Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [110]
We hacked along for a while, sleeping in different rooms and living pretty much separate lives until, several months later, on her birthday, March 17, I had a complete meltdown and threw her out of the house. It was a cruel and vicious thing to do, and within a few days I regretted it. I kept replaying our early days over and over in my head, desperately wondering why we couldn’t recapture that essence again, but I knew I had crossed a serious barrier this time and that I would have to leave her alone for a while. Pattie found a very nice apartment in Kensington and things actually settled down. I visited her once a week, and we were quite civil to one another. I stayed out at Hurtwood, doing bits and pieces, drinking in as controlled a manner as I could, but occasionally going on massive benders. It was like being in limbo again, not quite knowing where things were going or what the outcome of all of this would be.
I was sitting at home one day when I received a mysterious phone call from a lady with a strong European accent, who claimed to know all about my marriage difficulties over the years. She also said she knew how to repair them. I was intrigued, as well as angry. How had this person got my number, and where had she got all this inside information that she appeared to know? Soon after, she began to call quite regularly with bizarre instructions for getting Pattie to return, which I followed to the letter, my reasoning being, “What have I got to lose?” Little did I know what I was getting into.
For starters, I had to take a bath in an assortment of herbs, which left me looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Gradually the rituals got more convoluted and very creepy. For example, I had to cut my finger to draw blood, smear it onto a cross with Pattie’s and my name written on it, and read weird incantations at midnight. Then of course, with great excitement and expectation, I would call Pattie to see if she had changed at all in her demeanor toward me, which, needless to say, never happened.
The lady on the phone had a very sympathetic manner and eventually told me that the spell would only work if she could meet me and take the “sessions” to another level. She lived in New York, where I would be soon, so I agreed to meet her. I knew it was madness, but my rationale was still, “What harm can it do?” She was an extremely strange-looking woman, quite fat with bright red hair, and she told me that sex with a virgin would be necessary in order to complete the spell. “Where do you find a virgin in New York?” I replied, and she said, “I’m a virgin.” God knows why I didn’t just run then. I wish I had, but I was drunk and desperate, and still under the illusion that a reconciliation with Pattie would solve everything, so I went through with it. It was humiliating, and I did run, but only after the damage was done.
I escaped to LA to record songs for a new album, which was to be a collaboration between Phil Collins and Tom Dowd. I had asked Tom to coproduce it because I didn’t feel confident that Phil really knew my musical background well enough to do the job single-handed, and with Tom involved I felt I could oversee the production. We worked at Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood, with the basic band consisting of me on guitar, Phil on drums, Greg Phillinganes on keyboards, and Nathan East on bass. The horns—Michael Brecker on sax, Randy Brecker and Jon Faddis on trumpet, and Dave Bargeron on trombone—were overdubbed in New York, and Tina Turner and I duetted live on “Tearing Us Apart.”
For me these were pretty drunken sessions, and looking back, I don’t know how I got through them. Nigel, who came with me, had rented us a place on Sunset Plaza, and secretly I would drink and do coke until about six in the morning. Then at about eleven, I would go into the studio and somehow stay sober during the day. So from midday till about six in the evening I would try to work