Clapton (19 page)

I did eventually cut a track with Bob, on our next studio album,
No Reason to Cry
, recorded during the winter of 1975 at The Band’s Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, California. This was a drunk and disorderly kind of album, and we didn’t really know where we were going. We had no producer when we started, other than our engineer Ralph Moss, and we just lost direction. Part of the problem was that the setting of the studios and the situation were so idyllic that I for one couldn’t get myself together sufficiently to write any songs. After a couple of days I was ready to leave, so I called in The Band’s own producer, Rob Fraboni, to help us. Richard Manuel then came up with a song called “Beautiful Thing,” which was the first number we recorded and got us off to a start.

At the time, Bob Dylan was living in a tent in the garden of the studios, and every now and then he would appear and have a drink and then disappear again just as quickly. I asked him if he would contribute something for the album, write, sing, play, anything. One day he came in and offered me a song called “Sign Language,” which he had played for me in New York. He told me he had written the whole song down at one sitting, without even understanding what it was about. I said I didn’t care what it was about. I just loved the words and the melody, and the chord sequence was great. Since Bob doesn’t restrict himself to any one way of doing a song, we recorded it three different ways, with me duetting with him. It also gave me the opportunity to overdub Robbie Robertson, doing his “wang bar” thing that I love so much. All in all it’s my favorite track on the album.

One of the more bizarre guest appearances I took on during this period was in the south of Ireland in September when I was approached by Kevin McClory, the Irish producer of the James Bond movie
Thunderball.
He was mounting a charity extravaganza at Straffan House, his home in Kildare, in the form of a celebrity circus, which he called Circasia, in which he wanted me to perform alongside stars like Sean Connery, John Huston, Burgess Meredith, and Shirley MacLaine. Roger thought it would be a good idea, and as Burgess Meredith, star of
Day of the Locust
, was one of my heroes, I agreed to show up. It turned out to be an unforgettable event, and led to another interesting fork in the road.

On the first night, I met John Huston and sat in a circle of people around him, all of us spellbound, listening to his reminiscences. The following day, Burgess, Shirley, and I were gathered up and given our skit to rehearse. I had always had a crush on Shirley MacLaine, since seeing her in
Irma la Douce
wearing a tiny little teddy. What legs! I was keen to meet her, as she was known to be a very feisty lady. Our routine was loosely based on a piece of Chaplinesque slapstick. Burgess and I were dressed as clowns, with wigs, big funny noses, and great big shoes, and she was playing the Chaplin tramp. The idea was that she would wander around the ring and we would follow, each carrying a custard pie behind our back. We would sneak up behind her, with the intention of hitting her on each side of her face with the pies, but just as we were about to hit her, she would bend down to do up her shoelaces and we would end up hitting each other in the face, across her bent back.

There were two shows, the first being a free performance for handicapped kids, where the routine went without a hitch, with me and Burgess smothering one another with whipped cream, which the audience thought was hilarious. The evening show was the earner, with tickets going for £5,000 a head, and of course by this time, bearing in mind that we were in Ireland, the entire cast, with the exception of Shirley, had got blind drunk. Poor Mr. Connery lost control and went around the ring hanging underneath the horse he was supposed to be riding, which was five times more entertaining than what he was supposed to do, and Burgess and I took our cue from that. When Shirley bent down to do her laces, instead of hitting each other, we waited for her to straighten up again and then hit her full in the face, one on each side. She was furious and chased us out of the ring, screaming blue murder. Roger told me that after that, she would occasionally call the office to remark on whatever media trouble I had got myself into, still smoldering. Gorgeous woman.

The place where we were put to stay was a charming little hotel in the village of Straffan, called Barberstown Castle, part of which dates back to the thirteenth century. I immediately fell in love with it, possibly because the first night we were there, I got blotto without parting with a penny. I literally stood at the bar and drank all night and never saw any money change hands. I thought to myself, “This is heaven,” and I rang Roger the next day and told him, “You’ve got to come and see this. You won’t believe it.” A few weeks later we came out together and stayed the night and had the best time, getting pissed with the locals, all of whom, through our rose-tinted spectacles, seemed to be incredible characters and great singers. It had the same effect on Roger as it had on me, and we made the decision between the two of us to buy it.

