(Credits: Far Out / Showtime Documentary Films)
Sun 9 November 2025 14:50, UK
The entire story of Eric Clapton always comes back to him being on a constant musical journey.
He wants to tell everyone about the beauty of the blues every single time he plays, and while that does make for some records that are a little bit retro, no one could fault him for following his muse every single time he sat down in the studio. Each record he made had to be a reflection of him half the time, but he also knew that he was only as good as the people he surrounded himself with when he started playing.
He could sound absolutely fantastic even if he only had one microphone and an acoustic guitar, but outside of his unplugged material, the beauty of his playing tends to be reactionary. Any good jam is about listening to the other players and trying to perform exactly what’s needed for the song based on whatever riff is thrown at them. And it’s not like he didn’t have his hands full when working with Cream.
Jack Bruce was already coming up with fantastic songs before the band even got going, and while Ginger Baker could write decent tunes on his own as well, it all came back to how he used every single one of his drums to create the sound of bombs going off whenever they played live. That’s all well and good, but no one wants that kind of high energy every single time they perform.
‘Slowhand’ had wanted to move past the fighting in the group by the end of the 1960s, but his taste was also changing. He knew how to make fantastic rock and roll records, but the singer-songwriter side of him was begging to branch out by the time Blind Faith came around. So when he finally got together with Derek and the Dominos, he finally had the kind of band that could play anything that he wanted.
Since most of them had time to gel when working on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, they already had chops, but Clapton was more interested in their background as well. All of them were from all the places that he had dreamed of visiting in America, and since they experienced the music he loved firsthand, it was never hard to ask them to keep things a bit more rootsy or for them to know exactly what harmony he wanted.
There were a lot of great moments between him and Bobby Whitlock, but Clapton felt that nothing could take away from what Jim Gordon could do, saying, “To this day I would say that the bass player Carl Radle and the drummer Jimmy Gordon are the most powerful rhythm section I have ever played with. They were absolutely brilliant. When people say that Jim Gordon is the greatest rock ’n’ roll drummer who ever lived, I think it’s true, beyond anybody.”
While the story of Gordon is a lot more tragic when you delve into it, it’s not like he didn’t understand what the assignment was when working on Layla. He could make the band push and pull when they needed to, and while he might not have been the sole originator of the piano outro for the title track, the idea of putting right at the end of the tune was a stroke of genius on everyone’s part.
It’s sad to think that that chemistry is gone forever, but what all of them accomplished together as Derek and the Dominos is the kind of feat that no one else could have pulled off. The whole record sounds like Clapton going through pain, but rarely has any kind of heartache managed to sound this romantic.
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