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August 9, 2008

MARK BENNETT: ‘Clapton’ opens the door to a legendary life

By Mark Bennett

TERRE HAUTE — As with most books, this autobiography’s back cover includes a brief description of its author …

“Eric Clapton is married to Melia McEnery and is the father of four daughters. He lives outside London.” There’s no mention of guitars, “Layla” or Cream. He’s just a husband and dad with a house near a big city in England.

That characterization contrasts sharply from his fans’ 1960s graffiti declarations that “Clapton is God.”

“Clapton: The Autobiography” includes 328 pages. But those two sentences on the book’s back flap tell the story to a world that would define Eric Clapton in so many other ways. Each page of his blunt tale strips away another layer of the public’s misplaced adoration, until just an extremely mortal man with rare musical skill remains.

For those seeking dreamy, escapist sagas for their summer reading lists, “Clapton” will kick sand in their sun-kissed faces. Instead, Clapton opens the door to a legendary life and shows us what we — and more importantly he — missed along the way. It’s alternately painful, fascinating, pathetic, inspiring and, ultimately, healthy.

Clapton is not God. Rather, Clapton found God.

No doubt, that revelation destroys nostalgic perceptions of “Ol’ Slowhand.” And for the first 234 pages of this chronicle — the first 42 years of Clapton’s existence — there is no hint of any higher power, that is, beyond the buzz he craved as a wretched alcoholic and unrestrained drug user. We see a guy wandering remorselessly in and out of the lives of band mates and women, guided only by a purist passion for music and a slavish addiction to booze, cocaine and heroin.

If readers must cling to their teenage images of Clapton burning up his fretboard, fueled solely by sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, then they should stop reading at Page 234. Before that turning point, Clapton kept moving forward only because of his guitar virtuosity and in spite of his nearly constant inebriation. Even landmark events often left him unfazed. Take the historic 1971 Concert for Bangladesh in New York City, organized by friend George Harrison. Clapton recounts that weekend as a quest to hook up with Harrison’s wife, Pattie, and to score high-grade heroin. His performance in that Madison Square Garden show, under a mental haze, later left Clapton ashamed. “No matter how I’ve tried to rationalize it to myself over the years, I let a lot of people down that night, most of all myself,” he writes.

As a result, he’s watched the “Concert for Bangladesh” movie only once.

Clapton writes almost journalistically. Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon and B.B. King enter and exit scenes with little more fanfare than a session bass player from Tulsa. Some may consider Clapton’s writing style flat. But the absence of embellishment gives his story power. Because we’ve all heard Clapton’s incredible guitar work, the passages in which he gushes carry impact. When he reports about a night in 1967, hopping from one New York club stage to another with Hendrix, improvising with the house bands, Clapton concludes, “We’d get up and jam and just wipe everybody out.”

You’re left to imagine the look on those local musicians’ faces as Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton take over their gigs.

Amid the vignettes on drinking escapades, dalliances and connections with the famous, the atmosphere of revelry permeating Clapton’s days and nights gradually loses its joviality. His relationships are barely that, and only the strongest bonds survive his behavior. One of his blues heroes, Muddy Waters, acted in many ways like the father Clapton never had. But Clapton’s alcoholism rendered him incapable of cultivating a closer friendship with Waters.

For those first two-thirds of the book, you figure the story is little more than a devil-may-care rehash of Sixties and Seventies debauchery. Finally, as Clapton nears the end of his second, largely insincere stint in a rehab clinic, with his life in disarray, he crumbles physically and mentally. On his knees, terrified that he’ll relapse again, he prays, alone in a cold, empty room.

“I had found a place to turn to, a place I’d always known was there but never really wanted, or needed, to believe in,” Clapton writes. “From that day until this, I have never failed to pray in the morning, on my knees, asking for help, and at night, to express gratitude for my life and, most of all, for my sobriety. I choose to kneel because I feel I need to humble myself when I pray, and with my ego, this is the most I can do.”

At 42, his alcohol and drug use ended, and gave way to a new, sober life he’d not experienced since childhood.

Amazingly, Clapton perseveres, even though things got worse before they got better. The details of the death of his 4-year-old son Conor, who ran out an open window of their 53rd-floor apartment while playing hide-and-seek with his nanny, are almost too excruciating to read. And yet somehow Clapton — Eric Clapton the human being — endured having to identify his little boy’s body, a funeral and haunting anguish without turning back to the bottle.

For the past 20 years, this divinely gifted guitar player has stayed clear minded. He hunts, fishes and collects odd old things in a life now centered around his wife, his children and his sobriety. At 62, the past decade has “been the best of my life,” he writes.

Most of us would ask, how can that be? What about the Yardbirds, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominoes, “Layla,” “Sunshine of Your Love,” “Lay Down, Sally”? What about those credit card commercials, waxing about visiting the club where Clapton got his nickname “Slowhand”? What about the sold-out stadiums, concerts in the Royal Albert Hall and MTV “Unplugged”?

Turns out, it took years for Clapton to discover what many of us take for granted …

“Eric Clapton is married to Melia McEnery and is the father of four daughters. He lives outside London.”



Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

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