Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [70]
Frank Gore was nine years younger than me, age twenty, when I went to work on the family farm in Shropshire early in 1974. Though I had known him since he was fourteen, it was only as Alice’s little brother, and now we hit it off right away. I drove up from Hurtwood in a car that I had been given by George Harrison, a Mini Cooper Radford, a deluxe custom-built Mini that he had had painted with Tantric Indian symbols by a coach-painter. I took with me an acoustic guitar and some of my record collection, and since Frank turned out to be a huge music fan, that immediately gave us something in common. He was a great person to listen to music with and bounce ideas off of, and he became my sounding board as to how I was going to get back into playing. We were living in a tiny cottage with a couple of bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. It was pretty funky, but Frank was a great cook and we lived mostly in the kitchen.
Since I was so unfit after three years of doing little more than lying in a nod on a couch in front of the TV, the agreement was that, to begin with, I would work according to my condition. There was a lot of work to be done. Frank was running a farm that barely broke even, and doing it virtually single-handed. A friend of his, Mike Crunchie, and another man called Dai’ were the only farmhands I met, and it was Crunchie who showed me the ropes. I was soon up at dawn, working like a maniac, baling hay, chopping logs, sawing trees, and mucking out the cows. It was the kind of manual labor I hadn’t done since working with my grandfather on a building site, and I really loved it. I was soon getting very fit, and even though it was winter, I was getting brown, too, from windburn. In the meantime, Frank was swanning around buying and selling trucks and other heavy vehicles. He fancied himself a trader and loved to talk about the massive deals he was into for lorries and tractors and the like.
At around five or six, he would pick me up and we’d go into Oswestry and hit the pubs, where we’d listen to the jukebox and drink until we could hardly stand up. Sometimes we’d make complete asses of ourselves, but we were doing it in public, in an outward manner, and after the reclusive way I’d been living, that seemed very healthy. Then we’d go back to the cottage and Frank would fix some dinner, and we’d drink some more. I was having the best time I’d had for a long time. Frank did something very important for me. He made me feel good about myself again. When I was around the Pattersons, I always felt slightly ashamed of myself, as if I were a rehabilitating criminal, but when I was with him, although a good deal of it was fueled by alcohol, I felt confident and funny, as if I were finally coming out of my shell. He was very loving and kind to me, and best of all he seemed to have no agenda. I think he truly liked my company and just accepted me for who I was.
All the time I stayed with Frank, I began to collect songs and ideas for a new album. I was listening to all kinds of different music and even trying to write the odd line or two. Needless to say, the blues featured high in my priorities, and I was getting quite excited about starting on something soon. Going from a very isolated existence to a very gregarious one had a lot to do with me wanting to make music again, and for this I am truly indebted to David and the Pattersons, for this was the one area in which they were absolutely right to focus my energies. Apart from the material I had in mind, a possible band was also waiting in the wings. Carl Radle had sent me some tapes of a combo he was playing with in Tulsa, along with a note saying, “You should listen to this. I think you’d like working with these guys.” With Carl on bass, Dick Sims on keyboards, and Jamie