Slowhand

PROLOGUE: A CLOCKWORK STRAWBERRY

It’s December 1969, and lunchtime in a busy motorway cafeteria a few miles south of Leeds. Standing in the self-service queue are half a dozen young men whose shoulder-length hair, biblical beards and homespun clothes give them the look of nineteenth-century evangelists. Their fellow customers recognise them as rock musicians, pick up their mostly American accents and stare with curiosity or hostility, but no one yet realises that they include George Harrison.

Since the time of America’s Moon landing in July, it has been clear the Beatles are headed for break-up and that, with the saddest synchronicity, they and the 1960s may come to an end together. But every press report has the fractious four battling behind closed doors in London’s Mayfair. How can one of them–especially the most private, fastidious one–possibly be 170 miles to the north, in this unsympathetic environment of harsh strip-lights, clashing trays and greasy smells?

George is interrogating a female counterhand as to whether the mushroom soup of the day contains meat. ‘It’s mushroom soup,’ she reiterates patiently, still not recognising the face behind the beard or the voice. ‘It could be made with meat stock, though,’ George persists. ‘I’m a vegetarian, you see…’ Meanwhile, the bushy-bearded, fur-coated figure who’s next in line loads a plate with eggs, chips, bacon and baked beans and, for dessert, chooses a portion of synthetic-looking trifle in a frilled paper cup. He’s the twenty-four-year-old Eric Clapton. At the cash-register, he remembers he’s carrying no money–in this case not a mark of poverty but royalty. ‘Can anyone lend me a pound?’ he asks with a shamefaced grin at the incongruity of it.

The two choose a table in a deserted sector, where their companions respectfully leave them by themselves. George starts to eat his mushroom soup in the way taught at young ladies’ ‘finishing-schools’, tilting the bowl away from him, plying his spoon outwards. After a few spoonfuls, he detects the presence of meat and pushes the bowl aside. By now, he’s been noticed, if not yet positively identified, by a trio of women nearby, collecting dirty crockery with a trolley. After a murmured conference, their crew-boss, a formidable-looking Yorkshire matriarch, approaches and says, ‘It is you, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ George replies.

But there’s no escape: the women crowd round, paper napkins are produced and, dutiful Beatle that he still is, he signs them as directed for Sharon, June and their leader’s grandson, ‘little Willis’. ‘Why don’t you ask Engelbert here for an autograph as well?’ he suggests.

The trio turn to the table-companion who’s quietly working his way through his outsize fry-up. In truth, the most ardent Eric Clapton fans, even those who regard him as ‘God’, might have difficulty in recognising him today. His Apostolic beard is newly grown, replacing the earnest Zapata moustache he previously wore in homage to his best friend George, which in turn had superseded a mushroom-cloud Afro copied from Jimi Hendrix. No one else in his profession changes their look so frequently and radically. To these three least likely aficionados of psychedelic rock, all that can be said for certain is that he isn’t Engelbert Humperdinck.

‘Actually,’ George continues in the same flatlining tone, ‘this is the world’s greatest white guitarist… Bert Weedon.’

Another Beatly in-joke: few of Britain’s modern guitar stars would be where they are today without Weedon’s Play in a Day tuition-book. But with his lounge suits, crinkly dyed-blond hair and big white Hofner President, no one less rock ’n’ roll than dear old Bert can be imagined.

The trolley-boss realises it’s a wind-up, bridles with annoyance, but makes one last sally on behalf of little Willis’s autograph collection. ‘Are you a group as well?’ she asks Clapton sternly.

‘No,’ he says, avoiding her eye. ‘Just a hanger-on.’

Not every famous band’s break-up is a world-stopping tragedy like the Beatles’. Just a year prior to this encounter, the supergroup Cream–consisting of Clapton, drummer Ginger Baker and bass-player Jack Bruce and so named because each was previously in a top group–separated after only two years together. A fusion of old-fashioned blues with embryo heavy metal and freewheeling modern jazz, Cream were largely responsible for transforming pop into louder, more male-oriented rock; in their brief career they sold 15 million albums, of which the third, Wheels Of Fire, was the first double one to go platinum twice over.

Clapton has a history of walking out of bands at their peak (first the Yardbirds, then John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers), but this time his well-known restlessness was less a factor than the mutual, often violent hostility between Bruce and Baker in Cream’s premature curdling. Anyway, these days top bands continually split and re-form in different shapes like amoeba in a psychedelic light-show. Throughout the Anglo-American rock community, musicians are resigning from ensembles where they feel misunderstood, or whose commercial success has begun to weigh on them, and joining up with kindred spirits to play the kind of stuff they’ve always really yearned to.

