Eric Clapton was born on March 30, 1945 in Ripley, Surrey, England. Brought up by his grandparents he had a rather tumultuous but eneventful early life. As Clapton states in his autobiography: "A typical evening's entertainment for Riply kids was sitting in the bus shelter watching the traffic, in the vain hope that a sport car would go by..."

Clapton was exposed to music early and says that music always played a big part in his life. In the mid-fifties Clapton discovered Elvis Presly and Buddy Holly. As most of the music that he liked was guitar music Clapton badgered his parents to buy him a german-made Hoyer guitar for two pounds. Thus his guitar career began, playing an almost unplayable cheap guitar. His first song that he learned was by Harry Belafonte. A while later, Clpaton graduated to a better guitar made by Washburn.

In 1963, when Clapton was 17 he joined his first band. The band was called The Roosters and played most R&B.

In August 1963 he joined the Yardbirds. During it's time this amazing group featured three of the greatast living rock guitairsts, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck. Clapton remained with them until March 1965 when he resigned to join John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. He felt that the Yardbirds were becoming to pop-orineted and wished to get back to his blue's roots.

In July 1966 Clapton formed Cream which was one of the first super-group, power-trios. Clapton's first American tour was with Cream. Cream brokeup in 1968 after which Clapton performed with the group Blind Faith for the next seven months.

After this Clapton went on the found a group know as Derek and the Dominos. Clapton wanted to just be an equal member of the band and thus his name was not featured. However, his record company was concerned that no one would know that Clapton was in the band, so the record company had buttons produced that said; "Eric is Derek". This group disbanded in 1971.

From this time on, Clapton mostly performed as a soloist with his own backup bands.