Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [47]
When we returned to England in the early summer of 1968, commercially speaking we were in very good shape. We could have sold out concert halls wherever we went twice over. Disraeli Gears was a bestselling album in the States, and we had a hit single there with “Sunshine of Your Love.” As far as I was concerned, all this counted for nothing because we had lost our direction. Musically I was fed up with the virtuoso thing. Our gigs had become nothing more than an excuse for us to show off as individuals, and any sense of unity we might have had when we started seemed to have gone out the window.
We were also suffering from an inability to get along. We would just run away from one another. We never socialized together and never really shared ideas anymore. We just got together onstage and played and then went our separate ways. In the end this was the undoing of the music. I think if we had been able to listen to each other, and care for one another more, then Cream might have had a chance of further life, but at that point it was beyond our grasp as individuals. We were immature and incapable of putting aside our differences. Maybe, too, a little rest now and then might have helped.
Our decision to go our separate ways may have upset Robert Stigwood, but it was certainly no surprise to him. He’d been the recipient of too many increasingly desperate phone calls from America for that. He had told us from the very beginning that he had all our interests at heart, but as time went by I came to believe that it was me that he was starting to pin his hopes on. In the meantime we struck a deal agreeing to do two more albums, one of which we had partially recorded before leaving the States, a farewell tour of America in the autumn, and two last shows in London on our return.
It was great to be back at the Pheasantry, where Litvinoff was in an excitable mood, having been employed as dialogue coach and technical adviser on a film, Performance, being shot in Chelsea by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. The particular expertise for which he had been hired was his knowledge of the underworld, as the movie, which was basically a star vehicle for Mick Jagger, playing a faded rock idol, was set in the world of London gangsters. He was full of ideas about how he felt the story should develop, and every day he would come and tell me about all the goings-on on set and fill me in on whatever was going to be happening next day. One night he brought around the director, Donald Cammell, who managed to stage a power cut in the flat and then tried to grope my girlfriend Charlotte in the dark. A peculiar chap.
Life soon settled into the old routine, with people dropping in for tea and musical soirées. A regular visitor was George Harrison, whom I had known since I was in the Yardbirds. Not being the kind of guy, in those days, to instigate a friendship, I had just considered him a fellow musician. He used to drop by on the way home from his office in Savile Row to his bungalow in Esher, often bringing with him acetates of records the Beatles were working on.
Sometimes I would go down to George’s house in Esher and we’d play our guitars and take acid, and bit by bit a friendship began to form. One day, early in September, George drove me over to Abbey Road Studios, where he was recording. When we arrived, he told me they were going to record one of his songs and asked me to play guitar on it. I was quite taken aback by this and considered it a funny thing to ask, since he was the Beatles’ guitar player and had always done great work on their records. I was also quite flattered, thinking that not many people get asked to play on a Beatles record. I hadn’t even brought my guitar with me, so I had to borrow his.
My reading of the situation was that Paul and John were quite disparaging about both George’s and Ringo’s contributions to the group. George would put songs forward on every project only to find them pushed into the background. I think that he felt