Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [83]
One day an old beat-up bus rolled up the drive at Hurtwood, and out stepped Ronnie Lane, whom I had known since I first met the Small Faces in a guitar shop in the West End. We had got to talking, and they invited me down to the studio where they were practicing. I remember watching them playing and thinking how great they were. The one I was attracted to most in terms of personality was Ronnie. He was sharp and well-dressed and very funny as well as being very gifted musically. Then, when we were doing rehearsals at Ronnie Wood’s for the Rainbow Concert, he would drop by, and I remembered thinking that I’d like to spend more time with him one day.
Ronnie was about to turn a corner in his life. He had left his first wife, Sue, and had taken up with a woman named Kate Lambert, who was into the world of travelers and carts, and the gypsy lifestyle, so he was going down a road already familiar to me from hanging with the Ormsby-Gore clan. I was immediately interested, particularly since I’d always known that we had a lot in common and that sooner or later we’d probably get together. They parked their bus outside the house and stayed with us for a while. They told us that they had bought a hundred-acre farm on the Welsh borders, called Fishbowl, and were living there with a motley group of musicians and friends. It caught me like a bug, and I couldn’t wait to go up and visit them.
My fascination with the life that Ronnie described to me went back to something I had been exposed to a little bit with Steve Winwood when he was forming Traffic and I was forming Cream, and we had discussed the philosophy of what we wanted to do. Steve had said that for him it was all about unskilled labor, where you just played with your friends and fit the music around that. It was the opposite of virtuosity, and it rang a bell with me because I was trying so hard to escape the pseudo-virtuoso image I had helped create for myself.
Ronnie was into the same kind of thing, but it was much more convoluted because he was actually trying to combine his music with the running of a circus. It was called Ronnie Lane’s Passing Show, and it featured circus acts like jugglers, fire-eaters, and dancing girls as well as the band he had assembled, which he called Slim Chance, featuring, among others, Bruce Rowlands, Kevin Westlake, and Gallagher & Lyle. They would put up a big tent and then hang posters in the village, all done with a very casual approach. Whereas a real circus would have to get permission to go on the land a year in advance, they’d just turn up and put it up before anyone knew they were coming, and hope to get away with it. A certain number of the community would turn up, and if they were lucky, they’d make enough money to break even. This was a rarity, however, and the whole thing eventually fell to pieces.
Nell and I started to go and visit Ronnie and Kate in Wales. We’d just show up and blend in, and although there wasn’t a lot of room in the cottage, it didn’t seem to matter. I loved hanging out with Ronnie because we were both drinkers, and as we spent more time together, Ronnie’s musicality also began to rub off on me. Just like him, I was going through a very different period in my music. I’d been aware of J. J. Cale, and I was getting increasingly interested in country music and making music just for fun. I remember we once chartered a boat and sailed around the Med, and did a few shows off the boat in places like Ibiza and Barcelona. The band consisted of Ronnie and me, Charlie Hart on violin, Bruce Rowlands on drums, and Brian Belshaw on bass, and we’d sometimes set up on the quay and play like buskers while Nell and Kate would dress up in cancan outfits and dance. It was a complete fiasco and we certainly didn’t make any money, but it was a lot of fun. On another occasion, St. Valentine’s Day 1977, we played a secret