IN LATE 1968, Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood had a conversation that would help define Clapton’s direction in the coming decade. “We discussed the philosophy of what we wanted to do,” Clapton recalled in his autobiography. “Steve said that for him, it was all about unskilled labor, where you just played with your friends and fit the music around that. It was the opposite of virtuosity, and it rang a bell with me because I was trying so hard to escape the pseudo-virtuoso image I had helped create for myself.”
Indeed, Clapton’s Sixties hadn’t been so much swinging as swashbuckling. From the Yardbirds to the Bluesbreakers to Cream to Blind Faith, he leapt from band to band, wielding Teles, Les Pauls, SGs and 335s, while fanatics with spray-paint cans started a new three-word graffiti gospel across England — “Clapton is God.” In the final days of Cream, the by-then reluctant messiah’s go-to escape for sanity was the Band’s 1968 debut album, Music from Big Pink. That, and the music of J.J. Cale, with its understatement, groove and economy, became stylistic templates for Clapton, as did a brief tour in 1969 with Delaney & Bonnie, who encouraged him to focus on his singing and songwriting.
So began the transition from ‘God’ to ‘good all-rounder.’
Of course, it wasn’t just musical influences that were shaping him. He came into the decade with a developing addiction to heroin, which — after his first solo album — became so debilitating that it sidelined him for two and a half years. When he finally managed to get clean, it was only to trade one dependency for another; to read the chapters about the Seventies in Clapton’s autobiography is to almost feel contact drunkenness, so prevalent was his boozing. But like many
