Blues Rock · Rock
From “Clapton is God” to three Hall of Fame inductions — the guitarist who carried the blues into rock.
The biography
Eric Clapton was born in Ripley, Surrey, England, in 1945, and picked up the guitar as a teenager, obsessed with American blues — Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, B.B. King. By 1963 he was in the Yardbirds, where his fiery playing inspired the famous “Clapton is God” graffiti in London. The nickname “Slowhand” — a play on his unhurried stage manner — dates from those days.
After a stint with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, documented on the landmark Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton (1966), he formed Cream in 1966 with bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker. The first true rock supergroup, Cream took the blues to massive volume and improvisational lengths: Disraeli Gears (1967), Wheels of Fire (1968) and songs like “Sunshine of Your Love” and a searing live “Crossroads” made Clapton the defining guitar hero of the late 1960s. Blind Faith followed in 1969, a short-lived supergroup with Steve Winwood.
In 1970, Clapton formed Derek and the Dominos and recorded Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs — including “Layla,” his anguished love song for Pattie Boyd, then the wife of his friend George Harrison. The early 1970s brought heroin addiction and withdrawal from music, but he returned with 461 Ocean Boulevard (1974), whose reggae-tinged cover of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” became his only American No. 1 single and helped bring reggae to the U.S. mainstream.
Slowhand (1977) consolidated the comeback with “Wonderful Tonight,” “Lay Down Sally” and “Cocaine,” and the late 1970s and 1980s kept him on rock radio — Behind the Sun (1985) gave him the hit “Forever Man,” and August followed in 1986. Through it all, his playing stayed rooted in the blues: economical, vocal, and instantly recognizable.
Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — with the Yardbirds, with Cream, and as a solo artist. More than any other guitarist of his generation, he carried the blues into rock and roll, and rock and roll back to the blues.
What to listen for
Listen for the touch. Clapton rarely plays fast for its own sake; his signature is phrasing — bent notes that sing like a voice, vibrato that aches, and solos that build like sentences. Notice how his 1970s records strip the Cream-era excess away in favor of groove and songcraft, and how even his biggest hits leave space for the guitar to speak. The blues is always there, underneath everything.