When Graham Nash quits the Hollies to team with David Crosby from the Byrds and Steven Stills from Buffalo Springfield as Crosby, Stills and Nash, it seems that this pooling of top-level talent can’t get any better. But then, seven months after the end of Cream, Clapton and Ginger Baker are revealed to have joined forces with vocalist-organist Stevie Winwood from Traffic (and before that, the Spencer Davis Group) and bass-player Rick Grech from Family. Eschewing the new fashion for baptising bands with their members’ surnames like law firms, the super-supergroup will be called Blind Faith.

Though long ago credited with genius by his peers, Clapton at this moment is far from a national celebrity. In the Britain of 1969, rock music doesn’t yet titillate every generation and permeate every level of life. It belongs wholly to youth; the most visible part of that long-haired, unruly nation-within-a-nation known as the underground or counterculture. The Beatles apart, its luminaries are regarded as outside normal society, appearing in the national media only in negative contexts such as promiscuity, drunkenness and drug-abuse. With his still-spotless record as regards all three, Clapton has remained largely unknown to anyone over thirty.

Lately, however, he’s made a transition from the music trades to the society columns that only Mick Jagger had managed before him. The reason is his engagement to the Hon. Alice Ormsby-Gore, youngest daughter of the 5th Baron Harlech, a hereditary peer and former British Ambassador in Washington. Fleet Street loves this very Sixties romance between a member of one of Wales’s noblest families and a working-class boy from Surrey, and there’s little mention of the fact that when they met, the Hon. Alice had only just turned sixteen.

Blind Faith’s live debut is a free concert in London’s Hyde Park on 7 June in front of an estimated 120,000 people. The occasion kicks off a summer destined to be filled with epic open-air festivals marshalling rock’s premier division–the Rolling Stones also in Hyde Park, Bob Dylan on the Isle of Wight, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin at Woodstock–as if the Sixties’ thrice-blessed children are trying to hold on to the golden decade as long as possible and squeeze every last drop of joy from it.

Blind Faith’s eponymous first album is delayed by wrangles between the different record companies to which its members are contracted, so doesn’t come out until August. The cover shows an eleven-year-old girl with cloudy pre-Raphaelite hair, naked to the waist and brandishing a phallic-looking silver space ship–an image which, even in these permissive times, is notably pushing the boundaries. It immediately goes to number 1 in both Britain and the US (over there even entering the black R&B charts).

But for Clapton, Blind Faith do not live up to their hype and on their debut American tour, it becomes an increasing burden to him. He realises they’re under-rehearsed and have launched before building up enough original material: onstage, they soon exhaust the supply of their own songs and have to fall back on old hits by Cream and Stevie Winwood’s former band, Traffic, so that some rock critics, mortifyingly, dub them ‘Supercream’.

Fatefully, among the tour’s supporting acts are the American husband-and-wife country blues duo Delaney & Bonnie. Delaney Bramlett hails from Mississippi, a black-bearded, God-fearin’, hell-raisin’ good ol’ boy. Eastern-born Bonnie is his antithesis: angel-faced, blonde and refined-looking. In the early 1960s, she became the only white woman ever recruited into Ike and Tina Turner’s Ikettes, the sexiest of all backing groups. Seemingly in reaction to that, although still only twenty-five, she cultivates a grandmotherly look, pinning her golden hair haphazardly on top of her head and peering over little spectacles perched on her retroussé nose.

Clapton is immediately drawn to the Bramletts, whose soulful acoustic music seems to have all the integrity he finds lacking in Blind Faith. He starts hanging out with them, writing songs with them, even joining them onstage while giving over more and more prominence in his own band to Stevie Winwood. By the end of the tour, Blind Faith are finished and Clapton is planning to record with Delaney & Bonnie and go on the road with them. In token of his retreat from hype and over-adulation, they’ll be the headliners while he merely plays in the back-up band known simply as their Friends.

The Bramletts soon feel the financial clout of that unassuming chap who never has any money on him. Their Friends are otherwise made up of high-quality sidemen brought over from America, including drummer Jim Gordon, guitarist/keyboards-player Bobby Whitlock, bass guitarist Carl Radle and saxophonist Bobby Keys. Their new Friend-in-chief pays all the troupe’s air fares and hotel bills and gives them the run of his country mansion to rehearse with a set of expensive new amplifiers he’s had shipped over from New York.

