Eric Clapton's Story Skips The Music

I first saw Eric Clapton play guitar at the old Boston Garden on the distant evening of July 12, 1974, or so the internets inform me. I was 15, and he was 29, touring behind the "461 Ocean Boulevard" album and his ubiquitous hit cover of Bob Marley's "I Shot The Sheriff." I still love the album, but even then suspected it marked a turning point in his career, and in a not-necessarily-welcome direction. His drug addiction was doused (to be replaced by alcoholism, as it turned out), but so was the flame that burned behind Cream and Derek and the Dominoes. The solo album sounded practically middle of the road by comparison to those bands, and I remember being relieved that night when he did indeed play "Layla." The godawful "Unplugged" version of "Layla" was still almost 20 years away, but if you put your ear to the rails even then you could hear it coming...

We've rightly abandoned the canard that drugs or alcohol often aid creativity. But recovery culture has obscured the fact that the best art is often made amid the kind of turmoil that also inspires substance abuse. Cleaning up doesn't end an artist's greatness, but it can be coincidental. As I was lucky enough to hear in the 1990s, when he brought his all-blues tour into Buddy Guy's Legends club in Chicago, Clapton can still be a devastating guitarist on stage when he's in the mood, but his artistic goals have downshifted. Call it sobriety or maturity, but you can also call it sucking. If Jimi Hendrix had lived and stopped taking pills, would he now be recording a slowed-down acoustic version of "Purple Haze" soporific enough for Starbuck's?

All this is by way of saying that "Clapton: The Autobiography," which I read over the holidays, is much like the second half of his career, an Armani-clad, 12-step tale that scants his greatest music. This is probably only of interest to other baby boomer rock fans, but...

The book begins well enough, with his honest description of his poor, small-town English roots and confused origins. He was raised to believe his grandmother was his mom, and his subsequent contact with his real mother may be the root of the shitty way he sometimes treated women thereafter. His dubious status within his family, he writes, had already infected his personality with a sort of self-ashamed shyness that made him a very reluctant star.

Thereafter the book charts the ups and downs of his stardom, namedropping most of rock's greats while charting with AA-meeting candor his abuse of drugs and booze and the often appalling behavior it engendered. He goes on and off heroin, gets drunk for 10 years, gets sober and founds the Crossroads clinic to help other addicts. The final chapters are the book's worst; Clapton seems oblivious to how he sounds as he name-checks his favorite luxury hotels and extols the lifestyle of a millionaire country squire.

There's nothing in the heroin chapters as sordid as the passages about his purchase of a ginormous yacht. Consider, for instance, this graf,  in which he comes within hailing distance of self-awareness, then quickly tacks in the opposite direction: "Did I really have the right to own something like this? A toe-rag from Ripley, with no idea how to make money, and no real respect for it, either, cruising around in a 150-foot floating palace? It seemed unbelievable. I was on cloud nine and had to keep telling myself, 'Yes, you do deserve this.'"

Well.

All this is just chaff, of course. What disappointed me really about the book is the way it utterly breezes past the music. He speaks of his affection for the blues but generally his comments read a lot like his remark on Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog": "There was something about the music that made it totally irresistible to us." Yes, yes.. but WHAT? He keeps telling us about what great guitarists his friends are, but seldom gets more specific or describes their musical interaction in any but the most cursory terms.

For instance, there's the legendary moment when he gave what might be the single best instrumental performance on any Beatles record, playing lead on his friend George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." "I was a little nervous because John and Paul were pretty fast on their feet, and I was an outsider, but it went well," Clapton writes, noting that he had to use George's guitar because he hadn't brought his own. "We did just one take and I thought it sounded fantastic." That's all he says about the music.

For contrast, consider this passage from Bob Spitz's superlative "The Beatles: The Biography," which recounts how the increasingly unhappy Beatles recorded 14 unsatisfying takes before George brought in Clapton: "Before anyone had a chance to object, Clapton was already in Studio Two, strapping on his Les Paul guitar and listening to the rhythm track mixed down from their work on the sixteenth. The song was pretty much there, creating an effortless, affecting groove, but it lacked a dramatic device to liberate the emotional tension that is never far from George's caged expression. Clapton's poignant guitar riff provided everything it needed.  The way it weeps and moans, held in check by Eric's incisive phrasing, creates the longing that gives the song its emotional center..."

Perhaps Clapton's emotional troubles from his youth prevent him from extolling his playing in such a fashion, but there must have been some insight into the session that he could have provided beyond JOHN AND PAUL WERE PRETTY FAST ON THEIR FEET. Dude recorded with the Beatles and that's all he's got to say? Man.

From Clapton's book, you sometimes get the feeling that he and George weren't the great pals they're always said to be. When the book came out before Christmas, much was written about his account of the legendary love triangle between the two of them and Pattie Boyd, who was married to George when she inspired the lovelorn Clapton to record "Layla" and later married Clapton. The gossip is all in Clapton's book - although his account differs slightly from Boyd's, which was also published last fall.

What I hoped for, though, was some insight into the Miami recording sessions when Clapton and the Dominoes, bolstered by late addition Duane Allman, recorded the anguished, virtuoso cri de coeur "Layla" and the rest of the album, electrifying tracks like "Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad" and "Have You Ever Loved A Woman," torrents of notes from their guitars washing over the listener in waves of emotion.

"'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," Clapton writes.

"She had asked for flared, rather than straight bottoms, so I had written 'Bell Bottom Blues' for her," he writes.

"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 writes. "He was like the musical brother I'd never had but wished I did..."

SUBSTANCE? Tell me more!!! What substance? And how and why did you inject it? But Clapton's already off talking about the mass quanities of coke and smack they secured...

Sigh. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were pretty fast on their feet. Duane Allman was like the musical brother he never had. "Bell Bottom Blues" was inspired by a pair of jeans. It's all shallow and banal enough to make me weep, and not in the way of a good blues song.

I can only hope that someone like Spitz takes on Clapton's story, because the tale I'm interested in is not to be found in "Clapton: The Autobiography."

Comments

[sjcharbonneau]

Well stated and I agree.

[Isorski]

Well written review! I totally agree with you about the Beatles passage. I feel like the brevity of the book made for a quick read, though, which was nice. Paul McCartney's bio, for example, was so long and detailed I had a hard time staying interested. Maybe Clapton should have done a "part one" and "part two" or done something like Dylan with Chronicles. But who could mimic that forumala successfully!?

Anyway, I wrote a bit more glowing of a review of "Clapton" at http://isorski.blogspot.com/. You might have to scroll down a little to get to it. Check it out!

[Ziggy]

obviously, a review written by a guy who doesn;t know a lot about music.
Music is not quantifiable in words. One can argue about music theory and all that, but thats more the study of how vibrations in the air interact with each other, it has nothign to do with how people actually react to the music. So, complaining that EC can't elaborate on why certain musical chemistries work the way they do, and how music affects him is completely moot. If such things could be described in words, the music wouldn't exist, because it wouldn't be necessary. Music is a form of expression for when all other forms fail.