The one band Eric Clapton never wanted to reform again: “Not once”
Eric Clapton didn’t see life tied to one band for the rest of his days.
He liked the idea of going in different directions on every one of his albums, and even if the idea didn’t work out that well, he was much more comfortable moving on to whatever new idea he had coming down the pipeline. But when looking at some of the biggest heights of his career, he felt that it was better not to go back to nostalgia mine and make new records with his friends.
It was cool for the moment, and the idea of forming a band like Derek and the Dominos again was already a lost cause. It was one thing that Duane Allman was no longer on the planet, but Jim Gordon was already becoming one of the darkest individuals in the industry even before he went to prison, and Clapton didn’t see himself getting involved with that kind of approach again unless it was for a really good reason.
But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t have some fun jamming with a couple of friends every now and again. He was happy to lend his talents to whatever album one of his mates was doing, and when looking through some of The Beatles’ solo careers, a lot of them have been helped by getting Clapton behind the fretboard, whether that’s John Lennon’s ‘Cold Turkey’ or working with George Harrison to make one of his albums sound perfect.
If anything, that’s the role that ‘Slowhand’ felt most comfortable in. He didn’t want to spend his life trying to make some of the greatest rock and roll songs with him at the front. The idea of being in a band and providing a mean guitar solo appealed to him the most, and while he did get the chance to dominate his field when working with Cream, it’s no shocker that the band dissolved the way it did.
On any album, a band of that calibre is liable to either make one of the greatest albums of their career or want to kill each other, and Cream were definitely the latter. The band couldn’t stand the idea of being around each other for too long, and even though Ginger Baker did continue on with Clapton when he formed Blind Faith a few months after leaving the band, he was pretty comfortable saying that any chance of Cream getting together wasn’t something he really wanted to do.
They had their time in the sun, but since there was nowhere else to go, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his days in a band that fought like that, saying, “Not once … never. I suppose … I suppose we’ve all avoided it in a way. A bit frightened of the fact that we might have been wrong in breaking it up in the first place. Everybody was getting their rocks off too much, somehow, and it was just burning up very quickly. Everyone got into too much of a heavy ego-trip. Virtuosos and all that kind of rubbish.”
And when you look at the way that their actual reunions ended up, it wasn’t like Clapton was wrong for thinking that. All of those wounds hadn’t healed in the slightest by the time that they got back together, and while Clapton was able to power his way through a lot of those shows, the fact that one of them nearly ended with Baker and Jack Bruce nearly getting into a fight was a clear sign that he wasn’t ready to get back to the good old days.
They had their time in the sun, and the idea of him going back around again and getting into the same arguments wasn’t that interesting to him. After all, he had turned himself into one of the greatest solo guitarists of all time by the late 1970s, and it was up to him to make the next classic all by himself.
