Authors: Eric Clapton
I’d had a call from Carl Radle telling me that Delaney & Bonnie and Friends had disbanded, and asking me whether I might be interested in doing something with him, Bobby Whitlock, and Jim Gordon. Having nothing else on, I’d said yes, and they flew over to England and came to live at Hurtwood. 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 and getting to know them, and then we just played and played and played.
I was in absolute awe of these people, and yet they made me feel that I was on their level. My musicianship fit with their musicianship. We were kindred spirits, made in the same mold. To this day I would say that the bass player Carl Radle and the drummer Jimmy Gordon are the most powerful rhythm section I have ever played with. They were absolutely brilliant. When people say that Jim Gordon is the greatest rock ’n’ roll drummer who ever lived, I think it’s true, beyond anybody.
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 kept ourselves going with fryups and a cocktail of drink and drugs, mostly cocaine and Mandrax. “Mandies” were quite strong sleeping pills, but instead of letting them put us to sleep, we would ride the effect, staying awake by snorting some coke or drinking some brandy or vodka, and this would create a unique kind of high. This became the chemistry of our lives, mixing all these things together. God knows how our bodies stood it.
I had no game plan at this time. We were just enjoying playing, getting stoned, and writing songs. George Harrison was a frequent caller. He had recently moved from Kinfauns, his bungalow in Esher, to a sprawling mansion in Henley called Friar Park, and his visits gave me plenty of opportunity to flirt with Pattie behind Paula’s back. One night I called up Pattie and told her “the truth,” that it was not Paula I was interested in, or any other girl she might see me with, but that she was the one I really wanted. In spite of her protests that she was married to George and that what I was suggesting was impossible, she agreed to my coming over to talk to her. I drove over there, and we talked about it over a bottle of red wine and ended up kissing, and I sensed for the first time that there was some kind of hope for me. I knew then what I had suspected for some time, that all was not well in her marriage.
I was so buoyed up by what had happened with Pattie, as well as being a bit drunk, that on the way home, driving a little Ferrari Dino that I’d just bought, I took a corner in Clandon much too fast and hit a fence, and the car flipped over onto its roof. I didn’t pass out, but I found myself just hanging there upside down. Somehow I undid the seat belt and got out, and, realizing that I didn’t even have a driver’s license, made the decision to run home and make out that someone had stolen the car. So I set off running, but soon realized that I was heading in the wrong direction, back toward London.
I then thought that I would hide somewhere, so I opened a gate in the hedge, walked into what turned out to be a graveyard, and sat down on a grave. After a while I decided to go back and face the music. I walked back to where the car was, and all these people wearing dressing gowns were wandering around with torches, looking for the driver. I owned up that it was me. Someone had already called an ambulance and it arrived straightaway and took me to Guildford Hospital for a checkup. Then Bobby Whitlock came and took me home. Miraculously for me, I was unhurt, and luckily the police never got involved.
I began to get into the habit of dropping into Friar Park, in the hope that George might be away and I might catch a few moments alone with Pattie. One evening I went over there and found the two of them together with John Hurt. I was slightly taken aback, but George took over the situation and gave me a guitar and we started playing, which by now was a common occurrence with us.
There was quite an atmosphere in the house that night. A roaring fire was going, candles burning, and as the intensity of our playing increased, John sat there with a rapturous look on his face as if he were privy to some fantastic meeting of the giants, or battle of the sorcerers. With his actor’s imagination, I could see him creating this scenario in which George and I were somehow engaged in a musical duel for the hand of Pattie, who wafted in from time to time bringing us tea and cakes. The truth is, we were just jamming, although the mythical rumor of that night may have passed around a few dining room tables.
George was working on his first solo album,
All Things Must Pass
, and one day he asked if the Tulsa guys and I would play on it. I knew he had Phil Spector producing for him, so we made a deal whereby he would get Spector to produce a couple of tracks for us in return for having the use of our band for his album. After my dalliance with Ronnie Ronette, who had later told me how much I reminded her of her husband, I was curious to meet Phil Spector, and noticed that we actually did have the same kind of facial profile. We recorded two songs with him, “Roll It Over” and “Tell the Truth,” at Abbey Road Studios before turning ourselves over to George as his session musicians.
