The band Eric Clapton said never really existed: “Make-believe”
No band is meant to last forever. As much as people might expect their favourite acts to keep pumping out albums until the sun burns out of the sky, there’s never some way for a band to make the same type of music together for decades at a time and manage to tolerate each other every time they walk out of their dressing rooms every night. That shouldn’t take away from any of their classics, but Eric Clapton admitted that certain bands didn’t have any point in existing to begin with.
Granted, it’s easy for Clapton to look at his career more as a journeyman than a band member. All of his heroes never had a set lineup behind them every time they played, and sometimes, the biggest names in music are known to have a more flexible lineup than stick to the same group of people.
Even when bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were tearing up the charts, ‘Slowhand’ was much more interested in making music with one band and moving on to whatever his muse preferred. The Yardbirds were never meant to be his main outlet for the rest of his life, and while Cream did manage to give us some of the greatest psychedelic rock of all time, there’s a good chance that they would have killed each other had they decided to keep the band going after 1970.
While a lot of Clapton’s ill-fated groups were all pointing towards his future solo career, it’s not like they didn’t have merit. Hearing him play with John Mayall gave a brief glimpse into what Fleetwood Mac might have sounded like with Clapton in the band, and even when Cream broke up, hearing him flex his muscles in Blind Faith put a more rootsy spin on his old band’s jazzy stylings.
In the background, though, Clapton was falling apart after falling in love with Patti Boyd. It’s usually always a bad idea to fall in love with the wife of one of your best friends, but while ‘Slowhand’ tried his best to keep things professional, Derek and the Dominoes was his way of pulling out all of his lovesick feelings in song, even using the same band that appeared on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass.
While the supergroup has gone down in history as one of the greatest all-star teams in rock history, Clapton said that the band never had any agenda to carry on for much longer after their first album, saying, “[It was] a make-believe band, we were all hiding inside it… I mean, being Derek was a cover for the fact that I was trying to steal someone else’s wife. That was one of the reasons for doing it so that I could write that song, and even use another name for Pattie. So Derek and Layla – it wasn’t real at all.”
Still, there will always be what-ifs regarding their future for years. Even though any semblance of magic was snuffed out the minute that Duane Allman passed away, there was still room for Bobby Keys to collaborate with Clapton in the future, given the fact that his soulful meshed so well with the guitarist’s ‘woman’ tone.
Then again, Clapton never thought about that kind of longevity in any of his bands. All of his music was about moving on to what best suited him, and even if tracks like ‘Layla’ are fun to look back on, it’s more of a snapshot of that point in time in Clapton’s life right as his romantic world was falling apart.
