Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [27]
I wasn’t sure about the way he sang, or the way he presented himself, but I was very grateful that someone saw my worth, and my thinking was that maybe I would be able to steer the band toward Chicago blues instead of the sort of jazz blues that the band was currently playing. He seemed happy to go along with this. I think that until I came along, he had been quite isolated in his musical tastes, and now he’d found someone just as serious about the blues as he was.
I joined the Bluesbreakers in April 1965 and went to live with John in his house in Lee Green, which he shared with his wife, Pamela, and their children. Twelve years older than me, with long curly hair and a beard, which gave him a look not unlike Jesus, he had the air of a favorite schoolmaster who still manages to be cool. He didn’t drink and was a health-food fanatic, the first proper vegetarian I had ever met. Trained as a graphic artist, John made a good living as an illustrator of things like science fiction books, and he worked as well for advertising agencies, but his real passion was music. He played piano, organ, and rhythm guitar, and he had the most incredible collection of records I had ever seen, with rare singles of songs you otherwise find only on compilation albums. Many of these were ordered through Blues Unlimited, a specialist magazine run by blues fan Mike Leadbetter. I had a tiny little cupboard room at the top of John’s house, barely big enough for a narrow single bed, and over the better part of a year, when I had any spare time, I would sit in this room listening to records and playing along with them, honing my craft.
Modern Chicago blues became my new Mecca. It was a tough electric sound, spearheaded by people like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker, who had come up from the Delta to record for labels like Chess. The leading guitar players of this genre were Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Elmore James, Hubert Sumlin, and Earl Hooker, to name a few. It perfectly suited our lineup of guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard. John played piano, Hammond organ, and rhythm guitar. On drums we had Hughie Flint, who would go on to form a band with Tom McGuinness called McGuinness-Flint. I played lead guitar, and the bass player was John McVie, who later formed Fleetwood Mac with Mick Fleetwood. Not only was he a brilliant bass guitarist, but he was an incredibly funny man with a very dark, cynical sense of humor. At that time the two Johns and myself were obsessed with the Harold Pinter play The Caretaker. I had seen the film, with Donald Pleasance as the tramp Davies, as many times as I could, and I had also bought the script, a lot of which I knew by heart. We would spend hours acting out scenes from the play, swapping roles, so that sometimes I would play the character of Aston, other times Davies or Mick, and we would piss ourselves with laughter.
To begin with, since Mayall was that much older than the rest of us, and was to our minds a respectable middle-class man living with a wife and kids in suburbia, the dynamics of the band were very much “him and us.” We saw him in the role of schoolmaster, with us as the naughty boys. He was tolerant up to a point, but we knew there was a limit and we did our best to push him to it. We would take the mickey out of him behind his back, telling him he couldn’t sing, and giggling when he went out onstage bare to the waist. He