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Lot Essay
EC: I used this guitar on Tears In Heaven and Unplugged...I wrote most of those songs on this guitar. It's got a full-length story. There was a tour with myself and Ronnie Lane which was fairly bizarre...It was a tour of Europe on boats [1977]. We sailed around the Mediterranean, and we'd pull into different ports like Ibiza and St. Tropez...and most of the playing was done on the quayside for tourists [although] we had official venues to play also... We had one boat for the road managers, and one boat for the acts... and we'd be playing cards and having fun... When we got to Barcelona, John Porter, who was in Ronnie's band, and myself and Ronnie, were walking through the Ramblas, and we found this guitar stall and we bought three of these guitars... They were identical, all made by the same man, Alvarez. They were beautiful, all made of this beautiful dark wood. Tears In Heaven and My Father's Eyes were written on that guitar, it's got good provenance.
LD: It was a wonderful tour...It had had to be cancelled three times because of problems with the promoter, and it was the time of year when we couldn't get into hotels or villas, that's how we ended up on boats. I remember we did two gigs in Spain - a basketball arena that was a sweatbox, and a bullring in Ibiza, on the King of Spain's birthday... It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. Absolutely incredible.
In a recent interview with Nigel Williams, published in Uncut magazine, Clapton spoke of the solace he took from music, following the tragic death of his four-year-old son Conor in 1991. He spoke of ...the need to heal myself with music. I knew intuitively that if I played it would medicate me...the biggest problem was that I didn't know what to think or feel. I was bereft, and I went into numb zone - which is actually the body defending itself because madness beckons in these situations. So what I did to keep myself afloat was to play. I had a guitar in my hands all day until I went to sleep. And ...I composed. "My Father's Eyes" and "Tears In Heaven" came out of that. the songs just grew out of me. I played them over and over again. And it healed me and brought me back to life over a period of a year or more...
LD: It was a wonderful tour...It had had to be cancelled three times because of problems with the promoter, and it was the time of year when we couldn't get into hotels or villas, that's how we ended up on boats. I remember we did two gigs in Spain - a basketball arena that was a sweatbox, and a bullring in Ibiza, on the King of Spain's birthday... It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. Absolutely incredible.
In a recent interview with Nigel Williams, published in Uncut magazine, Clapton spoke of the solace he took from music, following the tragic death of his four-year-old son Conor in 1991. He spoke of ...the need to heal myself with music. I knew intuitively that if I played it would medicate me...the biggest problem was that I didn't know what to think or feel. I was bereft, and I went into numb zone - which is actually the body defending itself because madness beckons in these situations. So what I did to keep myself afloat was to play. I had a guitar in my hands all day until I went to sleep. And ...I composed. "My Father's Eyes" and "Tears In Heaven" came out of that. the songs just grew out of me. I played them over and over again. And it healed me and brought me back to life over a period of a year or more...