Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [90]
Albert was a great guitar player I had known since the John Mayall days, when he played in Chris Farlowe’s band. My take on him then had been that he was a brilliant player, but that he came from a more jazz or rockabilly direction, so I could admire him without thinking of him as a rival. He went on to play with Head, Hands & Feet, and over the years we became good friends and would, if one of us had to drop out of a gig for some reason, occasionally stand in for one another. Then he moved to America, where he was in great demand as a session musician. When George left, Roger Forrester suggested that I should bring an English guitarist into the band, instead of always playing with Americans, and recommended Albert as a possible replacement. I thought this was a great idea, though knowing Roger, he’d probably had it all worked out for ages.
When I got together with Albert, we immediately bonded in our humor, sharing a love of Python and Spike Milligan. To a certain extent music became incidental, because the kind we made, blues and R&B, came from such a strong source that it would never be threatened by the difference in our influences. We formed ourselves into a mock duo called the Duck Brothers and spent our spare time on the road entertaining ourselves by playing tunes on a couple of rare Acme Bakelite duck whistles we had found and which had a great tone. Unfortunately, this didn’t go down at all well with the Americans, who just didn’t get it, and things were not helped by the fact that Albert and I were boozers, while Carl, Jamie, and Dick were doing drugs of a more isolationist variety. It was the beginning of a rift that began to form between me and Albert and the rest of the guys.
By the spring and early summer of 1979, when we were touring the States promoting our latest album, Backless, this division had grown into marked bad feeling. A lot of paranoia was in the air, reminiscent of the days of the breakup of the Dominos, and we were not spending enough time with one another in a clearheaded way for us to overcome these feelings. It just became accepted that I was going down one road with Albert, having the kind of fun we were having, while the others were doing their own thing.
It got to the point where we were even keeping different timetables. When we were onstage, it was all okay, but everything else was suffering. Unbeknownst to me, Carl Radle had become a serious heroin addict, and my condition was going downhill, too. I was drinking at least two bottles a day of anything I could get my hands on. By the time the tour ended, in June, things had got to such a bad state that I knew there had to be a change, so with great trepidation, I instructed Roger to get rid of the band. He fired them all by telegram while I looked the other way.
Over the next two years, my drinking brought me to rock bottom. It infiltrated everything I did. Even my new band was born in a pub. Gary Brooker was an old friend from the Yardbirds days, when he had been keyboard player for the Paramounts. We had toured together and got on very well, and over the years I would bump into him occasionally, when he was with Procol Harum, and we developed a friendship and mutual respect. Then in the mid-seventies he started playing in a pub not far from Hurtwood, the Parrot Inn in Forest Green, two or three times a week, and when I was at home I would sometimes go over and jam. This had become more frequent since Pattie and I had married, and Joe Cocker’s brilliant keyboard player