Throughout the 1960s, Eric Clapton amassed an impressive band roster playing in pioneering groups like The Yardbirds, John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, and Cream, among many others. Despite what seemed like promising beginnings to these groups, they all dissolved for one reason or another.
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In just fifteen years, Clapton’s view of the final band he would be a part of before dedicating himself to a solo career transformed from a long-time endeavor to “make-believe.”
Eric Clapton Was Incredibly Optimistic In 1970
Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle, and Jim Gordon established Derek and the Dominos shortly after the dissolution of Cream and Blind Faith and their departure from Delaney & Bonnie and Friends. In a 1970 interview with Guitar Player, Clapton sounded incredibly optimistic about his next project.
The guitarist said he believed Derek and the Dominos had the capacity to last longer than his previous endeavors, if for no other reason than they hadn’t beleaguered themselves with contractual obligations yet. “No one in this group has signed one contract,” Clapton said. “In fact, I’d shy away from the idea because the only times I’ve ever signed anything on a piece of paper, it’s always meant that pretty soon after doing it, I’d get disillusioned. I mean, so far, the fact that we haven’t signed anything has been part of the reason why we stuck together.”
Clapton continued, “It would have to be a pretty strong reason for this group to break up. Because, you see, most of the times before, it was me that left. But this time, I can’t leave, you see, because I’m at the forefront of the group. I’m responsible, in a way. This is the first time I have had a responsible part in any group I’ve been in. So, I’ve gotta live up to it. If I chicken out this time, I cop out to myself, too.”
It would only take one year for Clapton to prove himself wrong.
His Final Band Ended in Tragedy and Acrimony
Despite how hopeful Eric Clapton sounded in 1970, it didn’t take long for things in the Dominos to turn sour. Much of this was out of the band’s hands. Two deaths—Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman—rattled Clapton and his bandmates, making it difficult to recalibrate and continue working amidst their grief. Clapton’s drug use was getting worse, and the love triangle between him, George Harrison, and Pattie Boyd was taking its toll, too.
“The end of the Dominos came too soon, and that left me very high and dry as to what I was supposed to be,” Clapton told Guitar Player fifteen years later, in 1985 (via Anthony DeCurtis’s Rocking My Life Away: Writing about Music and Other Matters). “I’d been this anonymous person up until that time. It was difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that it was me.”
In an interview with Musician, Clapton said Derek and the Dominos was “a make-believe band. We were all hiding inside it. Derek & the Dominos—the whole thing was…assumed. So, it couldn’t last. I had to come out and admit that I was being me. I mean, being Derek was a cover for the fact that I was trying to steal someone else’s wife. That was one of the reasons for doing it, so that I could write the song and even use another name for Pattie. So, Derek and Layla—it wasn’t real at all.”
Photo by Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images Photo Archives
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