Eric Clapton

• 1. Introduction

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  Eric Patrick Clapton was born on the 30th of March 1945 in Ripley, Surrey, to a sixteen-year-old mother and a Canadian soldier who had already shipped back across the Atlantic before his son drew a first breath. He grew up believing his grandmother Rose was his mother, and that his mother Patricia was merely his older sister. It was a family secret that would haunt him for decades, surfacing most visibly in a 1998 song called "My Father's Eyes". The guitar he received for his thirteenth birthday was a cheap German-made Hoyer acoustic with steel strings that were hard to press down, and he nearly quit before he started. But two years later he picked it up again, and something took hold. What follows is the story of how a boy from Surrey became the only person inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three times, how he assembled and dismantled one legendary band after another, how addiction and grief and heartbreak all found their way into his music, and why a piece of graffiti spray-painted on a wall in Islington in 1967 still echoes across the history of rock guitar.

• 2. Slowhand Rising

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  Giorgio Gomelsky gave Eric Clapton his nickname, and it came from an accident. When Clapton broke a string mid-concert with the Yardbirds, he would stay on stage to replace it. English audiences filled the silence with a "slow handclap", and Gomelsky turned the crowd's impatience into a pun: Slowhand. That nickname would eventually title one of Clapton's most celebrated solo albums. Clapton joined the Yardbirds in October 1963, synthesising the styles of Chicago blues masters Buddy Guy, Freddie King, and B.B. King into something distinctly his own. The band took over the Rolling Stones' residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond and began attracting a cult following. In December 1964, Clapton made his first appearance at the Royal Albert Hall in London. He would go on to perform at that venue over 200 times, saying it felt like "playing in my front room". The breaking point with the Yardbirds came in March 1965, when the band released "For Your Love", written by Graham Gouldman, who also wrote hits for Herman's Hermits and the Hollies. The song's pop direction was exactly what Clapton despised. He left the band the day the single went public, suggesting Jimmy Page as his replacement. Page, out of loyalty to Clapton, declined and put Jeff Beck forward instead. Clapton then joined John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. In his second stint with Mayall, he gained a reputation as the finest blues guitarist on the club circuit. He swapped his Fender Telecaster and Vox amplifier for a 1960 Gibson Les Paul Standard and a Marshall amp. Someone, identity still unknown, spray-painted "Clapton is God" on a wall in Islington, North London. The graffito was photographed, a dog urinating on the wall in the background, and the image circulated as a document of guitar-hero worship at its peak. Clapton, for his part, told The South Bank Show in 1987: "I never accepted that I was the greatest guitar player in the world. I always wanted to be the greatest guitar player in the world, but that's an ideal, and I accept it as an ideal." The Bluesbreakers album itself, recorded while Clapton was still a member, was not released until after he left the band for the last time in July 1966. Fans call it The Beano Album, because the cover shows Clapton reading the British children's comic The Beano.

• 3. Cream and Collision

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  Ginger Baker approached Clapton with the idea for a new band in 1966, and Clapton agreed to join on the condition that Jack Bruce was also included. Cream's first unofficial gig was at the Twisted Wheel Club in Manchester on the 29th of July 1966, followed two nights later by a full debut at the National Jazz and Blues Festival in Windsor. Before Cream, Clapton was largely unknown in the United States; he had left the Yardbirds before "For Your Love" reached the US top ten, and had not yet performed there. That changed fast. In March 1967, Cream played a nine-show stand at the RKO Theater in New York. It was there that Clapton's 1964 painted Gibson SG, called "The Fool" and decorated in psychedelic designs by a visual art collective of the same name, made its debut. The guitar would become one of the most recognisable instruments in rock history. Cream recorded Disraeli Gears in New York from the 11th to the 15th of May 1967. The album brought together Clapton's searing guitar, Bruce's fluid bass playing, and Baker's polyrhythmic drumming. Their US hit singles included "Sunshine of Your Love" at number five, "White Room" at number six, and a live cover of Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues", retitled "Crossroads", at number twenty-eight. Jimi Hendrix attended a Cream performance at the Central London Polytechnic on the 1st of October 1966 and sat in on a version of "Killing Floor". His arrival on the British scene had an immediate effect on Clapton. Top musicians including Clapton, Pete Townshend, and members of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles attended Hendrix's early club performances. By early 1967, Clapton was being called Britain's top guitarist, but Hendrix's arrival created a real rival for that crown. In 28 months, Cream had sold millions of records and played throughout the US and Europe. Drug and alcohol use escalated tensions among the three members. A strongly critical review in Rolling Stone of a concert on the band's second US tour shook Clapton profoundly. He has also credited Music from Big Pink, the debut album of The Band, as influencing his decision to leave. Cream disbanded in November 1968. Their farewell album, Goodbye, included the studio single "Badge", co-written by Clapton and George Harrison, who was credited under the pseudonym "L'Angelo Misterioso" due to contractual obligations. Harrison had met Clapton when the Beatles shared a bill with the Clapton-era Yardbirds at the London Palladium.

