for Clapton's failure, and there's no reason to write off all the music that emerges from Los Angeles and environs, as some would. But like many others—Bob Dylan for a while, and the Band perhaps permanently—Clapton has sacrificed much credibility in his move west. In place of a band and true collaboration, he has found only what everyone else has found in the Scene: cronyism. Because of the nature of the Scene's buddy system it is difficult for a musician to take control of and dominate his own album. The music men make when they come together like this springs from no long term commitment, and it shows.
On both 461 Ocean Boulevard and There's One in Every Crowd, the two studio albums recorded in Miami, Clapton's principal achievement was his emergence as a leader. Though he wasn't writing much, he dominated in other ways: as an arranger, as a singer (the most underestimated of his talents), as the organizer of a first-rate and often exciting band. With Layla, he had made the blues his own music, rather than a translated and transmuted idiom; the other records defined the nature of those blues; from "Willie and the Hand Jive" to "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."
No Reason to Cry erodes those gains. Once again, Clapton is playing in someone else's idiom, and though he's too skillful to turn in a really bad performance, the result is much more mélange than masterpiece. This would not necessarily be so disastrous if what replaced those gains was more than a dead end. It is not.
Clapton's old friends have let him down, and his new ones don't serve him much better. Ron Wood, Robbie Robertson and Georgie Fame are here but in roles so anonymous, or interchangeable, that it's hard to be certain where. Bob Dylan, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel leave their mark, but it's gloomy. Dylan's contribution, "Sign Language," is goofy—it invokes the name of Link Wray and not much else. If anything, the song, with Dylan's voice overwhelming Clapton's and a sound that's mostly polished and professionalized rolling thunder, is further evidence of Clapton's backsliding.
Danko ought to be embarrassed: he is either inept or saving his decent songs for his solo album. "Beautiful Thing," coauthored by Manuel, is the most banal song on an album full of them. The Clapton-Danko collaboration, "All Our Past Times," is salvaged by their vocal trade-offs and what might be a guitar interchange between Robertson and Clapton. Otherwise, it is maudlinly sexist and pedestrian Eagles fare. Finally, w
