It seems there’s no limit to notable musicians’ ability to surprise us. From Kanye West’s horrific and depressing descent into far-right politics and anti-Semitism to Elton John buddying up with sex pest Kevin Spacey, singers and songwriters are fully capable of catching us off guard. Case in point, famous guitarist turned anti-vax quack Eric Clapton just revealed his famous song “Cocaine” is also about his dead son.
Weird!
Really, what’s up with that? We mean, “Tears in Heaven”, we get. His son had just passed away in 1991, and he also needed a touching acoustic ballad for his upcoming MTV Unplugged concert, but “Cocaine”? It just doesn’t have the same somber, woeful presence that the other song has, and the subject matter is leaving us confused, to say the least. What significance could this possibly have with his deceased infant offspring? This just doesn’t seem to add up.
Also, Connor Clapton was just four years old when he died. We know British people are a bit more cavalier about cocaine than us stodgy Yanks, but this seems a little ridiculous. There’s no way the kid fell out of a window because he had been snorting lines of blow, is there? That kind of reckless behavior can absolutely be ascribed to someone who’s been gakking up lines at a party, but it’s a bit more difficult to explain when it’s a toddler hobbling around an upscale Manhattan high-rise.
Then again, Eric Clapton is anti-science, as evidenced by his recent online rants against the COVID-19 vaccine and his embrace of fellow British loony Van Morrison. Could it be that he considered cocaine some sort of special medicine and allowed his young children to experiment with it? Given all that we know about him today, that doesn’t seem nearly as strange as it once would have.
So, is this revelation by the former Derek and the Dominoes frontman something we should dismiss as the ramblings of a lunatic as he enters his 80s, or is it an unsettling insight into his personal life that we’d have been better off not hearing? We could find ourselves leaning one way or the other, but one thing is for certain: that man should not be allowed near children.
