Evil

The Zoo Crew has been spinning “Evil” by Derek & The Dominos off the Crossroads set, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO for any length of time, you already know this one does not behave like a polite album cut. It comes in sideways, a Willie Dixon warning dressed up in London studio air, and it still sounds like four guys who had stopped pretending they were a happy little band. Crossroads, the 1988 Eric Clapton box, is where most of us first caught it. The track sits on that set as a Dominos leftover, recorded in May 1971 at Olympic Studios in Barnes, long after the Layla album had been finished and Duane Allman had gone back to his own road. No slide guitar on this one. Just Clapton’s voice and guitar, Bobby Whitlock on piano, Carl Radle on bass, and Jim Gordon on drums. Producer credit on the tape boxes belongs to the band itself. John Jansen remixed it in 1987 so it could finally leave the vault.

The song is older than any of them. Willie Dixon wrote it, and Howlin’ Wolf cut it at Chess on May 25, 1954, with Hubert Sumlin and Jody Williams on guitars, Otis Spann on piano, Dixon himself on bass, and Earl Phillips on drums. Chess put it out that July with “Baby How Long” on the flip. Wolf’s version is a porch-light sermon about a man who should not trust a slow answer on the telephone. If she picks up too carefully, grab the first thing smoking. If you have to hobo a freight to get home, do it, because something is going on in that house. The Dominos did not soften the lyric. They just played it like men who had already lived a few of those phone calls.

Whitlock has told the story of those Olympic weeks more than once, and it is not a warm reunion tale. In a Classic Rock Revisited sit-down he walked through the day the Dominos finally came apart. Jim and Eric were already in a quiet war. Everybody in the room was drinking and using too much. Gordon had shown up with a brand-new kit, two kick drums, cymbals stacked everywhere, and he spent four or five hours banging on it and tuning while the rest of them sat in the big room and waited. Same room, Whitlock likes to point out, where he had played piano on the Stones’ Exile on Main St. sessions. The second Dominos album was supposed to come out of that stretch. What came out instead was a handful of tracks, “Evil” among them, and then silence. The band did not survive the summer.

That is why the cut feels different from the Criteria Studios stuff on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Those Miami dates in late summer 1970 were loose, loud, and still hopeful. Tom Dowd had the tapes rolling while Clapton and Allman chased each other around the room. Whitlock has said they treated the studio the same way they treated a gig, starting with a jam and letting the song find its own feet. “Evil” belongs to the later, thinner air in London. Clapton sings it straight, almost tired, and the band locks in behind him without the fireworks. When the box set finally dropped in April 1988, a lot of listeners treated it like a new Dominos single. It was not new. It was just late.

Later anniversary editions of Layla pulled the Olympic material back into the light, so “Evil” now rides next to “Snake Lake Blues,” “Mean Old Frisco,” and “Got to Get Better in a Little While.” Hearing them in a row is like standing in the doorway of a band that already knew it was finished and kept playing anyway. Radle’s bass does not show off. Whitlock’s piano answers the vocal instead of decorating it. Gordon, for all the trouble in the room, still plays like a man who could swing a blues without thinking about it. That is the part that stings. The music was still there. The friendship was not.

If you want the long road that led to that room, you start with a kid in Ripley, Surrey. Eric Patrick Clapton was born in 1945 and raised by his grandparents, Rose and Jack Clapp. He got hold of a guitar as a teenager after the blues records started landing in England, and he did not treat it like a hobby. By 1963 he was in the Yardbirds, and he walked out when the band leaned toward pop singles. John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers gave him a harder room and the “Beano” album. Cream, with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, made him famous in a way he later said he did not want. Blind Faith came and went in a blink. What he actually wanted, he told interviewers for years afterward, was to stand in a band and not be the poster on the wall.

Delaney & Bonnie & Friends handed him that chance. On their 1969 and 1970 tours he played guitar in the line, not out front, next to a Memphis keyboard player named Bobby Whitlock, a Tulsa bassist named Carl Radle, and a California drummer named Jim Gordon. Whitlock had come up around the Stax crowd, singing and playing on sessions before he ever met Clapton. When the Friends tour wound down, the four of them stayed together. They cut tracks for George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, then booked their own dates under a name that hid the star. Derek & The Dominos. Clapton has said the “Derek” tag was a joke that stuck, a way to keep his own name off the marquee. The first proper album, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, arrived in November 1970 and barely sold. The love songs on it were pointed at Pattie Boyd, who was married to Harrison at the time. The band toured, argued, and burned through the goodwill. By the Olympic sessions the next spring, the joke name was about all they had left in common.

Whitlock kept working. His own first solo album, cut around the same London months with pieces of the Dominos drifting in and out, came out in 1972. Clapton went quiet for a long stretch, then came back as a solo act. Gordon’s story turned dark in later years and does not need retelling here. Radle played on Clapton’s records into the late seventies and died in 1980. The four of them never got a second album into the shops. “Evil” is one of the reasons the second album still feels like a real record somebody misplaced, not a rumor.

The official home for the man who carried the Derek name is Eric Clapton’s site, where the Crossroads name still shows up on festival notes and the catalog keeps the Dominos years in the story. He is on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the fans who have been keeping the tape boxes straight since the early nineties, the long-running magazine Where’s Eric! is the deep shelf, and their Facebook page is where the set-list crowd compares notes. Put “Evil” on and let it run. It does not ask for a smile. It just tells you to get home.