“It was very much a management thing – ‘Find somebody to replace Clapton.’ Rory wouldn’t have any of it”: When Rory Gallagher was asked to fill Eric Clapton’s shoes in rock’s pioneering power trio

Despite their enormous success and equally profound influence on the development of rock, Cream disintegrated barely two years into their existence.

That very success had taken a heavy toll on the trio, which teamed Eric Clapton up with the famously always-at-loggerheads rhythm section of bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker.

Tired, among other things, of being sandwiched in between the volatile personalities of the latter two, Clapton was particularly eager to exit the fold.

“On the last US tour, after a gig in Texas in 1968, Eric came to me and said, ‘I’ve had enough.’ And I said, ‘So have I,’” Baker told Guitar World in 1997. “And that was it. We decided, for different reasons, that it was all over. When Cream died, it died. Short of murder, we couldn’t solve a problem between us.”

Grief, of course, has many stages, and according to Dónal Gallagher, brother of guitar legend Rory Gallagher, Cream’s management – when faced with the lucrative band’s breakup – definitely went through a pronounced denial stage.

According to Dónal, the band’s representatives, aware of Clapton’s disillusion, decided to try and nab a replacement: his brother.

(Image credit: Erica Echenberg/Redferns)Though held in high esteem in guitar circles (An oft-repeated, perhaps apocryphal story goes that Jimi Hendrix was once asked how it felt to be the greatest guitar player in the world, to which he said, “I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Rory Gallagher”), Gallagher hadn’t followed Clapton’s road to commercial triumph. A gig with Cream would certainly have given him a push in that direction.

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Nonetheless, the fiercely independent Gallagher had no interest.

“It was very much a management thing – ‘Find somebody to replace Clapton,’” Dónal Gallagher told Guitar World in a 2009 interview. “Rory was known to them, and they got on well. But Rory wouldn’t have any of it. He said, ‘Musically, there’s no way I’d try and fill somebody else’s shoes, especially Eric’s.’”

But what of the potential rewards – the fame, the money?

“Yes, it would have been a fast track,” Dónal said. “But he felt that he would never be his own man.”

Though quite a bit of it sadly only came after his untimely death in 1995, Gallagher has now received widespread recognition as one of the great blues-rock guitar heroes of his or any age.

Rory Gallagher’s 1961 Fender Stratocaster (Image credit: Future / Olly Curtis)Proof of this newfound recognition could be found last October, when Gallagher’s most beloved guitar, a heavily-worn ’61 Strat, sold at auction for an incredible $1.16 million.

The sale of the guitar was seen as so significant that it attracted the attention of significant figures in the Irish government, who endorsed a grassroots fundraising effort to keep the guitar in Gallagher’s native country.

The guitar was purchased for that princely sum by Live Nation Gaiety Ltd, with the intention of donating it to no less than the National Museum of Ireland.