You never told me he was that fucking good. - Eric Clapton

Early in my childhood, when I was about six or seven, I began to get the feeling that there was something different about me.

Something more profound also happened when I got this guitar. As soon as I got it, I suddenly didn’t want it anymore. This phenomenon was to rear its head throughout my life and cause many difficulties.

When you are playing night after night on a punishing schedule, often not because you want to but because you are contractually obligated to, it is only too easy to forget the ideals that once brought you together. There were times, too, when, playing to audiences who were only too happy to worship us, complacency set in. I began to be quite ashamed of being in Cream, because I thought it was a con. It wasn’t really developing from where we were. As we made our voyage across America, we were being exposed to extremely strong and powerful influences, with jazz and rock ’n’ roll that was growing up around us, and it seemed that we weren’t learning from it.