Eric Clapton was called God on the walls of London before he turned twenty-five. Graffiti reading “Clapton is God” appeared across the city, and he spent the next fifty years trying to live down the title while battling heroin addiction, alcoholism, and the grief of losing his four-year-old son. The guitar god myth obscured a far more complicated human story.

This episode traces Clapton from his confused childhood — raised by grandparents he believed were his parents — through the Yardbirds, Cream, Derek and the Dominos, and the personal tragedies that shaped his later career.

• He discovered at age nine that his “sister” was actually his mother and his grandparents had raised him
• “Layla” was written about his obsessive love for Pattie Boyd, the wife of his friend George Harrison
• He wrote “Tears in Heaven” after his four-year-old son Conor fell to his death from a Manhattan window
• He is the only musician inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three times