Clapton Read Online Free PDF

to the bridge they get higher and higher, which makes them hard to press down and painful to play. I got off to a pretty poor start because I almost immediately broke one of the strings, and since I didn’t have any others, I had to learn to play with only five, and played that way for quite a while.
    Going to Hollyfield Road School did a lot to enhance my consciousness of image, as I was meeting some heavyweight characters there who had very definite ideas about art and fashion. It had started for me in Ripley with jeans, which in the early days, when I was about twelve, had to be black and have triple green stitching down the outside, very cutting-edge stuff at the time. Italian-style clothes came next, suits with jackets, cut very short, and tapered trousers with winkle-picker shoes. For us, and for most other families in Ripley, everything was bought from catalogs, like the Littlewoods catalog, and, in my case, was altered if necessary by Rose. The guitar went with the beatnik look, which came in the middle of my time at Hollyfield. This consisted of skintight jeans from Moffats, taken in down the inside, a black crew neck pullover, a combat jacket from Millets—complete with “Ban the bomb” signs—and moccasins made up from a kit.
    One day I was kneeling in front of the mirror miming to a Gene Vincent record, when one of my mates walked past the open window. He stopped and looked at me, and I’ll never forget the embarrassment I felt, because the truth is that, driven though I was by the music, I was equally driven by the thought of becoming one of those people I had seen on TV, not English pop stars like Cliff Richard, but the Americans such as Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Gene Vincent. I knew then that something was calling me, and I wasn’t going to be able to stay in Ripley.
    Though I still hadn’t quite got to grips with the actual playing of the guitar, I wanted to look like I knew what I was doing and tried to cultivate the image of what I thought a troubadour should look like. I got a Biro and I wrote on the top surface of the guitar, in huge letters, the words LORD ERIC because I thought that’s what troubadours did. Then I attached a string to the guitar to serve as a strap and imagined myself with a girlfriend, also dressed in beatnik gear, going to play folk music in a coffee bar. The girlfriend materialized in the shape of a very pretty girl, Diane Coleman, who was also attending Hollyfield. She lived in Kingston, and we had a short but intense little fling until sex reared its head, and I panicked. Until then we had become very fond of one another and would spend hours listening to records together in her mum’s front room. My initial career as a troubadour was just as brief. We went out together to a coffee bar about three times, complete with the LORD ERIC guitar, and were both embarrassed, me by being too shy to play and she by witnessing it. Then, just when I thought I’d hit a brick wall, I found another guitar.
    There used to be a kind of flea market in Kingston, and I was wandering around one Saturday when I saw a very odd-looking guitar hanging up on one of the stalls. It was acoustic but it had a very narrow-shaped body, almost like a medieval English guitar, and a painting of a naked woman stuck on the back of it. Intuitively I knew it was good. I picked it up and, though I didn’t play it because I didn’t want anyone to hear, it felt perfect, like a dream guitar. I bought it there and then, for two pounds ten (shillings). Don’t ask me where the money came from, possibly cadged from Rose, or “borrowed” from her handbag. I have no real recollection of my financial arrangement back then with my folks. I think I was getting a pretty decent amount of pocket money each week, but it wouldn’t have been beyond me, I’m ashamed to say, to supplement my spending in any way that was open to me.
    By now I had mastered some clawhammer, and tried out a few of the folk