It appeared in 1965 in Islington, North London, spray-painted in black letters on a corrugated iron fence in a train station: CLAPTON IS GOD. Scrawled by an anonymous disciple, this graffiti of course referred to blues guitarist Eric Clapton, member of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. Clapton’s apotheosis was a sign of the times: It exemplified not only the remarkable rise of blues and rock music in 1960s Britain and across the world, but also the search for new gods to worship in an age of secularization and radical human autonomy.
Clapton was, in many ways, an unlikely candidate for deification: an insecure white schoolboy, raised in a placid English village, who popularized the music of poor black troubadours in the American South of the 1920s and ’30s. His idol was Robert Johnson, the mythic picker from the Mississippi Delta who, as the legend goes, went to a crossroads at midnight and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for mastery of the blues. (Clapton would later cover Johnson’s song “Cross Road Blues,” also known as “Crossroads,” about the incident, and release an entire album of Johnson covers.) Clapton, too, would pay a price for his success throughout a life of pain and tragedy, all recounted in at times harrowing detail in a new biography by Philip Norman. But beyond the typical ’60s hedonism of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, Clapton’s life is a different kind of legend: an almost didactic tale about the ways that suffering can lead to redemption.
“It is said that famous men are usually the product of an unhappy childhood,” remarked Winston Churchill in his biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. So it was with Clapton. He was born an illegitimate child in 1945 in the working-class village of Ripley; his father, a Canadian soldier stationed in Britain during the war, refused to take responsibility for him and left his teenage mother, Pat. She, too, would abandon Eric after meeting another Canadian soldier and departing for Canada, leaving him with his grandmother, Rose, who he initially believed was his mother. When he was nine, Pat visited and icily told him that he should still regard her as his sister. They never reconciled, and from then on his family and friends would treat him as a “wounded child” and try to protect him from the difficulties of life, a kindness that Clapton would rarely reciprocate.
He found solace in the music of Delta bluesmen like Johnson. “In late-1950s Britain,” Norman writes, “they were to be found only in the loneliest aisles of specialist record shops, most often lumped together in cheaply packaged compilations. Brilliant instinctive musicians who. . .were dimly outlined in sepia in their dusty suits or dungarees, holding ancient acoustic guitars that looked as malnourished as they did.” A classmate who listened to records with Clapton noted “what an extraordinary connection he had with the blues. It seemed to go directly to his soul because of some pain that was in him.”
After flunking out of art college because he spent most of his time practicing the guitar, he worked for a time as a plasterer and bricklayer with his grandfather, before forming a blues band called the Roosters with other working-class acquaintances like Ben Palmer, a woodcarver-turned-pianist. He immersed himself in Britain’s burgeoning blues and rock scene, earning recognition for his loud and aggressive playing style and eventually composing iconic riffs for some of the most influential bands of the era: the Yardbirds, the Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos. (The Dominos had to paste “Derek is Eric” stickers on their albums to alert fans that the diffident guitarist played on their records.) And he befriended and jammed with the other star musicians of British popular music: Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, George Harrison of the Beatles (it is Clapton playing guitar on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”), Pete Townshend of the Who, Jimi Hendrix. When he first played with Hendrix, Clapton stopped halfway through the song and walked offstage in astonishment. “You never told me he was that fuckin’ good,” Clapton said to Hendrix’s manager, his hands shaking.
Clapton never stayed in one band for long, quitting when disagreements arose or the music failed to reach to his standards, and leaving his bandmates without much explanation. He craved anonymity and a private life, even as that life was increasingly in shambles. Norman is harsh but fair when he writes that Clapton’s passionate yet short-lived relationships left women with “addictions as bad as his, or worse, and permanent collateral damage while he moved on to the next one without a backward glance.” Distraught after the Dominos disbanded and he had failed to lure away Pattie Harrison, the wife of his best friend and former Beatle George (the wailing guitars and supplicatory lyrics of the Dominos’ most famous song, “Layla,” not-so-subtly betrayed his longing), Clapton became a heroin addict, holing up for three years inside his English mansion Hurtwood Edge. He made Alice Ormsby-Gore, his 18-year-old girlfriend and daughter of the Welsh aristocrat Lord Harlech, travel to London to secure their heroin. Only decades later, when Alice died from a heroin overdose in 1995 after years of addiction and alcoholism, would Clapton realize, as he put it, “the damage I had done to this poor girl”—an admission of the devastation wrought by his vices.
