Why Eric Clapton almost didn’t play the Rainbow Concerts: “I had to prop him up”
Most artists are coming from a place of love whenever they put together a concert. There’s a pure joy that comes with anyone trying to bring people together through music, and especially when rock and roll reached the Summer of Love, it felt like everyone wanted to create a utopia right there in the middle of the crowd. While Eric Clapton helped lead that sentiment when playing with Cream, that didn’t mean he had to enjoy every single concert that he was told to play.
Because from the first time he left The Yardbirds, Clapton had a hard time hanging onto one band for too long. There were moments where things started to work out, but seeing how Cream ended made him realise what he should be looking for out of a band when shuffling through acts like Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominoes.
Throughout every band he worked with, it didn’t take much time to realise what licks belonged to him. Despite leaving The Yardbirds in his salad days, Clapton was always going to be a blues purist, and even when he started making songs that had more in common with folk rockers like The Band, he was more than happy to shed some light on a Muddy Waters lick the world may not have heard of.
Around the mid-1970s, though, Clapton had started to reach his own breaking point in his personal life. He had already been reeling over his conflicting feelings about Patti Boyd on ‘Layla,’ and even if he was still on good terms with George Harrison at this point, his drug habits had started to get out of control, eventually becoming a heroin addict at the start of his solo career.
If there was one thing that was going to lift him out of the darkness, it was bound to be the music. After all, some of the best bluesmen have channelled their pain through their songs, and since the world was eager to hear what Clapton had in his vaults, it took Pete Townshend to get him back into the world when playing a run of gigs at The Rainbow in 1974.
That’s not to say that Clapton didn’t go on kicking and screaming in some respects, though, with Townshend remembering, “I had to prop him up and teach him how to play again. The guy had shut himself away for the better part of 21 years. Me and the father of the girl Eric was living with at the time organised this concert and bullied him into doing it. He didn’t want to do it.”
Despite still being slightly strung out, Townshend did the rock world a great service by getting Clapton back in action. Seeing the audience’s reaction helped renew his faith in playing music again, and even Harrison said that his guitar comrade looked like an angel whenever he went on one of his wild solos.
But that kind of music doesn’t come from someone who has simply practised all of their scales and put all the notes in the right place. Clapton was still going through a lot of pain, and even if it took a lot for him to even consider playing that run of shows, a lot of his greatest moments from this concert may as well have been an example of him trying to exorcise all of his demons through his music.
