,’ then a big-band piece by Stan Kenton, a dance tune by Victor Sylvester, maybe a pop song by David Whitfield, an aria from a Puccini opera like La Boheme, and, if I was lucky, Handel’s ‘Water Music,’ which was one of my favorites.” We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to listen to a wide variety of music.
“Music became a healer for me, and I learned to listen with all my being. I found that it could wipe away all the emotions of fear and confusion relating to my family. These became even more acute in 1954, when I was nine and my mother suddenly turned up in my life. By this time she was married, to a Canadian soldier named Frank MacDonald…one evening…I suddenly blurted out…’Can I call you Mummy now?’…Then she said in a very kindly way, ‘I think it’s best, after all they’ve done for you, that you go on calling your grandparents Mum and Dad,’ and in that moment I felt total rejection…my disappointment was unbearable.”
“By the time I took my Art A Level, at the age of sixteen, and moved on to Kingston School of Art…I was becoming quite proficient as a player and learning new things all the time. I used to frequent a coffee bar in Richmond called L’Auberge…they would have New Orleans jazz bands playing there, people like Ken Colyer, and the Temperance Seven, and we loved it…Drugs were rare, and even the drinking was fairly moderate.”
Art school didn’t’ last long, however.
“Being thrown out of art school was another rite of passage for me…(I) accepted a job working for Jack (his grandfather) as his ‘mate’ at fifteen pounds a week, which was a good wage. It meant mixing up lots of plaster, mortar, and cement and getting it to him quickly…I got extremely fit, and I really did love the work, probably because I knew it would not last forever…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…His legacy to me was that I should always try to do my best, and always finish what I started.” We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to have personal values of hard work and faithfulness to complete projects.
Some of Clapton’s strongest early musical influences were John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis. Clapton, along with some of his friends formed a group ‘The Roosters’. “We met for rehearsals in a room above a pub somewhere in Surbiton…The Roosters rehearsed more than we played…It seemed like the ‘trad jazz’ movement was dying, and was taking folk and blues with it…Most of our gigs were on the Ricky Tick club circuit, a series of clubs in the Home Counties run by Phillip Hayward and John Mansfield.”
Eventually, he was recruited into another group called Casey Jones and the Engineers. In the same geographical region, The Rolling Stones were formed, and The Beatles also came through the area to see the Stones. “There was obviously a mutual admiration thing going on between them and the Stones.”
In that environment, one evening the Yardbirds asked Clapton to join their group. “I was still a bit wary about joining another group, but I genuinely thought it would be no more than a stopgap. There were five of us: Keith on vocals and harp, Chris Dreja on rhythm guitar, Paul Samwell-Smith on bass, Jim McCarty on drums, and myself on lead.”
“For the first time in my life, I now had a full-time job as a musician, which meant giving up working for my grandfather. My grandmother was delighted, as she knew where my talents lay, while my grandfather was quietly amused, so they gave me their blessing…At first I lived at home, drawing a weekly wage packet, and commuted to rehearsals and gigs, but after a while Giorgio rented us a flat on the top floor of an old house in Kew, and we all moved in together. This was a great period for me, as it was the first time I had lived away from home.”
“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.”
“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 not 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.” We teach students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to focus on what they have to work with, rather than looking and searching for what is not yet available to them.
He eventually formed the group Cream. “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.”
“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…Famous musicians would drop by the Atlantic studios to voice their approval- Booker T., Otis Redding, Al Kooper, and Janis Joplin among them- and word was soon out that something extraordinary was in the making.”
“Unfortunately for us, Jimi (Hendrix) had just released Are You Experienced?, and that was all anyone wanted to listen to. Everywhere you went it was wall-to-wall Jimi, and I felt really down. I thought we had made our definitive album (Disraeli Gears), only to come home and find that nobody was interested. It was the beginning of a disenchantment with England, where it seemed there wasn’t really room for more than one person to be popular at a time. What I loved about America was that it seemed such a broad breeding ground for different acts and talent, and different forms of music. You could be in a car and tune the radio to a country music station, a jazz station, a rock station, a blues station, or an oldies rock station. Even back then the categorization was so wide, there seemed to be room for anyone to make a living out of it and be at the forefront of what they were doing.”
“Touring America is what made Cream as famous as we became. U.S. audiences really couldn’t get enough of us.”
“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…Stephen had asked me to visit his ranch in Topanga Canyon to watch his band, Buffalo Springfield, rehearse.”
