In the music business since the 1960s, Eric Clapton has gone through many different phases in his career, being part of several acclaimed bands and evolving his sound over the decades.
Every fan of the singer and guitarist has their favorite period of his music, and he once revealed which era of his career he is most proud of.
The part of his career Eric Clapton said he is most proud of
“I think the greatest thing now that I recognize from it, was how lucky I was to be around those kind of musicians, especially like Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, I mean, everyone of them. Bobby Whitlock, Duane Allman. I mean, that was an incredible (band). If I’m proud of anything, I’m proud of the fact that I was enough of a musician for them to want to work with me.”
“(…) We’ve been working and living together for about a year as the Dominos back in England. (We were) living down in the country, touring and doing clubs. We were writing as we went along but it hadn’t really put together a concept for this thing at all. It was going to be one, perhaps one album, but then when Duane came into the mix. It was just a question of like opening every door we could and going in every room. Trying every piece of material that I could think of from my past, his past and then it was a double album. But I think the group, the Dominos, were already pretty well… I mean, I’d known them and played with them since Delaney & Bonnie. When (she) left, we knew one another pretty well.”
He continued:
“To begin with, it didn’t do very well. It was actually quite a long time before it became a popular record. I think it was out for a long time before it took off. Because I think it was anonymous, people didn’t really know anything about it. I didn’t promote it, you know. I never really wanted, that was a classic example of my philosophy about record promotion. If it is good, it will sell on its own merit,” Eric Clapton said in an interview for the documentary “Standing at the Crossroads” (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).
Eric formed Derek & The Dominos in the spring of 1970 and they recorded the classic album “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs”. As he said, one of the main ideas behind the album was to record something anonymously and see if it would sell only because the material was good. Besides “Layla”, which became one of the songs he played live the most during his career, that record also had classics like “Bell Bottom Blues” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”.
The tragic end of two of Eric Clapton bandmates in Derek & the Dominos
Although the band really had a magical time together and recorded one of the most important albums of the history of Blues Rock, two of its members had a tragic end. The first was Duane Almman, who tragically passed away at the age 24 in the following year in a motorcycle accident in Macon, Georgia.
The second was drummer Jim Gordon, whom Clapton described as “the greatest Rock ’n’ Roll drummer who ever lived.” According to the guitarist, the last time Derek & the Dominos played together, the session ended with a “huge row” with Gordon, which led him to storm out of the studio in a rage.
He was one of the most sought-after session musicians of the 1960s and 1970s. Gordon played with George Harrison, the Beach Boys, Alice Cooper, the Byrds and more. However, in the following decade, in 1983, during a psychotic episode, he killed his mother. The former drummer was sentenced to 16 years to life in prison. He remained incarcerated until his death in 2023 at the age of 77. In the early 90s, when asked about Gordon, Eric said he had no idea the musician had undiagnosed schizophrenia.
Eric said:
“I’m scared to death of that (talking to him these days). A part of me says I owe it to him to try and get in touch. But I’m scared. I was scared of him at the end of Derek and the Dominos. One of the reasons we broke up was the rapport between me and Jim, which had always been so good, had broken down. In the middle of a session when we were trying to do a second studio album, I said something about the rhythm being wrong for the song. Jim said something like ‘Well the Dixie Flyers are in town. You can get their drummer.’”
He continued:
“I put my guitar down and walked out of the studio, and I didn’t speak to him again. But I had no idea that he had a psychotic history of visions and hearing voices, from an early age. That was never apparent when we were working together. It just seemed like bad vibes, the worst kind of bad vibes. I would have never said that he was going mad. To me, it was just the drugs,” Eric Clapton said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 1991. Since Gordon’s death, Clapton is the last surviving member of the band. According to ChartMasters, the Dominos’ album has sold an estimated more than 43 million copies worldwide.