Sex, drugs and rock and roll – that’s the lifestyle so many covet. It’s the foundation the whole genre is built on, arguably, as from the second people have picked up electric guitars and plugged them in, the hedonistic attitude that now feels inseparable from it was right there.
For better or for worse, it’s part and parcel of being a rockstar. Eric Clapton knew that.
For a long time, Clapton knew it well and loved that fact. When he first joined the Yardbirds, it was a dream for a young man. Suddenly, the 18-year-old had status and was having a lot of fun with that as the band swiftly built a cult following during their live residencies. By 19, he was on stage at the Royal Albert Hall and after the show, he was partying hard with the spoils of success.
It led to a wild life. When he left the Yardbirds and started Cream, it got even wilder as the combination of him, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce levelled up the antics when the band were adopted into the big leagues of counterculture. As tracks like ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ hit the airwaves, they were heroes writing new rock anthems and, once again, they were enjoying the spoils of success.
Making himself a legend and hanging out with peers who were doing the same, Clapton was at the top of his game and was enjoying that alongside the likes of the Rolling Stones or the Beatles. To the public, they were stars. But inside, they were realistically all still just young boys who wanted to have fun. Combine that with the level of money and access they had, and it’s easy to understand how so often fame leads to a type of hedonism that turns dangerous.
For Clapton though, the realisation of that danger only came after the fact when he looked back at his time in Derek and the Dominos and almost couldn’t believe he made it out alive.
“We went on tour and I don’t know how we got through it with the amount of drugs we were doing,” he said, recalling the band’s three week tour around the UK in 1970. From the fact that the band were so short-lived, only staying together for a year, it’s easy to see where the story goes as Clapton added, “That’s when it got out of control.”
As another band where Clapton had gathered the best players around, and another group of boys keen to have a good time, especially within the context of Clapton secretly falling in love with Pattie Boyd for an additional sprinkle of emotional chaos, Derek and the Dominos dove into the deep end of rock and roll hedonism. But looking back, that scared Clapton.
“It frightens me to think about it. It was cocaine and heroin, and it wore the band down and a hostility was released that hadn’t been there before,” he said as the hedonism only ever landed them in arguments and conflict. They weren’t a band of brothers all having fun together. Instead, the drugs and the booze made them fighty.
“Whatever held us together got thrown out and the atmosphere was so bad you could cut it with a knife,” he remembered of those backstage times. Nothing good was ever going to come of it and so the band split. Despite the hits they made, and how desperately so many people would want to hear ‘Layla’ played by the original unit, the fear those nights put into Clapton meant that they’d never get together again.
