On the evening of March 19, 1991, Eric Clapton drove his four-year-old son, Conor, out to Nassau Coliseum on Long Island to see the circus. It was the first time he had ever taken the boy out on his own. Less than a day later, Conor was dead. Out of that one evening came “Circus,” a song Clapton played for MTV’s cameras in 1992, then left off the album that made him bigger than ever.
A father still finding his way
Conor was born in August 1986 to Clapton and the Italian actress Lory Del Santo. Clapton was still drinking when the boy arrived, and he later said his son was the main reason he went back into treatment. He did not want a small child watching him live that way.
Sobriety did not turn him into a hands-on father overnight. He and Del Santo lived apart, and she later described him as someone who looked at Conor from a distance, unsure what to do with him. By early 1991 Clapton had just closed a record 24 nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The year ahead was supposed to be quieter, with time set aside for his son.
Three rings on Long Island
The show that night was the big American kind, with three rings running at once. Clapton later remembered clowns and tigers everywhere and vendors selling things the whole time.
What stayed with Conor was smaller. On the ride back into Manhattan, he talked about a clown who had been running around waving a knife. Clapton had not even seen it. The boy had been a little scared and completely thrilled.
All he could talk about was this clown.
At his mother’s apartment, Conor pretended to fall asleep, then climbed into her bed to keep talking about the day with his father. Del Santo later said Clapton came home from that outing overjoyed. He told her that from then on he wanted to care for Conor himself, without help, and to bring him to London.
The morning after
On March 20, Clapton woke early at his hotel. The plan was to walk across town, pick up Conor and his mother, and take them to the zoo. Then the phone rang.
It was Del Santo. Conor had fallen from an open window of her 53rd-floor apartment on East 57th Street. In his 2007 autobiography, Clapton wrote that his first response was a question he later called the silliest he could have asked: Are you sure?
Conor was buried in Ripley, the Surrey village where Clapton grew up. Clapton withdrew to England and stayed out of sight for months.
Writing his way through it
He coped the only way he knew. He played guitar every day and threw himself into work. That summer a handful of songs came out of him, several of them about Conor. By October 1991 he was in The Village Recorder in Los Angeles cutting early versions of three of them, “My Father’s Eyes,” “Lonely Stranger” and “Circus Left Town.”
“Circus Left Town” went straight back to Long Island. It holds the noise of the big top, the excitement in the back seat, and the knowledge that it was the last such night.
The song that didn’t make Unplugged
On January 16, 1992, about 300 fans rode coaches out of London to Bray Studios near Windsor, where MTV was filming Clapton for Unplugged. Early in the set he played three new songs written during that grieving summer. Before one of them, he told the room plainly that it was about his son and the last night they spent together, at the circus.
These songs helped me get through a very hard patch in my life.
When the album came out that August, “Tears in Heaven” was on it. “Circus Left Town” was not. Clapton did not feel the song was finished, and he let the performance go. Unplugged became the best-selling live album ever made and won six Grammys. The quieter song for Conor stayed behind.
Circus, at last
Clapton kept playing it on his 1992 tour, and fans traded bootleg tapes of it for years. When he began work on the album Pilgrim, it was one of only two finished songs he brought into the studio. The other was “My Father’s Eyes.”
Released in 1998 and shortened to “Circus,” it reached No. 39 in Britain. That year Clapton told the BBC the circus in the song was also Conor himself, the circus of his own life, and that this part of his life had now left town.
The 1992 Unplugged performance finally came out in 2013, on an expanded reissue of the album. Clapton brought the song back again in 2016 for six nights at Tokyo’s Nippon Budokan.
Millions know “Tears in Heaven,” the song about where Conor went. Far fewer know “Circus,” the one about where he had just been.