The rock star secured fame by bringing US southern music to a new audience. Then the unrestrained hedonism began
This is an excerpt from The Guardian
Some time around 1965, when he was 20 years old and playing guitar with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers Eric Clapton hardly seemed the obvious pop star type. He was handsome, but not spectacularly so. What imbued him with a special charisma was his seriousness. On a mission to expose the music of the US south to a new audience in as pure a form as possible, he captured the raw emotion of the sound he loved enough to transfix his young listeners.
Clapton was not alone in this among young British blues musicians but he was certainly a figurehead. He moved on to join Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker in Cream and on a solo career at its height, earned him six Grammy awards in a single year and a record-breaking run of 24 nights at the Royal Albert Hall.
The consequences of success in rock’s boom years – the unrestrained hedonism fuelled by unimaginable wealth – would choke the lanes of Surrey with Ferraris overturned during stoned pre-dawn rides home from the London clubs where the in-crowd gathered.
Clapton collected Ferraris like he had once collected Dinky Toys, with an obsessive enthusiasm that tended to fade as soon as the desired object was in his possession.
It was the same with women, some of whom flocked to him in the vain hope of loyalty as well as his company in bed. The models and “posh birds”’ step out of the pages of Vogue and Tatler into Norman’s narrative, some of them – including Boyd, for whom he wrote “Layla”, “Wonderful Tonight” and “Old Love” – just about resilient enough to survive their lover’s treatment, while others, such as the waif-like aristocrat Alice Ormsby-Gore, with whom he shared his heroin habit, fared less well. The only one to dump him seems to have been Carla Bruni, the present Mme Sarkozy, who took up with Mick Jagger en route to the Élysée palace.
Norman accurately describes Eric’s characteristic expression as one of “wary anxiety”. But he also details the years in which the guitarist snorted powder through £50 notes, which were then tossed away, only to be quietly washed and pocketed by a servant, and there was always someone to clear up the mess after a hotel food fight. These were rock’n’roll’s Bullingdon years, and there are times in this account when the reader feels that the examples of debauchery are being held up for inspection between the thumb and forefinger of a white-gloved hand.
Slowhand’s unusual childhood may have created the insecurity and irresponsibility that damaged him and others. He was brought up by his mother’s parents, whom he believed for many years to be his mother and father. The truth came out eventually, and his birth mother would return decades later, but the bond was never truly established.
