UnNews:Eric Clapton finally sober enough to understand "Cocaine" lyrics
| UnFair and UnBalanced | ✪ | UnNews | ✪ | Thursday, April 25, 2024, 00:53:59 (UTC) |
| Eric Clapton finally sober enough to understand "Cocaine" lyrics | 
|
 |
UnNews Audio (file info) |
| Listen to this story! | |
Problems playing this file? You might be a dope. |
|
3 October 2006
ST. PAUL, Minn. - Eric Clapton is playing "Cocaine" in concert again, now that he's finally clear-headed enough to understand the lyrics.
The recovering drug addict and alcoholic, stopped performing the song written by J.J. Cale when he began his attempt to clear all the drugs from his system that had accumulated over nearly 40 years of performing rock and blues.
"I stopped playing it because I thought that it might be giving the wrong message to people who were in the same boat as me," Clapton recently told The Associated Press.
"But I recently actually read the lyrics, and it turns out that the song, is clearly anti-drug. I mean, I must have played that song 1000 times. Who would have guessed? So I figured, why not approach it from a more positive point of view, and perform it as not a pro-drug song, but just as a reality check about what it does."
Clapton's band shouts out "dirty cocaine" during the song, snorts long lines of it, and falls over dead.
"It's one of those songs that you can take it any way you like," Clapton told the AP. "But it very clearly says in the opening verse, `If you want to get down, and get some ground round,' I mean, that's what the song's about, is that, you know, hamburger."
Clapton, who founded the posh Crossroads Centre addiction recovery center on the Caribbean island of Antigua just so he could have a comfortable place to dry out, also said he missed playing "Cocaine," with its signature guitar riff, "just purely from a musical point of view."
Clapton, 61, is really fuckin old.