When Your Grief Becomes Your Biggest Hit: Eric Clapton and “Tears in Heaven”
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
Today is the 35th anniversary of a music-related tragedy: On March 20, 1991, Eric Clapton’s young son Connor fell out of an apartment window in New York City. He was only four-years-old and fell when an unsecured window in an apartment gave way. It’s the kind of tragedy that makes no sense, has no precedence, and is nothing that you can prepare for, as rare as a lightning strike. It’s the kind of event we all experience, in a way: The one certainty of life is that it will sideswipe you, lay you low, and catch you when you least expect it. That grief will be an emotion you must learn to navigate is one of the few certainties of life.
Like any great artist, Clapton approached his grief through his art. After a mourning period, Clapton, who had been enjoying the beginnings of a “comeback”—he’d done time in Hazelden Betty Ford in Minnesota and recorded and toured sober for the first time behind 1989’s Journeyman—threw himself into his next musical project. The project: the soundtrack for a now-forgotten movie called Rush.
The movie stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jason Patric as two undercover cops who pose as drug addicts to ensnare a local drug kingpin. Things go off the rails when the duo start taking drugs for fun and attempt to frame the kingpin without any evidence. It’s not a Great movie, but it’s the kind you’d have fun watching at 3pm on a lazy Saturday on Turner Classic Movies.
Clapton, amid dealing with his grief at Connor’s passing, scored the movie with much of the band that made Journeyman with him, and turned in a mostly instrumental score that has some of his most soulful, beautiful playing. Clapton talks often in his memoirs of feeling less confident as a songwriter than as a player, and his playing does all the talking for him here; it’s mournful, and sometimes zippy for action sequences. It’s a score that can’t help but sound like a Clapton album above all else, the true mark of a great guitar player:
The album closes with three songs with vocals; the first is “Help Me Up,” a stomping blues rocker about how love can lift you out of the darkest pits, and save you. “Don’t Know Which Way to Go” is a classic barroom blues ballad by the old Chess Records majordomo Willie Dixon that Clapton covers with Buddy Guy. And the final track is the one most explicitly about Connor’s death: “Tears in Heaven.”
If you’re of a certain age, you can probably hum this song from memory and probably have its music video burned into the recesses of your brain pan. It’s hard to describe what this song was like, when it went crazy on the charts—you’d hear it in the van, you’d hear it at school, you’d hear it at the pharmacy, you’d hear it in TV ads. Your mom loved it, your dad loved it, your grandma loved it, your little sister loved it.
But it wasn’t the version from Rush that went crazy: It was the version Clapton performed in early 1992 for his edition of MTV’s Unplugged. Clapton’s set on the show is the best-selling live album of all time; in the year of peak-grunge, a soft, quiet, acoustic blues album with a song about a child’s death was one of the biggest selling hits of the decade. Possibly apocryphal tales say that Martin Acoustic Guitars only weathered the non-acoustic ‘80s and early ‘90s thanks to the album selling millions of copies and everyone went acoustic. “Tears in Heaven” is by a significant margin Clapton’s most famous song in the U.S.; it’s his only Top 10 single, and the only single of his besides his cover of “I Shot the Sheriff” to even chart.
But imagine this, for a moment. Your son has passed away in a scenario you couldn’t have ever conceived, and as part of the grieving process, you write a song about what you imagine it’d be like to see that son in Heaven and knowing you still must live years and years yet without him. That song is put at the end of a soundtrack for a movie that will underperform at the box office--$7 million on a $17 million budget—and end up in the never-ending film recycling bin that is Tubi. Then, you play the song as part of your set on Unplugged, and it blows up unlike any song you’ve ever released, including “Layla,” including “White Room,” including “Sunshine of Your Love,” including “Cocaine.” How might that warp your relationship with your grief? How might it feel to be expected to perform that grief, night after night, year after year?
Well, Clapton stopped playing “Tears in Heaven” sometime in the ‘00s, along with the song devoted to his grief over his father’s passing (“My Father’s Eyes”). “I didn’t feel the loss anymore, which is so much a part of performing those songs,” Clapton told the AP in 2004. “I really have to connect with the feelings that were there when I wrote them. They’re kind of gone, and I really don’t want them to come back, particularly. My life is different now.” It’s hard to begrudge him that. He’s played both songs semi-recently, but they’re not usual songs in his sporadic setlists.
Joan Didion once wrote that there’s a delta between what we think grief is like and what grief actually is, how it’s experienced by a person. Clapton experienced grief in actuality and then had to experience that grief every time he played “Tears in Heaven.” That song might sound now, 35 years later, like a symbol of ‘90s adult contemporary rock, that toothless genre it’s easy to write off. But “Tears in Heaven” has a much deeper, sadder story, one that’s worth revisiting today, as you think about the people you’ve lost and had to keep strong living without.
--Andrew Winistorfer
