Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [46]
The closest we came to trouble was in Boston on April 4, the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. James Brown was playing in the theater opposite us, and we had to be smuggled out of our venue through the back door because the people coming out of the James Brown show were trashing everything they could get their hands on. That night anybody white was in danger, and over the next few weeks, playing in places like Detroit and Philadelphia, we could really feel the tension.
I had never really understood, or been directly affected by, racial conflict. I suppose being a musician helped me to transcend the physical side of that issue. When I listened to music I was fairly disinterested in where the players came from, or what color their skin was. Interesting, then, that ten years later I would be labeled a racist, for making drunken remarks about Enoch Powell onstage in Birmingham, England. Since then I have learned to keep my opinions to myself, even though that was never meant to be a racial statement. It was more of an attack against the then government policies on cheap labor, and the cultural confusion and overcrowding that resulted from what was clearly a greed-based policy. I had been in Jamaica just before, and had seen countless commercials on TV that were advertising a “new life” in Great Britain; and then at Heathrow, I had witnessed whole families of West Indians being harassed and humiliated by the immigration people, who had no intention of letting them in. It was appalling. Of course it might have also had something to do with the fact that Pattie had just been leered at by a member of the Saudi royal family—a combination of the two perhaps.
Whistle-stop touring in America was the beginning of the end for Cream, because once we started constantly working in such an intense way, it became impossible to keep the music afloat, and we began to drown. It seems that everybody has always believed that the demise of Cream was predominantly due to the clash of our personalities. True though it may have been that Jack and Ginger were often at each other’s throats, this was only a tiny part of the picture.
When you are playing night after night on a punishing schedule, often not because you want to but because you are contractually obligated to, it is only too easy to forget the ideals that once brought you together. There were times, too, when, playing to audiences who were only too happy to worship us, complacency set in. I began to be quite ashamed of being in Cream, because I thought it was a con. It wasn’t really developing from where we were. As we made our voyage across America, we were being exposed to extremely strong and powerful influences, with jazz and rock ’n’ roll that was growing up around us, and it seemed that we weren’t learning from it.
What brought me up short more than anything else was being introduced to the music of The Band by a friend of mine, Alan Pariser, an entrepreneur from LA who knew just about everybody in the music business and could connect you with anyone you wanted to meet. He had tapes of their first album, called Music from Big Pink, and it was fantastic. It stopped me in my tracks, and it also highlighted all of the problems I thought we had.
Here was a band that was really doing it right, incorporating influences from country music, blues, jazz, and rock, and writing great songs. I couldn’t help but compare them to us, which was stupid and futile, but I was frantically looking for a yardstick, and here it was. Listening to that album, as great as it was, just made me feel that we were stuck, and I wanted out. Stigwood began to get regular calls from me after gigs, telling him, “I’ve gotta go home, I can’t