“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…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 the 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 was growing up around us, and it seemed that we weren’t learning from it.” It is easy to become complacent as an artist. In our music school in Odessa, Texas, we hope to give our students the accountability they need to always strive for greater excellence.
“When 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.”
Clapton joined up with a husband and wife team Delaney & Bonnie. “It was the beginning of one of the most extraordinary periods of my life, the memory of which is dominated by one thing- incredible music. It began with me just talking to these guys about music….I was in absolute awe of these people, and yet they made me feel that I was on their level.”
“All we did was jam and jam and jam and night would become day and day would become night, and it just felt good to me to stay that way. I had never felt so musically free before.” We believe that improvisation plays a key role in the musical development in the student of our music school in Odessa, Texas.
At this time, George Harrison frequently came around, along with his wife Pattie. Clapton admits, “his visits gave me plenty of opportunity to flirt with Pattie behind Paula’s back.”
Clapton admits being addicted to heroin, trying to go ‘cold turkey’ to get off of it.
“George was a committed Christian and came on quite strong about God and Christianity and Jesus, and I found this a little overwhelming because I felt so vulnerable. To a certain extent I felt he was taking advantage of my situation, so I was a little guarded around both of them. Though I had certainly looked at religion, I have always been resistant to doctrine, and any spirituality I had experienced thus far in my life had been much more abstract and not aligned with any recognized religion. For me, the most trustworthy vehicle for spirituality had always proven to be music. It cannot be manipulated, or politicized, and when it is, that becomes immediately obvious. But of course, I could not explain that to them back then.”
Clapton was in and out of a number of relationships with women, and had later heard that Pattie had actually left George, so he continued to pursue her. By his own admission, however, “my relationship with Pattie, now that we could actually be together, was not the incredibly romantic affair it has been portrayed as being…because my addiction was always in the way.”
At this point Clapton was also a full-blown alcoholic. “Over the next two years, my drinking brought me to rock bottom. It infiltrated everything I did.”
“The fallacy about drinking, however, is that when people say they drink to forget, all it does is magnify the problem. I would have a drink to banish the problem and then, when it didn’t go away, have another one, so the end of my drinking days were really insane, because I was constantly spurred on by the hope that I could somehow get to another place.”
He eventually tried to get rehab help at Hazelden in Center City northeast of Minneapolis-St. Paul. “I was either above or below everybody. I was either towering above as Clapton the guitar virtuoso, or cringing on the floor, because if you took away my guitar and my musical career, then I was nothing. My fear of loss of identity was phenomenal…When the focus shifted toward my well-being as a human being, and to the realization that I was an alcoholic and suffering from the same disease everybody else was, I went into meltdown.”
“Reflecting on the years after I came out of Hazelden, I now realize that there was no reason for me to be making records at all. A more intelligent approach to rebuilding my life would have been to leave recording for a while to try something else, and spend a few years finding out what is was that I really wanted to do rather than just step back into the accepted pattern from the past.”
While on tour Clapton entered into an affair with Yvonne, from Doncaster. “Another piece of shocking news that reached me on my return from the Roger Waters tour was in a letter from Yvanne, who wrote to say that she was pregnant and that the baby was mine…Pattie had begun an affair with a society photographer.” They were soon divorced.
Writing in his journal, Clapton states, “The whole day I spent getting more and more suicidal, until finally the phone rang in the evening and it was Roger W., who just by being gentle brought me out of it. I stopped drinking, threw the coke away and drank glass after glass of water until finally I came back to a feeling of clarity and ease. I must never let this happen again…”
“Two things helped me during this dark period. First and foremost was my music, the one thing that was always there for me. ‘I want to express all my pain in my music,’ I wrote in one entry in my diary. ‘I don’t want to stifle it, I want it to reach others in pain so that they can know they are not alone.’”
As Clapton was touring Italy, he started having an affair with Lori. “As soon as Lori came to understand that she could never get me to commit to anything, she went back to Milan.” Lori became pregnant and in August 1986, gave birth to Conor, their son.”
Clapton’s drinking was full-blown again. He admits, while on a tour in Australia, “By then there had been such an erosion of my capabilities that I couldn’t stop shaking. For the second time, I’d reached the point where I couldn’t live without a drink and I couldn’t live with one. I was a mess, and so far as my playing was concerned, I was just about scraping by…I suddenly knew that I had to go back into treatment.”
