The 1970s band Eric Clapton thought he would not match again: “Dead and buried”
The entire journey of Eric Clapton has always been about moving forward.
Anyone could have tried finding one sound and sticking with it, but even if Clapton never stopped his love affair with the blues, there was always going to be something pushing him to make music that was a bit more off the beaten path than what every other rock guitarist was doing. He wanted the chance to show his stuff every single time he played, but there were more than a few times where some project left a hole in his heart when the music stopped.
But it’s not like ‘Slowhand’ was a stranger to that kind of turmoil, either. Some of the best blues musicians of all time get their greatest strengths from tragedy, and while Clapton would have rather not carried around all that heartache in his chest, he knew that he could channel all of it into great songs at the end of the day. The thought of losing a child isn’t something you’d wish upon anyone, but ‘Tears in Heaven’ was Clapton’s perfect way of translating his sorrow into music.
Long before he was thinking about settling down, though, Clapton could hardly hold onto a single band for too long. The entire purpose of a blues icon like him was to be the travelling troubadour that kept moving on to the next phase of life, and by the time that Cream had ended, it’s not like Clapton didn’t have a good idea of what he wanted to do next. He wanted to work with the best musicians he could, and getting Blind Faith was the next best thing after his first supergroup fell through.
If you look at how they shaped up, though, Clapton seemed almost too gung-ho about entering the next phase of his career. The band were still going through those birthing pains when they played their first shows, and Steve Winwood wasn’t going to keep going in a band like that if he didn’t feel comfortable playing their songs. But for a brief moment in time, it looked like Derek and the Dominos were going to make everything alright.
Clapton had the perfect musicians with him, the kind of hits that anyone would have fallen in love with, and even a perfect singing partner in Bobby Whitlock, but given how everything fell out, it was also the darkest time of his life as well. His love for Pattie Boyd was rejected once again, and after getting into a massive fight with Jim Gordon and losing Duane Allman, playing any of those songs aside from ‘Layla’ ever again had to do a number on his psyche whenever he performed.
And even though he was ready to celebrate his last supergroup decades removed from their formation, he wasn’t shy about wanting to forget all of the painful memories of that time as well, saying, “Doyle [Bramhall II] and Derek [Trucks] both expressed so much interest in this stuff that I thought was dead and buried. It’s a difficult thing to revisit the Dominos thing. It isn’t an emotional thing. It’s how do you make that work with a bigger band. But it was infectious from Doyle and Derek: ‘They really want to do this stuff.’ So I thought, ‘This is the perfect opportunity. Because they can do it.’”
Those days seemed to be gone forever, but it’s not like Trucks and Bramhall had shaky hands when it came to the material, either. There’s hardly anyone who could manage to capture the same slide feel that Duane Allman had on the original, but Trucks is still one of the most lyrical guitar players who ever lived, and when he played with Clapton, you could hear the reverence that he had to make sure that everything sounded perfect.
Clapton never had a problem with trying to go back to those days, but even if he never wanted to talk to some members of the band ever again, he could at least find ways of remembering the good times whenever he kicked off the riff to ‘Layla’. Because as much as the album itself was laced with heartache when it first came out, that didn’t stop ‘Slowhand’ from proving to everyone why he was still considered a guitar god.
