At 80, Eric Clapton Finally Reveals the 5 People He Loved the Most

At 80, Eric Clapton Finally Reveals the 5 People He Loved the Most

I didn’t really know anything about it. I mean, other than it’s uh it’s sort of history from a very, very um layman’s point of view. And uh um I would have been so nervous about um playing with other people of that stature. Um so, I was sitting at home not too long ago just going through some old things, and someone asked me a question I’d never really stopped to think about.

They said, “Who are the five people you’ve loved the most?” I smiled for a second cuz that’s a much easier question than asking who was the greatest or what was my biggest hit or any of the things people usually want to know. Um people always ask about the career, you know, the albums, the tours, the the famous moments.

 But that’s not what comes to mind anymore. I suppose the older you get, the more you realize that what actually mattered wasn’t the spotlight. It was the quiet moments just outside of it. Um so, I gave that question some thought, and five names came into my head almost immediately. Um the first person I thought about was George Harrison.

 The first name that came into my mind was George. Um now, everyone knows who George was, a Beatle, the quiet one, the spiritual one. And all of that is true, I suppose, but it’s also it’s not the point. The George you knew was the man who would make you tea at 3:00 in the morning and talk about absolutely nothing important simply cuz he didn’t want the evening to end.

 I first met him in 1964 backstage at a Christmas show. I was with the Yardbirds, skinny and shy and absolutely nobody, and he was well, he was a Beatle. Um I remember walking into that dressing room and just feeling completely out of my depth, but George singled me out. He’d heard me play, and he wanted to talk about guitar strings and bending notes and old blues records.

He made me feel like I belonged there, which was um it was a gift. He had no reason to do that. Um George had this way of entering a room. He didn’t announce himself. He’d just sort of appear with this little half smile like he was already amused by something he hadn’t told you yet. And when he laughed, really laughed, it was this sharp bark that seemed to surprise even him.

We spent so many nights in his music room at Friar Park just passing a guitar back and forth, playing old Carl Perkins riffs. No recording, no agenda. He’d talk to me for hours about his roses, soil composition, the best time to prune, the battle against slugs. I knew nothing about gardening. Um I just sit there nodding thinking this is a Beatle talking to me about mulch. But I loved it.

 I loved every second of it. Uh and the thing about George that I’ve carried with me my whole life is his capacity for forgiveness. Everyone knows the story. I fell in love with his wife, Patty. I wrote Layla about her. I pursued her openly. It was uh it was a terrible thing to do to a friend. Um there was a party in the early ’70s at the height of all that and the tension was immense.

 Everyone in the room knew the situation. George caught my eye across the room, walked over, leaned in close, and said, “You can have her, but you have to take the mortgage, too.” Then he just walked away. He chose friendship. He chose a joke over fury. I’ve spent my whole life trying to understand how he did that.

 Um when my son, Conor, died in 1991, I was I was destroyed, completely destroyed. And George was one of the first people to reach me. He didn’t offer platitudes. He didn’t talk about spiritual planes. He just showed up, sat with me in silence, and eventually said, “There’s nothing I can say that will make this better, but I’m here and I’m not leaving.

” And in the months after he’d call constantly, not to check in, but to distract me. He’d launch into some Monty Python bit or ridiculous story about Formula 1. Um he kept me company in the dark. George died in 2001. I got the call at home in Surrey and just sat in my kitchen for a long time. I knew it was coming, but knowing doesn’t prepare you.

Nothing prepares you. I visited Friar Park after and Olivia showed me the gardens he’d tended so lovingly. I stood among those roses and I wept. But when I think of George now, I don’t think of the end. I think of a night in the late ’80s, the two of us quite drunk, trying to reenact the Dead Parrot Sketch from memory.

We couldn’t remember the lines. We kept dissolving into laughter, starting over, forgetting again, until we were on the floor, tears streaming down our faces, utterly incapable of finishing. We weren’t rock stars that night. We were two idiots who couldn’t stop laughing. And that’s how I remember him, laughing so hard he had to push his glasses up his nose.

Um the next person I want to talk about is John Mayall. Uh John was Well, they call him the Godfather of British blues, and that’s accurate, I suppose, but it makes him sound like some kind of calculating star maker. He wasn’t. John was a deeply private man, almost a hermit, who happened to have an extraordinary ear for talent.

I joined the Bluesbreakers in 1965. I was 20 years old. I’d just left the Yardbirds on principle cuz they were moving away from the blues, and I was completely adrift. Um my first rehearsal with John was in this cold, cramped room in London, and I was terrified. John was older, in his 30s, which seemed ancient to me, and he carried himself with this quiet authority.

He didn’t offer praise. He just played, expected me to keep up, and nodded slightly when he did. He was the first grown-up musician I’d ever worked with. He treated it like a job, not a party. I needed that. Um the thing about John is that he was utterly consistent. He didn’t fidget, didn’t fill silence with chatter.

 He’d sit behind a mixing desk with this expression of absolute concentration. Being around him felt like being in the presence of a musical monk, someone who had renounced everything except the work. And there was one night driving through the Midlands after a show, everyone else asleep in the van. John was driving.

