“I wasn’t asked”: The band Eric Clapton would have loved to join
Nothing was off the table whenever it came to Eric Clapton playing guitar. He was always a free agent even when working in The Yardbirds, and there was no chance of him holding onto a group for too long before he had moved on to something different. While that ultimately led to his inevitable solo career, there were always a few opportunities for Clapton to join other groups that never quite panned out.
Then again, Clapton could never be told what to do in a band. Anyone that’s being called a musical god by everyone in England isn’t going to always have their head on straight when talking about their ego, and while Cream let him do pretty much anything he could have wanted, there was always that lingering tension between Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker that made it almost impossible for him to carry on for too long in the group.
So when he eventually walked out with his guitar in tow, it was inevitable that he would have people knocking down his door. His guitar talents had already been a central part of The Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, but since he got on so well with the rest of the Fab Four, it wasn’t that out of question to see him working with George Harrison on All Things Must Pass with all the future members of Derek and the Dominoes.
Whereas that band has been etched in stone as one of the greatest supergroups of all time, Blind Faith doesn’t seem to get as much love by comparison. Granted, the band’s material only consisted of one album with six songs, and since one of them wasn’t ‘Layla’, it’s hard to judge them both together, but listening to Steve Winwood play off of ‘Slowhand’ on tracks like ‘Presence of the Lord’ was a perfect way to transition from Bruce’s more operatic voice in Cream.
‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ was already a good sign that things were headed in the right direction, but Clapton was as interested in where Winwood had been. He was starting to fall in love with the songwriting he heard from groups like The Band, but he knew that there was something magical about the way that Traffic operated that he could have definitely added his own spice to.
“I didn’t think that they were any better with me playing with them, but I felt that they needed another instrument. I still think they do. A bass, y’know. I was hoping after that gig that I would be asked. If I had been, I would have joined.”
Eric Clapton
So when the opportunity came for Clapton to join, he was seriously considering it, saying in 1970, “I was literally dying of starvation to play. I went up to see them in Oxford and I got to jam with them. It was just Steve and Jim and Chris. And I liked the sound of it. I didn’t think that they were any better with me playing with them, but I felt that they needed another instrument. I still think they do. A bass, y’know. I was hoping after that gig that I would be asked. If I had been, I would have joined. Just like that. But I wasn’t asked, so it didn’t happen.”
Although that certainly would have been interesting, that would have also meant that some of Clapton’s greatest solo works may have sat on the shelf for a little while. It’s easy to see a song like ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ in the Traffic mould, but the thought of hearing Winwood singing ‘Layla’ instead of Clapton feels wrong, especially without the fantastic slide playing Duane Allman does on the original.
There are still elements that they could pull off, but that’s ultimately up to whether Clapton and Winwood are up for working together again. Even though they have bother drifted far away from how they sounded in the 1970s, Clapton always has a love of the blues, so the door will always be open for him to make something happen later down the line.
