Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [85]
My drinking was getting worse all the time, and I was starting to get into trouble at the Windmill, usually just verbal, but sometimes becoming physical. Then I would get into the car and crash it into the fence between the pub and the house, a distance of about three hundred yards. Drink was also affecting my performance. During one London concert, in April 1977, I just walked off the stage after about forty-five minutes. It was at the end of a British tour, and we’d added on one last show, at the Rainbow, and my system just couldn’t take it.
Halfway through the set I started to feel pretty strange, and it got worse and worse and I thought, “Well, if I don’t walk off now, I’m going to fall over,” so I stumbled off. Roger took me outside for some fresh air, telling me, “You don’t have to go back on, boy, you don’t have to go back on. Don’t worry about it, if you’re not feeling all right, we’ll call it a day.” I sat in the dressing room for a while, then Pete Townshend, who was guesting with the band, came in and said quite angrily, “Is this what you call show business?” The result was that I made it back on after Pete and got through the rest of the performance by literally miming his playing and singing.
Looking back, I can’t believe the ways I endangered my life. Returning from Japan in the autumn of 1977, we stopped off to do a couple of shows in Honolulu. On one of the nights, I happened to know that my drummer, Jamie Oldaker, had pulled a girl and taken her back to his room, and I decided that I would spoil it and also give him a fright. I had a ceremonial samurai sword with me, a tourist souvenir rather than a real one, so I got myself dressed up in a pair of pajama bottoms, into which I somehow tucked the sword and, naked apart from that, climbed out onto the balcony of my hotel room. Then, edging myself round the ledge that protruded from the wall of the hotel and connected the balconies, I climbed from balcony to balcony to the room where I knew Jamie was sleeping. When I finally climbed through his window, he was furious. We were thirty floors up and I was drunk, and the poor girl was freaked out of her mind. I was a bit disappointed and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. It was supposed to be a brilliant joke. Worse was to come.
We were startled by a knock at the door, and when Jamie opened it, two guys with guns were outside, pointing them at our door from a crouch position. Someone had spotted me out on the ledge and thought I was some kind of an assassin and called the police. When they realized it was just a drunken idiot making a fool of himself, they begrudgingly let me go, but it took a lot of sweet talk from Roger, who was getting quite good at this. Unfortunately, such behavior did little for my reputation, and when, in November 1978, Roger had to cancel a show in Frankfurt for technical reasons, the headlines of one of the big national papers screamed ERIC CLAPTON—TOO DRUNK TO PLAY.
The tour in question was a little jaunt dreamed up by Roger, both to promote our new album and to be the subject of a candid documentary film about life on the road, to be called Eric Clapton’s Rolling Hotel. The idea was that the band would tour Europe by rail, aboard not an ordinary train but three coaches that had once been part of Hermann Göring’s own private train, which Roger had tracked down somewhere in Europe. They consisted of a drawing room coach, a restaurant coach, and a sleeping car, and they would be hooked up to trains that happened to be going in the direction we wanted. Roger thought this would be great fun for one and all. I thought so, too, and went along