While the Slowhand moniker has endured across decades, Clapton's tenure with the band that cemented his early reputation as well as the name, was so short that he'd already quit The Yardbirds by the time they had their first hit. For Your Love, which Clapton had played on reluctantly, peaked at number three on the UK singles chart. This chapter initiated a pattern that would mark the first decade of Clapton's recording career; he would join a group, build a strong following that typically culminated in commercial success, before abruptly reaching a breaking point and moving on to other pursuits. As a result his sound, catalogue, and nicknames are as varied as the musicians he has surrounded himself with over his long career.
After The Yardbirds, Clapton played on and off in John Mayall's Bluesbreakers before teaming up with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce to form Cream. Having changed his equipment substantially post Bluesbreakers, Clapton now wielded a more fluid, increasingly legato guitar tone that was a revelation in its time, and serves as a template for much of the ‘classic rock' that would follow. The public reaction to this sea change in the already revered guitarist's style is best encapsulated by a now infamous bit of graffiti spray-painted on a wall in an Islington underground station praising Clapton as a guitar genius. To his credit, Clapton was embarrassed by the hero worship. "I never accepted that I was the greatest guitar player in the world," he told The South Bank Show in 1987. "I always wanted to be the greatest guitar player in the world, but that's an ideal, and I accept it as an ideal".
In the wake of Cream's demise, Clapton soldiered on founding the super group Blind Faith with Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood and Ric Grech. Although the group recorded the classic cut Can't Find My Way Home, belief in the project flagged and they had disbanded before completing their seventh month as a group. Despite this, Clapton also managed to record his first solo album during this period, releasing the eponymous Eric Clapton in 1970 which yielded an unexpected hit in the form of JJ Cale's After Midnight.
With the close of the sixties Clapton had become disillusioned with the culture of stardom that pervaded his life. In response, he recruited a band of relative unknowns to record with producer Tom Dowd at the historic Criteria Studios in Miami. Clapton's avoidance of his fellow rock luminaries was short-lived though, as guitarist Duane Allman of The Allman Brothers Band was added to the proceedings after being introduced by Dowd, who was working with both groups, at a concert in Miami. The results are legendary, perhaps reaching an apex with the transcendent exchange of guitar solos between Allman and Clapton on Layla. This new band borrowed from yet another Clapton moniker, certain friends called him Del, to be called Del and the Dynamos. That is, until someone mistakenly misread the name as Derek and The Dominos, cementing the group's almost timeless name.
Del, Derek, Slowhand; none of these names really tell us much about the real Eric Clapton, whose life has been equally touched by tragedy and struggle, as it has by success and glory. No one ever renamed Clapton when he finally let us into his personal life, penning Tears in Heaven, in the wake of his son Conor's accidental death in 1991. But the song humanised the guitar idol, as fans came to see him for the first time as a father who had suffered an unimaginably painful blow.
The success of Clapton's subsequent MTV Unplugged album probably has more to do with the music itself, than the biographical implications, but it underscores the way in which Clapton has continued to draw from a deep and varied music career to re-establish and reinvigorate his relevance time and time again. Who is Eric Clapton today? Catch him at Yas Arena tomorrow night to find out.
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