“One More Chance”
Clapton has won 18 Grammy Awards, ranks number two on Rolling Stone’s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” and was inducted into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame three times—a record. At 71 years old, Clapton is still releasing studio albums, including last year’s I Still Do. But his past demons are coming back to haunt him in the form of nerve damage spurred by years of substance abuse. “I’ve had quite a lot of pain over the last year. It started with lower back pain, and turned into what they call peripheral neuropathy—which is where you feel like you have electric shocks going down your leg,” Clapton told the Daily Mail.
Peripheral neuropathy is brought on by excessive drinking, the New York Times reports. It “includes both a direct poisoning of the nerve by the alcohol and the effect of poor nutrition associated with alcoholism,” the Times said. The condition also affects nearly half of all career alcoholics. The condition doesn’t come as a surprise to the English-born rocker, especially given his troubled past. In some ways, he sounds downright at peace with it. “Because I’m in recovery from alcoholism and addiction to substances, I consider it a great thing to be alive at all. By rights I should have kicked the bucket a long time ago,” he said in the Daily Mail. “For some reason I was plucked from the jaws of hell and given another chance.”
“Ain’t Going Down”
Clapton’s battle with substance abuse has been in the spotlight for decades. In fact, at one point, it was quite literally in the spotlight. His heroin addiction had spun so far out of control that he passed out during the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden. In a 2007 NPR profile on the “Cocaine” singer, he estimated that he was spending $16,000 a week on heroin (that’s about $55,000 a week in today’s dollars). “The thing about that kind of addiction that’s pretty funny, on reflection, is that I always thought, ‘I’m handling this. I can handle it. I can stop anytime. I just don’t want to stop right now,'” Clapton said in the NPR piece. Painkillers were also in the mix, too: ‘There was one point there where they were flying me to hospital in Saint Paul [Minnesota] and I was dying, apparently—I had three ulcers and one of them was bleeding. I was drinking three bottles of brandy and taking handfuls of codeine, and I was close to checking out. It’s amazing that I’m still here, really.”
And even after he’d conquered heroin and pills, he was still doing battle with the bottle. During one concert, he performed most of it on his back. “It didn’t seem that outlandish to me, and in fact, probably was all I was capable of. It was either that or just laying down somewhere else. The fact that I was laying down on stage means at least I showed up,” Clapton said. What’s more is that his problems with addiction didn’t start with heroin, cocaine, or booze. In a 60 Minutes interview, Clapton pointed his finger at a surprising culprit: “When I was five, six years old, I was cramming sugar down my throat as fast as I could get it down,” he said. “I became addicted to sugar because it changed the way I felt.”
Clapton got sober in 1987. “My second visit to [treatment]was, on the face of it, much like the first, but, on a deeper level, it was very different. This time I had no reservations about why I was there—I had tried to control my drinking and failed—so there was no more debate, no more gray area for me,” he said in his autobiography. With Clapton’s sobriety has come a desire to help still struggling addicts and alcoholics. In 1998, he opened the doors to Crossroads, a 36-bed treatment facility in the Caribbean. Crossroads is located in Antigua which is “one of the only places on earth I’ve found where I completely discard the pressures of my life,” he wrote in his autobiography.
“Heaven Is One Step Away”
Given the progressive nature of the disease, Clapton’s current struggles with peripheral neuropathy won’t get any easier. “One thing I had to realize was that this particular condition I’m living with isn’t necessarily going to get better,” Clapton notes. “Like sometimes things do—you might catch something, and it will get better. Not this.” It’s a difficult diagnosis for Clapton and a complicated condition. According to the Times overview, peripheral neuropathy brings with it a wide range of symptoms, including numbness, muscle weakness, nausea, and the sensation of “pins and needles.” It’s also very hard to treat—especially for someone with a history of painkiller problems.
Clapton’s condition, however, comes at a time when he’s already considered retiring from the stage. To that end, he’s already scaled back his appearances. “I don’t think those big world tours are possible for me anymore, nor are they desirable, because there’s somewhere else I’d rather be—with my kids and my wife,” he told NPR. “The home life has a lot of power for me now, and it’s where I get most of my satisfaction.” In other words: Clapton finds himself at a crossroads. And while his condition has slowed him down, it may provide the perspective he needs for the future.
Photo courtesy of Alex G via Flickr [CC0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/] (resized and cropped)