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of red wine?” and he would start singing, “Get up and get your man a bottle of red wine…” It would just flow out of him, and by the time we got to the studio, the song would be finished. I remember thinking to myself, “How does he do it? He just opens his mouth and out comes a song.” We’d go straight into the studio and record it live. Then I would put a couple of vocal tracks down, with Delaney coaching me, and then it would be time for the girls and the horns. Rita and Bonnie would be given their part and they’d sing it, Jim and Bobby would put some riffs on, and that was the whole thing wrapped up. It was fantastic and I was in my element, recording my own album with the best band in the land. Delaney had brought out something in me that I didn’t know I had.

My solo career really began there. I knew I had it in me really, but I had stuffed it down to the point that I had stopped believing in myself. I’ll never be able to repay Delaney for his belief in me. He saw something I had stopped looking for in myself. Making that record was one of the most important steps I would ever take, and it was a truly memorable experience. I remember going in one day when we didn’t have a song planned, and Leon came up to me and said, “I’ve got a line for you,” and thinking aloud, he said, “You’re a blues musician, but people don’t know that you can also rock ’n’ roll, so we can say…”

I bet you didn’t think I knew how to rock ’n’ roll.

Oh, I got the boogie-woogie right down in my very soul.

There ain’t no need for me to be a wallflower,

’Cos now I’m living on blues power.

Just like that, no effort, and that was the birth of the song “Blues Power,” one of my favorite songs on the album.

However much I may have been enjoying living in LA, and hanging out with all these great musicians, I was also suffering from occasional bouts of homesickness. Alice used to come out to see me, and although she got on really well with Delaney, she wasn’t really comfortable hanging out with the band, and it was quite clear that she wanted me to go home. I think she was threatened by the gypsy in me, which she saw emerging as I was hanging out with Delaney. I had a restlessness in me, which I still have, and however much I loved my roots of Ripley and Hurtwood, the road always beckoned. The idea of traveling and making music with a band of musicians in different places never stopped motivating me. At that moment, however, with the album completed, I was ready to go home.

My relationship with Alice, always something of an on/off affair, was at that time headed for the rocks, mostly because of my continuing obsession with Pattie. However hard I tried, I just could not get her out of my mind. Even though I didn’t consider that I really had any chance of ever being with her, I still thought of all my other affairs with women as being merely temporary. I was totally distracted by the idea that I could never love another woman as much as I loved Pattie.

In fact, in order to get closer to her, I had even taken up with her sister. The circumstances that led to this were curious and had happened a few months before, when Delaney & Bonnie played the Liverpool Empire, with George playing guitar. Pattie had showed up, accompanied by her younger sister Paula. After the show, when we were all back at the hotel, George, who was motivated just as much by the flesh as he was by the spirit, had taken me aside and suggested that I should spend the night with Pattie so that he could sleep with Paula. The suggestion didn’t shock me, because the prevailing morality of the time was that you just went for whatever you could get, but at the last moment, he lost his nerve and nothing happened. The end result was not the one George wanted, as I ended up spending the night with Paula instead of him.

When I got back to Hurtwood, in the spring of 1970, Alice and I had a bust-up and she went off to Glin, her Welsh family home, a manor house outside Harlech. This side of her life, the aristocratic social part, was something I never wanted to get involved in. I didn