It’s an odd moment to crave anonymity, since he’s currently being interviewed for a profile in the London Sunday Times’s hugely prestigious and glamorous colour magazine whose readership is around 1.5 million, and his portrait is to be taken by the magazine’s star photographer, the Earl of Snowdon.

That the Queen’s brother-in-law (husband of her sister, Princess Margaret) should be a working photojournalist epitomises how the 1960s have sent Britain’s ancient class barriers tumbling. But rock music will not touch the Royal Family for some years yet and Lord Snowdon, whose subjects are normally the elderly and impoverished, asks the profile-writer–me–to suggest how and where the portrait might be shot. I mention the graffito that appeared on a London tube-station wall in 1965 when our subject was still in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. CLAPTON, some anonymous spraycan-artist declared, IS GOD.

The earl takes it literally, mobilising two assistants, a bank of strobe lights, an illustrated guide to the pagan deities of Norse and Germanic mythology and a smoke machine. The Delaney & Bonnie tour rehearsals are in progress at the Lyceum, a subterranean, gilt-encrusted ballroom just off London’s Strand. Snowdon photographs Clapton alone on the dance-floor with a vintage black Gibson Les Paul. He’s temporarily clean-shaven, revealing a face one cannot call good-looking or bad-looking, or anything really, with its wide-set eyes, pointed nose and slightly receding chin. But already, as if by some instinctive defence mechanism, the first tendrils of a new moustache have begun to sprout.

Shot from below, looming through icy clouds of dry ice with features convulsed as if in pain or ecstasy (though more likely in reaction to the smoke), he resembles a T-shirted Wotan hefting a thousand-watt spear; all that’s lacking are Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and a horned helmet.

On 1 December, Delaney & Bonnie and Friends appear at London’s Royal Albert Hall, where Cream gave their already legendary farewell concerts almost exactly a year earlier. Ordinarily, it would be a wildly over-ambitious venue for a visiting American act with neither a hit single nor album in the UK. But the name Eric Clapton on the poster has guaranteed that it’s sold out.

The troupe wait to be called onstage at the mouth of a tunnel, overlooked by a block of seats. A boy as slight and inconspicuous as Clapton spots him below and calls out, ‘You’re great, Eric.’

‘Thanks, man,’ he answers resignedly.

The evening’s emcee introduces him as ‘the guy who got this gig together and the band will be going to play around…’ True to his promise, Clapton stays out of the limelight, standing on the right, well behind Delaney, identifiable only by the puffed-out sleeves of his grey silk shirt. But it soon becomes clear the audience is homing in on his guitar as if picking the best bits out of a salad. Among the songs he’s written with the Bramletts is ‘Comin’ Home’, counterpointing Delaney’s near-falsetto with a bass riff like an early rough sketch for ‘Layla’. Each growl of the riff receives an ovation.

He has the type of ‘white’ blues singing voice that many young Britons have discovered in themselves, most notably Georgie Fame and Stevie Winwood. But although he’s sung in both Cream and Blind Faith, it’s been little more than underscoring to Jack Bruce or Winwood. The Bramletts have told him he’s far better than that, Delaney warning in Southern-preacher fire ’n’ brimstone style that if he doesn’t use his voice as he should, ‘God will take it away.’

Unluckily, their British television debut together was on a show co-hosted by Georgie Fame and an equally bluesy-voiced Brit, Alan Price, formerly of the Animals. Seemingly intimidated by such competition (even though neither Fame nor Price performed on camera with the D&B troupe), Clapton remained a country-picking accompanist, glancing diffidently at Delaney as if to join in the vocal would have been the height of presumption.

But tonight, he sings lead on J. J. Cale’s ‘After Midnight’ and on ‘I Don’t Know Why’, a big-production soul number co-written with the Bramletts. Each brings the Albert Hall to its feet, rapturous that this time he’s not saying goodbye but hello–and they can hear it.

The tour begins in West Germany and Scandinavia, then returns to Britain where I join its northern leg to round off my Sunday Times Magazine profile of Clapton. His publicist Robin Turner is on hand, but these are the days before PR people hover possessively over star clients, doling out access in half-hour portions in hotel-rooms. I ride the bus with the musicians, hang out with them between shows and watch every performance from the wings.

From this privileged vantage point, I notice an addition to the Friends: an extra guitarist in a black Stetson hat and buckskin jacket whose gaunt, bearded face noticeably lacks the good humour of his American colleagues. It’s George Harrison, who has joined the tour to escape the strife among his fellow Beatles and get used to playing live again after years shut away in the recording studio. He keeps well to the back of the stage, providing chords only. Until the story gets out in Melody Maker–and in a motorway cafeteria near Leeds–the audiences have no idea who he is.