 For an hour, neither of us spoke. Just the road and the engine and John occasionally humming a blues phrase to himself. Um that drive, that silence, it was one of the most formative hours of my life. No pressure to perform, just the quiet presence of a man who asked nothing of me except that I play honestly.

 Uh there was a moment in the studio recording the Beano album. I was struggling with the solo for Have You Heard? Just couldn’t get it right. Take after take, John stopped the session, walked over to my amplifier, adjusted the settings, stepped back, and said, “Now try it, and stop thinking about yourself.

” I played it again, and it was the one we kept. He was the first person who taught me to get out of my own way, to stop performing and just play. That lesson took me decades to fully absorb. John is still alive, you know, in his 90s now, still in California, still probably organizing his tape archive. Um we don’t speak all the time, but knowing he’s still out there connects me to who I was when I was 20.

A few years ago, I visited him at his home, and it was the same organized chaos, shelves of tapes and diaries, the same quiet, focused presence. I’ll sometimes get a package in the mail from him, a recording from some long-ago session, a photograph I’d never seen, No fanfare, just evidence that the moment happened. Um John is like a lighthouse.

He doesn’t move. Whatever storm I was in, I always knew where to find him. Um now, the next person who came into my mind was Pattie, Pattie Boyd. And uh I imagine this is the one everyone expects. She was my great love, the inspiration for Layla and Wonderful Tonight, the woman I famously won away from my best friend.

But um that’s the story the world knows. The private truth is different, and it’s harder to talk about, honestly. Pattie was not the goddess the songs made her out to be. She was warm and sharp and funny and deeply, deeply kind. Um the public image of her was this untouchable muse, but the real Pattie was earthy and practical.

 She remembered everyone’s birthday. She could diffuse any tension with a well-timed joke. She kept the human scale of life in focus when the men around her were lost in their own mythologies. I first saw her at a party at George’s house in the late ’60s, and it was like being struck by lightning. Not just her beauty, cuz she was extraordinarily beautiful, but her warmth.

 She made me feel immediately comfortable in a setting where I was acutely aware of being a guest in someone else’s extraordinary life. Um I knew I was in trouble the moment I met her. I also knew I couldn’t stop it. Um the relationship was, well, it was difficult. Everyone knows the arc. I pursued her while she was married to George.

 I showed up at their house uninvited, half drunk, declaring my love for her in front of him. It was humiliating. It was shameful. And Pattie looked at me with this mixture of compassion and clarity and said, “Eric, you need to go home and take care of yourself. This isn’t about me.” She was right. It wasn’t about her.

 It was about the hole inside me that I was trying to fill with her. She saw through me completely, and she was kind about it anyway. We married in 1979, and the marriage was troubled. I was drinking heavily. I was unfaithful. I was emotionally absent. She endured more than anyone should have to. We divorced in 1988.

 But here’s what the public narrative often misses. We remained friends after the anger cooled, after I got sober, we maintained a connection that became one of the most important friendships of my life. We talk less now than we used to, but we say more. Every conversation matters. Um there was one Sunday afternoon in the late ’70s, autumn, at our home in Surrey.

 Patty was in the kitchen making soup, and I was sitting at the table, exhausted from the road, reading a newspaper. The windows were fogged with steam. Neither of us were speaking. It was so ordinary, so domestic. I remember thinking, this is what I was chasing, this moment right here. It was the most peaceful I’d ever felt, and it had nothing to do with anything famous.

It was just her and soup and a quiet afternoon. Patty is still in the world, still taking photographs, still herself. And knowing she’s out there gives me a sense of continuity. Proof that I survived my own chaos, that someone who saw me at my absolute worst still sees me as a friend. She could have hated me.

 God knows I gave her reason, but she chose love. She chose to remember the good. That takes more strength than anything I’ve ever done on a stage. Um the fourth person is Steve Winwood. Steve is uh he’s the most naturally gifted person I’ve ever stood next to on a stage, and also the most completely unassuming.

 I first saw him in the mid-’60s fronting the Spencer Davis Group. He was maybe 16, and he opened his mouth to sing, and I felt the ground shift. It wasn’t just talent, it was a voice utterly beyond his years, beyond explanation. I went backstage after, and he was sitting quietly in a corner, looking like a schoolboy who’d wandered into the wrong building, shy, almost monosyllabic, completely unaware of what he’d just done.

 I recognized that immediately. He wasn’t trying to be a star, he was just doing what he was born to do. Um Steve entered a room like a man who hoped no one would notice him, shoulders slightly hunched, moving to the nearest corner. But when he played, everything changed. At the organ or the piano, he became completely absorbed.

His voice still seemed to come from somewhere other than his modest frame. Offstage, the most ordinary person. Onstage, a force of nature. Neither version was an act. Uh during the Blind Faith tour in 1969, the pressure was immense. Supergroup, impossible expectations. One night after a show, somewhere in the American Midwest, Steve and I ended up alone in the hotel bar.

