Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [91]
After trying ourselves out on a local audience in Cranleigh Village Hall, we went out on the road, around Europe and the Far East, and the concerts in Budokan, Tokyo, were recorded for our first album together, which was released in May under the title Just One Night. But I missed Carl, and I was riddled with guilt because he had saved my neck at one point, by sending me that tape, and I’d turned my back on him. I never saw him again. In May 1980 the news reached me that he had died of kidney failure, brought on by the effects of alcohol and narcotics, and deep down I felt partly responsible for it.
When I heard about Carl, we had just completed a UK tour, our first for eighteen months, so I was at home for a prolonged period. I became depressed and lost myself in drinking. My normal day became just sitting in front of the TV and responding very aggressively to anybody who came to the door or wanted me to do any work. I became very negative about everything. I just wanted to stay at home and get drunk, with Pattie as a slave cum partner. I was drinking copious amounts of Special Brew, which I was secretly topping up with vodka, so that it looked like I was only drinking beer. Then I would take coke on top of this, which was the only time when Pattie would join me, as she liked to do cocaine without the booze, so this became our meeting place.
At some point in the day we would go off to the pub together, either to the Windmill, where we’d hang out with the landlord, or to the Ship to meet the Ripleyites. Nor did Pattie’s presence get in the way of my trying to get something going with one of the barmaids, or indeed any woman who walked in the door. Then I would round people up and invite them back home, often complete strangers. My favorite thing was to pick up derelicts, or “men of the road” as I preferred to call them, my thinking being that these were “real” people. I’d see one walking along the road and stop the car and pick him up. They were often barking mad and talking gibberish, but I’d take them home and Pattie would have to cook dinner for them. It wasn’t long before she was having to tell people not to offer me drinks if we were out, because she could see I was getting worse.
I couldn’t get Carl out of my mind. The band did a short tour of Scandinavia in September and October, during which the coroner’s report into his death was published. The next day I wrote the following entry in my diary: “I have written (unwittingly) a song for Carl Dean, and as a result I am drinking too much and wallowing in the glory of being the one who had the strings of altrering [sic] his destiny, so they say…doesn’t it occur to anyone that I was in the front line with him? I haven’t even read the report so why should I be so hurt and angry? I will tell you why—I loved and left the man and there will never be a day go by when he doesn’t enter my heart…. If I am guilty, then God alone will cut me down, and all will be forgiven, even those who calm me and tell me it’s all a bad dream…. We cut the song beautifully and it shall be called ‘e.c..c.d.’”
By the time we set off, at the beginning of 1981, on a major fifty-seven-date tour of the USA, my booze intake was being supplemented by large quantities of Veganin, a codeine-based sedative. I was suffering from a bad back, caused, I thought, by a hefty slap from my Irish pal Joe Kilduff, whom I’d been drinking with a couple of months previously on one of my visits to Barberstown Castle. At first I was taking about nine at a go, several times a day, but then as the pain got worse, and I couldn’t sleep, I began to take more and more, till I was swallowing up to fifty tablets a day. The upshot was that on Friday, March 13, seven dates into the tour, I collapsed in agony as I came offstage in Madison, Wisconsin. We flew to St. Paul, Minnesota, where Roger had me rushed to a hospital. I was diagnosed with