• 4. Harrison, Layla, and the Dominos

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  George Harrison became one of the most important relationships in Clapton's life, and it pulled him into the most painful chapter of his personal story. Clapton's close friendship with Harrison brought him into contact with Harrison's wife, Pattie Boyd, with whom he became deeply infatuated. When Boyd rejected his advances, the anguish fuelled most of the material for Derek and the Dominos' album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, recorded in 1970. The band's name itself was a fluke. Tony Ashton of Ashton, Gardner and Dyke suggested the provisional name "Del and the Dynamos", using "Del" as his nickname for Clapton. When the name was misread, Derek and the Dominos stuck. Clapton's intention with the band was deliberate: he wanted to step back from the cult of personality around him and function as part of an ensemble. The title track, "Layla", was inspired by a classical Persian love story, Nizami Ganjavi's The Story of Layla and Majnun, a copy of which Ian Dallas had given to Clapton. The tale of a young man who fell hopelessly in love with a beautiful, unavailable woman and went mad because he could not marry her mirrored Clapton's own situation exactly. The recording sessions took an unexpected turn when producer Tom Dowd, who was simultaneously producing the Allman Brothers, invited Clapton to an outdoor Allman Brothers concert in Miami. Clapton and Duane Allman met on stage, then played all night in the studio, and became inseparable for the sessions. Allman added slide guitar that became a defining element of the album's sound. The two parts of "Layla" were recorded in separate sessions; the piano melody in the second part was played by drummer Jim Gordon, though Bobby Whitlock stated it was actually written by Rita Coolidge. During the sessions, Clapton was devastated by news of the death of Jimi Hendrix. Eight days earlier, the band had recorded a cover of Hendrix's "Little Wing" as a tribute. On the 17th of September 1970, one day before Hendrix's death, Clapton had purchased a left-handed Fender Stratocaster intended as a birthday gift for him. Allman was killed in a motorcycle accident on the 29th of October 1971. Clapton later wrote in his autobiography that Allman had been the "musical brother I'd never had but wished I did." The album received lukewarm reviews on release, and the group disbanded soon after. Drummer Jim Gordon, who had undiagnosed schizophrenia, later murdered his mother during a psychotic episode and was confined to sixteen years to life in prison, later being moved to a mental institution where he remained for the rest of his life.

• 5. Addiction and Return

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  Clapton withdrew from touring and recording after the Dominos broke up, retreating to isolation in his Surrey residence and nursing a heroin addiction. His career hiatus lasted years, interrupted only by his appearance at George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh benefit shows in New York in August 1971, where he passed out on stage, was revived, and managed to finish his performance. Pete Townshend of the Who organised a comeback concert at London's Rainbow Theatre in January 1973, titled the "Rainbow Concert", specifically to help Clapton get back on his feet. In 1974, Clapton started living with Pattie Boyd, and he was no longer using heroin, though he had gradually begun to drink heavily. He assembled a new touring band and recorded 461 Ocean Boulevard, an album that deliberately emphasised compact songs over extended guitar solos. His cover of Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" became his first number-one hit. In 1976, he performed as one of the guests at the farewell concert of The Band, captured in a Martin Scorsese documentary titled The Last Waltz. Clapton's alcoholism eventually became acute. After calling his manager and admitting the problem, he flew to Minneapolis-Saint Paul in January 1982 and checked into Hazelden Treatment Center in Center City, Minnesota. He drank heavily on the flight over, fearing he would never drink again. He wrote in his autobiography: "In the lowest moments of my life, the only reason I didn't commit suicide was that I knew I wouldn't be able to drink any more if I was dead." He would return to Hazelden in November 1987, and has stayed sober ever since. His album August, produced with Phil Collins in 1986, became his biggest seller in the UK to that point, reaching number three on the charts. Its first track, "It's in the Way That You Use It", appeared in the Tom Cruise and Paul Newman film The Color of Money. And at the 1987 Brit Awards in London, Clapton received the prize for Outstanding Contribution to Music.

