Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [76]
A post-psychedelia drunkenness seemed to sweep over everybody in the entertainment business during the early seventies. To be onstage, you were almost expected to be drunk. I remember doing one entire show lying down on the stage with the microphone stand lying beside me, and nobody batted an eyelid. Not too many complaints came back, either, probably because the audience was as drunk as I was. Of course, a few shining lights were on the road at that time, artists with high ethical and professional standards such as Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and B. B. King. And if I had had the courage or the clarity of mind to understand the example they were setting, maybe I would have started to address my steady decline. But this is alcoholism we’re talking about, and I was already in deep denial about the direction my life was taking.
Private concern over my condition was building, but without proper information. The only thing the people in my immediate circle knew how to do was preserve the status quo, and Roger became part of that. Apparently his brief from Stiggy had been to keep everything working and functioning, and so he became my enabler, making sure I had everything that I wanted, encouraging me just enough, playing the party animal with me and making me laugh. We became incredibly close, and I began to look upon him as a father figure. He traveled everywhere with me, and all the time he kept an eye on me, asking everybody, “Where’s Eric? What’s he up to? Is he all right? Give me a report.” I, in the meantime, was in a happy alcoholic haze, failing to notice that everybody who worked for me now worked for Roger, and that the balance of power had shifted.
Roger’s real coup, and the thing that really cemented our relationship, was to produce Pattie. It was the first time he really waved his magic wand, and the fact that it made a long-held wish come true left me totally under his spell. Roger had heard through the grapevine that Pattie had actually left George and gone to stay in LA with her sister Jenny, who was married to Mick Fleetwood. He suggested that I call her up and get her to come and join me on the tour.
This all came quite out of the blue, but I summoned up the courage to ring and she said yes. It was a lot to take in considering how little I’d seen of her during the previous three years. She joined us in Buffalo on July 6, where we were playing to a crowd of forty-five thousand at the War Memorial Stadium. It was not an auspicious start. I was almost blind from a severe bout of conjunctivitis caught from Yvonne Elliman, with whom I was still carrying on, and so drunk from nerves that I managed to crash into a huge potted plant on the stage. But that night, when I played “Have You Ever Loved a Woman?,” the words had a very special meaning.
My relationship with Pattie, now that we could actually be together, was not the incredibly romantic affair it has been portrayed as being. Rather than being a mature, grounded relationship, it was built on drunken forays into the unknown. With what I know now about my condition, I don’t know if we ever really had a chance for anything better, even if we had been together earlier, because my addiction was always in the way. Having said that, we really were in love and having a lot of fun, but we were on the road, and although it was great to finally be together without having to hide, reality would have to be faced sooner or later.
Part of my denial about our relationship encompassed the way I needed to identify Pattie. Calling her Pattie meant acknowledging that she was still George’s wife, so as a kind of subconscious sidestep, I nicknamed her “Nell,” or “Nelly,” sometimes “Nello.” She didn’t seem to mind, even though it meant becoming known by this moniker to everyone involved in her new life. I suppose I may have been paying homage to my favorite great aunt, or just trying to relegate her to a sort of barmaid status so that I wasn’t so much in awe of her. Difficult to say. Back then my thoughts and actions were never easy to interpret, even for