A new documentary beautifully captures how Eric Clapton lived the blues
Eric Clapton: A Life in Twelve Bars premiered at this year’s Toronto film festival, moving a customarily restrained audience to a standing ovation. Made by the irrepressible Lili Fini Zanuck, an industry legend and only the second woman to have won a Best Film Oscar (for Driving Miss Daisy in 1990), it is thankfully not a mere re-treading of an illustrious career for fans. A Life in Twelve Bars cuts deeper than mere tribute, opening with Clapton eulogising one of his own idols, blues artist BB King, at his passing in 2015.
It then takes us to utterly charming footage of his childhood, the 1950s Britain promised by the Brexit campaign, family values and reassuring whiteness everywhere - rather brilliantly undercut with the truth of Clapton’s parenthood. The curtain lifts and we learn that Clapton’s parents as he knows them are actually his grandparents and the woman he thinks was his sister conceived him during a one-night stand with a soldier and was then sent abroad to avoid the stigma of single motherhood. Clapton’s mother’s rejection - it appears - is the demon he spends years of his life battling with a near-suicidal drug and alcohol addiction.
His other crutch - for which we are considerably more grateful - is his guitar. "Without me realising it, the music took the pain away," the older Clapton recalls of hearing black legends such as Muddy Waters play the blues on the radio for the first time. I was reminded of one of the most enjoyable autobiographies I’ve read - by another American who felt like an outsider and then went on to make a career of it – filmmaker John Waters writing in Role Models about what it felt like to hear the high-octane, unfettered energy of Little Richard tearing through his white, suburban middle-class home, making him feel like there was real life somewhere out there.
Clapton appears more intellectually curious and more conscious than several other white musicians of his debt, of the debt of rock and roll to black artists. He also looks further afield for inspiration, discovering Bismillah Khan, wanting his guitar to replicate the sound of Khan’s shehnai. If white people can “dig” music inspired by black artists, he’s heard saying in the 60s, then they can open their minds to the possibility of going to hear black artists themselves performing it, adding that white rock and rollers will then have to find something else to do. It is a sign then of how far his alcoholism changed him that years later, he’s heard drunkenly hurling racists slurs and admiringly quoting Enoch Powell during one disastrous concert.
An especially moving thread of Twelve Bars explores Clapton’s increasing attraction to his friend George Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd. Faithful to her philandering husband, she rejects him, plunging him into further dismay. Reading his copy of the doomed love story of Layla and Majnun, and moored in his own drug-addled wilderness, he identifies with Majnun - roaming the desert - "Layla" is one of the many songs he writes for Boyd.
It is nothing short of heartbreaking that when she does finally leave her husband, she finds Clapton at such a low ebb that even love can’t cure him. What can cure him though is rehab, and this is the positive note we end on, with a cleaned up Clapton, now a cuddly, family man, opening a free rehab facility for those facing the hell he lived with.
The twelve bars of the title are a guitar chord progression used in the blues, but what you hear with Clapton’s guitar isn’t the blues being played, as this documentary shows, it’s the blues being lived.