Clapton eventually got clean after some intensive “neuroelectric therapy.” But almost immediately thereafter, he became an alcoholic to dull the pain of being sober. His regimen of two bottles of brandy a day nearly killed him; he collapsed after a show in 1981 and was taken to a hospital, where the medical team found five bleeding ulcers and declared him to be “45 minutes from death.” At other times, drinking was the only thing that saved him: “Whenever his mind turned to suicide, as it often did,” Norman writes, “what held him back was the thought that if he were dead, he’d no longer be able to drink.” Pattie, who did eventually leave George to marry Eric and tried without success to have a child with him, divorced him after despairing of his drinking bouts and affair with the Italian actress and photographer Lory Del Santo, with whom he then had the son that Pattie had always wanted. She was another victim of Clapton’s persistent juvenility and “wounded” mentality: “I thought I wasn’t worthy of anything decent,” he would later write, “so I could only choose partners who would ultimately abandon me, as I was convinced my mother had done all those years ago. . .If anything honest and decent came along, I would shun it and run the other way.”
The birth of his son Conor finally induced Eric to grow up and be the father that he never had, and he quit alcohol for good after another stint in rehab. But tragedy soon struck again: In 1991 Conor evaded his nanny and jumped out the window of a New York apartment building, falling to his death from the 53rd floor. Eric had been preparing to meet him that morning to take him to the zoo. Rather than succumbing again to drugs or alcohol to relieve his sorrow, or ending his life as so many musicians of his generation had (Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison), Clapton soothed himself with music and wrote some of his best songs: “Tears in Heaven,” a heartbreaking expression of his doubts about whether his son would greet him in the afterlife, sung in a lachrymose falsetto and accompanied by an ethereal Spanish guitar; and “My Father’s Eyes,” which described the experience of not knowing his father but somehow seeing him in the eyes of his son before he died. It’s a relatable epiphany for any man who has noticed the traits of his father in his own son, the mystic chords that link the living, the dead, and the not-yet-born:
I’m like a bridge that was washed away;
My foundations were made of clay.
As my soul slides down to die.
How could I lose him?
What did I try?
Bit by bit, I’ve realized
That he was here with me;
I looked into my father’s eyes.
A rarity among the tumultuous careers of most blues and rock musicians, Clapton’s has had a happy ending: He married American Melia McEnery in 2002 and has since had three daughters. He remains the only artist with three inductions into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame (Yardbirds, Cream, his solo career), and he’s releasing a Christmas album this winter with bluesy takes on classics like “White Christmas.” Leaving his childhood behind, Clapton has looked outside of himself to help others, establishing and financing the Crossroads Center on the Caribbean island of Antigua to help other recovering addicts.
Clapton, despite his decorated and lengthy career, is still less well known than other septuagenarian rockers like Paul McCartney, and Norman’s biography is a suitable introduction. He is a bit too fond of the sensational and bizarre detail, however (such as when Clapton consulted Dr. John, the New Orleans blues musician, about how he could use voodoo to woo Pattie away from George), and this overstuffed book fails to leave much space for reflections on Clapton’s life and times.
A “rock biographer” who has now chronicled the lives of McCartney, Jagger, John Lennon, and Elton John in addition to Clapton, Norman has written elsewhere that “the 60s’ most fervent acolytes tend to be people who never experienced them first-hand”; they pine for the “rosy blur of psychedelic colour, sexual permissiveness and Beatles music” while preferring to overlook the decade’s “complexity and manifold horrors.” He never quite says this, but Clapton’s life is proof enough of these horrors: the addictions to sex and drugs, for instance, which destroyed more lives than they “liberated.” Flower children and their wannabes wanted to be freed from the shackles of hierarchical authority, even from God; instead, they found a new form of servitude.
Clapton’s redemption came only when he rejected this bondage for a different form of obedience. When he returned to a rehab clinic to try and quit alcohol, he faced another crossroads in his life. He had made a habit out of taking the wrong path, but this time was different. The man who had been worshipped as a deity humbled himself; he got down on his knees and prayed. He surrendered. As he wrote in his autobiography:
Within a few days I realized that something had happened for me. An atheist would probably say it was just a change of attitude, and to a certain extent that’s true, but there was much more to it than that. 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. 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.
If you are asking why I do all this, I will tell you. . .because it works, as simple as that.
The blues may never be as popular again as they were in the ’60s, but their enduring power lies in the evocation of an ancient sadness: a sadness that existed long before an English boy was abandoned by his parents or former slaves suffered the poverty and oppression of the American South. It’s the all-too-human sadness of pain, alienation, and forsakenness. But as Clapton discovered, if you humble yourself, if you express gratitude for the gift of being, you can learn to love others. And find peace.