Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [72]
Throughout the course of my addiction, Stigwood had always believed I would come through. Even though it was an enormous gamble for him, he stuck by me, and one of the first things I did on my return was to arrange a meeting with him.
“What do you want to do?” he asked. “Because I know what I want you to do.”
I said, “Well, I’ve got all these ideas, and I think I want to make a record.”
“Well that’s great,” he said, “because that’s exactly what I had in mind. Here are your tickets to Miami, and the studio’s already booked, with Tom Dowd to produce it and engineer it, if you want him.”
And that was it. It had all been prearranged, and they were just waiting for me. I remember thinking how great his foresight was in putting together a deal I could just step into. He’d also rented us a house, 461 Ocean Boulevard, a luxury home right on the seafront in Miami Beach, and I flew there at once.
When I arrived, I was greeted by Carl, who then drove me from the airport to meet Jamie and Dick. They were very feisty young guys, bright and confident and not in the least impressed by me. They made me feel old, and I was only twenty-nine! The idea was that we should play as a quartet, augmented in the studio by other artists, and I instinctively understood that the success of the record depended entirely on the kind of chemistry we developed. The first and most important task for me was to find a way to restore my playing ability in the company of proper musicians. We ended up finding a compromise in which they played minimally to my capabilities. This gave the music a certain charm, in that it was very basic.
One of the extra musicians whom Stigwood had brought in to join us was Yvonne Elliman, a brilliant young singer who had played the part of Mary Magdalene both on Broadway and in the movie for Jesus Christ Superstar. Of Irish and Hawaiian descent, she was incredibly pretty and exotic looking, with long dark hair, and Stiggy was very keen that we should collaborate. Since I had had virtually no sex life in the last few years, it is not hard to imagine what happened in the heady atmosphere of recording in Miami. Yvonne and I fell in lust with each other and were soon flirting and mucking around and enjoying a passionate affair. She really liked to have fun and drink and do dope and generally hang out with the guys, and we became good friends. I was also impressed by her terrific voice, and it wasn’t long before I asked her to join the band.
The guitar I chose to use for my return to recording was one I had built myself, a black Fender Stratocaster I had nicknamed “Blackie.” In the early days, in spite of my admiration for both Buddy Holly and Buddy Guy, both Strat players, I had predominantly played a Gibson Les Paul, but one day while on tour with the Dominos, I saw Steve Winwood with a white Strat and, inspired by him, I went into Sho-Bud in Nashville, and they had a stack of Strats in the back of the shop. They were completely out of fashion at the time, and I bought six of them for a song, no more than about a hundred dollars each. These vintage instruments would be worth about a hundred times that today. When I got home, I gave one to Steve, one to Pete Townshend, and another to George Harrison, and kept the rest. I then took the other three and made one guitar out of them, using the best components of each.
Having come from the Dominos, who were hard-playing