It takes a lot for any artist like Eric Clapton to start losing faith in music.
For him, picking up the guitar was practically a salvation from all the hardship in his life, and by learning the language of the blues, he found the key to expressing himself in a way that he could have never done with words. So when that music starts giving you nothing in return after years of rewarding you, there’s bound to be a moment where things start to feel like they’re falling apart.
Then again, when you expect anything from music, you’re expecting too much. Any musical instrument might be a way to alleviate emotional pain for Clapton’s heroes like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but they didn’t magically find a way to free themselves thanks to the guitar. They put in the work to make sure that they could pull the darkest pieces of their heart, and even if Clapton wasn’t tied to any band, he let that fury show whenever he took a solo.
Although a lot of Clapton’s music would transition to more singer-songwriter music in the 1970s, there’s hardly a second in the 1960s where he didn’t play wildly inventive stuff. The Yardbirds may have been a stopgap between him reaching the big time and starting to work on more adventurous music, but even before Cream started, tunes like ‘Steppin’ Out’ were reason enough for people to pick up anything they could get their hands on about him.
But while Cream did eventually give ‘Slowhand’ a home, it didn’t last long, either. He knew he couldn’t deal with the fighting between Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, and even if he tried to keep things going with Blind Faith, it was only a matter of time before he officially went solo. Even if he had exorcised his demons at the time, though, Derek and the Dominos set him up for dealing with one of the most difficult heartaches of his career.
Given the nature of his relationship with Patti Boyd, Layla feels like being a voyeur in one of the biggest musical soap operas of the time. Clapton did at least have a musical way of pining after Boyd without acting on those feelings, but when the Dominos decided to call it a day, he didn’t know where he could turn anymore.
He had had a family that could help guide him through the harshest time of his life, but when he started working again, he didn’t have the same spark that he usually did, 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 if he did eventually come back, that didn’t mean that he hadn’t picked up a few more demons along the way. He had already been dabbling in heroin use around that time, but for all of the great material to be found in his 1970s output, even Clapton himself has talked about how it’s easy to hear him blitzed out of his mind on half of the records, with him trading in his other vices for drinking.
Clapton eventually may have found out that music was the best way out of his pain, but there’s a good chance that we could have witnessed a rock and roll tragedy if things had played out differently. He was still among the greatest guitarists of all time, but he was now starting to realise that life as a guitar god had a few more low points than he would have bargained for.
