Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [31]
But, another part of me thought the “Clapton is God” thing was really quite nice. I’d been ousted from the Yardbirds, and they’d brought in Jeff Beck. They immediately had a string of hits, and I was quite put out by that, so any kind of accolade that came from just playing, without selling myself or promoting myself on TV, was welcome. There’s something about word-of-mouth that you cannot undo. In truth, I felt grateful about it because it gave me status, and, even better, it was the kind of status nobody could tamper with. After all, you can’t muck around with graffiti. It comes from the street.
By the early summer of 1965, though I was still living in John’s house in Lee Green, I was spending a lot of time with a group of friends hanging out in a flat in Long Acre, Covent Garden, owned by a woman named Clarissa, who was the girlfriend of Ted Milton. Ted was the most extraordinary man. A poet and visionary, whom I had first met at Ben Palmer’s, he was the first person I ever saw physically interpreting music. We were at home at Ben’s house, and after dinner he put on a Howlin’ Wolf record and began to enact it with his entire being, dancing and employing facial expressions to interpret what he was hearing. Watching him, I understood for the first time how you could really live music, how you could listen to it completely and make it come alive, so that it was part of your life. It was a real awakening. Ted and Clarissa lived in a second-floor flat, which consisted of several rooms opening off a long corridor and a big kitchen, and it was the center of our lives for a while.
The cast of characters included John Bailey, known to us as “Dapper Dan” for his suave good looks and natty sense of dress, who was studying anthropology; Bernie Greenwood, a doctor with a clinic in Notting Hill, who was also a great saxophone player; Micko Milligan, a jeweler and part-time hairdresser; Peter Jenner and Andrew King, who lived in the flat opposite and were just starting to manage Pink Floyd; and my old friend June Child, who now had a job working for them as their secretary. Looking back on it, we had the time of our lives, drinking, smoking massive quantities of dope, and believing that everything we were doing was totally original (and sometimes it was), while poor old Clarissa went out to work to pay for it all.
Bit by bit this scene began to take up more and more of my spare time. It was outrageous really. We’d just spend hours and hours listening to music and drinking Mateus rosé, real headache material, which I absolutely loved. Sometimes we’d get into spontaneous laughing jags, brought on by God knows what, where we’d latch on to a particular word or phrase, or on something we’d seen, and we’d just start laughing hysterically, and it would become unstoppable. We could literally laugh for hours at a time. Laughing was also part of another pastime, where we’d listen to one song over and over for a whole day—a favorite was “Shotgun” by Junior Walker—before passing out, and then start again when we came round.
In the middle of the summer of ’65, six of us spontaneously decided to get a band together and drive round the world, financing the trip by playing gigs along the route. We called ourselves the Glands. John Bailey would be the vocalist, with Bernie Greenwood on sax. Ted’s brother Jake would play drums, Ben Palmer was lured back to the piano, and on bass we had Bob Rae. Bernie’s car, an MGA, was traded in for an American Ford Galaxy station wagon to serve as our transport, while I had a few hundred quid in wages saved up with which I bought an amplifier and a couple of guitars. Considering that I was supposedly the draw of the Bluesbreakers, I suppose you could say it was a tad irresponsible of me to just take off like this. If I mentioned it to John at all, it was only to say that I was going off for a little while. I really did leave him in the lurch, and he had to trawl through several different guitarists to fill the gap while I was away.
With six of us squashed into the Ford Galaxy, we set off in August, driving