Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [54]
We played in front of this vast crowd on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, and I wasn’t really there. I had zoned out. Maybe I was wrong, and that Ginger had not picked up, but I felt that whatever we had achieved up till that point in terms of bonding, rehearsing, and playing had been a complete waste of time. I remember thinking, “If this is the first gig, where the hell will we go from here?” The audience may have loved it and the atmosphere was great, but I really didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t helped by the fact that we were completely underpowered. We didn’t have enough amplification for playing outdoors in the park, and we sounded small and tinny. I came off the stage shaking like a leaf and feeling that I’d let people down. My blaming mechanism laid the fault at Ginger’s feet, setting up a resentment that just grew and grew.
Stigwood didn’t give us time to think. We went straight out on the road for a tour of Scandinavia to settle the band in, and it was a tactic that worked. Ginger came back from the edge, and we began for the first time to sound pretty good. We got some of our power back, playing smaller venues, and the band started to forge ahead. On our return home, we went into the studio to finish the album with Jimmy.
One day I got a call from Bob Seidemann, whom I had met in San Francisco. Bob, a brilliant photographer, was slightly eccentric and a very funny man. We had spent a lot of great times together in the days of the Pheasantry. He looked like something out of a drawing by Robert Crumb, who was also a friend of his. He was very tall with long frizzy hair, which stood out behind him, a great big face and nose, and long, thin legs.
Bob told me that he had an idea for an album cover for us. He wouldn’t say what it was, just that he was going to put it together and then show us. When he finally presented it, I remember thinking that it was rather sweet. It was a photograph of a young, barely pubescent girl with curly red hair, photographed from the waist up, naked, and holding in her hands a silver, very modernistic airplane, designed by my friend the jeweler Micko Milligan. Behind her was a landscape of a green hill, like the Berkshire Downs, and a blue sky with white clouds scudding across it. I immediately loved it because I thought it captured the definition of the name of our band really well—the juxtaposition of innocence, in the shape of the girl, and experience, science, and the future represented by the airplane.
I told Bob that we should not spoil the image by putting the name of the band on the front cover, so he came up with the idea of writing it on the wrapper instead. When the wrapper came off, it left a virgin photograph. But the cover caused a huge outcry. People said the representation of the young girl was pornographic, and in the States record dealers threatened to boycott it. Since we were about to embark on a major tour there, we had no alternative but to replace it with a shot of us standing in the front room at Hurtwood.
It was quite clear from the opening night at Madison Square Garden in New York on July 12, 1969, that Blind Faith was not going to have to work hard to pull in the crowds. There were too many Cream and Traffic fans around for that, and the truth is we didn’t