Over the next few years we got some good use out of it, and a lot of very funny and sometimes strange stuff would go on there, usually in the bar. The restaurant was the actual earning part of the business, and the bar was where the locals and myself would get completely legless every night. At the end of a good night, it would look like a hurricane had swept through the room, with broken glass and furniture everywhere, bodies half hidden under carpets, and me unconscious behind the bar. In the morning the cleaning girls would come in, and within ten minutes the place would look as good as new, ready for a lunchtime session. When, eventually, I became sober, it was decided that we should sell it. By then I hardly went there, and in fact it would have been a reasonably dangerous place to go. But I have extremely fond memories of my times there, in the company of wonderful characters, like Breda, our manager, and her erstwhile boyfriend Joe Kilduff, my drinking buddy. They were great days.

In the spring of 1976, after a year of living in the Bahamas and touring Australia, America, and Japan, I eventually returned to England, where, for a while, Nell and I enjoyed a period of real domestic bliss. Hurtwood was in a terrible state back then. It hadn’t had a lick of paint or much care of any kind, because Alice and I had ignored and neglected it from the day that Monster started to restore it. It was borderline squalid. When we had a couple of dogs living there—Jeep, a weimaraner, my first dog since childhood, and Sunshine, a golden retriever—we would let them crap in the house because we were too stoned to clear it up. The curtains and upholstery were beginning to rot. Nell immediately threw herself into trying to make the house nice again, starting with putting an Aga stove in the kitchen. She was a very social lady and wanted to make the place ready to receive visitors. Like me, Nell enjoyed a drink, though it may not have been to the same extent, and so drinking became an accepted part of our life, and our activities branched off from that. The heroin culture, which I had been immersed in with Alice, had consisted mostly of watching TV or movies when we were not actually pursuing the drug itself. What now followed on from that was a much more pub-oriented lifestyle, starting with the Windmill, the pub at the top of the drive, and extending to Ripley to watch cricket matches and drink in a convivial manner with friends at the cricket club.

Nell met Guy and Gordon, my old school friends, and once again they became part of my network. We were an outgoing couple, and we started to collect other couples. Local married couples became part of our social circle; some were drinkers, others just liked to come around and have dinner. My life suddenly changed from being very introverted to becoming part of this golden duo, holding dinner parties and going out to premieres and things like that. It was much the same for Nell, who had been holed up for years in the gothic gloom of Friar Park with George. It was a fantastic time for me, getting to know all my Ripley friends again. We started something called the Ripley Spoons Orchestra. We’d all go to the cricket club, where Chris Stainton would play the piano and there’d be ten or fifteen people all playing spoons and having a great singsong. For a while, Nell and I really felt part of the community.

During this period, Nell asked if I would meet a man who had begun dating her youngest sister, Paula. The idea was that, as acting head of the family, I was supposed to give this guy the once over, to ascertain whether he was worthy or not. This suited my grandiose view of myself, and I went up to town to have lunch with him. His name was Nigel Carroll, and I liked him instantly. We had a lot of things in common and became good friends, and of course he got the thumbs-up from me.

He was pretty much in love with Paula, and I could tell that he was a capable and honest man, but unfortunately for him, she wasn’t ready to settle. It was tragic, because Paula had a little boy, William, whom Nigel had become very attached to, and when the affair ended he was brokenhearted. I asked him if he would like to come on the road with me to take his mind off things, and for the next several years he was my personal assistant.

