Got to Get Better in a Little While

You are locked into Derek and the Dominos and a song that never got the album it was written for. “Got to Get Better in a Little While” is Eric Clapton telling the truth out loud while the band around him was already coming apart. It opens the third disc of his 1988 box set Crossroads, the first time most of the rock audience heard the studio take, and it still hits like a door kicked in. Wah-wah guitar, a rolling bass line, a drummer who will not sit still, and a vocal that sounds like a man bargaining with himself. This is freeform album rock the way THE ZOO was built to play it. No jingles, no countdown, just the cut and the story behind it. Park it here with THE ZOO and let the tape roll.

Derek and the Dominos were never supposed to be a household name. That was the point. After Cream and Blind Faith, Clapton was sick of being God on a poster. In the spring of 1970 he pulled keyboardist and singer Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle, and drummer Jim Gordon out of the Delaney and Bonnie circle and hid the whole outfit behind a fake name. Dave Mason sat in early and then stepped aside. The four of them slipped into George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass sessions as the house band, then headed for Criteria Studios in Miami with producer Tom Dowd. Duane Allman walked in off an Allman Brothers gig, sat down, and the room changed. What came out was Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, a double album soaked in unrequited love for Pattie Boyd, slide guitar that still has not been bettered, and a rhythm section that played like it had something to prove and nothing to lose.

The band did not stop writing when Layla wrapped. “Got to Get Better in a Little While” was already in the set while they were still on the road behind that album. They played it at the Fillmore East in October 1970, long enough and loose enough that the live reading later landed on the 1973 album In Concert. On November 5, 1970, they took it to The Johnny Cash Show at the Ryman in Nashville, the only known professional film of the Dominos, with Cash and Carl Perkins joining them on “Matchbox.” That television performance sat in the vault for decades and finally surfaced on the 40th anniversary edition of Layla. The song was a concert animal before it was a studio animal. Clapton wrote it. The lyric is a vow and a confession at the same time. He was deep in heroin. The band was fraying. The chorus keeps promising that the mess will clear if he can just hold the line a little longer. On a rock station that still cares about the deep cuts, that is the whole point of the record.

The studio version you hear from Crossroads was cut in May 1971 at Olympic Studios in Barnes, London, during the sessions for a second Dominos album that never happened. Clapton has said those dates broke down halfway through on paranoia and tension, and the band dissolved. Duane Allman was not in the room. He had gone back to the Allman Brothers, and he was killed in a motorcycle crash in Macon later that year. What remained on the Olympic tape was Clapton’s vocal, his wah-drenched guitar, Carl Radle’s bass, and Jim Gordon’s drums. Bobby Whitlock’s keyboard and chorus parts were never finished. When the track was remixed by John Jansen in 1987 and dropped onto Crossroads the following year, it still sounded like a jam that had been caught before the vocal arrangement was done. Five minutes and thirty-two seconds. Incomplete on purpose, or incomplete because the room would not hold. Either way, it is one of the toughest things the Dominos left behind.

Crossroads itself is the long map of Clapton’s career up to that point: the Yardbirds, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith, the solo records, and the Dominos. Polydor issued the box in April 1988, six discs, and the Dominos leftovers from Olympic sat on disc three next to “Evil,” “One More Chance,” “Mean Old Frisco,” and “Snake Lake Blues.” For years that incomplete Olympic take was the studio version. Bootlegs had circulated the second-album sessions, but Crossroads was the official door. In 2010, for the deluxe 40th anniversary edition of Layla, Whitlock was brought back in to finish what the 1971 tape had left open. He cut the missing chorus and organ, and the completed mix went out with a jam version beside it. In March 2011 the finished song was issued as a single with “Layla” on the flip. Clapton has kept the tune in the set ever since, including the 12-12-12 Concert for Sandy Relief and the 2013 Crossroads Guitar Festival. The Crossroads box cut is still the one that feels like the band in the room, unfinished and unwilling to quit.

The four men who made that noise did not get a long run. The Dominos existed from the spring of 1970 into 1971. Layla stiffed at first and only became a landmark after the title track finally cracked the charts in 1972. Radle stayed in Clapton’s circle through the seventies and died in 1980. Gordon, later diagnosed with schizophrenia, killed his mother in 1983 and remained institutionalized until his death in 2023. Whitlock kept writing, painting, and telling the Dominos story from Texas until he died in August 2025. Clapton is the last surviving member of the official lineup. The name Derek was a joke that stuck. The music was not a joke. It was the sound of a guitarist trying to disappear into a band and failing, because the songs were too personal and the playing was too good.

Clapton was born March 30, 1945, in Ripley, Surrey. He came up through the Yardbirds, left because they were getting too pop, joined John Mayall, and cut the Beano album that rewired British blues guitar. Cream made him a star he did not want to be. Blind Faith was a supergroup that lasted one album and a tour. The Dominos were the correction: a working band, American rhythm section, Southern slide guitar when Allman was in, songs about a woman he could not have and a habit he could not shake. After the group collapsed he disappeared into heroin, came back with 461 Ocean Boulevard, and spent the decades after that moving between blues covers, film scores, Unplugged, and the Crossroads rehab center he built in Antigua. The official trail runs through ericclapton.com, the fan club at EC Access, Facebook, and Instagram. He does not keep an official account on X. The long-running fan magazine and archive is Where’s Eric, and the Dominos page lives at Derek and the Dominos on Facebook.

Put “Got to Get Better in a Little While” next to “Bell Bottom Blues” and “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad” and you hear the same man, three different temperatures. This one is the recovery song written before the recovery. The wah pedal talks more than the lyric does. Radle walks the changes like he is holding the floor up. Gordon pushes the tempo until the guitar has to answer. On the Crossroads mix there is no Duane Allman slide to lean on, and the track is stronger for it. It is Clapton without the safety net, promising he is going to get better and not yet sure the promise will hold. That is the cut. That is the Dominos. Leave it up loud.