Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [32]
The following morning we all made up, loaded the equipment back into the Ford, and set off again on the road. Driving through Yugoslavia, on a cobbled road between Zagreb and Belgrade, the car shook so much that it came apart. The body actually left the chassis. We had to get a piece of rope and tie it around and underneath the car. So now six people and all their equipment were traveling in a car being held together by a piece of rope. It was a shambles. When we finally got as far as Greece, to Thessalonica, we were so hungry, because we hadn’t eaten anything for days, that we ate raw meat at the butcher’s! Eventually, when we reached Athens, we got a job playing at a club called the Igloo.
The Igloo Club was so called because it was designed to look like the inside of an igloo, with everything rounded. It had a resident band called the Juniors, and their manager needed another band to support them, because their set started at seven and the club would stay open until two or three in the morning. John Bailey talked this guy into hiring us. We found a place to stay, in a room on the top floor of a house that was run by an old Egyptian colonel. I loved it there and was soon having the time of my life. The gig consisted of us playing three sets a night, alongside the Juniors, who were doing songs by the Beatles and the Kinks. Since they didn’t know these very well, we were also helping them out a little bit.
Two nights after we got this gig, the Juniors were involved in a car crash, and two of them were killed outright. The following morning we were having coffee at the club when the manager came in and started screaming the name of Thanos, the keyboard player, whom he was apparently in love with and who was one of the guys who had died. “Thanos! Thanos! Thanos!” he screamed, and then he started throwing glasses at the mirror behind the bar. Someone said we had better get out, so we all left and he smashed the club to bits. It was closed for two days, and we were advised to stay put because something would be sorted out.
They repaired the club, and someone who represented the heartbroken manager approached me and told me that they needed to get things up and running again, and they wanted me to play with the Juniors. So the next thing I knew, I found myself playing a set with them, then a set with my band, another set with them, followed by a set with my band, and so on until I had played a six-hour stretch without stopping. After a few days of this, the Juniors suddenly took off. I knew all the songs they wanted to play, and I seemed to have put a new sound into the band, and the next thing I knew we were doing gigs in Piraeus playing to ten thousand people. I was thrilled to be able to help the Juniors get to a bigger audience, but it all smacked of the pop world I had tried to put behind me. It was like déjà vu. Meanwhile, the Glands had had enough and were itching to move on.
When I told the drummer in the Juniors that I was thinking of leaving, he said, “You’d better not. The manager will come after you if you try to leave, and he’ll cut your hands off.” I got the impression he wasn’t joking, so we planned to do a runner. Ben secretly organized train tickets while the band members packed up their stuff. I turned up as usual one afternoon for a Juniors rehearsal, but we had a car waiting on the other side of the building. At a given signal, I said I was going to the toilet