Eric Clapton – The Autobiography
By Eric Clapton with Christopher Simon Sykes
Published by Century (Random House), 2007

Turning 63 next month, Eric Clapton surveys his sober domestic bliss and recalls, amid poignancy and pain, the wild ride that got him there. My review for The Nation, published on January 27.

Somewhere out there, hopefully, is another ageing music star who will deliver his story with a combination of Eric Clapton’s plain speaking and the artfulness of Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles”. Clapton’s book isn’t devoid of art, but it was his stated ambition to tell his tale in his own words and without any razzmatazz, and unfortunately his matter-of-fact monologue on recovery and survival can be a little wearying.

I often wondered just what Christopher Simon Sykes did as ghost writer, particularly when Eric unwittingly wears his male chauvinism on his sleeve as he drones on about the many women in his life. He admits he’s never been any good with women and acutely explains the psychological reasons why, but as much as readers will sympathise over his abandonment by his mother, couldn’t Sykes have helped him sound less like an idiot when he was constantly referring to one female conquest after another as pretty or ravishing or voluptuous?

At one point he mentions to a pal that he’s “never dated an Italian woman”. A specimen is duly brought to his laboratory.

This, however, was Lori del Santo, with whom Clapton had Conor, whose horrible death at age two inspired “Tears in Heaven”. There is a line about Conor that stops you cold. Clapton points out that “Unplugged”, the biggest-selling album of his career, was the cheapest to make. “But if you really want to know what it actually cost me, go to Ripley, and visit the grave of my son.”

This is how poignant the book can be. Stunning lines like that make it easy to forget Eric’s general lug-headedness, and certainly everything is forgiven when he talks about his music. He’s got a career and a half to cover in among all the personal drama, and he’s met everybody in the business, of course. The names, bless him, never stop dropping. His stints with the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Blues Breakers and Cream each rate a chapter, and they’re liberally sprinkled with Beatles and Stones, as well as his good mates Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix.

I’d always believed Eric was already with Cream by the time the “Clapton is God” graffiti popped up around London, but he tells me that was during the Blues Breakers period, in 1965. He does admit to having felt pressured by it, but doesn’t seem as perturbed as other biographers have suggested. Three decades later he was actually collecting “graffiti art”, though he doesn’t appear to see a link.

There are several little surprises like this. When Cream was put together, Clapton wanted Steve Winwood in the line-up, but Bruce and Baker insisted on a power trio. Clapton later teamed up with Winwood in Blind Faith, of course, and interestingly they’re doing some shows together this month in New York.

Cream were “champing at the bit” to perform at the Monterey Pop Festival in ’67, but manager Robert Stigwood wanted them to break into the American market via the “back door”. When Cream did emerge in Los Angeles that November, Clapton was “pretty contemptuous” of the psychedelic scene, but he was soon flying on acid: “On one trip it was in my head that I could turn the audience into angels or devils according to which note I played.”

Eric dodged a legal bullet when the cops raided a Buffalo Springfield rehearsal he was attending, and then he heard the Band’s “Music from Big Pink” and realised that Cream was accomplishing nothing by comparison.

For a long while thereafter, Clapton’s tale mingles the horrors of addiction with the fun of getting there. Then people start dying and he comes close to joining them.

There are complicated and tedious recoveries from junk and booze. He only kicked the latter for good when Conor came along, but while acknowledging the necessity of growing up, however belatedly, Clapton really found salvation in prayer. He’s ambiguous about who it is he prays to, even in the context of praying at the Twelve Steps meetings he attends to this day.

Before his addiction, he says, “I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Herman [sic] Hesse and Kahlin [sic] Gibran, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Little Walter. In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.”

“The Autobiography” is part of Clapton’s recovery – a process of systematically setting everything straight that also includes contacting long-lost acquaintances and apologising for being a jerk. As such, the book is, to a great extent, a giant thank-you card to all the people, dead and living, who have helped or influenced him.

Regrettably for the reader, this can become cloying in print, particularly when he’s forever being so nice. The book might be subtitled “Eric bites his tongue”. Early on he refers to the Beatles as “wankers”, and that is the worst thing he has to say about anyone (apart from himself).

“I believe that if Robert Johnson was reincar- nated,” says Slowhand, “he is probably BB King.”

Clapton’s long battle with low self-esteem finally ended at a triple confluence of events –the death of his mother, a fund-raiser for Crossroads, the recovery house he built in Antigua, and meeting Melia, today his wife and the mother of his three daughters. His ultimate message is that quitting booze is really just the beginning: “It has taken 20 years of non-stop sobriety,” he writes, “for me to acquire any kind of maturity”.

Now, as his reward, there are Ferraris, fly fishing, fashion design and even jaunts with the likes of Roger Waters and Mark Knopfler, roaming countryside estates and shooting game fowl.

This is the curious lurch in the end as you find yourself reading about an ageing, upper-class equivocator who’s just added yet another house to his real-estate collection, yet frets that his daughters will get seasick at the outset of a Mediterranean cruise on a yacht he’s booked for a month, thus wasting his money. It’s the skewed perspective of the very rich. The daughters are fine, there is some postcard patter about the beautiful islands, and then he buys the boat, although, for the first time in his life, he has to borrow money for the purchase. But then there’s a big cash-spinner of a tour coming up, so not to worry.

This was the world tour that brought Clapton to Bangkok a year ago, and he says, as much as loved performing everywhere, he was counting the minutes until he got back home to the family at the country mansion he’s owned since the ’60s, called Hurtwood. All the hurt of Hurtwood resolves into a happy ending that’s quite charming, with a few words on the chances of him retiring anytime soon: “For now I will leave the door open, and maybe that will make it easier for me to stay inside.”

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How does Eric fare in the Music in Dorseyland listings? Erm, not all that well, actually, but the competition was always pretty rough. Elsewhere on the blog he gets a mention in the context of the Band (in his book he agrees with me that his version of “I Shot the Sheriff” was crap) and Hendrix.