 Everyone else had gone to bed, and we didn’t talk about the tour or the music. We talked about cars. Steve loved cars, not flashy sports cars, but well-engineered vehicles. He described his ideal car in exhaustive detail, the sound of the engine, the feel of the gearbox. I just listened, fascinated. It was the first time I realized Steve was just a normal bloke who happened to have this extraordinary gift.

 He could have been a mechanic. He would have been a brilliant mechanic, and he would have been happy. Um what I admire most about Steve is his complete absence of ego. He never positioned himself as a genius. He never demanded top billing. He just wanted to keep making music on his own terms. We’ve never had a fight, not one, in over 50 years.

I don’t know anyone else I can say that about. Um he’s still out there, still playing, still approaching music with the same quiet devotion. If I could choose one person to play with on my last night on Earth, it would be Steve because with him it’s never about Clapton and Winwood. It’s just about the sound.

Um and the last person the last person I want to talk about is B.B. King. Uh B.B. was the king of the blues and that title was not an exaggeration. He was the living embodiment of the music that saved my life. But that’s not why I loved him. I loved him cuz he was the father I never had. I first met him in 1967 at a club in New York.

I was 22, already famous, already the subject of that ridiculous graffiti. But standing in B.B.’s dressing room, I felt like a child. I was so nervous I could barely speak. He was seated in this large chair, Lucille across his lap, and he looked up at me with those enormous kind eyes and broke into this wide smile.

 “Come on in, young man,” he said. “I’ve heard about you.” My voice cracked when I tried to answer. He just laughed, not mockingly, but with genuine warmth, and gestured for me to sit. For the next hour, he treated me not as a white British kid playing black American music, but as a fellow musician, an equal. He had no reason to be kind to me.

I was a white boy who’d gotten rich playing his music. He could have resented me. Instead, he welcomed me. Um B.B. filled a room not with volume, but with presence. He was a large man with enormous hands, and when he laughed, his whole body shook. He called everyone young man or young lady regardless of age.

 He was physically affectionate, always touching a shoulder, patting a hand, and he was the same person at 2:00 in the morning in a dingy dressing room as he was on stage at the Royal Albert Hall. The same warmth, the same humor. I kept waiting to discover some dark side. It never existed. He was exactly what he appeared to be.

 Um in the late ’90s, I visited him at his home in Las Vegas and B.B. King, the king of the blues, stood at his stove and made me fried chicken and collard greens. We ate dinner and watched a boxing match on television. He provided a running commentary analyzing the fighter’s footwork with the same precision he brought to a guitar solo.

 Um I sat there on his sofa eating his food and I thought, “This is the greatest night of my life.” Uh he used to talk to Lucille, not just on stage as a bit. He talked to her in private, too. He’d pick her up in a quiet moment, stroke her neck, and murmur something. I once asked him what he was saying.

 He smiled and said, “I’m thanking her. She’s been good to me. You got to thank the things that love you, young man.” He wasn’t joking. He had a relationship with that guitar. He was grateful to it. And that’s how he lived his whole life with gratitude for everything and everyone that loved him. Um we recorded an album together in 2000.

Riding with the King. One afternoon, I played a solo I was proud of. B.B. listened, then said quietly, “That was real pretty, young man, but you’re thinking too much. You’re trying to impress me. Don’t try to impress me. Try to tell me the truth.” I was stung, then humbled, then grateful. I played it again, stripped away every unnecessary note, and when I finished, he nodded and said, “Now you’re playing the blues.

” That single sentence is worth more than every award I’ve ever received. And B.B. died in 2015. I visited him in hospice a few weeks before the end. He was frail, his voice a whisper, but his eyes still held that warmth. He squeezed my hand and said, “Keep playing, young man. The blues needs you.” Um I barely made it out of the room before I broke down.

 But when I think of B.B., I don’t think of that room. I think of his laugh, that enormous, body-shaking laugh. I think of him telling stories about the Chitlin’ Circuit, playing in a juke joint with a crooked floor, sliding backward in his chair. “I played a whole set facing the wall,” he said, laughing. The people didn’t care.

 They were dancing. He could have been angry about what he went through. He chose to find the comedy in it. He made that choice every day. Um so, those are the five. When I think about George, I remember laughter, two idiots on the floor, unable to finish a Monty Python sketch. When I think about John, I remember silence, a van driving through the night, a man humming the blues.

 When I think about Patty, I remember grace, soup on the stove, a quiet afternoon, kindness I didn’t deserve. When I think about Steve, I remember joy, pure, uncomplicated joy in making sound. And when I think about BB, I remember love, just complete, unconditional love. Music gave me a career, but people gave me a life. I suppose if I could have one more afternoon with any of them, I wouldn’t want to talk about music.

I’d want to talk about roses, or cars, or the perfect plate of barbecue. I’d want to talk about roses, or cars, or the perfect plate of barbecue. I’d want to talk about roses, or cars, or the perfect plate of barbecue. I’d want to talk about roses, or cars, or the perfect plate of barbecue. I’d want to talk about roses, or cars, or the perfect plate of barbecue.

 I’d want to talk about roses, or cars, or the perfect plate of barbecue. I’d want to talk about nothing at all, really, just be in the room with them. That would be enough. And after all these years, those are the people I still miss the most.