Eric Clapton was 21 when he left John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers in 1965, convinced he was heading toward something even deeper into the blues.
Instead, he spent the next three decades taking a remarkably circuitous route back to the place he had started.
When From the Cradle arrived in 1994, Clapton finally recognized the irony. The album was his first full-length studio statement devoted entirely to the blues since Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton, and he realized he was essentially making the record he had envisioned nearly 30 years earlier.
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“It’s taken a lot of courage for me to go back,” he said. “I’m really retracing my steps back to John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.”
After establishing himself as an electric-guitar blues hero with Mayall’s band, Clapton left in 1965 expecting to move into an even more hardcore blues setting. Instead, his next project was Cream, the groundbreaking power trio he formed with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker.
“When I was leaving John Mayall, in my head, I was going to an even more hardcore blues situation,” Clapton said. “Which backfired. Although it came out to be a great hybrid, it wasn’t my intention to go that way.”
Cream would, of course, become one of the most important bands in rock history. But its extended improvisations, psychedelic leanings and jazz influences took Clapton somewhere very different from the stripped-down blues he had imagined.
His subsequent career took him further still. Derek and the Dominos produced “Layla,” one of the defining songs of his career, while his solo work established him as a major rock star. There were also much darker periods, including his struggle with heroin addiction and the collapse of Derek and the Dominos, after which he nearly quit music altogether.
Yet the blues remained the thread running through it all.
By the early 1990s, Clapton had reached another turning point. His Unplugged album became a huge success, winning three Grammys and giving him the confidence to follow his instincts rather than chase another rock hit. With From the Cradle, he decided to stop circling the music that had first made him want to become a guitarist and immerse himself in it completely.
“Now what I’m doing is I’m going back to that jumping-off point,” he said. “It’s almost like I’m just leaving John Mayall now, and I’m producing my own blues band.”
The phrase “jumping-off point” is particularly revealing. Clapton wasn’t simply revisiting his past. He felt as if he were finally picking up the journey he had begun in 1965.
“It’s taken me 30 years of meandering around the backstreets to get there,” he said. “And I don’t know why. I always felt very afraid of being true to myself. But right now, I want to do it.”
He was also candid about why it had taken so long. When asked whether From the Cradle was an album he could have or should have made nearly 30 years earlier, Clapton agreed.
“It’s what I intended to do after the Yardbirds, before John Mayall,” he said. “Here was a period when this was the album I would’ve made, except I wouldn’t have had the gift — I maybe would’ve had the gift, but I wouldn’t have had the technique to do it. I would’ve collapsed.”
That distinction is important. At 21, Clapton had the ambition and the blues obsession, but he didn’t yet have the experience to make the record he imagined. By 1994, after three decades of playing, recording, touring and living through some extraordinary highs and lows, he felt ready.
And he wasn’t taking the responsibility lightly. From the Cradle found him tackling songs associated with blues giants including Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Elmore James and Freddie King. He described Muddy Waters’ songs as particularly intimidating.
“Muddy’s songs have been the hardest,” Clapton said. “His music was the first that got to me and it remains some of the most important music in my life today. I love this man so much that I want to do it absolutely perfectly and, of course, that’s not possible.”
For Clapton, the album ultimately represented something more fundamental than a return to a particular sound.
“From the Cradle is ‘me’ in terms of my musical identity,” he said. “It’s where I’ve come from and what I mean. And wherever I go in the future will be the result of this.”
After 30 years of meandering, Clapton had finally arrived back at the place he had been trying to reach all along.
