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By Root 1121 0

stopped, and the event was a great success. I spent the whole day welcoming and listening to all of my favorite musicians. I was like a kid in a sweet shop. At some point in the proceedings I asked J. J. Cale if he would consider making an album with me. In fact, what I asked was for him to produce my next album. I have always been a huge fan of his recorded sound. He has a unique approach to recording and I wanted to avail myself of that. He kindly said yes, and we made a plan to meet up in a year’s time and do it. If nothing else came from the festival but that, I would have been happy, but in fact it was a tremendous experience, and the subsequent auction raised a lot of money for the Centre.

This was when I finally parted with Blackie, and the cherry red Gibson ES-335 that I had owned since the Yardbirds. It was the first serious guitar I had ever owned, and the day before the festival I went to see them both on display and bid them farewell. It was hard. We had traveled a lot of miles together, and I knew I would never find another instrument that could take the place of either of these. The sums they fetched defied belief. Blackie went for $959,500, creating a world auction record for a guitar, while the “cherry red” brought in $847,500, the highest price ever for a Gibson. Altogether, eighty-eight guitars were sold, raising $7,438,624 for Crossroads.

The tour of America took me through to the autumn, and then on my return to England, I delved into a new hobby that was to equal fishing as an obsession in the years to come. My friend Phillip Walford, who is the river keeper on the stretch of the river Test that I fish, had always said that I should take up game shooting, if only for the logical reason that the shooting season starts when fishing season ends. I had always avoided the subject, simply because I intuitively knew that shooting was an intensely social pastime as opposed to fly-fishing, which is almost entirely solitary. To balance up the amount of time my business requires me to be in the public eye, I have always steered toward activities that allow me a certain amount of solitude, and fly-fishing has always provided me with that.

In fact, it was pigeons roosting in the eaves of our house, cooing in the evenings and waking the kids up at five in the morning, that tipped the balance. I went out and bought a shotgun, and one thing just led to another. I am a deep-end person, and in just a short time I was ordering braces of fine English guns and driving all over the country to shoot on different estates, gradually improving my skill and having the time of my life.

Ethically it was never a problem for me, and it is the same with fishing. My family and I eat what I catch and shoot. It is fresh and healthy and we love it. I am a hunter; it is in my genes, and I am quite comfortable with that. I also support a lot of other countryside pursuits, quite simply because I believe they are an important part of our culture and heritage, and need protecting, usually from people, or movements of people, who have little understanding of the delicate economic balance of countryside communities and who have watched too many Disney movies.

I soon began to bump into old friends who had also taken up the sport, like Paul Cummins, who had been the comanager of Dire Straits. He introduced me to Jamie Lee, who manages a shoot called Rushmoor, in Dorset. Jamie is said to be one of the best game shots in the world, though it’s usually him that’s saying it, and his shoot, a private syndicate, is the best run I have ever been on. In addition, the guys in the syndicate are some of the most interesting people you could ever hope to meet, even though one or two of them are definitely psychotic. Gary Brooker, Steve Winwood, Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and Mark Knopfler are also keen shots, so it’s almost like coming full circle, meeting up again with all my old chums from the sixties music world in another, completely different sphere.

During the time that I wasn’t shooting, I was hatching a plot for the following year. For some time