Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [100]
After a couple of weeks, Tom Dowd came to me and laid it on the line that nothing was going to happen with this new album unless we had a radical change of musicians. He recommended that I fire the current band, with the exception of Albert Lee, and that we start again from scratch. He added that he could get legendary session musicians Donald “Duck” Dunn and Roger Hawkins to come and stand in, and even told me that Ry Cooder was interested in coming down. He said if I wasn’t prepared to do the firing myself, then he would do it for me. I was excited by the names he’d mentioned, people I’d held in high esteem for years, and I decided to take this fork in the road.
In my drinking days, I would have got Roger to do my dirty work, but I had learned from my time at Hazelden that I needed to start taking responsibility in these matters. That night I had dinner with the band members and told them, “I’m very sorry, but I’ve got bad news. This just isn’t working, and it’s been suggested to me that I try something else. So I’m asking you all to go home, and I’ll let any of you know if I want you to come back to play on tour.” A stunned silence fell over us when I told them.
Sacking the band was a huge thing for me to do and very painful. For Henry Spinetti and Gary Brooker, the wounds took a long time to mend, and I’ve never seen Dave Markee since. As for Chris Stainton, he was the lucky one who got rehired and has been at my side ever since. Firing them personally had a positive effect on me, in that it established my ability to take control over my working life, which previously had been totally in the hands of Roger. It also triggered a mini-breakdown. The pressure to complete this album, my first since emerging from alcoholism, was enormous, and it had to be good. We had one more song to complete, and at some point I just broke down with Tom, sobbing my heart out in front of him.
I think, as much as anything else, I was grieving the loss of my relationship with alcohol, which was very powerful and an emotion I had not hitherto sufficiently acknowledged. It had been my first relationship and subsequently played a hugely significant part in my life. I called the album Money and Cigarettes, because that’s all that I saw myself having left. When we had the playback party, with Tom, Roger, Pattie, and a few other people, what would normally be, I suppose, for most artists a joyous celebration seemed more like a wake. There was definitely something forced about the album, and when we went on the road with it through most of 1983, it was a bit of an anticlimax.
I think subconsciously part of me was rebelling, telling me that all I really wanted to do was play music I loved with people I loved and cared for. This really struck home when I became involved in the ARMS (Action Research into Multiple Sclerosis) concerts at the end of the year. This was a series of charity concerts organized by Glyn Johns to benefit research into MS, a disease that had recently struck down Ronnie Lane. Over the years that I had stayed with Ronnie in Wales, I had noticed that his playing style was becoming more and more erratic, until he was almost just strumming the air in front of the guitar without actually hitting the strings. I had no idea what that was all about, until now, when it all suddenly made sense.
Ronnie had found somebody who could give him hyperbaric treatments, which involved being put into a decompression chamber, and this would alleviate his symptoms and make life bearable for him for quite long periods