“I stumbled through my month in treatment much as I had done the first time…then one day, as my visit was drawing to an end, a panic hit me, and I realized that in fact nothing had changed in me, and that I was going back out into the world again completely unprotected…I was absolutely terrified, in complete despair.”
“At that moment, almost of their own accord, my legs gave way and I fell to my knees, In the privacy of my room I begged for help. I had no notion who I thought I was talking to, I just knew that I had come to the end of my tether, I had nothing left to fight with. Then I remembered what I had heard about surrender, something I thought I could never do, my pride just wouldn’t allow it, but I knew that on my own I wasn’t going to make it, so I asked for help, and, getting down on my knees, I surrendered.”
“Within a few days I realized that something had happened for me. An atheist would probably say it was just a change of attitude, and to a certain extent that’s true, but there was much more to it than that. I had found a place to turn to, a place I’d always known was there but never really wanted, or needed, to believe in. From that day until this, I have never failed to pray in the morning, on my knees, asking for help, and at night, to express gratitude for my life and, most of all, for my sobriety. I choose to kneel because I feel I need to humble myself when I pray, and with my ego, this is the most I can do.”
“If you are asking why I do all this, I will tell you…because it works, as simple as that. In all this time that I’ve been sober, I have never once seriously though of taking a drink or a drug. I have no problem with religion, and I grew up with a strong curiosity about spiritual matters, but my searching took me away from church and community worship to the internal journey. Before my recovery began, I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hess, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Water. In some way, in some form, God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.” We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to have a heart that is open to God’s leadership in their lives.
Clapton began to gain insights on his life. “I found a pattern in my behavior that had been repeating itself for years, decades even. Bad choices were my specialty, and if something honest and decent came along, I would shun it or run the other way. It could be argued that my choices reflected the way I saw myself, that I thought I wasn’t worthy of anything decent, so I could only choose partners who would ultimately abandon me, as I was convinced my mother had done, all those years ago.”
By this time Lori and his son Connor had moved to New York City. Clapton received an urgent phone call from Lori saying that Connor had just died. He had fallen forty-nine floors out of the apartment’s window, which had been left open for cleaning.
Clapton shared with his friends, who were trying to console him in the loss of his son, as he was teaching in the twelve step program, “I recounted the story of how, during my last stay in Hazelden, I had fallen upon my knees and asked for help to stay sober. I told the meeting that the compulsion was taken away at that moment, and as far as I was concerned, this was physical evidence that my prayers had been answered. Having had that experience, I said, I knew I could get through this.”
Clapton met Melia in Los Angeles at an event featuring Jimmie Vaughan and his band. “I had gone to the party…feeling detached and numb, which is how I usually feel at big gatherings anyway. Suddenly a very beautiful girl, who was one of the staff showing people to their tables, came up to me…and asked if she could have her picture taken with me.
He asked her out on a date, and they were eventually married. Things were starting to even out for Clapton, with his new wife. He became more of a ‘family man’, now with two daughters with his wife, Melia. He also began to have greater satisfaction in his music-making.
“Musically, life was full, too. Over thirty years since we had fist jammed together at the Café Au Go Go, I finally cut the album with B.B. King that he and I had been talking about for a long time. We called it Riding with the King. Working with B.B. was a dream come true.”
“The last ten years have been the best of my life. They have been filled with love and a deep sense of satisfaction, not because of what I feel I have achieved, but more because of what has been bestowed on me. I have a loving family at my side, a past I am no longer ashamed of, and a future that promises to be full of love and laughter…As I write this, I am sixty-two years old, twenty years sober, and busier than I have ever been…My family continues to bring me joy and happiness on a daily basis.”
“Looking back, my journey has brought me into proximity with some of the great masters of my profession, and all of them took the time to show me something of their craft, even if they weren’t aware of it. Perhaps the most rewarding relationship I have had with any of these great players has been with Buddy Guy…The one man I have left out so far is Muddy Waters, the reason being that, for me, he represented something much more fundamental.”
“The music scene as I look at it today is little different from when I was growing up. The percentages are roughly the same- 95 percent rubbish, 5 percent pure. However, the systems of marketing and distribution are in the middle of a huge shift, and by the end of this decade I think it’s unlikely that any of the existing record companies will still be in business. With the greatest respect to all involved, that would be no great loss. Music will always find its way to us…Music survives everything, and like God, it is always present. It needs no help, and suffers no hindrance. It has always found me, and with God’s blessing and permission, it always will.”