Wonderful Tonight
by Patti Boyd and Penny Junor
Three Rivers Press, 2007
I’ve got a soft spot for rock and roll biographies. I must have consumed 50+ over the years, including those of bands. It’s not so much understanding the musicianship that attracts me as getting to know the real people behind the songs that had the power to transport me to another world.
Patti Boyd’s autobiography took me back into the 1960s and 1970s, the decades in which I was a child and teen. Though not a musician herself, she moved in their circles thanks to her relationships with George Harrison and Eric Clapton, circles that included hobnobbing with trendy boutique owners, fashion designers, photographers, and other denizens of Swinging London. Her anecdotes about them are enlightening. Who knew wild man Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones was also an accomplished artist? No bio of the Stones I’ve read have ever mentioned that tidbit. And that dentist who inspired the Beatles song “Dr. Robert?” He put them, and their wives, under anesthesia before he worked on them, and Patti hints that he could have been doing anything to them while they were lying unconscious in the chair.
Yet Patti is also surprisingly humble, and I kind of wish, even, that she’d gone more into detail about her own family. Born of upper class roots, she spent time in colonial Africa with her grandparents and later suffered under the English boarding school system that separates children from the parents and forces them to live in sparse, even hellish conditions. Yet, many of those children grew into independent and restless beings, becoming the artistic shakers and movers of the 1960s. (Of course, family money may have played a part in their rejection of the 9-to-5.) Patti moved into modeling at a young age thanks to her fresh good looks, and with hard work was given a ticket into that golden world, and I can’t help feel, as with many rock star wives, girlfriends, and groupies, her fractured family played a part in her remaining there and putting up with a lot of BS. Also like many of those women she never received credit for the inspiration and even the co-creation she gave her men. In the bio she states her own spiritual yearnings predated George’s, and in fact were what inspired him to join her in exploring Indian religion. If not for Patti, there might never have been the George we know now (or did; he passed in 2001.)
Eric Clapton, sorry to say, comes off as a dick in the book, even as Patti puts a good spin on her experiences with him. He was a raging alcoholic, didn’t know how to handle his finances and live in the real world, and cheated on her, even siring two children out of wedlock, one of which she discovered only as she was divorcing him.
A good addition to your rock star bio collection.
