Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [44]
Bill Graham, who had invited us to play in San Francisco, was the entrepreneur and visionary who opened the Fillmore Auditorium as a rock venue at the beginning of 1966. Formerly the Majestic Academy of Dancing, it stood on the corner of Fillmore and Geary Streets and had already become one of San Francisco’s institutions. Bill loved the idea of free expression and fostering new talent, and his vision had been to start a venue where people could come and, under minimum supervision, do what they wanted.
San Francisco was, in those days, home of the drug culture, and I think he pretty well turned a blind eye to drug using; so long as no one was endangering anyone else, they were free to trip out or smoke pot. In many ways he was like a father figure to all the bands and a lot of the other creative people who inhabited the city, like the artists who designed all the posters, and he was very well respected and loved by everyone who worked with him. There were those who intimated that he was involved with some shady characters and was “connected,” but I never saw any evidence of that.
We were told by Bill that we could play anything we liked for as long as we liked, even if this meant playing till dawn, and this is where we started openly exploring our potential. Anywhere else, our concerns might have been on our presentation, but playing at the Fillmore, we soon realized that no one could see us because they were projecting light shows onto the band, so that we were actually in the light show. It was very liberating. We could just play our hearts out, without inhibition, knowing that the audience was more into whatever scenery was being projected onto the screen behind us. I’m sure a good deal of them were out of their heads, half of them maybe, but it didn’t matter. They were listening, and that encouraged us to go places we’d never been before. We started doing extended solos, and were soon playing fewer and fewer songs but for much longer. We’d go off in our own directions, then hit these coincidental points in the music when we would all arrive at the same conclusion, be it a riff or a chord or just an idea, and we would jam on it for a little while and then go back into our own thing. I had never experienced anything like it. It had nothing to do with lyrics or ideas; it was much deeper, purely musical. We were at our peak during that period.
It was an incredible time for me, and I met some amazing people, like Terry the Tramp, head of the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels; Addison Smith, who lived on a houseboat in Sausalito and lived the pure hippie life that most people could only pretend to; and Owsley, the chemist who made most of the acid we were all taking. We were staying in a great little hotel called the Sausalito Inn, which at one time had been a bordello, hanging out with musicians like Mike Bloomfield and David Crosby, smoking pot, and dropping a lot of acid. At times I was actually playing on acid. I don’t really know how I got through it, because I didn’t know if my hands were working, what the guitar was that I was playing, or even what it was made of. On one trip it was in my head that I could turn the audience into angels or devils according to which note I played.
Our first American tour lasted seven weeks, culminating in a return to New York to play twelve nights at the Café Au Go Go and a couple at the Village Theater, where we shared the bill with one of Martin Sharp’s favorite artists, Tiny Tim. One night I had a call from Ahmet asking me to drop by Atlantic Studios the next day, as there was someone he wanted me to meet. So I went up there, and Aretha Franklin was in the control room with all her family, her sisters and her father. There was a powerful feeling in the room. Nesuhi Ertegun was there as well as Ahmet and Tom Dowd, and at least five guitar players were on the floor, including (I think) Joe South, Jimmy Johnson, and Bobby Womack, with Spooner Oldham, David Hood, and Roger Hawkins as the rhythm section. All these incredible musicians had come up from Muscle