Working with Spector was quite an experience. I thought he was a really sweet guy, maybe just a bit eccentric, but the rumor was that he carried a gun, so I was a little bit wary. Most of the time, though, he was hilariously funny, and he and George really seemed to hit it off. His method of working was to get a lot of players in the room and have them all playing at the same time, creating the famous “wall of sound.”
Other than my group and George, there seemed to be hundreds of musicians in the studio—percussionists, guitarists, George’s group, Badfinger, Gary Wright and Spooky Tooth—all hammering away like mad. To my ears it sounded great and big. A lot of drugs were also around, and I think this was when heroin began to come into my life. A particular dealer used to come around whose deal was that you could buy as much coke as you wanted on the condition that you took a certain amount of smack at the same time. I would snort the coke and store all the smack in the drawer of an antique desk at Hurtwood.
On a Sunday night in June, we tried the band out in front of an audience at a charity concert at the Lyceum in the Strand, in aid of Dr. Spock’s Civil Liberties Legal Defense Fund. In the excitement of just forming the group, one thing had slipped our minds, and that was, right up to the last minute before we were to go onstage, we had no name for ourselves. Ashton, Gardiner, and Dyke were the opening act, and Tony Ashton always used to call me Del and suggested that we should be Del and the Dominos. When he did finally announce us, without any mention of our real names, it was as Derek and the Dominos, and the name just stuck. Our set consisted of songs from our Delaney days, like “Blues Power” and “Bottle of Red Wine,” a couple of blues numbers, “Crossroads” and “Spoonful,” and, because Dave Mason had joined us for this one show, a Traffic song, “Feelin’ Alright.”
The thing I remember best about that whole evening was not the show, but a weird meeting I had afterward with Dr. John, who had been in the audience. I had come across the legendary “Night Tripper” before, in New York City, on the very night Delaney had told me that my gift would be taken away from me if I didn’t sing. On the way home from seeing Sha Na Na, we had dropped by Dr. John’s hotel, where he had sung a great song for us called “You’re Giving Me the Push I Need.” It was the first time I had met him, and I was totally mesmerized. Soon after that we went to see him play live, and I just fell in love with him. He’s a wonderful man and an incredible musician. Whether or not he was ever a practicing voodoo doctor, I don’t know, but for my own purposes, at that time, I chose to believe he was.
When I ran into him at the Lyceum, I told him that I wanted to consult him as a doctor. He asked me what my problem was, and I told him that I needed a remedy. “What kind of remedy?” he asked, and I told him…“A love potion.” In a way, I was just calling his bluff, but he then asked me to tell him a little more about the situation. So I told him I was deeply in love with the wife of another man, and that she was no longer happy with him, but wouldn’t leave him. He gave me a little box made out of woven straw and told me to keep it in my pocket, and gave me various long-forgotten instructions as to what to do with it. I do remember that I did exactly as I was told.
A few weeks later, purely by chance, or so it seemed, I ran into Pattie, and we just kind of collided, to the point where there was no turning back. A little while later I saw George at a party at Stigwood’s house and blurted the whole thing out to him: “I’m in love with your wife.” The ensuing conversation bordered on the absurd. Although I think he was deeply hurt—I could see it in his eyes—he preferred to make light of it, almost turning it all into a Monty Python situation. I think he was relieved in some way, though, because I’m sure all the time he knew what had been going on, and now I was finally owning up to it.
This was the beginning of a semi-clandestine affair between us, and the end of my relationship with Paula, who moved on to Bobby Whitlock. But however much I tried to persuade her, it was quite clear that Pattie had no intention of leaving George, even though I was convinced that the writing was on the wall for them. Tormented by my feelings for her, I threw myself into my music, starting with a UK tour of the Dominos. The idea was that wherever we went, we should play incognito and in this way get back to our roots. At first, it worked. We toured around the country, playing small clubs and halls in towns like Scarborough, Dunstable, Torquay, and Redcar, and no one knew who we were, and I loved it. I loved the fact that we were this little quartet playing in obscure places, sometimes to audiences of no more than fifty or sixty people.
