(Credits: Far Out / Chris Hakkens)
Sun 15 February 2026 15:00, UK
There was nothing that was going to stop Eric Clapton from being one of the biggest rock and roll guitarists that the world had ever seen.
He had spent years mining those blues licks that he picked up from the greats, and when he finally reached his ‘God’ status midway through the 1960s, it looked like he had done everything that he had set out to do as a virtuoso. But just because someone can play a million notes per second doesn’t necessarily mean they have to stop when they reach the top of the mountain.
Clapton was clearly one of the best guitarists in the world, not named Jimi Hendrix, when Cream first started, but when his American colleague came to town and tore the roof off of every venue, he needed a change of scenery. There was no way that he was going to interpret the old blues cats better than Hendrix could, and while he could still solo to his heart’s content, he was better cut out for songwriting than trying to match the kind of magic that the guitar wizard played with on any given song.
If he was going to start writing his own material, that meant starting back at zero all over again. He had only written a handful of songs in his Cream days, and while he had a better outlet for his songs in Blind Faith, they were never going to work out once word spread around the rock and roll circuit. So while Steve Winwood made his way back to Traffic and eventually his solo career, Clapton had a much better idea of what he wanted to do. He had his heart set on Patti Boyd, and Derek and the Dominos was the perfect outlet for him.
He didn’t want to break up George Harrison’s home by any stretch, so getting the best players that he could on the same record to help air out his pain was the next best thing. No one could have predicted that they would eventually record one of the most highly acclaimed albums of all time, but the reason why people picked up on Layla was that they could feel his pain through the speakers.
Clapton could only rely on his band to help get him through that dark time, so seeing them dissolve was going to be even more painful. Carl Radle may have been fine with Clapton throughout his career, but after Duane Allman made his way back to his brothers and Jim Gordon had a massive falling-out with ‘Slowhand’, he was seriously mulling over the idea of walking away from music altogether.
He had already dealt with romantic heartache, but all of his problems with musicians led to him walking away for years, saying, “Derek and the Dominos were recording in here when we broke up, and I went into that dark place. I didn’t give a shit about the music anymore. We’d come in and just argue all day and have a go at one another, and then one of us would blow up and split. The music didn’t matter. I didn’t like the sound of my guitar, I didn’t like the way I played, and it took me a while to go away and come back to it.”
Even when you look at his comebacks, it’s not like he was taking the breakup very well, either. He had already been nursing a nasty heroin habit, and while his playing never left him when Pete Townshend put together that show with him at the Rainbow, you could tell that the blues was coming from a far more sorrowful place than when he used to jam with Cream or John Mayall.
It was going to take him a bit to sort himself out, but even if 461 Ocean Boulevard wasn’t the most intense outing he ever made, he was more than willing to give it a shot again. He had been through all of that heartache, but if he learned anything during those years away, it was that the music was strong enough for him to get through any kind of pettiness that the Dominos had.