Eric Clapton

Eric Clapton, born March 30, 1945, in Ripley, England, is one of rock music's defining guitarists, a musician whose career has moved through blues, psychedelic rock, and singer-songwriter pop across six decades.^[1]

He rose to prominence in the mid-1960s as lead guitarist of the Yardbirds, then joined John Mayall's Bluesbreakers before co-founding Cream, one of the first successful power trios, alongside Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. After a brief stint in the supergroup Blind Faith, Clapton formed Derek and the Dominos, whose 1970 double album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, written largely to express his desperate love for Pattie Boyd, the wife of his close friend George Harrison, is now regarded as his masterpiece^[1]. The album was a commercial disappointment on release, and in its aftermath a depressed and isolated Clapton spent roughly three years battling heroin addiction before a successful comeback with 1974's 461 Ocean Boulevard. Boyd eventually left Harrison for Clapton, and the two married in 1979 before divorcing in 1988^[1]. He has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three times, as a member of the Yardbirds in 1992, as a member of Cream in 1993, and as a solo artist in 2000^[2].

Clapton's life changed again on March 20, 1991, when his four-year-old son Conor, born from his relationship with Italian model Lory Del Santo, died after falling from a 53rd-floor window of a New York City apartment during a visit, an accident that occurred after building maintenance staff had left the window open^[3][4]. Clapton withdrew from public life before returning to work on the score for the film Rush, during which he and lyricist Will Jennings wrote "Tears in Heaven" as a direct response to Conor's death. The song went on to win three Grammy Awards and become Clapton's best-selling American single, and it marked a turning point in how Clapton's audience understood him, less as a guitar virtuoso and more as a survivor working through the hardest passage of his life in full public view.^[3]

Clapton published an autobiography, Clapton, in 2007, and was the subject of the 2017 documentary Clapton: Life in 12 Bars, both of which trace the throughline from his addiction struggles of the 1970s to the grief and recovery of the early 1990s.^[1]