Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [122]
I also got a big kick out of watching Monster restore and furnish my new house with beautiful antiques, and, inspired by his passion, I started buying art for the walls. I had just stumbled onto the work of Sandro Chia and Carlo Maria Mariani, and began filling up the house with their canvases. It was the first time I had spent big money on art, and I remember showing Roger a Richter I had just bought in an auction for £40,000. It was gray brushstrokes from top to bottom. Roger couldn’t believe it. I wish I had a picture of his face when I told him how much it cost. Over the next couple of years I built up quite a respectable collection of contemporary painters and became deeply interested in art all over again.
The year 1991 was horrendous on the face of it, but some precious seeds were sown. My recovery from alcoholism had taken on a new meaning. Staying sober really was the most important thing in my life now and had given me direction when I thought I had none. I had also been shown how fragile life really is, and strangely enough had somehow been cheered by this, as if my powerlessness had become a source of relief for me. The music, too, took on a new energy. I had a need to perform these new songs about my son, and I really believed that they were meant to help not just me, but anybody who had or would suffer such extraordinary loss. The opportunity to showcase them came in the guise of an Unplugged TV show for MTV. I had been approached to do it, and wasn’t sure, but now it seemed like the ideal platform. I sat in my house in Chelsea and worked out a repertoire for the show that would allow me to really revisit my roots and present these new songs in a safe and careful environment.
The show was great. Andy Fairweather Low and I did quite a lot of bare acoustic work on the Robert Johnson and Broonzy material, and we performed “Tears in Heaven” and “Circus Left Town,” although I later vetoed “Circus” on the grounds that it was too shaky. I also enjoyed going back and playing the old stuff like “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” which was how it had all started back in Kingston so long ago.
Russ produced the album of the show and Roger was like an expectant father hovering over the project, while I was fairly dismissive, saying that I thought we ought to put it out as a limited edition. I just wasn’t that enamored with it, and as much as I’d enjoyed playing all the songs, I didn’t think it was that great to listen to. When it came out, it was the biggest-selling album of my entire career, which goes to show what I know about marketing. It was also the cheapest to produce and required the least amount of preparation and work. But if you want to know what it actually cost me, go to Ripley, and visit the grave of my son. I think that’s also why it was such a popular record; I believe people wanted to show their support for me, and those who couldn’t find any other way bought the album.
The American summer tour that year, however, threw this particular phenomenon back in my face. “Tears in Heaven” was high on the charts, and I was trying to open the show with it in front of crowds of people who were screaming their heads off, with the result that I couldn’t hear myself think, let alone play. I would come offstage every night heartbroken and angry that they weren’t listening. I felt I couldn’t do the song justice, and with no stagecraft to fall back on, I had absolutely no idea what to do about it. How do you tell twenty thousand people to “curb your enthusiasm”? It was a no-win situation, but I eventually got audiences to calm down. I found that moving the acoustic songs to the middle of the set gave the fans a chance to settle down before the big hit was launched on them.
The end of the year saw