The night that Pete Townshend saved Eric Clapton’s life
Following his pioneering work in The Yardbirds and wielding his The Fool-designed guitar in the psychedelic rock trio Cream, Eric Clapton found himself at the forefront of British 1960s counterculture—already a legacy of one of popular music’s most celebrated guitarists before the decade was out.
Yet turmoil was swiftly engulfing Clapton as the 1970s arrived. Burning longing for George Harrison’s wife Patti Boyd had risen to selfishly excruciating peaks, the howling rock ode to his unrequited love on Derek and the Dominoes’ ‘Layla’ had failed to chart high, and a growing heroin habit was consuming his and girlfriend Alice Ormsby-Gore’s lives for the next three years.
Retreating from the music world to his Hurtwood Edge Surrey mansion, the couple lived a reclusive life snorting smack and capturing odd demos on his rudimentary cassette machine. Heroin had become the day’s priority. Selling guitars to feed his habit, his performance at Harrison’s and Ravi Shankar’s The Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 was only pulled off by a cameraman’s supply of methadone—Ormsby-Gore racing around New York and having failed to score.
By 1973, Clapton hadn’t gotten any cleaner. Keen to figuratively slap him out of his opium fug, The Who’s Pete Townsend conceived of an event to encourage a ‘comeback’ and push Clapton on a sober path back toward rock ‘n roll, corraling Ronnie Wood and Traffic’s Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi to help their old friend.
“His (Townshend’s) answer was to put together a concert,” Wood revealed in 2007’s Ronnie. “That it was time to drag Eric out of his reclusion in Surrey and up to London for rehearsals Which is exactly what we did. We literally dragged Eric out of his house and moved him into mine”.
Still hooked on the hard stuff, Clapton nevertheless arrived for stage rehearsals at Guilford Civic Hall and played confidently and authoritatively to the pleasant surprise of the band. Panic struck Townsend and the team shortly before the two sets at London’s Rainbow Theatre, however. Famous for his sweet tooth—a quirk immortalised on The Beatles’ ‘Savoy Truffle’—an indulgence in chocolate alongside his heroin fancy had resulted in an inability to fit into his trousers and frantic last-minute letting out of the waist.
Despite some initial nerves, Clapton was able to capture his old magic. “We did the Hendrix hit ‘Little Wing’ and lots of Eric’s big songs like ‘Let It Rain’, ‘Badge’, ‘After Midnight’ and ‘Bell Bottom Blues’,” Wood recalled. “By the time we reached the end of the set with ‘Key To The Highway’ and ‘Crossroads’, no one had any doubts: Eric was back”.
Townsend had pulled Clapton from the brink, at least temporarily. It took another year to finally kick his habit, but heroin was swapped with alcoholism, and a long slog of battered performances and drunken racist rants typified the remainder of his 1970s. Entering sobriety in the early 1980s, his road to recovery was a rocky one, but Townsend and his Rainbow Theatre idea can credibly claim to stand as the lightning rod for change.
