by Stephen King
[ed. Clapton is like the Zelig of Rock and Roll culture and history. He's everywhere, and has some amazing stories to tell.]
Most A.A. meetings begin with the chairman offering his qualifications at the head table next to the coffee maker. This qualification is more commonly known in the program as the drunkalogue. It’s a good word, with its suggestions of inebriated travel, and it certainly fits Eric Clapton’s account of his life. “Clapton” is nothing so literary as a memoir, but its dry, flat-stare honesty makes it a welcome antidote to the macho fantasies of recovery served up by James Frey in “A Million Little Pieces.”
A drunkalogue consists of three parts: what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now. Following a format that Clapton, now 20 years sober, could probably recite in his sleep, the world’s most famous rock-and-blues guitarist duly — and sometimes dutifully — covers the bases. He is rarely able to communicate clearly what his music means to him (“It’s difficult to talk about these songs in depth,” he says at one point; “that’s why they’re songs”), but his writing is adequate to the main task, which is describing how he became the rock ’n’ roll version of Harry Potter: Clapton is, after all, the Boy Who Lived. And this drunkalogue has other things to recommend it; to my knowledge, no other addict-alcoholics can claim to have filched George Harrison’s wife or escaped — barely — dying in a helicopter crash with Stevie Ray Vaughan. Both Clapton’s and Vaughan’s choppers took off into heavy fog after a show in Wisconsin. Vaughan’s turned the wrong way and crashed into an artificial ski slope.
I’ve heard it suggested at recovery meetings that the true alcoholic is almost always an overachiever with a bad self-image, and Clapton fits this profile as well as any. After millions of records sold, thousands of S.R.O. concert dates and decades of conspicuous consumerism (Visvim shoes, Patek Philippe watches, a yacht), he can still call himself “a toe-rag from Ripley.”
That’s the small town in Surrey where Clapton grew up. He discovered, as a child of 6 or 7, that the couple he believed to be his parents were really his grandmother and step-grandfather. His mother was actually the daughter of Rose Clapp and her first husband, Rex Clapton. His father was a married Canadian airman named Edward Fryer: “The truth dawned on me, that when Uncle Adrian jokingly called me a little bastard, he was telling the truth.”
Clapton’s first guitar (he seems to remember them all) was a Hoyer too big for him, and painful to play; his first addiction, Horlicks and Ovaltine tablets stolen from the local sweet shop; his first encounter with the sexual embarrassment that would haunt him for years came with a school caning (“six of the best”) after asking a schoolmate, with no idea what the query meant, if she might “fancy a shag.” He got drunk for the first time at 16 and woke alone in the woods, with fouled trousers, vomit on his shirt and no money. Then he adds the perfect drunkalogue kicker: “I couldn’t wait to do it all again.”
He got his chance. His rise from the Yardbirds (1963-65) to sold-out stadium shows (Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos) was meteoric, but his sense of inadequacy and painful shyness never left him. Perhaps not surprisingly, his idol was the mythic bluesman Robert Johnson, so painfully shy himself that he once recorded songs while facing into the corner of the room.
The drunkalogue’s “what happened” part is more familiarly known to ex-juicers as “hitting bottom.” Clapton hits his in 1981, about 15 years after seeing his first piece of “Clapton Is God” graffiti on a London wall. It was preceded by D.T.’s, bleeding ulcers and a grand mal seizure. He played through them all, often brilliantly (by other accounts; never by his own). Nor was he deterred by the drug-related deaths of peers like Brian Jones, Keith Moon and Jimi Hendrix (for whom Clapton had bought a guitar on the day Hendrix died).
At Christmas in 1981, while dressed only in bright green thermal underwear (and “looking like Kermit the Frog”), he was locked in his bedroom by his wife at the time, Pattie Boyd, so he wouldn’t spoil Christmas for the gathered friends and family. Shortly thereafter, Clapton finally called his manager for help and checked into Hazelden, which “looked grim and resembled Fort Knox. ... It didn’t surprise me to learn that when they tried to get Elvis to go there, he apparently took one look at it and refused to get out of his limo.”
It took him two tries — and I love the image of him setting the dining room table for his fellow patients at mealtime — but he finally “got it,” as A.A.’s say. It took him about six years, a not unusual length of time. Some never get it.
The most harrowing and touching episode in Clapton’s early recovery deals with the death of his 4-year-old son, Conor, who fell out a window while playing hide-and-seek with his nanny and dropped 49 stories. The job of identifying the body fell to Clapton. I cannot comprehend how one stays sober under such circumstances, especially one in the early years of recovery, but somehow Clapton did.