• 6. Grief and the Unplugged Sessions

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  On the 20th of March 1991, Clapton's four-year-old son Conor died after falling from the 53rd-floor window of his mother's friend's apartment at 117 East 57th Street in New York City. Clapton was staying at a nearby hotel and was preparing to pick Conor up for lunch and a visit to the Central Park Zoo when he received a hysterical phone call from Conor's mother, Lory Del Santo. He described feeling like he "went off the edge of the world" and, arriving at the scene, felt "like I had walked into someone else's life." The first person to offer condolences was Keith Richards, who had himself lost his young son Tara in 1976. Conor's funeral took place on the 28th of March at St Mary Magdalene's Church in Ripley, Surrey, and he was buried in the churchyard there. Clapton's grief became the song "Tears in Heaven", co-written with Will Jennings. He performed it live in front of a small audience on the 16th of January 1992 at Bray Film Studios in Windsor, Berkshire, for his Unplugged album. The album reached number one on the Billboard 200 and was certified Diamond by the RIAA, meaning it sold over ten million copies in the United States. At the 35th Annual Grammy Awards, Clapton received six Grammys for the single "Tears in Heaven" and the Unplugged album. On the 9th of September 1992, he performed "Tears in Heaven" at the MTV Video Music Awards and won Best Male Video. In 1998, recovering from addiction himself, Clapton founded the Crossroads Centre on Antigua, a medical facility for those recovering from substance abuse. That same year, his Grammy award-winning song "My Father's Eyes" addressed the father he had never known, a search that would not reach its conclusion until a Montreal journalist named Michael Woloschuk traced members of Edward Walter Fryer's family through Canadian Armed Forces service records. Fryer, it turned out, was born on the 21st of March 1920 in Montreal and died on the 15th of May 1985 in Newmarket, Ontario. He was a musician who played piano and saxophone, a lifelong drifter who had apparently never known he had fathered Eric Clapton.

• 7. Influences and the Guitar

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  Clapton has named Muddy Waters, Freddie King, B.B. King, Albert King, Buddy Guy, and Hubert Sumlin as the guitarists who shaped him. In his 2007 autobiography, he calls Muddy Waters "the father figure I never really had", and Waters remained a part of his life until his death in 1983. Clapton has said that blues musician Robert Johnson is his single most important influence. In an essay for a 1990 boxed set of Johnson's recordings, he wrote: "Robert Johnson to me is the most important blues musician who ever lived. He was true, absolutely, to his own vision... his music remains the most powerful cry that I think you can find in the human voice, really." Buddy Holly also left a deep mark. The "Chirping" Crickets was the first album Clapton ever bought. He later saw Holly on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and in his autobiography recounted seeing Holly holding a Fender Stratocaster and thinking: "That's the future, that's what I want." Beyond guitarists, the 2017 documentary Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars shows Clapton citing Bismillah Khan, the Indian shehnai master, as an influence, saying "I wanted my guitar to sound like his reed instrument." He also cited harmonica player Little Walter: "The sound he made with the harmonica playing through an amplifier. It was thick and fat and very melodic." Clapton's guitars have their own separate history. His psychedelic 1964 Gibson SG, "The Fool", found its way to Todd Rundgren in 1972 for US$500. Rundgren renamed it "Sunny", restored it, and sold it at auction in 2000 for US$150,000. Clapton's 1964 Cherry-Red Gibson ES-335 was sold at a 2004 auction for US$847,500. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd later described the effect of hearing Clapton's recording technique, after Clapton moved microphones away from amplifiers to capture room sound during Bluesbreakers sessions: "That changed everything. Before Eric, guitar playing in England had been Hank Marvin of the Shadows, very simple, not much technique. Suddenly we heard something completely different." The Guardian, in 2011, attributed the creation of the cult of the guitar hero entirely to Clapton, placing it at number seven on their list of the fifty key events in rock music history.