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.
![derek and the dominoes derek and the dominoes](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8L3uPTud7Is/TZnycbUQLxI/AAAAAAAAOFI/IgC3L2uFOj8/s1600/derek.jpg)
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.