Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [25]
“If you want to, I’ll try and get you in,” I replied. When we arrived at the Odeon, I told the stage manager she was a friend of mine, and took her over to the Beatles’ dressing room, which was on the same level as the stage. They were getting ready to go on, but they took a moment and were really friendly and polite to her. But when we got to John, and I introduced her, he made a face of mock boredom and started doing wanking movements inside his coat. I was really shocked, and quite offended, because I felt responsible for this harmless little old lady, and in a sense, of course, he was insulting me. I got to know John quite well later in our lives, and we were friends I suppose, but I was always aware that he was capable of doing some pretty weird stuff.
Though the Yardbirds weren’t yet in the big-money league, we were making enough for me to buy my first really serious guitar, a cherry red Gibson ES-335, the instrument of my dreams, of which the Kay had been but a poor imitation. Throughout my life I chose a lot of my guitars because of the other people who played them, and this was like the one Freddy King played. It was the first of a new era of guitars, which were thin and semi-acoustic. They were both a “rock guitar” and a “blues guitar,” which you could play, if necessary, without amplification and still hear them.
I had seen the Gibson in a shop on either Charing Cross Road or Denmark Street, where several music stores had electric guitars in the windows. To me they were just like sweet shops. I would stand outside staring at these things for hours on end, especially at night when the windows would remain lit up, and after a trip to the Marquee, I would walk around all night looking and dreaming. When I finally bought the Gibson, I just couldn’t believe how shiny and beautiful it was. At last, I felt like a real musician.
The truth is, I was taking myself far too seriously and becoming very critical and judgmental of anybody in music who wasn’t playing just pure blues. This attitude was probably part of my intellectual phase. I was reading translations of Baudelaire, and discovering the American underground writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg while simultaneously watching as much French and Japanese cinema as I could. I began to develop a real contempt for pop music in general, and to feel genuinely uncomfortable about being in the Yardbirds.
No longer were we going in the direction I wanted, mainly because, seeing the runaway success of the Beatles, Giorgio and some of the guys had become obsessed with getting on TV and having a number one record. It’s quite possible that Giorgio was still smarting from having lost the Stones, but what was clear was that we weren’t moving upward fast enough, so each of us was told to go out there and find a hit song. Actually I had no problem with having a hit, as long as it was a song we could be proud of. Funnily enough, Giorgio had played me a song by Otis Redding called “Your One and Only Man” several months before. It was a catchy song, which I felt we could do a version of without selling ourselves short. Then Paul Samwell-Smith came up with a song called “For Your Love,” by Graham Gouldman, later of 10cc, which was clearly a number one. I balked, but the others all loved it, and that was that.
When the Yardbirds decided to record “For Your Love,” I knew it was the beginning of the end for me, as I didn’t see how we could make a record like that and stay as we were. It felt to me that we had completely sold out. I played on it, though my contribution was limited to a very short blues riff in the middle 8 section, and as a consolation they gave me the B side, an instrumental called “Got to Hurry,” which was based on a tune hummed by Giorgio, who gave himself the writing credit under the pseudonym O. Rasputin.
By then I was a pretty grizzled and discontented individual. I deliberately made myself as unpopular