Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [42]
I will never forget returning to London after recording Disraeli Gears, with all of us excited by the fact that we had made what we considered to be a groundbreaking album, a magical combination of blues, rock, and jazz. Unfortunately for us, Jimi had just released Are You Experienced?, and that was all anyone wanted to listen to. He kicked everybody into touch, really, and was the flavor not just of the month but of the year. Everywhere you went it was wall-to-wall Jimi, and I felt really down. I thought we had made our definitive album, only to come home and find that nobody was interested.
It was the beginning of a disenchantment with England, where it seemed there wasn’t really room for more than one person to be popular at a time. What I loved about America was that it seemed such a broad breeding ground for different acts and talent, and different forms of music. You could be in a car and tune the radio to a country music station, a jazz station, a rock station, a blues station, or an oldies rock station. Even back then the categorization was so wide, there seemed to be room for anyone to make a living out of it and be at the forefront of what they were doing. When I came home, it seemed that if you weren’t scoring 10 out of 10 on the day, you were nowhere.
On the plus side, even if the record wasn’t selling as well as I’d hoped, I was having a great time. I had moved from Regents Park to the Kings Road, Chelsea, to share a studio with Martin Sharp, with whom I had become good friends. Martin was a very gentle man who had an insatiable appetite for life and new experiences. At the same time, he was very considerate and sensitive to others. An admirer of Max Ernst, who inspired a lot of his work, he was and still is a great painter. When I met him he had just started writing verse. Our apartment was on the attic floor of the Pheasantry, a historic eighteenth-century building, so called because pheasants had once been reared there for the Royal household. We had a large kitchen, three bedrooms, a huge living room with beautiful wooden floors, and great views from the dormer windows. I decorated my room in bright red and gilt, a perfect reflection of the times.
Quite a community of people was living in the Pheasantry. Martin and I had two of the rooms, which we shared with our respective girlfriends, Eija and Charlotte. The third room was taken by another painter, Philippe Mora, and his girlfriend Freya. The ground floor was a massive studio owned or leased by portrait painter Timothy Widbourne, who was busy painting the queen’s portrait while we were upstairs, quietly getting out of our skulls. But the most colorful character in our midst, if not the most powerful, was David Litvinoff.
Litvinoff was one of the most extraordinary men I’ve ever met, a fast-talking East End Jew with a stupendous intellect who appeared not to give a shit what anyone thought of him, even though I know he really did, and sometimes painfully so. He talked ten to the dozen, usually jumping from one subject to another. He had piercing blue eyes set in a sharply chiseled face, which had a huge scar right across it. This, he said, was the result of an altercation he had had with the Krays. I never found out the exact reason for this, and I didn’t feel comfortable asking him about it, although he seemed to wear the scar with pride.
Litvinoff told me that he had once worked on Fleet Street, helping to put together the William Hickey gossip column on the Daily Express, a job that got him into all kinds of dodgy situations, often connected with people paying him backhanders to keep them out of