This was an incredibly creative time for me. Driven by my obsession with Pattie, I was writing a lot, and all the songs I wrote for the Dominos’ first album are really about her and our relationship. “Layla” was the key song, a conscious attempt to speak to Pattie about the fact that she was holding off and wouldn’t come and move in with me. “What’ll you do when you get lonely?” The
Layla
album was recorded at Criteria Studios in Miami, where we headed in late August. Its beginnings were inauspicious, because we soon found that, apart from “Layla,” which was still no more than a framework, we actually had very little material. Before I left, Pattie had asked me to get her some pairs of these jeans we used to wear called Landlubbers, which were hipsters with two little slip pockets at the front. She had asked for flared rather than straight bottoms, so I had written “Bell Bottom Blues” for her. Then I had another love song about her called “I Looked Away,” and one or two blues covers I was keen to record, but it was all taking a lot of time and for the first couple of weeks we really weren’t getting anywhere.
What we were doing was having a lot of fun. During the day we would go swimming and have saunas, and then it was off to the studio to jam, sometimes with chemical assistance. We were staying in a funky little hotel on Miami Beach where you could score hard drugs in the gift shop by the front reception desk. You just placed your order with the girl who worked there, and you’d come back the next day and she’d hand it over to you in a brown paper bag. By this time we were doing quite a lot of different stuff: smack and coke as well as all kinds of mad stuff like PCP.
One night our producer, Tom Dowd, told me that the Allman Brothers Band was playing the Coconut Grove and suggested that we all go down to see them. With their long, long hair and beards, the band looked amazing, and they were great musicians. I loved them, but what really blew me away was Duane Allman’s guitar playing. I was mesmerized by him. He was very tall and thin with an air of complete conviction, and although he didn’t sing, I felt sure he was the leader of the band, just by his body language. Tom introduced us to the band after the show, and we invited them back to the studio for a jam, which resulted in me asking Duane to play on the sessions while they were in town.
Duane and I became inseparable during the time we were in Florida, and between the two of us we injected the substance into the
Layla
sessions that had been missing up to that point. He was like the musical brother I’d never had but wished I did; more so than Jimi, who was essentially a loner, while Duane was a family man, a brother. Unfortunately for me, he already had a family, but I loved it while it lasted. These kinds of experiences don’t happen every day, and I knew enough by then to cherish it while I could.
Having another guitarist made our band come alive, and when Duane went back to playing with the Allman Brothers, we were never really the same again. The Dominos returned to England and carried on touring, but when we put out the album, it died because, even though word was beginning to seep out that “Derek is Eric,” I wasn’t prepared to do any press or help it in any way. I was still a real idealist in those days, and my hope was that the album would sell on its merit. It didn’t, of course, because lack of promotion meant that nobody knew it was out there. In the end, pressure from the record company on the one hand and Stigwood on the other compelled me to agree first to having “Derek is Eric” badges released to the press, and second to our promoting the album both at home and in the States.
By the time I got back to America, my heart was no longer in the Dominos. We had scored masses of coke and smack before we left Florida and took it on tour with us. With the amount of drugs we were taking every day, I really don’t know how we got through that tour alive, and by the time we came back to England, we were all on the path to becoming full-blown addicts. Tom Dowd was so worried about me that he asked Ahmet Ertegun to come and see me. Ahmet took me aside and talked to me in a very fatherly way about how concerned he was about my drug taking. He told me all about his experiences with Ray Charles, and how painful it had been for him to watch Ray get more and more caught up in the world of hard drugs. At one point he became very emotional and started to cry. You would think that, because I can recall this with such clarity, it had some effect on me, but the fact is, it didn’t make the slightest difference. I was hell-bent on doing what I was going to do and really didn’t see it as being all that bad.