Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [77]
The Ocean Boulevard tour continued throughout most of 1974. We played forty-nine sold-out shows in the United States, Japan, and Europe, almost all of them in huge stadiums, and much of that time is a blackout. Looking back on it, however, I think that Roger was probably right to have been worried about sending me out to play in these vast arenas. After having been out in the cold for so long, I was nervous and rusty onstage, and so tended to avoid playing the solos that fans had paid to come and hear. My live guitar playing didn’t really pick up until we started playing smaller venues in the U.S. the following year. Nell stayed till the end of the first leg of the American tour and then went home.
The minute she left, I was off having one-night stands and behaving outrageously with any woman who happened to come my way, so my moral health was in appalling condition and only likely to get worse, while my drinking was steadily increasing. It seemed like I was already trying to sabotage my relationship with Pattie, as if now that I had her, I didn’t want her anymore. Only a couple of other people were inclined to keep up with me, Legs Larry and, to a certain extent, Carl, but a lot of the others would try to avoid us. Occasionally Roger would tell me to slow up, and I might think about it for a while before pouring myself another drink to drown the idea, or I would get angry and tell him to mind his own business.
When the tour was over, because of the success of “I Shot the Sheriff,” Tom and Roger thought it would be good to head down to the Caribbean to follow up the reggae thing, and they arranged a trip to record in Jamaica, where they felt we might dig around and get some roots influence. Tom was a great believer in tapping the source, and I was happy to go along with this since it would mean that Pattie and I would also be able to have a kind of honeymoon. Kingston was a great place to work. Wherever we went, there was music in the air. Everyone was singing all the time, even the maids in the hotel, and it really got into my blood, but recording with the Jamaicans was something else.
I really couldn’t keep up with their intake of ganja, which was massive. If I had tried to spark up as much or as often, I would either have passed out or started having hallucinations. We were working at Dynamic Sound Studios in Kingston, and people were coming in and out all the time, toasting these huge “trumpet” joints and making so much smoke in the room that I couldn’t see who was there and who wasn’t. We were doing a couple of songs with Peter Tosh, who looked like he was unconscious a lot of the time, just slumped in a chair. Then he’d get up and play brilliantly while we were cutting the track, playing his wah-wah reggae chop, but as soon as we stopped, he would just go back into a trance.
I was seriously interested in reggae, but having already got acquainted with Bob Marley and the Wailers, I wasn’t sure where to go next. On reflection, Toots and the Maytals would have been ideal; they are now one of my all-time favorite bands, but back then we hadn’t made that connection. The problem was, in my drunkenness, I was being led around quite a lot by Tom, and even Roger, with them making assumptive artistic choices on my behalf, sometimes disastrously so. Just going to Jamaica was not going to be enough, and trying to make a bridge between reggae and rock music without having some kind of plan was not going to be easy. It had happened, in a very naïve way, with “I Shot the Sheriff,” but we had done that without really thinking about it, and when we did start to think about it, it was already too late. We found ourselves either playing full reggae or rock ’n’ roll. We did one song on the album called “Don’t Blame Me,” written by George Terry, a sort of sequel to “I Shot the Sheriff,” but it didn’t sit well. It felt like we were milking a formula, which in effect was what we were doing, and that almost always backfires. Though there was a lot of stuff in the can, the album we ended up with, which