[Slowhand] Book Review NY Times

[Lauren Blatt]

 From the NY Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 7, 2007
Music

A Guitar God’s Memories, Demons and All 
By ALAN LIGHT

IT is one of the most mythic romantic entanglements in
rock ’n’ roll history. At some point in the late
1960s, Eric Clapton fell in love with Pattie Boyd,
wife of his close friend George Harrison. Mr.
Clapton’s 1970 masterpiece, “Layla and Other Assorted
Love Songs” (recorded with his band at the time, Derek
and the Dominos), was an offering and a plea to her;
they eventually married in 1979 and divorced in 1988. 

The saga sits at the center of “Clapton: The
Autobiography,” which is being published this week by
Broadway Books. Mr. Clapton’s memoir follows the
recent release of Ms. Boyd’s side of the story in
“Wonderful Tonight” (named for a song he wrote about
her), which in September entered the New York Times
best-seller list at No. 1. Mr. Clapton said that he
had not read her book but that he had seen excerpts in
newspapers and noted discrepancies, both small and
large, between the two accounts of their relationship.

On the phone from his home outside London, where he
lives with his wife, Melia McEnery, and their three
daughters, he singled out as far-fetched Ms. Boyd’s
description of a night in which he and Mr. Harrison
had a “guitar duel” for her hand. “We each have our
different versions of our years together,” he said.

His description of his relationship with Ms. Boyd,
though, offers few excuses for his emotional swings,
substance abuse and extramarital affairs (including
one that produced his oldest daughter) that defined
much of their decade together. “Someone recently read
the book and told me that I was really hard on
myself,” Mr. Clapton said. ”I think that’s a
misunderstanding of it. I just tried to take
responsibility for all the different phases of my
life.”

There is now a long tradition of rock biographies,
usually the more lurid, the better. But as the
luminaries of rock get older, they are beginning to
write their own histories. The autobiographies of Bob
Dylan and Sting have been best sellers in recent
years, this fall will see the publication of books by
Ron Wood and Slash, and Keith Richards recently
received a contract for more than $7 million for his
life story.

“Clapton” chronicles the many musical configurations
of Mr. Clapton’s career. He has played in several
monumental bands (the Yardbirds, Cream); accompanied
giants from the Beatles and Bob Dylan to Muddy Waters
and Howlin’ Wolf; and topped the charts and filled
arenas as a solo performer. (An accompanying two-CD
retrospective, “Complete Clapton,” is also being
released this week.) 

With his sturdy blues foundation, liquid tone and
architecturally structured solos, Mr. Clapton, 62, is
one of rock’s most influential and revered guitarists.
Early in his career, the scrawled phrase “Clapton is
God” was a common sight on the walls of London.

But Mr. Clapton’s life has also been defined by a
series of tragedies and oddities. He was raised by his
grandparents, under the illusion that they were his
parents; he never met his father and, until the age of
9, believed that his mother was actually his older
sister. He suffered through a lengthy, epic battle
with alcoholism and drug addiction. In 1991, Mr.
Clapton’s 4-year-old son, Conor, died after falling
out of a hotel room window (inspiring one of his most
popular songs, “Tears in Heaven”).

“I wanted to wait until I had an entire life to write
about,” he said. “And though I don’t think I’m quite
done yet, my memory was starting to play tricks on me.
I realized that if I didn’t do it now, I might have to
rely on other people’s memories, and it might start to
lose some of the accuracy.”

Unlike some of his peers, though, Mr. Clapton has long
been known as extremely private and press-shy. He said
that he had thought about writing his memoirs for a
long time, though always at the prompting of others.

He first attempted the conventional process for a
celebrity memoir, with the use of a ghostwriter:
Christopher Sykes, a longtime friend. But Mr. Clapton
was unhappy with this version. “It looked very
defensive, judgmental, full of self-justification,” he
said. “It just looked dreadful.”

Charlie Conrad, Mr. Clapton’s editor, acknowledged
that the early drafts were “a bit breathless.” He
said, however, that even at that stage, “we were fully
satisfied; we were actually surprised at how frank and
forthcoming it was, but he felt it wasn’t truly him.”

So in the midst of a worldwide tour last winter, Mr.
Clapton — who, in the book, describes himself as both
lazy and a perfectionist — took over the writing
himself. He put himself on a disciplined schedule,
working in “self-imposed exile” in his hotel room
every morning and afternoon.

“I found that I couldn’t wait to pick up the thread
each time,” he said. “I really enjoyed doing it; it
was really fun to learn how to put a sentence and a
paragraph together.”

What is most striking about the result is the author’s
distinctly measured tone, which never becomes
hysterical or sentimental, even when writing about
painful, dramatic or unflattering situations. (“I
considered all of my previous irrational behavior to
have been reasonably excusable,” he writes, fairly
late in the story, “because it had been conducted with
consenting adults.”) In at least one case, though, his
voice was a cause for concern from his editors.