Here up north, ‘Clapton is God’ tends to be taken at face value and since the Blind Faith debacle, many have wondered when they’ll see him again, if ever. His only concern is that they should appreciate his protégés and he’s visibly upset when their response proves tepid. Robin Turner says the Scandinavian audiences showed even less tact: ‘Eric was almost in tears because people were shouting for Delaney & Bonnie to get off the stage and for him to play on his own.’

For Turner, this whole exercise is yet further evidence of ‘Eric’s chameleon personality’, something which goes far deeper than hair follicles. ‘He has a way of turning into whoever he’s with. When he was hanging out a lot with George Harrison, he bought a big house like George’s and a big Mercedes… George gave him his Indian-painted Mini. When he was with Stevie Winwood, setting up Blind Faith, he went back to jeans and wanting to live out in the country. When he met Delaney & Bonnie, he gave up travelling first class and just climbed aboard their bus.’

Even with this colossally distinguished Friend among the Bramletts’ retinue, downhome togetherness prevails. There are no star dressing-rooms: Clapton, Harrison and the Americans share communal changing areas with their British support band, Ashton, Gardner and Dyke. Clapton’s guitars lie around out of their cases, unguarded: his cherished Gibson Les Paul; a metal Dobro dating from the 1930s; a custom-made Zemaitis acoustic twelve-string, inlaid in silver, that he calls ‘Ivan the Terrible’. At one point he picks it up to show George something and, looping its strap over his head, says in all seriousness, ‘I’m not very good at chords.’

Perpetually circulating joints aside, there’s none of the depravity associated with rock tours–at least, none visible. No move is made to trash any of the gloomy old grand hotels where they’re accommodated, despite the surly staff and impossibly pretentious restaurants which refuse service to long hair, ponchos and crushed velvet trousers on principle, and close as early as nine p.m.

Nor are there groupies or orgies; quite the opposite, the Americans with their solemn beards and grave, old-fashioned speech (‘I don’t care for any, thank you’…) give the impression of a non-stop Bible meeting. In any case, Bonnie Bramlett, always the focus of things in her granny glasses, wearing a shawl, working at a piece of embroidery and sometimes breaking into a soul-smoky gospel song, would act as a powerful deterrent.

When I get Clapton alone–as I can pretty much any time between shows–he’s friendly and candid, speaking in a Sixties-classless voice with a faint Surrey burr. I notice the dull teeth that are the legacy of most British boys born during or just after the Second World War. He’s articulate far beyond usual rock-star level and better-read than any I’ve met before, save only John Lennon. At the moment, he’s immersed in A.J. Cronin’s Hatter’s Castle, the story of a tyrannical Scottish hat-maker which reaches its climax with the 1879 Tay Bridge railway disaster. He already loves the 1942 film noir version, starring Robert Newton and the young James Mason.

He tells me about Robert Johnson, the blues musician who for him surpasses all others; a figure likewise credited with genius as a very young man. It resonates hugely with him that at recording-sessions Johnson was too humble to look the engineer in the eye, but sang and played facing the wall.

He also talks about his childhood, something rock celebrities in this era seldom do. I’m the first interviewer to hear how he was brought up by his grandmother, believing that she was his mother, and how when his real mother came back into his life, he had to pretend she was his grown-up sister. This creates a bond, for there was a similar deception in my own family that blighted my existence for years afterwards. I assume the Sixties have helped him get over it just as they’ve helped me.

When I raise the question of his personal wealth–in reference to all that expensive equipment given to the Delaney & Bonnie band–he’s neither offended nor evasive. ‘I dunno how much I got, man,’ he confesses.

Rock stars are granted a second childhood–for the rest of their lives if they choose–and nowhere more so than when on tour. In one of our conversations, he reminisces about his days with the Yardbirds, belting up and down Britain packed into a single van, and about musicians’ roadside meeting places like the Ram Jam Inn. ‘And there was a transport caff just off the M1 called the Blue Boar where you could get away with anything. Throwing plates of fried tomatoes… anything.’

Those memories of the old Blue Boar are clearly hard to shake. In Newcastle-on-Tyne, the hotel has unbent sufficiently to leave a cold supper laid out for the musicians after the show. It’s an impressive spread but not much of it gets eaten, for Clapton starts a food-fight that leaves everyone soaked in mayonnaise and vinaigrette and picking lettuce leaves and bits of sweetcorn out of their hair and beards, helpless with laughter. ‘That was great,’ he says later with the exhilaration of someone fresh from a spa.