Later, after telling his story at an A.A. meeting, he was accosted by a woman who said he had taken away her last excuse to drink. “I’ve always had this little corner of my mind which held the excuse that, if anything were to happen to my kids, then I’d be justified in getting drunk. You’ve shown me that’s not true.”
In drunkalogues, the final part of the tale — what it’s like now — is usually the most rewarding to live and the least interesting to listen to; veteran drunks have heard it all before, and the newbies, shaking and pale, rarely believe it (I myself believed that anyone claiming more than four months of continuous sobriety had to be flat lying). Clapton’s tale is no different. The founding of Crossroads, the now famous recovery center that he built in Antigua, is the best part. Otherwise, the final chapters are only intermittently interesting: Clapton raises a family, Clapton buys cool clothes, Clapton offers a curmudgeonly overview of pop music (“95 percent rubbish, 5 percent pure”). Most of all, Clapton plays gigs, gigs, gigs. It’s like reading a letter from a cheerful uncle who is now getting on in years.
Clapton is honest — sometimes, as in the account of his son’s death, even searing — and often witty, with a hard-won survivor’s humor. There’s plenty of uplift as well. What Clapton’s drunkalogue lacks is any real insight into the music he’s spent his life playing. We know it gives him joy — he continues to live on what he once called “blues power” — but he’s only rarely able to communicate that joy, or convey what it was like to be a part of the mad hot ballroom that was the British pop music scene between 1963 and 1970.
It’s not lack of will or effort; Clapton does the best he can with what he has, and the result is an honorable badge of a book. He may not have the skill of a Mary Karr or Frank McCourt, but I’m sure he writes better than most memoirists play guitar. And sometimes the workmanlike flashes into the wonderful, as when he describes himself in his early days as “a green young scholar listening my way forward.”
Then there’s the story of one of the most notorious rock acts ever to play the storied Albert Hall in London — the Mothers of Invention. Clapton writes, “Frank Zappa’s keyboard player, Don Preston, known as ‘Mother Don,’ broke into the hall’s organ keyboard, which was locked behind two glass doors, and played a raucous version of ‘Louie Louie’ that brought the house down.”
I could have used a little more of that. It’s not memoir or drunkalogue. That’s rock ’n’ roll.
Stephen King is an original member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band created to benefit literacy. His new novel, "Duma Key," will be published in January.
via:
Most A.A. meetings begin with the chairman offering his qualifications at the head table next to the coffee maker. This qualification is more commonly known in the program as the drunkalogue. It’s a good word, with its suggestions of inebriated travel, and it certainly fits Eric Clapton’s account of his life. “Clapton” is nothing so literary as a memoir, but its dry, flat-stare honesty makes it a welcome antidote to the macho fantasies of recovery served up by James Frey in “A Million Little Pieces.”
A drunkalogue consists of three parts: what it was like, what happened and what it’s like now. Following a format that Clapton, now 20 years sober, could probably recite in his sleep, the world’s most famous rock-and-blues guitarist duly — and sometimes dutifully — covers the bases. He is rarely able to communicate clearly what his music means to him (“It’s difficult to talk about these songs in depth,” he says at one point; “that’s why they’re songs”), but his writing is adequate to the main task, which is describing how he became the rock ’n’ roll version of Harry Potter: Clapton is, after all, the Boy Who Lived. And this drunkalogue has other things to recommend it; to my knowledge, no other addict-alcoholics can claim to have filched George Harrison’s wife or escaped — barely — dying in a helicopter crash with Stevie Ray Vaughan. Both Clapton’s and Vaughan’s choppers took off into heavy fog after a show in Wisconsin. Vaughan’s turned the wrong way and crashed into an artificial ski slope.
I’ve heard it suggested at recovery meetings that the true alcoholic is almost always an overachiever with a bad self-image, and Clapton fits this profile as well as any. After millions of records sold, thousands of S.R.O. concert dates and decades of conspicuous consumerism (Visvim shoes, Patek Philippe watches, a yacht), he can still call himself “a toe-rag from Ripley.”
That’s the small town in Surrey where Clapton grew up. He discovered, as a child of 6 or 7, that the couple he believed to be his parents were really his grandmother and step-grandfather. His mother was actually the daughter of Rose Clapp and her first husband, Rex Clapton. His father was a married Canadian airman named Edward Fryer: “The truth dawned on me, that when Uncle Adrian jokingly called me a little bastard, he was telling the truth.”
