Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [61]
When I ran into him at the Lyceum, I told him that I wanted to consult him as a doctor. He asked me what my problem was, and I told him that I needed a remedy. “What kind of remedy?” he asked, and I told him…“A love potion.” In a way, I was just calling his bluff, but he then asked me to tell him a little more about the situation. So I told him I was deeply in love with the wife of another man, and that she was no longer happy with him, but wouldn’t leave him. He gave me a little box made out of woven straw and told me to keep it in my pocket, and gave me various long-forgotten instructions as to what to do with it. I do remember that I did exactly as I was told.
A few weeks later, purely by chance, or so it seemed, I ran into Pattie, and we just kind of collided, to the point where there was no turning back. A little while later I saw George at a party at Stigwood’s house and blurted the whole thing out to him: “I’m in love with your wife.” The ensuing conversation bordered on the absurd. Although I think he was deeply hurt—I could see it in his eyes—he preferred to make light of it, almost turning it all into a Monty Python situation. I think he was relieved in some way, though, because I’m sure all the time he knew what had been going on, and now I was finally owning up to it.
This was the beginning of a semi-clandestine affair between us, and the end of my relationship with Paula, who moved on to Bobby Whitlock. But however much I tried to persuade her, it was quite clear that Pattie had no intention of leaving George, even though I was convinced that the writing was on the wall for them. Tormented by my feelings for her, I threw myself into my music, starting with a UK tour of the Dominos. The idea was that wherever we went, we should play incognito and in this way get back to our roots. At first, it worked. We toured around the country, playing small clubs and halls in towns like Scarborough, Dunstable, Torquay, and Redcar, and no one knew who we were, and I loved it. I loved the fact that we were this little quartet playing in obscure places, sometimes to audiences of no more than fifty or sixty people.
This was an incredibly creative time for me. Driven by my obsession with Pattie, I was writing a lot, and all the songs I wrote for the Dominos’ first album are really about her and our relationship. “Layla” was the key song, a conscious attempt to speak to Pattie about the fact that she was holding off and wouldn’t come and move in with me. “What’ll you do when you get lonely?” The Layla album was recorded at Criteria Studios in Miami, where we headed in late August. Its beginnings were inauspicious, because we soon found that, apart from “Layla,” which was still no more than a framework, we actually had very little material. Before I left, Pattie had asked me to get her some pairs of these jeans we used to wear called Landlubbers, which were hipsters with two little slip pockets at the front. She had asked for flared rather than straight bottoms, so I had written “Bell Bottom Blues” for her. Then I had another love song about her called “I Looked Away,” and one or two blues covers I was keen to record, but it was all taking a lot of time and for the first couple of weeks we really weren’t getting anywhere.
What we were doing was having a lot of fun. During the day we would go swimming and have saunas, and then it was off to the studio to jam, sometimes with chemical assistance. We were staying in a funky little hotel on Miami Beach where