Free Clapton by Eric Clapton Page A

big-money league, we were making enough for me to buy my first really serious guitar, a cherry red Gibson ES-335, the instrument of my dreams, of which the Kay had been but a poor imitation. Throughout my life I chose a lot of my guitars because of the other people who played them, and this was like the one Freddy King played. It was the first of a new era of guitars, which were thin and semi-acoustic. They were both a “rock guitar” and a “blues guitar,” which you could play, if necessary, without amplification and still hear them.
    I had seen the Gibson in a shop on either Charing Cross Road or Denmark Street, where several music stores had electric guitars in the windows. To me they were just like sweet shops. I would stand outside staring at these things for hours on end, especially at night when the windows would remain lit up, and after a trip to the Marquee, I would walk around all night looking and dreaming. When I finally bought the Gibson, I just couldn’t believe how shiny and beautiful it was. At last, I felt like a real musician.
    The truth is, I was taking myself far too seriously and becoming very critical and judgmental of anybody in music who wasn’t playing just pure blues. This attitude was probably part of my intellectual phase. I was reading translations of Baudelaire, and discovering the American underground writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg while simultaneously watching as much French and Japanese cinema as I could. I began to develop a real contempt for pop music in general, and to feel genuinely uncomfortable about being in the Yardbirds.
    No longer were we going in the direction I wanted, mainly because, seeing the runaway success of the Beatles, Giorgio and some of the guys had become obsessed with getting on TV and having a number one record. It’s quite possible that Giorgio was still smarting from having lost the Stones, but what was clear was that we weren’t moving upward fast enough, so each of us was told to go out there and find a hit song. Actually I had no problem with having a hit, as long as it was a song we could be proud of. Funnily enough, Giorgio had played me a song by Otis Redding called “Your One and Only Man” several months before. It was a catchy song, which I felt we could do a version of without selling ourselves short. Then Paul Samwell-Smith came up with a song called “For Your Love,” by Graham Gouldman, later of 10cc, which was clearly a number one. I balked, but the others all loved it, and that was that.
    When the Yardbirds decided to record “For Your Love,” I knew it was the beginning of the end for me, as I didn’t see how we could make a record like that and stay as we were. It felt to me that we had completely sold out. I played on it, though my contribution was limited to a very short blues riff in the middle 8 section, and as a consolation they gave me the B side, an instrumental called “Got to Hurry,” which was based on a tune hummed by Giorgio, who gave himself the writing credit under the pseudonym O. Rasputin.
    By then I was a pretty grizzled and discontented individual. I deliberately made myself as unpopular as I could by being constantly argumentative and dogmatic about everything that came up. Eventually Giorgio called me to his office in Soho and told me that it was quite clear that I was no longer happy in the band, and that if I wanted to leave, then he wouldn’t stand in my way. He didn’t exactly fire me. He just invited me to resign. Totally disillusioned, I was at that point ready to quit the music business altogether.

I nitially I was distraught after leaving the Yardbirds. I felt much as I did when I was thrown out of art school and the reality finally kicked in. But in a short time my equilibrium came back, and I was able to pat myself on the back for sticking to my principles, even though I wasn’t really sure quite what my principles were. “For Your Love” was a huge hit, and nobody on the outside