“Checking out”: The day in 1982 when Eric Clapton very nearly died
Eric Clapton’s battle with addiction was one that nearly cost him his life. In fact, it was a miracle that he survived 1982.
Drugs were like an albatross around the guitarist’s neck for a lengthy portion of his early career. The former Cream man could have easily found his way onto the all-too-long list of rock ‘n’ roll drug casualties, but, thankfully, Clapton managed to escape before it was all too late. In the interim years, he openly admitted that he knows just how fortunate he truly was.
Recently, he reflected on this, commenting, “The bottom line is that I’m an alcoholic and an addict, and I was trying to find the meaning of life in drugs and alcohol. I had to really make a decision if I wanted to live and if I wanted to live without drugs and alcohol.”
In 1982, that decision was still up in the air. Due to his immense fame, drugs became a coping mechanism for Clapton, and with his financial resources, he could over-indulge as often as he liked. This was far from ideal for a man who once said: “I like solitude. I like the anomalous life. I like a quiet life.”
For over three years, he had a severe addiction to heroin, and instead of immediately replacing that high with sobriety, the musician turned from heroin to alcohol in a bid to fill the void left by the opioid. In later reflections, he admits that he never even considered the clean, cold turkey approach.
“The presence of music in my life has always been the salvation element of it. Not necessarily the playing, as much as just being conscious of it, listening to it, has kept me moving,” Clapton wrote in his autobiography about how he eventually got himself clean. But along the way, a harrowing incident almost precluded this turning point.
In 1982, the musician knew that he was drinking himself into an early grave and finally sought help for his substance abuse. After calling his manager in a cry for help, he finally admitted he was an alcoholic. From there, Clapton flew to Minneapolis–Saint Paul in January 1982 and checked in at Hazelden Treatment Center, Minnesota, in a bid to rid himself of addiction.
“I don’t know how I survived, the 1970s especially. There was one point there where they were flying me to hospital in St Paul [Minnesota] and I was dying, apparently,” he admitted to Classic Rock in 2017 about that rescue mission. “I had three ulcers and one of them was bleeding.”
Adding, “I was drinking three bottles of brandy and taking handfuls of codeine and I was close to checking out.” This potent mixture had his insides churning. This flight was a last chance saloon, and with regret, Clapton adds, “And I don’t even remember.”
This brush with death revived his zeal for life in a sober vein. “It’s amazing that I’m still here, really,” he added. “In the lowest moments of my life, the only reason I didn’t commit suicide was that I knew I wouldn’t be able to drink any more if I was dead,” he frankly wrote in his autobiography. “It was the only thing I thought was worth living for, and the idea that people were about to try and remove me from alcohol was so terrible that I drank and drank and drank, and they had to practically carry me into the clinic”.
“I was out on a long leash. And I think it was his hope that I would see sense eventually. Which of course I did.”
Eric Clapton
During the peak of his heroin addiction, Clapton was spending the equivalent of over £8,000 a week in today’s money on securing the drug, which almost left him financially devastated. “I was close to running out [of money]. I was running on empty, financially. But I think management was very shrewd – it was Robert Stigwood who was keeping an eye on it,” Clapton said in the same interview with Classic Rock.
“I think his optimism, and I suppose his hope, was that there would be light at the end of the tunnel,” the ‘Layla’ guitarist continues. “They didn’t police me that much. I was out on a long leash. And I think it was his hope that I would see sense eventually. Which of course I did.” Although he came perilously close to not getting the chance, raising questions over whether the leash was a little too long, especially given all the casualties and continual troubles we still see celebrities facing.
“I don’t know how close I go and the people around me too. I was taking people with me. That’s always the worst part about an addict or an alcoholic: people are dragged along, and sometimes they go down before the principal character,” Clapton added with more than a pinch of honesty.
Now, though, he has been sober for a number of decades and has never been tempted to break his sobriety. However, he did, ironically, admit that he doesn’t regret this problematic period of his life, which helped make him the man he is today. “I don’t know that I can honestly regret any of it safely, because it’s brought me to where I am.”
He continues, “My life would not be the same, and I would not have what I have today, were [it not] for the fact that I went through all this stuff,” Clapton said in the documentary A Life in Twelve Bars. “But I suppose if I do have any regrets, it is that musically I lost something there,” he added remorsefully, reflecting on a career he saw as going awry.
Clapton’s admission that he’s not the same artist today because of his drug abuse may have an element of truth to it, but there is an even greater argument that the drugs may have played a part in the dark controversies that have also pitted his career. His playing was forever highwire, and his lifestyle was too.
He went from his grandparents’ home in Ripley to being hailed as one of the greatest guitarists in history, not long after entering his 20s. This was unprecedented. He was being called “God” in London when, only a few years earlier, the guitar was just a humble folk instrument. The whirlwind that followed just nearly blew the Promethean guitarist over.
Reaching this point was never easy. But now, he has been sober since 1987, and he comments, “My music is about healing the wounds in me, and then healing the wounds in other people. That’s what I’m in it for now.”
