musicians that plays for free in public spaces, spreading the anti-lockdown word and sometimes singing songs with lyrics like “You can stick your poison vaccine up your arse.” For their efforts, Jam for Freedom are often hassled by police, and McLaughlin himself says he was arrested for what he calls “breach of Covid regulations” during one show. .

And one day this past spring, he was shocked to see a £1,000 donation on the site from Eric Clapton.

“I’m, like, this could be fake,” McLaughlin recalls.

“It was something complimentary, along the lines of, ‘Hey, it’s Eric — great work you’re doing,’ ” McLaughlin says.

The two later talked by phone, and before McLaughlin knew it, Clapton offered his family’s white, six-person VW Transporter van as a temporary replacement for Jam for Freedom’s wheels.

He also gave them a chunk of money (McLaughlin declines to say how much) to buy a new van — and said he might even sit in with the group at some point.

Anthony Fauci has said is “part of the problem — because you’re allowing yourself to be a vehicle for the virus to be spreading to someone else.” And while never explicitly condemning the lockdown, he’s said “live music might never recover” and joined Van Morrison for three songs that amount to lockdown protest anthems.

By way of a friend’s social media account, he’s also detailed what he called his “disastrous” experience after receiving two AstraZeneca shots (“propaganda said the vaccine was safe for everyone,” he wrote).

His fellow musicians don’t know what to make of it all: Queen’s Brian May referred to vaccine skeptics like Clapton as “fruitcakes.” Longtime Clapton collaborators and friends in the music business declined to comment about his current beliefs to Rolling Stone.

In the summer of 1976, Dave Wakeling thought he knew Clapton, too.

A clearly inebriated Clapton, who unlike most of his rock brethren hadn’t weighed in on topics like the Vietnam War, began grousing about immigration.

The concert was neither filmed nor recorded, but based on published accounts at the time (and Wakeling’s recollection), Clapton began making vile, racist comments from the stage.

“Clapton was to me somebody who represented the kind of crossover figure who was kind of like me in the other direction – me being a Black kid who actually liked white music, and he a white guy who actually liked Black music,” Phillips says.

It hung like a toxic cloud over the whole evening.” As one of the few Black people in the crowd, Phillips says he also felt “all eyes were kind of upon me, and then swiveled way from me.”.

“What Eric said was a total surprise,” recalls George Terry, a member of Clapton’s band at the time, “as he never mentioned he would be saying something at the concert to me or other members of the band that I knew of.”.

“The man can play,” says Buddy Guy, the Chicago blues legend who first met Clapton in the Sixties and has jammed with him numerous times since.

But in an 1968 interview with Rolling Stone, Clapton referred to Hendrix with a derogatory term that was also hipster slang at the time.

He’s on the same level as Governor Wallace of Alabama — a high-level conservative, real old tub-thumping British imperialist of the old order.” Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech had spawned a white nationalist movement.

in reaction to comments like Clapton’s.

Some who knew and worked with Clapton at the time (and haven’t seen him much since) argue his Birmingham rant didn’t reflect his true feelings.

I don’t think it was one of those things where people say, ‘Well, if you’re drunk, it doesn’t matter — if you said it, you meant it.’ I don’t think he meant it.” Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2017, “I just have to face the guy that I became when I was fueled on drugs and alcohol,” Clapton said.

— featuring artists like the Clash and Steel Pulse — in reaction to comments like those Clapton made in Birmingham.

press, Clapton sent a handwritten letter to the British music newspaper Sounds, apologizing “to all the foreigners in Birm. . . . It’s just that (as usual) I’d had a few before I went on and one foreigner had pinched my missuss’ bum and I proceeded to lose my bottle.” (He claimed, in part, that a rich Saudi had leered at his then-partner Pattie Boyd.) But he also added, in what seemed like an endorsement of a white supremacist, “I think that Enoch is the only politician mad enough to run this country.” In an interview with that same publication, he downplayed the Birmingham rant yet again: “I thought it was quite funny actually,” comparing the incident to a Monty Python skit.

at the time, also resurfaced in Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars, a 2017 authorized Clapton documentary that, with his eventual approval, recounted that career low point.

