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By Root 783 0

and hearing Bobby Whitlock pull up in the driveway outside and scream for me to come out. He sat in his car outside all day, and I hid. And that’s when I went on my journey into the smack. I basically stayed in the house with my girlfriend for about two and a half years, and although we weren’t using any needles, we got very strung out. All that time, though, I was running a cassette machine and playing; I had that to hold on to. At the end of that period I found I had boxes full of playing, as if there was something struggling to survive.

I guess that’s what kept you alive.

I had no care for the consequences; the idea of dying didn’t bother me. Dying from drugs didn’t seem to me then to be a terrible thing. When Jimi died, I cried all day because he’d left me behind. But as I grow older, as I live more, death becomes more of a reality, something I don’t choose to step toward too soon.

So then, in January 1973, Pete Townshend organized a concert for you at the Rainbow in London, with Ron Wood, Steve Winwood and others.

I did that very much against my will. I wasn’t even really there. It was purely Townshend’s idea, and I didn’t know what I’d done to earn it. It’s simply that he’s a great humanitarian and cannot stand to see people throw their lives away. It didn’t matter to him if I was willing or unwilling; he was making the effort so that I would realize, someday, that someone cared. I’m always indebted to him for that.

If that didn’t draw you out, what did?

Carl Radle sent me a tape of him playing with Dick Sims and Jamie Oldaker in Tulsa. I listened to it and played along with it, and it was great. So I sent him a telegram saying, “Maintain loose posture, stay in touch.” And at some point after that, I started to get straight.

Then you made ‘461 Ocean Boulevard,’ your resurrection album. Are you happy with that record?

Yeah, very. I’d wanted to do “Willie and the Hand Jive” since my childhood, and the Robert Johnson song [“Steady Rollin’ Man”] and “Motherless Children” for almost as long. George Terry was there [in Miami], and when we were hanging out before the band arrived from Tulsa, he played me this Bob Marley album, Burnin’, and “I Shot the Sheriff” was on there. I loved it, and we did it, but at the time, I didn’t think it should go on the album, let alone be a single. I didn’t think it was fair to Bob Marley, and I thought we’d done it with too much of a white feel or something. Shows what I know. When I went to Jamaica after that, a lot of people were very friendly because of the light it had thrown on Bob Marley, and Marley himself was very friendly to me as well.

Your Tulsa band could play everything from reggae to blues to pop. What happened to that band?

Toward the end of that particular band, we were gettin’ out of it again, and I was in the lead. I started to get straight, but I was drinking maybe two bottles a day of whatever hard stuff I could get my hands on. And there was real bad tension in the band that was aimed at me. Then I hired Albert Lee. We became friends, and there was a division between these two Englishmen and the Tulsa boys. And at the end of this particular tour, I think it was in ’78, I fired everybody. Not only that, I didn’t even tell them—I fired them by telegram. And I never saw Carl again. He’d saved me at one point, sending me that tape, and I turned my back on him. And Carl died. It was, I think, drugs, but I hold myself responsible for a lot of that. And I live with it.

Bobby Whitlock is a songwriter in Nashville, right? And I read recently that Jim Gordon had been convicted of murdering his mother [RS 449]. I heard that you were among the few people from his past who got in touch and tried to help.

I did try. When I was last in L.A., I kept making inquiries about how to get in to see him. But then I spoke to [drummer] Jim Keltner about it, and Keltner said it probably wouldn’t be a good idea, that they had him on so much Thorazine he didn’t really know what was going on.

I remember your coming to America in 1981 for a tour and