Free Clapton by Eric Clapton Page B

could understand why I had chosen such a moment to quit, when the band was on the up. But the truth is, I felt it was a dreadful waste of what had potentially been a good rock blues band. For a time I returned to live in Ripley, feeling shy, frightened, and disheartened by a business in which everyone seemed to be on the make and selling out rather than being in it for the music. For a while I stayed with Rose and Jack, who were both very supportive of me. By then, I think they knew I was serious about what I was doing and had decided to stand behind me.
    I had a West Indian girlfriend around this time, Maggie, who was a dancer on
Top of the Pops
, and one night she and I went down to Ronnie Scott’s club in Soho to meet up with a friend of mine, Tony Garland. Tony was a fellow music fan I used to hang out with at the Marquee, and in the early days he was the first person I ever saw wearing flared trousers. He had made them himself by sewing triangular inserts into his Levi’s. On that particular night he was with a great-looking girl, June Child, who was obviously smart as a whip and very, very funny. She and I got talking and laughing, and she was taking the mickey out of Tony, whom she kept referring to as “Wanker Garland,” and I started to join in. This was much to the annoyance of Maggie, who was more accustomed to getting all the attention, and the result was that by the end of the evening we had swapped partners.
    I left the club with June, who instantly became one of my best friends. We did not become lovers, however; I really enjoyed her company as a friend and didn’t want to spoil it. I’m pretty sure she wanted to go down that road, but at that point I hadn’t figured out that it was possible to fancy a girl and also be friends with her. Sex was still a matter of conquest rather than the result of a loving relationship. The idea simply never occurred to me that you could have an intelligent conversation with a girl and then sleep with her. Retrospectively I kind of regret that we never got it together, as I’m sure we would have had a great time.
    June not only became my pal, she also, since I couldn’t drive, became my voluntary chauffeur. One day I asked her to take me to Oxford to visit Ben Palmer, the keyboard player with the Roosters. Ben was an incredibly charismatic man, very funny, very intelligent, and very worldly and wise, with strong, angular, rather aristocratic features that made him look as if he came from the eighteenth century. He was a creative man of great depth, who could turn his skill in any direction.
    He was then living in a studio above some stables, where he had taught himself woodcarving, and when we arrived he was putting the finishing touches on a Tang horse. He said he had given up the piano completely. Ben was the only other person I knew who was as fanatically purist about the blues as I was, and I tried to talk him into doing something with me. I thought maybe we could produce a guitar-and-piano blues record, but he steadfastly refused. To begin with I felt very depressed, and for a few weeks Ben looked after me like an older brother, keeping an eye on me and cooking me delicious meals. He also introduced me to
The Lord of the Rings
, which I spent hours reading.
    In the meantime, June had given Ben’s number to John Mayall, a blues musician with a credible reputation, and leader of his own band, the Bluesbreakers. He called and asked if I might be interested in joining his outfit. I knew who he was from the Marquee, and I admired him because he was then doing exactly what I always thought we could have done with the Yardbirds. He had found his niche and was staying there, touring good clubs and making the odd record, without ever really going for broke. The fact that I didn’t really like the two singles he’d made, “Crawling Up a Hill” and “Crocodile Walk,” which to me were like pop R&B, was immaterial, because what I saw was a frame that I could fit into.
    I