I still saw George, who never lost the habit of coming around to play new songs he’d written. One Christmas Eve he came over, and when I answered the door, he squirted a water pistol in my mouth, and it was full of brandy. For some time we had this edgy relationship going on between us, and he’d often make sarcastic little remarks referring to Pattie’s leaving. He wouldn’t hide it under the carpet. Sometimes we’d laugh, and at times it would be uncomfortable, but it was the only way we could go on. One night we were sitting in the great room at Hurtwood when he said, “Well, I suppose I’d better divorce her,” to which I replied, “Well, if you divorce her, then that means I’ve got to marry her!” It was like a scene from a Woody Allen film. Over the years, our relationship developed into a sort of cagey brotherliness, with him, of course, being the elder brother. There was no doubt that we loved one another, but when we actually got together it could get quite competitive and tense, and I very rarely got the last word.

Toward the end of 1976, an invitation came in to attend a big party celebrating the demise of The Band. It came as a bit of a shock. I had no idea that they were disbanding, but I remember Robbie grousing about being on the road, back at Shangri-La Studios. It was a tremendous honor to be asked to play. A lot of very respectable players were scheduled to perform, including Van Morrison and Muddy Waters, not to mention Bob himself. The new hotshot director of
Taxi Driver
, Martin Scorsese, would film it for posterity, and The Band were going to play their final set, with a host of guests getting up onstage. The show was at the Winterland, the big rock venue in San Francisco that had flourished throughout the sixties alongside the Fillmore. Pattie and I flew over a couple of days before and started some hard-core partying. It was great to meet up with Robbie and Richard again. Needless to say, Richard and I got along famously. We were cut from the same cloth, and I loved all the other guys; they were like family to me. The gig was great, except at the beginning of “Further Up the Road” my guitar strap came undone, and I only just caught my guitar before it fell to the floor. Van and Muddy stole the show, although “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” stands as one of my favorite filmed live performances of all time.

One day an old beat-up bus rolled up the drive at Hurtwood, and out stepped Ronnie Lane, whom I had known since I first met the Small Faces in a guitar shop in the West End. We had got to talking, and they invited me down to the studio where they were practicing. I remember watching them playing and thinking how great they were. The one I was attracted to most in terms of personality was Ronnie. He was sharp and well-dressed and very funny as well as being very gifted musically. Then, when we were doing rehearsals at Ronnie Wood’s for the Rainbow Concert, he would drop by, and I remembered thinking that I’d like to spend more time with him one day.

Ronnie was about to turn a corner in his life. He had left his first wife, Sue, and had taken up with a woman named Kate Lambert, who was into the world of travelers and carts, and the gypsy lifestyle, so he was going down a road already familiar to me from hanging with the Ormsby-Gore clan. I was immediately interested, particularly since I’d always known that we had a lot in common and that sooner or later we’d probably get together. They parked their bus outside the house and stayed with us for a while. They told us that they had bought a hundred-acre farm on the Welsh borders, called Fishbowl, and were living there with a motley group of musicians and friends. It caught me like a bug, and I couldn’t wait to go up and visit them.

My fascination with the life that Ronnie described to me went back to something I had been exposed to a little bit with Steve Winwood when he was forming Traffic and I was forming Cream, and we had discussed the philosophy of what we wanted to do. Steve had said that for him it was all about unskilled labor, where you just played with your friends and fit the music around that. It was the opposite of virtuosity, and it rang a bell with me because I was trying so hard to escape the pseudo-virtuoso image I had helped create for myself.

Ronnie was into the same kind of thing, but it was much more convoluted because he was actually trying to combine his music with the running of a circus. It was called Ronnie Lane’s Passing Show, and it featured circus acts like jugglers, fire-eaters, and dancing girls as well as the band he had assembled, which he called Slim Chance, featuring, among others, Bruce Rowlands, Kevin Westlake, and Gallagher & Lyle. They would put up a big tent and then hang posters in the village, all done with a very casual approach. Whereas a real circus would have to get permission to go on the land a year in advance, they’d just turn up and put it up before anyone knew they were coming, and hope to get away with it. A certain number of the community would turn up, and if they were lucky, they’d make enough money to break even. This was a rarity, however, and the whole thing eventually fell to pieces.