Clapton’s ‘Autobiography’ boring tale of sex and drugs

“Clapton: The Autobiography”

by Eric Clapton (Broadway, 352 pages, $26)

So who knew Eric Clapton was such a bore?

OK, maybe everybody who bought his last few albums or saw him on his last world tour, which had all the fire and spontaneity of a Fred Thompson interview.

But even that couldn’t prepare us for the snooze that is “Clapton: The Autobiography.”

Clapton apparently wrote the book himself. It, however, has the unmistakable cadence of dictation, the sort of repetition one often finds in anecdotes recalled on the private jet between gigs.

As a rule, I don’t read show-biz autobiographies. Where once they were sanitized beyond recognition, in the style of Billie Holiday’s “Lady Sings the Blues,” they now have been smutted up and strutted out like rap videos. How many groupies, how many drugs, how many rehabs before one finds inner light?

Ironically, Clapton’s life could make that of any Motley Crue member look like a Unitarian minister.

For starters, his supposed mother was really his grandmother, and his older brother was really his uncle. He lived in relative poverty before acquiring a cheap guitar and learning to play blues by listening to old Muddy Waters records.

By 14, he was earning spending money in a band, and while still in his teens joined the Yardbirds, then quit after one album because the group released a single, “For Your Love,” that he thought wasn’t authentic enough.

Then came Cream, Blind Faith, superstardom and a crush on his friend George Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, that produced the love song “Layla.” At that time he was an unrepentant junkie, but he won her away and wrote her the beautiful (if slightly nauseating) “Wonderful Tonight.”

The lyric was not written because, as the song says, she looked stunning at a party they attended, but because she would try on dozens of outfits before they went out, making him so crazy he told her she looked wonderful in all of them.

We haven’t gotten to the crazed two-bottle-a-day alcoholism and the death of the son he barely knew, Conor, whom he immortalized in a song first given to a movie about junkies.

By the end of the book, Clapton can barely be bothered to recall the last names of all the supermodels he squired before settling down with a wonderful wife and three daughters.

At one point he does sidestep into his immense talent briefly to explain to us what a blue note is, that bending sound that takes us somewhere deep and true.

Maybe in the second edition he’ll catch that and take it.