Live fast and die old: Clapton beats the odds
He perhaps now deserves the mantle of rock’s greatest survivor. Since his emergence as a guitar sensation in the early Sixties Eric Clapton has dodged death and ignominy to achieve a career longevity denied to many of his contemporaries.
A new book tells how Clapton, now 72, crashed his Ferraris, avoided a seat in a doomed helicopter and overcame addictions that led to the consumption of mountains of heroin and lakes of brandy.
Partly based on the first interviews with his closest circle, Slowhand by Philip Norman lays out in detail how many times the musician flirted with death and career-ending scandals during a career in which he bestrode some of the seminal bands of the 20th century.
Clapton survived three car crashes during his most hedonistic period, was given tip-offs to avoid drug busts and had other scandals hushed up, the book claims. ‘‘All these things that normally eliminate rock stars, he has dodged,’’ Norman said. ‘‘His brushes with the law have been so slight despite his addiction to heroin, there has been the helicopter crash, the car crashes, he has never had to sue his management, he still has his copyrights.
‘‘Mostly these people don’t have this luck. Buddy Holly died at 22, Jimi Hendrix at 27, [as did] Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse. Luck is not associated with these people; they fall into the wrong crowds or bad management.’’
The biography, released this week, originally had the cooperation of Clapton, whose continued sobriety he has partly attributed to the biggest tragedy in his life in 1991, when his fouryear-old son Conor fell to his death from a New York apartment.
Clapton provided Norman with his diaries and letters, as well as access to his childhood friends, the domestic staff who saw the darkest days in his Surrey mansion and the management figures who covered up troubles while ensuring the millions of pounds kept on flowing. Clapton then withdrew his help but, according to the writer, ‘‘it was all too late because they had all talked their heads off so it was kind of authorised and then unauthorised’’.
The book recounts how a drunk Clapton suffered only a perforated eardrum and cuts and bruises after driving his Ferrari 365 GT4 BB at 150kmh into a van in 1976.
His manager bought the owner’s silence.
Six years earlier, and without a driving licence, he had flipped a lilac-coloured Ferrari on to its roof. The book recounts how Clapton had been driving home from George Harrison’s mansion ‘‘euphoric after having won a first kiss’’ from Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, whom he would eventually marry. He was unharmed in the crash.
He damaged another Ferrari when driving 300 metres to the pub at the end of his drive near Ripley, south-west of London. While touring in Wisconsin in 1990 he boarded one helicopter after a ‘‘flurry of seat switching’’. The other one crashed into an artificial ski slope killing all on board, including fellow guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Despite spending the equivalent of £10,000 (NZ$19,500) a week on heroin for three years during the 1970s, before moving on to a two bottles of brandy a day, Clapton has avoided serious illness, death and criminal convictions.
Despite more than 1000 onenight stands, there is only one known ‘‘illegitimate’’ child. His divorces came in the days before the courts would have been more generous to.
After years of sobriety and relative quiet his good fortune continues, according to Norman. Three Gerhard Richter canvases he bought in 2001 for US$3.4 million sold for about US$74 million.