Clapton does appear to have a credulous side: In the book, he detailed the bizarre incident in the Eighties when “a lady with a strong European accent” called him at home, told him she knew all about his difficulties with Pattie Boyd (his wife by then), and persuaded him to try all sorts of odd rituals — like “cut my finger to draw blood, smear it onto a cross with Pattie’s and my name written on it, and read weird incantations at night.” (At her suggestion, he also flew to New York and slept with her before realizing that none of that madness would bring Boyd back.) .

He told Oracle Films — a website that claims to “fight for open debate and freedom of information in the face of global government encroachment and big-tech censorship” — that after a second dose, his hands “didn’t really work,” and that it accelerated his condition.

“This . . . ramped up, on a scale of 10, from three to eight or nine: agony, chronic pain. . . . It took my immune system and shook it around again.” Clapton said he lost the use of his hands for three weeks.

To Oracle Films, Clapton remarked that he could “feel the alienation” from his peers and even family members over the past year.

After Clapton offered to lend Jam for Freedom his family van, McLaughlin met with Clapton, casually dressed in a blue sweater and moccasins, at his recording studio in London.

McLaughlin says Clapton was still feeling the aftereffects of his shots, telling McLaughlin he hadn’t been able to play guitar for months?

“We did want to have a jam, but because of his condition at the time, it was tough for him to play — and to play outside when his fingers are cold because of the side effects,” says McLaughlin?

“You can imagine that that would stress him out.” Clapton posed for a photo next to the van with McLaughlin, which the group later shared on its social media channels?

“It sounds like he’s having another Enoch Powell moment,” says Oakes.

In his interview with Oracle Films, Clapton complained that after he expressed his views, “I was labeled as a Trump supporter.” But his old-world streak reaches back to at least 2007, when Clapton — along with Bryan Ferry and Steve Winwood — played a benefit at a castle in Berkshire, England, for the Countryside Alliance, a U.K.

At the time, a Clapton representative confirmed that he supported the Alliance but didn’t “hunt himself.” That association still rankles some of his peers.

“I love Eric Clapton, he’s my hero, but he has very different views from me in many ways,” Brian May told The Independent.

“He’s a person who thinks it’s OK to shoot animals for fun, so we have our disagreements.” But Clapton’s stance — based around his support for what a spokesperson called “people’s private pursuits” — got another group on his side: Thanks to that concert, the National Rifle Association -trumpeted “Eric Clapton Supports Fox Hunting” on its site?

Conservative young-gun pundit Michael Knowles — who once filled in for Rush Limbaugh and “wrote” Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide, a bestselling novelty book that consisted entirely of blank pages — tweeted, “Eric Clapton is a much more credible person than Dr

“Clapton isn’t pontificating about matters of science or health — he’s discussing his own experience with this vaccine,” he says

“I think in many ways Eric Clapton does have more credibility on this question and many others than Dr

Jam for Freedom’s McLaughlin sees the situation in much the same way, and his chat with Clapton confirmed it

“He said we’re essentially doing what he and his contemporaries in the Sixties did, which was embracing freedom, getting out of government control and societal control,” McLaughlin says

“I don’t get it — I always thought he was a liberal,” says one music-industry veteran who has worked with Clapton over the years

At WPLR, a leading classic-rock station in Connecticut, Chaz, a morning-show DJ who declines to use his real name, says Clapton is “a Mount Rushmore figure.” But the DJ is wrestling with a former hero’s disorienting statements

At the time, Tarrant County, home to Fort Worth, had the second-highest tally of Covid cases in Texas since the start of the pandemic — 307,000 in a state with 3 million cases

“I don’t think he’s really making a political stance,” says David Hayner of Granbury, Texas, attending his first Clapton concert

“Somebody said, ‘Have you seen what Eric said?’ ” says Guy

anti-vaccine, covid-19, Eric Clapton