![]() The Dominos was really just a stepping stone to his solo career, of his being able to go out there on his own and be the Eric Clapton that he became Bobby Whitlock “The Dominos was really just a stepping stone to his solo career, of his being able to go out there on his own and be the Eric Clapton that he became.” “He didn’t know what his next step was going to be, but he wasn’t ready to be a solo artist and front his own group,” says Bobby Whitlock, Clapton’s co-singer, co-songwriter and keyboard-playing partner in Derek and the Dominos. 50 years ago, the real salvation Derek and the Dominos offered Eric Clapton was time - a break from his past in which he could figure out what he wanted to do with his career. It’s almost unheard of.”īut writing an album to the woman of your dreams and using it to slip undetected back into the world where you’d been a kingpin - these are acts of desperation. It was the most pure experience I’ve ever had in terms of making an album and then promoting it anonymously. “As we began touring, bit by bit people were talking about us and saying, ‘Who is this?’ ‘What is this band?’ They kind of figured it out. And it was a funny time, ’cause it worked by word of mouth. ![]() “And yet there was this quartet that was one of the most powerful bands I’ve ever been anywhere near - and I was in it! The rhythm section on its own I would have watched all night. “We even did a tour of England, playing little clubs, and there would be nobody there, because nobody knew who we were, so they didn’t come! “What I really loved about that album was nobody knew who we were,” Clapton said. There was nothing to indicate that the sleeve contained two slabs of anguished, potent blues rock played and sung by one of the day’s most popular and influential guitarists. Its back cover showed a photo of a guitar - Brownie, the 1956 Fender Stratocaster that Clapton played on the album - with a pair of black-and-white square-toed derby shoes, surrounded by a tumble of dominos. We used to jam before everything when we were living at Hurtwood, and we carried that over to the sessions Bobby Whitlock We jammed a lot, sometimes it seemed like for days. ![]() Its cover featured no band name or title, simply a rendering of the painting La Fille au Bouquet - The Young Girl with the Bouquet - by French-Danish painter Emile Frandsen de Schomberg. Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs was released without fanfare in November 1970. Working with skilled, seasoned American musicians, none of whom were known to audiences on either side of the Atlantic, Clapton could slip undetected into record bins, charts and venues. With Derek and the Dominos, however, Clapton set out to create a hard-working blues-rock band lacking the kind of star power of his earlier groups. That’s what Blind Faith was all about, but it was never exposed to the public.” We have tapes of that, which are just hours of instrumental, fun-type jazz things. “The best stuff we did was when we were just jamming at Steve’s place, or at my house. “Our names got in the way - all that supergroup hype,” Clapton told Guitar Player back in 1970. It was the Eric Clapton they wanted, the one he no longer wished to be, and the band’s demise followed swiftly. Lacking even an hour’s worth of original material, they were forced to rely on playing the Cream songs Clapton had come to loathe. Assembled quickly, the group recorded one album before going out on tour woefully underprepared. Hoping to tone down the theatrical aspects of Cream’s blues-rock, he launched Blind Faith, a comparatively low-key affair with Baker, Steve Winwood and Rick Grech. In the following years, the sentiment expressed in graffiti would be embraced by guitarists and music fans across the continents when Clapton took his electric guitar playing to greater heights in Cream, the commercially successful supergroup trio he formed with bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker in 1966.īut by 1968, he’d had enough. It was the most pure experience I’ve ever had in terms of making an album and then promoting it anonymously Eric Clapton What I really loved about that album was nobody knew who we were. It was around that time that an unknown fan spray-painted “Clapton Is God” on a corrugated metal wall in Islington, London. The 1960s had seen him rise from obscurity to prominence, first as a member of the Yardbirds and then as the hotshot guitar slinger in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. And it neatly summed up Clapton’s desperation.īeyond his feelings for Pattie, Clapton had another reason to go undercover: He was tired of fame. ![]() Layla dies in torment, and Majnun weeps at her grave before expiring. Layla is given in marriage to another man, but when he dies she’s confined to her house for another two years. In Nizami’s telling, the young man Majnun is mad with passion for Layla, but his proclamation of love for her is considered an abomination that violates the secrecy of divine love.
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