Clapton’s first guitar (he seems to remember them all) was a Hoyer too big for him, and painful to play; his first addiction, Horlicks and Ovaltine tablets stolen from the local sweet shop; his first encounter with the sexual embarrassment that would haunt him for years came with a school caning (“six of the best”) after asking a schoolmate, with no idea what the query meant, if she might “fancy a shag.” He got drunk for the first time at 16 and woke alone in the woods, with fouled trousers, vomit on his shirt and no money. Then he adds the perfect drunkalogue kicker: “I couldn’t wait to do it all again.”
He got his chance. His rise from the Yardbirds (1963-65) to sold-out stadium shows (Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos) was meteoric, but his sense of inadequacy and painful shyness never left him. Perhaps not surprisingly, his idol was the mythic bluesman Robert Johnson, so painfully shy himself that he once recorded songs while facing into the corner of the room.
The drunkalogue’s “what happened” part is more familiarly known to ex-juicers as “hitting bottom.” Clapton hits his in 1981, about 15 years after seeing his first piece of “Clapton Is God” graffiti on a London wall. It was preceded by D.T.’s, bleeding ulcers and a grand mal seizure. He played through them all, often brilliantly (by other accounts; never by his own). Nor was he deterred by the drug-related deaths of peers like Brian Jones, Keith Moon and Jimi Hendrix (for whom Clapton had bought a guitar on the day Hendrix died).
At Christmas in 1981, while dressed only in bright green thermal underwear (and “looking like Kermit the Frog”), he was locked in his bedroom by his wife at the time, Pattie Boyd, so he wouldn’t spoil Christmas for the gathered friends and family. Shortly thereafter, Clapton finally called his manager for help and checked into Hazelden, which “looked grim and resembled Fort Knox. ... It didn’t surprise me to learn that when they tried to get Elvis to go there, he apparently took one look at it and refused to get out of his limo.”
It took him two tries — and I love the image of him setting the dining room table for his fellow patients at mealtime — but he finally “got it,” as A.A.’s say. It took him about six years, a not unusual length of time. Some never get it.
The most harrowing and touching episode in Clapton’s early recovery deals with the death of his 4-year-old son, Conor, who fell out a window while playing hide-and-seek with his nanny and dropped 49 stories. The job of identifying the body fell to Clapton. I cannot comprehend how one stays sober under such circumstances, especially one in the early years of recovery, but somehow Clapton did.
Later, after telling his story at an A.A. meeting, he was accosted by a woman who said he had taken away her last excuse to drink. “I’ve always had this little corner of my mind which held the excuse that, if anything were to happen to my kids, then I’d be justified in getting drunk. You’ve shown me that’s not true.”
In drunkalogues, the final part of the tale — what it’s like now — is usually the most rewarding to live and the least interesting to listen to; veteran drunks have heard it all before, and the newbies, shaking and pale, rarely believe it (I myself believed that anyone claiming more than four months of continuous sobriety had to be flat lying). Clapton’s tale is no different. The founding of Crossroads, the now famous recovery center that he built in Antigua, is the best part. Otherwise, the final chapters are only intermittently interesting: Clapton raises a family, Clapton buys cool clothes, Clapton offers a curmudgeonly overview of pop music (“95 percent rubbish, 5 percent pure”). Most of all, Clapton plays gigs, gigs, gigs. It’s like reading a letter from a cheerful uncle who is now getting on in years.
Clapton is honest — sometimes, as in the account of his son’s death, even searing — and often witty, with a hard-won survivor’s humor. There’s plenty of uplift as well. What Clapton’s drunkalogue lacks is any real insight into the music he’s spent his life playing. We know it gives him joy — he continues to live on what he once called “blues power” — but he’s only rarely able to communicate that joy, or convey what it was like to be a part of the mad hot ballroom that was the British pop music scene between 1963 and 1970.
It’s not lack of will or effort; Clapton does the best he can with what he has, and the result is an honorable badge of a book. He may not have the skill of a Mary Karr or Frank McCourt, but I’m sure he writes better than most memoirists play guitar. And sometimes the workmanlike flashes into the wonderful, as when he describes himself in his early days as “a green young scholar listening my way forward.”
Then there’s the story of one of the most notorious rock acts ever to play the storied Albert Hall in London — the Mothers of Invention. Clapton writes, “Frank Zappa’s keyboard player, Don Preston, known as ‘Mother Don,’ broke into the hall’s organ keyboard, which was locked behind two glass doors, and played a raucous version of ‘Louie Louie’ that brought the house down.”
I could have used a little more of that. It’s not memoir or drunkalogue. That’s rock ’n’ roll.
Stephen King is an original member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band created to benefit literacy. His new novel, "Duma Key," will be published in January.
via:
