Clapton is not God

The legendary guitarist's autobiography is an exhausting, but ultimately moving, journey through a dazed life.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Books, Music, Memoirs, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Gary Kamiya, Reviews, Book reviews

Oct. 31, 2007 | In early 1967, word hit the U.S. about a new British group: a killer trio called Cream. The Beatles, the Stones and the Who were the reigning champs of rock at the time, but they didn't sell themselves as virtuosos the way Cream did. These guys were all about chops.

"I Feel Free," the first song on Cream's first album, announced that something new had arrived in pop music -- something hard, cold and scarily precise. Ginger Baker's mathematical, machine-gun-like drumming and Jack Bruce's sophisticated bass line set the stage, and then in wailed this spine-shivering guitar solo by Eric Clapton, the notes bent uncannily up to pitch and so overloaded with sustain they seemed to ooze liquid electricity. Clapton floated along through the solo like a malevolent hummingbird, and then at the end flipped the switch on his Gibson into the treble position and just blasted off a short, savagely accurate blues riff to take it home. You could hear Albert King and Buddy Guy and the whole history of electric blues guitar in that teeth-gritting riff, but it was fed through a monstrous Marshall amp and transformed into something predatory and exultantly modern. It was one of the first guitar solos in rock history that had a spotlight on it.

That spotlight had been shining on Eric Clapton since his days with the Yardbirds, the groundbreaking British blues-rock group, and then with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. In 1965, delirious fans started scrawling "Clapton is God" graffiti on London walls. And for about five more years, Clapton was god -- or at least the second-best guitarist in rock. (Like the great Joe Frazier, who had the misfortune to fight at the same time as Muhammad Ali, Clapton had the bad luck to hit his peak just when a guy named Jimi Hendrix appeared on the scene.) His solos were at once architectural and fiery, heavily indebted to American blues players but unmistakably Clapton.

Clapton made four great albums with Cream and another excellent one with the heavily hyped supergroup Blind Faith, released a decent solo album, and a pretty good double album, "Layla," in 1970. But musically, that was his high-water mark. Since those days, Clapton has released dozens of albums and had lots of big hits, but he did by far his best work between the ages of 21 and 25.

This isn't unusual in rock, where age does not always bring majesty. But for fans whose interest in rockers' lives is pretty much confined to carved-in-Mount-Rushmore figures like the Beatles and Bob Dylan, the new Clapton autobiography thus starts out at a considerable disadvantage, one that can uncharitably be summed up as, "Who cares?" Clapton did gain personal notoriety for his tormented relationship with George Harrison's wife Pattie, for beating alcoholism and drug addiction, and for the tragic death of his young son. But is the life story of a former rock legend turned artistic B-lister really worth reading?

The answer turns out to be yes. "Clapton" is really two stories in one, and he tells them both pretty well. On the one hand, it's a classic rocker's autobiography, a big bag of buttered celebrity popcorn, filled with inside dish about famous musicians, drunken, stoned escapades and abortive relationships. But it's also a redemption narrative, in which a wastrel is saved by grace after hitting bottom.

This may not sound like a promising combination. Rock autobiographies can be superficial, gossipy and dumb. And redemption narratives are frequently marred by psychobabble and after-the-fact moralizing. Fortunately, though Clapton's perspective is that of a survivor, he neither flagellates himself nor tries too hard to justify his screw-ups. Mostly, he simply presents his misadventures with a kind of no-nonsense wryness. It's true that he does posit some self-help-tinged explanations for why he kept screwing up, which sometimes verge on the canned. But even canned self-analysis can contain truth. In the end, Clapton ended up cleaning up his own mess, and you'd have to be cynical indeed not to be moved by his tale of redemption.

In Clapton's account, many of his later problems with emotional intimacy are traceable to a dark family secret. Clapton's real mother, Pat, gave birth to him out of wedlock and handed him over to her parents, Rose and Jack, who raised him as if he was their child. When he discovered the truth at an early age, he withdrew into himself. Later, when the truth had been acknowledged by all, he blurted out to Pat in front of his grandparents, "Can I call you Mummy now?" His mother replied, "I think it's best, after all they've done for you, that you go on calling your grandparents mum and dad." Clapton writes, "in that moment I felt total rejection." He attributes his decades-long inability to form lasting relationships with women to this early sense of inadequacy.

Clapton grew up in the village of Ripley, in rural Surrey, where life horizons were limited. He began to play the guitar while at art school. That's also where he first heard the blues. It was another example of the collision of black American music with British youth, the strange alchemy that produced so much of the greatest pop music of the 20th century. "It's very difficult to explain the effect the first blues record I heard had on me, except to say that I recognized it immediately," he writes. "It was as if I were being reintroduced to something that I already knew, maybe from another, earlier, life."

He set about trying to play like Big Bill Broonzy and Jimmy Reed, and later was introduced to John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Little Walter. But the revelation was Robert Johnson, the brilliant, mysterious Delta blues singer and guitarist who was to serve as the lodestar for Clapton's entire career. "At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense, and this man made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play ... After a few listenings I realized that, on some level, I had found the master, and that following this man's example would be my life's work."

After starting out with a local band called the Roosters, Clapton rapidly moved up through the Yardbirds, the Bluesbreakers and finally Cream, which quickly became an enormous success. Clapton was especially proud of the group's second album, "Disraeli Gears," but was hurt when British fans, gaga over Jimi Hendrix, slighted the album. As Cream played endless, grueling American tours, Clapton became further disenchanted. "[P]laying to audiences who were only too happy to worship us, complacency set in. I began to be quite ashamed of being in Cream, because I thought it was a con. It wasn't really developing from where we were." What crystallized his dissatisfaction was hearing the classic first album by the Band. "Here was a band that was really doing it right, incorporating influences from country music, blues, jazz, and rock, and writing great songs. I couldn't help but compare them to us ... I wanted out."

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