Delaney Bramlett, that black-bearded, roistering good ol’ boy, has become his soulmate. During the few daylight hours that see rock musicians up and about, they disappear together for long periods, apparently perpetrating juvenile mischief in the wider world. When they return from one such expedition, Delaney has somehow lost one whole leg of his jeans up to the thigh. He continues wearing them nonetheless, even onstage.

Before the second Newcastle show, the pair sally forth again, intending to purchase water pistols. Instead they return with a quantity of little plastic fruit, oranges, lemons and pears with grotesque, leering faces that can be wound up to walk a few unsteady paces on undersized legs. That night, while the support band, Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, are playing, Clapton ducks onstage and sets a lemon toddling along the top of Tony Ashton’s electric organ.

After the show, they all hold races with the clockwork fruit on the dressing-room floor. It’s a scene I’ll always remember: the long-haired, hippy-garbed figures cheering on their chosen miniature oranges, cherries or grapefruit; Bonnie Bramlett, gold-haired and grannyish, an island of tranquillity, working at her embroidery and softly singing ‘Oh Happy Day’; her black-bearded spouse, with one leg clothed in blue denim and one bare, encouraging a scarlet strawberry: ‘C’mon Big Red! You’re a winner, Big Red! Go, Big Red… go!’

My last night with the tour is in Liverpool, a city which has raised no monument to its four most famous sons and now seemingly never will. Out of respect for George Harrison, the subject is never mentioned. Instead, the talk turns to last August’s Woodstock festival and its surprise hit, an American vocal group named Sha Na Na who perform Fifties rock ’n’ roll as knockabout comedy.

None of the Sixties’ musical heroes, Dylan included, would be where they are without those primordial anthems by Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and the rest. Throughout the decade, they’ve put rock ’n’ roll firmly behind them, focusing always on evolution and experimentation. But on the cusp of the Seventies–with Heaven knows what lying ahead–there’s a rush of nostalgia for its exuberance, simplicity and what’s recognised now as wondrous innocence.

So this evening’s Delaney & Bonnie show features a bunch of golden oldies like Richard’s ‘Rip It Up’, all so familiar that they don’t need rehearsing. Despite the fine specimens all around him, Clapton’s bushy beard has not returned and to get into the Fifties spirit he wets his hair and combs it into a Teddy Boy quiff that finally stamps some character on his naked face–a faint look of Gene Vincent.

The so-called rock ’n’ roll ‘tribute’ is intended as parody–but those old three-chord chestnuts prove as potent as ever. By the end, a guitar virtuoso who normally seldom moves onstage, and never smiles, is angling his fretboard… going down on one knee like Cliff Gallup from Vincent’s band the Blue Caps… actually laughing.

Even George feels the exhilaration. ‘I’d forgotten what a gas playing live can be,’ he says afterwards ‘That Little Richard medley is in E, isn’t it?’

Though the tour’s live album will give Delaney & Bonnie the intended boost and Delaney will go on to produce Clapton’s first solo album, his acoustic-folk-rock-Lawd A’mighty-ham ’n’ grits-down-on-the-bayou interlude is nearing its end. In rock’s ever-changing light-show, a new amoeba is soon to take shape.

A few months from now, Delaney & Bonnie’s Friends will be no more and Clapton will have taken the nucleus to form yet another band–one giving a new twist to his relentless self-effacement. In tune with the burgeoning rock ’n’ roll revival, their name will hark back to late-Fifties vocal groups whose leaders went semi-incognito (Dion and the Belmonts, Danny and the Juniors, Little Anthony and the Imperials), while wryly suggesting some clunky British contribution to the genre. They will be Derek and the Dominos, the vehicle for one of rock’s greatest love songs and for their modestly pseudonymised leader to embark on the seduction of his Beatle best friend’s wife.

Backstage in Liverpool, Delaney little suspects what a different place Clapton’s head is already in while they and the others race their clockwork fruit over the changing-room floor. Crouched down with one leg still bare, the Satanic-looking good ol’ boy cheers on his plastic strawberry, which does indeed seem to possess a turn of speed its orange, lemon and grapefruit rivals do not. ‘C’mon, Big Red… don’t let me down! You can do this! Go, Big Red, go!’

He wails in frustration–a foretaste of much more to come–as Big Red hits a bump in the carpet and topples over, its legs continuing to rotate feebly.