Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [53]
From the beginning it was a very stiff, uncomfortable situation. I wasn’t in love with Alice; my heart, and a good deal of everything else, being with Pattie. I also felt very ill at ease about the age difference, especially since she had told me she was still a virgin. In fact, sex played very little part in our lives. We were more like brother and sister, although I was hoping that eventually it would blossom into a normal relationship. Her father was a serious jazz enthusiast, and she had inherited a love of music from him, so we listened to a lot of records, and we smoked a lot of dope.
Another extraordinary thing struck me later on. When I was a kid on the playground, age seven or eight, my friend Guy and I had a game in which we would fall about laughing over the most ridiculous names we could think of, and the silliest name we came up with was Ormsby-Gore. When things began to go badly wrong between me and Alice, I had a terrible fear that getting attached to an upper-class girl like her was part of a childhood resentment, connected to my feelings about my mother, to bring down women, and that deep inside I was thinking, “Here’s an Ormsby-Gore, and I’m going to make her suffer.”
Steve came over to Hurtwood in the first few weeks after Alice arrived, and we spent hours playing together. I had set up the front room as a music room cum living room, with a table and chairs and a large couch as well as a drum set, keyboards, and amps for the guitars. Equipment was everywhere, with tape recorders and microphones for recording and cables running down the hall. It was a semistudio, really, and we would jam and jam and record and record, all the time testing the air. During those first days we worked with a little drum machine, until Steve said that he wanted to ask Ginger to join us. So Ginger came to stay, too, and once we had a drummer, we started to look around for a bass player. I was still very reluctant to go through my Cream experience with Ginger again, but I felt that if Steve was happy with him, then I should at least try to make a go of it. As for a bass player, I knew Rick Grech, who played with the group Family, from the Speakeasy. We were good mates, and he was a great guy, so he just kind of fell in with us.
All the early rehearsals of the new band took place at Hurtwood. We would start work at about midday and jam late into the night. We had a lot of good fun, but it soon got out of hand in that we were just wandering around musically without ever getting anywhere. Once we got into the studio, however, it started to take shape. I had already written “Presence of the Lord,” and I also came up with the idea of doing a cover of the Buddy Holly song “Well…Alright.” Steve had a few songs, too, like “Sea of Joy” and “Can’t Find My Way Home,” but we were basically still a jam band and didn’t really care what we were doing.
Eventually someone came up with the bright idea of bringing in the brilliant young producer Jimmy Miller, to try to give the music some focus and cut some tracks for a possible album. Jimmy had worked with Steve on the Traffic albums, and it seemed the most logical way forward. Soon, however, word leaked out in the music press that I was playing again with Ginger, and that Steve, a big star himself, was involved. For the first time, as far as I am aware, the dreaded word “supergroup” reared its head. That’s when I saw the red light, but I decided to go through with all of this and see where it was leading, because Steve was involved and because I had nothing else interesting going on. Subliminally, perhaps, my ambition was to re-create The Band in England, an idea that I knew was a huge gamble, which is probably why I named the new band Blind Faith.
We started our professional career on June 7, 1969, with a free concert in Hyde Park. This was the first