The current best-selling status of Pattie Boyd’s memoir, “Wonderful Tonight” – about being married to George Harrison while falling for guitar god Eric Clapton – has established that romantic triangle as the great rock ‘n’ roll love story. And, since neither relationship ended well, the great tragic rock ‘n’ roll love story.
That has made Clapton’s autobiography eagerly awaited. And, since he’s a frank and direct writer who doesn’t hide his feelings, he does address the affair at some length and with some discomfort:
“I told her that if she didn’t leave him, I would start taking heroin full-time,” he writes. “In truth, of course, I had been taking it almost full-time for quite a while. She smiled sadly at me, and I knew the game was over. That was the last time I saw her for several years.” (That passage, by the way, comes well before Clapton and Boyd began their troubled life together; they married in 1979 and divorced in 1989.)
Yet one suspects that those primarily interested in the Clapton- Boyd-Harrison affair will choose Boyd’s book over this. One reason is that Clapton suffered a greater tragedy than a broken heart. In 1991 his young son, Conor, by Italian actress Lori del Santo, ran through an open window in her New York condominium and fell 49 floors to his death.
“I went to see him … at the funeral home, to say goodbye to him, and to apologize for not being a better father,” Clapton writes. (The death prompted his song “Tears in Heaven,” after “Layla” his most well-known composition.)
But another reason is that, in the end, this book is most interesting for what it reveals about his music rather than his love life. He would agree, I think – his most telling comment about the latter comes when describing losing his virginity as a teen: “I was terrified and fumbly; I still am for that matter.”
And what’s most interesting about the music is his diffident, almost-dismissive attitude to the quality of his greatest, most enduring work. As rock ‘n’ roll became the art form known as rock, he was in the forefront. But he didn’t enjoy it.
From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, he worked with the Yardbirds (“For Your Love”), John Mayall, Cream (“Sunshine of Your Love”), Blind Faith (“Presence of the Lord”) and Derek & the Dominos (“Layla”) without seeming to be satisfied. (He did enjoy briefly touring and recording as a glorified sideman with Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, an American rock-and- soul revue.)
He sheds some light on his discomfort here. It seems to arise from both a desire to be a journeyman blues player, and thus suspicious of rock excess, and a dislike for being called a “guitar god.”
When he was with Mayall in the mid-1960s, developing his trademark fast and loud style of playing, “Clapton Is God” graffiti started appearing on London walls. “Through my playing, people were being exposed for the first time to the sound of the Chicago blues. It was almost as if they thought I had invented it.”
He pinpoints what he kept running from. “I was trying so hard to escape the pseudo-
virtuoso image I had helped create for myself,” he says.
Clapton’s recollections about how he first became interested in music are compelling. As he grew up in England with his grandparents – his young single mom had moved to Canada and married – he discovered his love for guitars and the American blues of Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and especially Freddy King. “It was very similar to hearing the sound of a Ferrari, or a powerful motorbike, or the sounds of certain animals that make your hair stand on end,” he writes.
I wish Clapton had written even more about music. A fair amount of this book is glum and melancholy as he goes through his struggles with hard drugs and alcoholism. (He eventually successfully went through rehab – he even beat a cigarette addiction!) As such, it’s the latest such confessional rock ‘n’ roll autobiography in the nature of John Phillips’ classic “Papa John” and David Crosby’s “Long Time Gone.”
Not to be callous, but such stories have become predictable. In reality, Clapton has led a charmed life. Even amid all the personal turmoil and tragedy, the hits never stopped coming and he kept getting richer.
Today, he is happily married and, at age 62, has three young daughters with his wife. (He also has an older daughter.) He makes successful new albums, although they look back at his blues roots rather than forward to revolutionizing pop and rock. He is still a guitar god and seems to have found peace with that. But it hasn’t been easy for him.
Steven Rosen is a freelance
writer in Cincinnati.
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NONFICTION
Clapton:
The Auto-
biography,
by Eric
Clapton, $26
