Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [62]
One night our producer, Tom Dowd, told me that the Allman Brothers Band was playing the Coconut Grove and suggested that we all go down to see them. With their long, long hair and beards, the band looked amazing, and they were great musicians. I loved them, but what really blew me away was Duane Allman’s guitar playing. I was mesmerized by him. He was very tall and thin with an air of complete conviction, and although he didn’t sing, I felt sure he was the leader of the band, just by his body language. Tom introduced us to the band after the show, and we invited them back to the studio for a jam, which resulted in me asking Duane to play on the sessions while they were in town.
Duane and I became inseparable during the time we were in Florida, and between the two of us we injected the substance into the Layla sessions that had been missing up to that point. He was like the musical brother I’d never had but wished I did; more so than Jimi, who was essentially a loner, while Duane was a family man, a brother. Unfortunately for me, he already had a family, but I loved it while it lasted. These kinds of experiences don’t happen every day, and I knew enough by then to cherish it while I could.
Having another guitarist made our band come alive, and when Duane went back to playing with the Allman Brothers, we were never really the same again. The Dominos returned to England and carried on touring, but when we put out the album, it died because, even though word was beginning to seep out that “Derek is Eric,” I wasn’t prepared to do any press or help it in any way. I was still a real idealist in those days, and my hope was that the album would sell on its merit. It didn’t, of course, because lack of promotion meant that nobody knew it was out there. In the end, pressure from the record company on the one hand and Stigwood on the other compelled me to agree first to having “Derek is Eric” badges released to the press, and second to our promoting the album both at home and in the States.
By the time I got back to America, my heart was no longer in the Dominos. We had scored masses of coke and smack before we left Florida and took it on tour with us. With the amount of drugs we were taking every day, I really don’t know how we got through that tour alive, and by the time we came back to England, we were all on the path to becoming full-blown addicts. Tom Dowd was so worried about me that he asked Ahmet Ertegun to come and see me. Ahmet took me aside and talked to me in a very fatherly way about how concerned he was about my drug taking. He told me all about his experiences with Ray Charles, and how painful it had been for him to watch Ray get more and more caught up in the world of hard drugs. At one point he became very emotional and started to cry. You would think that, because I can recall this with such clarity, it had some effect on me, but the fact is, it didn’t make the slightest difference. I was hell-bent on doing what I was going to do and really didn’t see it as being all that bad.
What I didn’t realize then was—after his experiences not just with Ray but with other people in the jazz world who had gone down the drugs road and ended up dead—just how scared Ahmet was of what might happen to me. He was just doing his best to dissuade me from carrying on. Drugs were the beginning of the end for the band. We couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t work. We couldn’t agree. We were paralyzed, and this led to hostility growing among us. We attempted to make another album, but it just fell to pieces. The final straw came when Jim Gordon and I had a huge row and I stormed out of the studio in a rage. The band never played together again. Disillusioned, I retired to Hurtwood.
This was the beginning of