If Clapton is God, Who is Pattie Boyd?

In 1965, before Eric Clapton even began playing in Cream, an unknown Londoner scrawled “Clapton is God” on the wall of an underground station. It’s unclear how long it took after Cream’s demise, but eventually someone came up with a response: “What do Clapton and coffee have in common? They both suck without Cream.” Whoever that person was will be inclined to snicker upon learning that Clapton’s new autobiography, Clapton, was in fact ghost-written. Having built a career on sharing songwriting credits and performing covers, the book is yet another example of Slowhand’s inability to get the job done by himself.

The book’s release closely followed the release of Pattie Boyd’s autobiography, Wonderful Tonight (also ghost-written), which documents her stormy relationships with Clapton and George Harrison before him. Unfortunately, after reading the two in tandem, one can heap even further scorn upon Clapton for having allowed his book to be substantially identical to Boyd’s in many ways.

It does appear at first that the two books nicely complement one another. When Clapton mentions that tensions between Pattie and George Harrison were so bad that she had hoisted a jolly roger flag to the roof of their house, it comes across as a metaphor—until in Wonderful Tonight Pattie actually describes how she lowered the royal Order of Merit flag flying over their house and replaced it with a skull and crossbones. There are several other such juicy moments Clapton glosses over that are elucidated by Boyd, and vice versa.

But consider the following passage on Clapton’s relationships with women circa 1965: “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.” Flip to Boyd, ostensibly circa 1974: she quips that in dealing with women, Clapton “couldn’t understand the concept of having a platonic friendship with them; if no sex was involved, he didn’t see the point.”

I doubt there are any coincidences in publishing, and it would not surprise me if the books were edited by the same team—both were issued on twin imprints of Random House. What’s more, they are both written in the same style, one that is personal without revealing personality. We get lots of anecdotes, but they are often capped off with sentences like, “The memories flooded back of laughter, lovely parties, and the good times we’d had,” for Boyd; or for Clapton, “I have extremely fond memories of my time here ... they were great days.”

Yet it wouldn’t be fair to turn this review into quibblings about the lack of an authorial presence—these are celebrities, not writers. If this makes the books slightly less interesting on one level, there is a part of you that is nevertheless gratified by reading honest accounts of lives you have always been curious about.

So we do get Clapton describing moments like, “Backstage, John [Lennon] and I did so much blow that he threw up, and I had to lie down for a while”; or how in the throes of his alcohol addiction he would lie in bed next to Boyd “in the fetal position,” unable to have sex. Boyd is slightly more discreet about such experiences, though she is frequently upfront about her feelings, telling us that despite the emotional roller coaster Clapton wound up putting her through, she never would have traded the initial passion of their relationship.

That said, the anecdotes the average reader would be most interested in when picking up these books are pretty weak: Clapton’s days with Cream are fast-forwarded through with nary an ounce of detail about their ultimately venomous relations, and there are a good number of recollections that are frustratingly left unelaborated, like a “dalliance” he apparently had with Ronnie of the Ronettes, or his “severe” criticism of Led Zeppelin. With Boyd we get some decent perspectives on what it was like to be a “Beatle wife,” and there is also a particularly interesting story about George being found guilty by a judge of “subconsciously plagiarizing” the tune of “My Sweet Lord” from a song by The Chiffons.

But the world will apparently never know how certain conversations between a gorgeous English fashion model and photographer (Boyd) and a bizarre Japanese-American painter and musician (Yoko) went. There’s also a potentially great scene described by Boyd where Clapton and Harrison challenge each other to a guitar duel, yet the only description she gives is that Harrison lost because he “went in for instrumental gymnastics,” which is actually a rather nonsensical description of guitar playing.

Boyd ultimately comes off as a typical nostalgic boomer, writing in her epilogue, “Our generation really did lead a revolution: as teenagers we refused to conform and we’re still refusing to do what’s expected of us.” One never really shakes the valedictorian air permeating her text.

The same can be said of Clapton’s work, and perhaps this is an unavoidable trait of autobiographies of famous people of a certain age. Yet for all the derision he’s invited over his career, Clapton successfully portrays himself as a pretty decent, if pathetic, guy who cares passionately about his music. For someone who usually comes off as wishing he were a poor black hobo, one learns that Clapton had plenty to draw from in his own life.