Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [38]
They were all doing internships of one kind or another and it was an entirely platonic relationship, but it made me feel incredibly grown up. I was living with the opposite sex, unattended. At the same time, I bought my first car. It was a 1938 right-hand-drive Cadillac Fleetwood that had been made for the London Motor Show, and I saw it in a garage on Seven Sisters Road. It was huge, in perfect condition, and cost only £750. Even though I couldn’t drive, I bought it anyway. The dealer delivered it and parked it right outside the house. It sat there, getting covered in leaves, and I used to just look at it out the window. A couple of times Ben Palmer drove me around in it, but he said it was a nightmare to drive because it was so big and had no power steering.
Almost exactly two months to the day after our debut at Windsor, on October 1, we were booked to play at the Central London Polytechnic on Regent Street. I was hanging about backstage with Jack, when Chas. Chandler, the bass player with the Animals, appeared, accompanied by a young black American guy whom he introduced as Jimi Hendrix. He informed us that Jimi was a brilliant guitarist, and he wanted to sit in with us on a couple of numbers. I thought he looked cool and that he probably knew what he was doing. We got to talking about music, and he liked the same bluesmen I liked, so I was all for it. Jack was cool about it, too, though I seem to remember that Ginger was a little bit hostile.
The song Jimi wanted to play was by Howlin’ Wolf, entitled “Killing Floor.” I thought it was incredible that he would know how to play this, as it was a tough one to get right. Of course Jimi played it exactly like it ought to be played, and he totally blew me away. When jamming with another band for the first time, most musicians will try to hold back, but Jimi just went for it. He played the guitar with his teeth, behind his head, lying on the floor, doing the splits, the whole business. It was amazing, and it was musically great, too, not just pyrotechnics.
Even though I had already seen Buddy Guy and knew that a lot of black players could do this kind of stuff, it’s still pretty amazing when you’re standing right next to it. The audience was completely gobsmacked by what they saw and heard, too. They loved it, and I loved it, too, but I remember thinking that here was a force to be reckoned with. It scared me, because he was clearly going to be a huge star, and just as we were finding our own speed, here was the real thing.
The single of “I Feel Free” was released in America on the Atco label, a subsidiary of Atlantic Records, which was headed by Turkish-born New Yorker Ahmet Ertegun, a legendary figure in the world of black music. He had masterminded the careers of artists such as Ray Charles, the Drifters, and Aretha Franklin and produced many of their records. He had taken an interest in me since being on a trip to London, early in 1966, to see Wilson Pickett, one of his artists, playing at the Astoria Theatre in Finsbury Park. After the show, he had thrown a party at the Scotch of St. James’s, a fashionable club in Mayfair, and had been impressed by my playing during a jam session with Pickett’s band. Cream was signed up by Atlantic not long after this, and when our first album, Fresh Cream, was about to be released in the States, Ahmet persuaded Stigwood that it was vital that we come over to promote it.
We were all so excited. To me America was the land of promise. When I was eight or nine years old, I had been given a prize at school for neatness