Presence of the Lord

The Zoo Crew has got Blind Faith on the turntable, and the record spinning for the Zoo Freaks is "Presence of the Lord," the Eric Clapton tune from the only album those four ever cut together, the 1969 self-titled Blind Faith. If you have been riding with THE ZOO for a while, you already know how a song like this sits in a freeform set. It is not a shout-along. It is a slow walk into a room that feels quieter than the one you just left, with Steve Winwood up high on the vocal and Clapton answering him on guitar like he is still figuring out what he meant when he wrote the words down.

Clapton has called it a song of gratitude. In the notes that have followed the track for years, he framed the message as a way to say thank you to God, or whatever a person chooses to call that presence, for whatever happens. That reading stuck, and it fits the chorus, where the singer says he has finally found a way to live in the color of the Lord, and then a place to live in the presence of the Lord. What makes the story richer is that Clapton later tied the same lines to something more ordinary. In his 2007 autobiography he pointed at the comfortable confines of a new home he had bought, the first place that felt like it belonged to him. The verse that Zoo Freaks know by heart, "I have finally found a place to live, just like I never could before, and I know that I don't have much to give, but I can open any door," can hold both meanings at once. A house. A little peace. A thank you that does not need a pulpit.

There is a small, telling detail about how the vocal got assigned. This was the first song for which Clapton wrote all the lyrics himself, not just a riff handed to somebody else to finish. Even so, he did not want to sing it. He wrote the melody in a higher key than he could comfortably reach, on purpose, so Winwood would have to take the lead. He thought Winwood was the better singer, and most folks who have heard both of them on this track would not argue. Winwood carries every Blind Faith vocal on the album. On this one he is also on keyboards, with Ric Grech on bass and Ginger Baker on drums, Clapton on guitar. Jimmy Miller produced the sessions, split between Morgan Studios in Willesden and Olympic Studios in Barnes, in the spring of 1969. Early working tapes even carried a different title, "Lord Protector," before the song settled into the name on the sleeve.

The band that played it barely had time to become a band. After Cream came apart and Traffic went quiet, Clapton and Winwood started jamming in Clapton's place in Surrey, then moved over to Traffic's rehearsal cottage in Berkshire. They talked about cutting something loose, maybe even with the Booker T. rhythm section, Duck Dunn and Al Jackson Jr. Then Baker read in the music papers that the two of them were working and drove out to the cottage. Clapton later wrote that he and Winwood were smoking and playing when a knock came at the door. It was Ginger. He sat in on Jim Capaldi's kit and, just like that, the quiet little project had a drummer and a manager's machine behind it. Clapton had promised Jack Bruce that if the Cream three worked together again, all three would be there, and he did not want another band built on reputations. Winwood talked him into keeping Baker. Ric Grech came over from Family in May. Clapton offered the name Blind Faith, a nod to the self-belief they were going to need, and Winwood went along even though he thought the name already sounded like hype.

They debuted in London's Hyde Park on June 7, 1969, in front of a crowd that has been counted anywhere from a hundred thousand on up, before the album was even in the shops. The record followed in August, on Atco in the States and Polydor in Britain, and went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic. Side two was thin, anchored by Baker's long jam "Do What You Like," because the sessions were hurried and a Scandinavian run plus an American tour kept interrupting them. Still, two songs walked out of that short life and stayed: Winwood's "Can't Find My Way Home" and Clapton's "Presence of the Lord." Rolling Stone later parked the album on a list of great one-album wonders and called both of those tracks incredible. Clapton never really dropped the song. He kept it in the solo set for years, and he and Winwood brought it back out when they shared stages again, including the Madison Square Garden runs that reminded everybody how well those two voices and that guitar still fit.

The sleeve is its own chapter, and the Zoo Crew would be leaving out half the bar-room argument if we skipped it. Photographer Bob Seidemann shot a young girl holding a silver model aircraft. The picture was pulled from American pressings and replaced with a shot of the band in a cottage, instruments swapped around for the camera. Seidemann's image is the one most British copies carried, and it has been debated ever since. None of that changed what was in the grooves. What you hear on "Presence of the Lord" is a band that was already fraying, playing a personal song as if they had all the time in the world.

If you want the long view on how this crew got started, you have to back up past the cottage door. Steve Winwood was the kid from Birmingham who sang "Keep On Running" with the Spencer Davis Group while he was still in his teens, then helped invent Traffic with Jim Capaldi, Chris Wood, and Dave Mason. Eric Clapton had already been through the Yardbirds and John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, the gunslinger years, before Cream with Baker and Bruce made him the guitarist everybody in a ballroom wanted to see. Baker came out of the Graham Bond Organisation with a jazz student's ear and a double-bass-drum kit that could take over a room. Grech had been holding down the low end, and sometimes the violin, in Family. Put those histories in one room in early 1969 and the music press treated it like the first real supergroup. The trouble was the room never stayed private. Hyde Park, then the coliseums, then audiences that cheered whether the band was on or off. Winwood said later they failed in part because they could not resist the old hits, and a Baker solo made the crowd think they were watching Cream. By the end of the summer the faith was gone. Clapton slid into Delaney and Bonnie's troupe and on toward Derek and the Dominos. Winwood went back toward Traffic and a long solo life. Grech played with other bands until his death in 1990. Baker kept working until 2019. Winwood and Clapton are the two still here.

That is the weight under a four-minute song. A writer handing his own lyric to a better singer. A new house and an old restlessness in the same verse. A drummer who would not stay outside the door. For the files, the surviving members keep the story up on their own pages. Clapton's official site still walks through the 1969 dates at ericclapton.com, including the Hyde Park debut and the week the album came out, and the official store listing for Complete Clapton still names the track outright at store.ericclapton.com. His official Facebook is facebook.com/ericclapton, and the X account that has posted about the Blind Faith years is x.com/EricClapton. Winwood's official site is stevewinwood.com, his Facebook page, which has carried the story of the album hitting number one, is facebook.com/stevewinwood, and his Instagram, which has marked the Hyde Park debut, is instagram.com/stevewinwood. Clapton has not kept an official Instagram. There is no standing Blind Faith office and no fan page we can point you to that is clearly theirs and still talking about this record. The song does not need one. It is on the platter, Winwood is out front, and the door in the lyric is still open.