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Layla: The Love Song Eric Clapton Stole From a Persian Poet — and the Guitarist Who Made It Immortal
Layla: The Love Song Eric Clapton Stole From a Persian Poet — and the Guitarist Who Made It Immortal In the summer of 1970, Eric Clapton was the most famous guitar player in the world and the most miserable man in rock. He had been through Cream — the first supergroup, the band that invented…
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Eric Clapton: The Family Man Behind the Guitar Hero
For decades, the public story of Eric Clapton was written in the language of loss: the blues, the addiction, the tragedies that seemed to stalk him. But there is a second act to his life, quieter and far happier, that began in an unlikely place — a department store party in Columbus, Ohio — and…
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How Eric Clapton Created “Blues Breakers”: The Story Behind the Beano Album
In the spring of 1966, a twenty-one-year-old guitarist walked into Decca Studios in West Hampstead carrying a sunburst Gibson Les Paul and a small amplifier he intended to turn up louder than anyone had dared before. Three months later, the record he made there would redraw the map of British rock guitar. It is still…
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The Untold Story of Eric Clapton: From “Clapton Is God” to the Gentlest Giant in Rock
There is a moment in every guitar legend’s life when the world decides who they are. For Eric Clapton, it happened on a wall in London in the mid-1960s, when someone spray-painted three words that would follow him forever: “Clapton Is God.” He was barely twenty years old. What makes his story so moving is…