“They called me up and wanted to know why I was so
detached about the loss of my son,” Mr. Clapton said.
“I had to explain that it was impossible to re-enter
that period of time. It’s so traumatic that I can
really only talk about it from a distance, as if it
were about someone else.” In the book, he writes that
when he got the news, he “stepped back within himself”
and then entered “a permanent daze.”

He added that it wasn’t a matter of being unable to
summon his feelings. “It’s not difficult to revisit.
The sadness is always there, it taps me on the
shoulder and all comes flooding back. But it is
difficult to write about it without sensationalizing
it or falsely creating an emotional standpoint just
because that’s what’s expected.”

Mr. Conrad said that both he and the book’s editor in
Britain found the chapter about Conor’s death “kind of
restrained” but ultimately accepted it. “We suggested
that he might explore it in more depth, but he gave us
what he wanted to say.”

The biggest curiosity for readers, however, presumably
surrounds his account of his marriage to Ms. Boyd. Her
book incited a bit of a tabloid frenzy, particularly a
scene of the two guitarists battling for her affection
with their instruments like medieval knights.

Mr. Clapton remembers the evening in question. “I went
over just to hang out, he got two guitars, and we
played,” he said. “But we were always doing that, so
how do you make an everyday thing into a commodity?”

Ms. Boyd said in an e-mail message that she and Mr.
Clapton are “friends” now but that he “is quite right
in saying that we each have our memories of our years
together.”

Despite his anguish over his initially unrequited
love, which drove him deeper into addiction, Mr.
Clapton says now that the affair didn’t seem like such
a big deal. “At the time it was kind of like swinging,
very loose and amoral,” he said. “I think we didn’t
give it too much thought. It was really only later
that we realized that we treated each other quite
badly.”

The despair of “Layla,” Mr. Clapton added, represented
a creative choice, not a documentary about his life.
“That’s the art of writing love songs,” he said. “I
was desperately obsessed with Pattie, but creating a
song is just putting a stamp on a feeling.”

Ms. Boyd has different feelings about the intensity of
their affair. “It was a big deal,” she wrote. “Eric
was very attractive and persuasive. George and I had
many problems in our relationship that had a great
deal to do with the enormity of his fame and his
increasing passion for meditation and the spiritual
life. He frequently simply wasn’t there for me, and
there were other women.”

Mr. Clapton’s friendship with Mr. Harrison survived
the change in Ms. Boyd’s allegiance; famously, the
former Beatle once said, “I’d rather she be with him
than some dope.” Mr. Clapton served as the musical
director for the “Concert for George” tribute show
after Mr. Harrison’s death from cancer in 2001.

“For George, it was all maya,” he said, referring to
the Hindu concept of cosmic illusion. “Something would
come up, and we would get together to play because
that’s what drew us together. His take was purely
spiritual, that we could always get past the physical
world.”

Ms. Boyd’s summation is that “George was able to put
all of this in perspective.”

If Mr. Clapton sounds at peace with his complicated
personal history, what emerges as he recounts his
musical career in his autobiography is a kind of
perpetual dissatisfaction. In one telling anecdote, he
remembers coveting a certain guitar when he was young,
only to lose interest after buying it. “As soon as I
got it, I suddenly didn’t want it anymore,” he writes.
“This phenomenon was to rear its head throughout my
life and cause many difficulties.”

Mr. Clapton comes across as feeling equally uneasy as
a frontman and as part of a band. He tells of joining
and quitting groups, no matter how successful,
frequently and with little warning. He races
dismissively through his solo albums from the 1970s
(which he described in conversation as “unfulfilled
and half-baked”). Most recently, he seems happiest
collaborating with old friends like B. B. King or the
reclusive songwriter J. J. Cale; he is exploring
possibilities with Steve Winwood, his partner in the
ill-fated supergroup Blind Faith.

“My musical identity has taken my entire life to
develop,” Mr. Clapton said. “Now I can sing in a band,
play backup, lead, sing a duet — there doesn’t have to
be a label on it anymore. The most important thing is
that I enjoy listening to music, and I still do.”

Mr. Clapton said he finds his stability in the blues,
the music that he first loved and that he continues to
regard as a kind of beacon. “There’s a
matter-of-factness, a sense of acceptance about the
blues,” he said. “Acceptance is a great state of
being. It steps aside of hysteria, drama, extreme
emotions.” And it is precisely this even, unblinking
sensibility that defines the author’s voice in
“Clapton.”

“To write this book, I had to be comfortable with my
day-to-day existence,” Mr. Clapton said. “I like that
I can look back and feel comfortable with my life.”

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