Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [65]
In the summer of 1971, over a year into my self-imposed exile, George called me one day to ask if I’d fly to New York to play in a show he was putting on at the beginning of August at Madison Square Garden to raise money for the victims of the Bangladesh famine. He was only too aware of my drug problems and may have seen this as some kind of rescue mission. Whatever the reason, I told him I could go only if he could guarantee that they could keep me supplied. Since the initial schedule was about a week’s rehearsal followed by the show, he was pretty certain he could take care of it. The consensus was that finding stuff in New York would not be a problem, and if there were any difficulties, apparently people who knew some people would be able to sort me out.
The journey got off to a very bad start. When Alice and I got to the airport, Pattie was there to see me off. I can’t remember how this came about, but it was wonderful and disastrous all at the same time. Alice was furious and came to the conclusion that I was secretly still seeing Pattie, which wasn’t true, but who could blame her for thinking that? I was in such a haze most of the time that situations like this were commonplace. I could make arrangements to meet someone somewhere and then forget about it two minutes later. The result was, fantasy and reality were sharing the same space in my head, which became a labyrinth of half-formed plans and ideas, none of which I could seriously commit to. Emotionally and spiritually, though, I was bankrupt, and therefore unconcerned, but this sort of situation did not worry me too much. As long as I had enough stuff to get me through the flight, I was happy.
By the time we got to the hotel in New York, the drugs were starting to wear off. As promised, however, there was a good supply waiting in my room. I tried some, but nothing happened. It turned out that what they had scored for me was street-cut, with a very low amount of actual heroin in it and cut with something nasty, like strychnine, so that it was about a tenth as strong as what I was used to. The result was that I went cold turkey for the first two or three days and missed all the rehearsals. I just lay on the bed in our hotel room, shaking and mumbling like a madman, apologizing to anybody who came to check on me, while Alice ran around town tirelessly trying to find me the real thing.
Luckily for me, Allen Klein, the Beatles’ manager at the time, who was helping George produce the show at the Garden, heard that I was in trouble and offered me some medication he was taking for his ulcers. I took some and, amazingly, at the eleventh hour, it made me feel okay. At the last minute I got to the sound check and quickly ran through some of the things I was supposed to do, and although I have a vague memory of this, and then of playing the show, the truth is I wasn’t really there, and I felt ashamed. No matter how I’ve tried to rationalize it to myself over the years, I let a lot of people down that night, most of all myself. I’ve seen the concert only once on film, but if I ever want a reminder of what I might be missing from the “good old days,” this would be the film to watch.
When we returned home, we retreated to Hurtwood and closed the door. For a long time I didn’t go out at all, leaving Alice to do all the shopping and cooking and, most important, the scoring. She developed a relationship with a guy named Alex who lived in Notting Hill. As well as being a dealer, he was a writer and also a registered drug addict, which meant that every day he would get a prescription for his fix. It came in pill form, and we would buy it from him if he was unable to score the street stuff. We preferred the real thing, because it was raw and much more powerful, whereas