On a cold Wednesday night in December 1970, Syracuse accidentally hosted one of the most outrageous guitar summits in rock history. Eric Clapton‘s Derek & The Dominos rolled into the Onondaga County War Memorial with Duane Allman in tow and Elton John in the opening slot, and barely anyone knew what they were about to see.
The show was never officially recorded, the set list is mostly lost, and the arena was reportedly partitioned because ticket sales were so sluggish. Yet for a few thousand upstate New Yorkers, December 2, 1970 may have been the greatest five dollar rock show ever staged.
Setting the stage: from Cream burnout to Layla obsession
By 1970 Clapton was trying to disappear. After the deafening ego wars of Cream, he had fallen for the rootsy subtlety of The Band’s “Music from Big Pink” and started dreaming of a group where songs and ensemble feel could eclipse the guitar hero circus.
That group became Derek & The Dominos, built from his Delaney & Bonnie touring comrades Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle and Jim Gordon. Within months they were in Miami cutting “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs,” then back out on a brutal U.S. tour that would run from October into early December.
Duane Allman had already turned heads as the slide guitar genius behind the Allman Brothers Band and as a Muscle Shoals session assassin. He favored fat Gibson tones into loud Marshall stacks and a glass pill bottle for slide, crafting vocal like phrases that fused Delta blues with jazz inflections.
Clapton fell in love with that sound during the Layla sessions, where Allman joined as a de facto fifth Domino and played on much of the record. Clapton’s own career timeline places Allman at the Miami sessions from late August and back alongside the band at the Onondaga War Memorial shows, while widely circulated Tampa audience tapes from the previous night are explicitly billed as Derek and the Dominos with Duane Allman.
How Syracuse lucked into a once-in-a-lifetime bill
So how did this near mythical line up end up in a mid size Rust Belt arena? Long time Syracuse DJ and historian Ron Wray remembers the date first being advertised for October 18, 1970 with British rockers Toe Fat opening, only to be quietly pushed to December 2 when the Layla album was still unfinished and contractual issues meant promoters were barred from using Clapton’s name on the posters, which helped keep ticket sales lukewarm despite prices in the $3.50 to $5.50 range.
In the gap between those dates the bill got even crazier: an unknown piano slinger named Elton John was added above Toe Fat, and the War Memorial was reportedly curtained off to half capacity to avoid the embarrassment of empty seats. Decades later, a commenter under Wray’s piece recalled standing by the stage as the Dominos kicked off with “Layla” and brought the house down with a marathon “Let It Rain”, still describing it as one of the greatest shows they ever saw.
In other words, for the price of a pizza you could watch Eric Clapton’s hottest band, Duane Allman crashing the party and Elton John still in hungry club mode. If you tried to design the perfect classic rock bill on a budget, you would probably invent exactly what Syracuse casually got on a Wednesday night.
Who was actually on stage that night?
Archival nuts have done some of the forensic work for us. Where’s Eric!, the long running Clapton fan site, lists the Syracuse show as Derek & The Dominos with Duane Allman on guitar, backed by Whitlock, Radle and Gordon, with Toe Fat in support and the set list marked bluntly as “unknown”.
Setlist hunters have filled in the opening acts. Toe Fat’s short slot at the War Memorial is remembered mainly for a snarling run through Elton John’s own “Bad Side of the Moon,” while John’s early U.S. set that night revolved around songs like “Can I Put You On” and, again, “Bad Side of the Moon,” delivered in a lean quartet format years before the feather boas and stadiums.
For the headliners, the only hard data we have is a fragmentary setlist entry that lists an unknown opener followed by “Blues Power” and adds one tantalising note: “Duane Allman came on stage after the first song.”
Reconstructing the music: what did Syracuse actually hear?
To reconstruct the rest of the night you have to triangulate from the neighboring dates. The previous evening in Tampa, setlists show the Dominos and Allman running a tight, eight song blueprint – “Layla,” “Got to Get Better in a Little While,” “Key to the Highway,” “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?,” “Blues Power,” “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” “Bottle of Red Wine” and “Let It Rain” – a selection that crops up again and again on late 1970 shows.
The Tampa audience tape that circulates among collectors makes it clear this was not a polite, radio length set. Songs routinely spill past the ten minute mark, “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” in particular turning into a quarter hour of sustained guitar crossfire before resolving back into the chorus.
Given the brutal U.S. routing at that point in the tour, it is unlikely the band reinvented the show twenty four hours later in Syracuse. The safest bet is that the War Memorial crowd heard some variant of that same running order, with Allman joining from the second song onward and turning what was already a ferocious live band into something bordering on a jam supergroup.
| Probable song | Why it is likely |
|---|---|
| Layla | Opened many late 1970 shows and is remembered by at least one attendee as the Syracuse opener. |
| Got to Get Better in a Little While | New, unreleased jam vehicle that appears in the same slot on multiple nearby dates. |
| Key to the Highway | Became a staple blues workout in the middle of Dominos sets that week. |
| Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad? | Centerpiece guitar duel for Clapton and Allman on the Tampa tape. |
| Blues Power | Specifically documented for Syracuse and used to bring Allman onstage after the opener. |
| Have You Ever Loved a Woman | Slow blues showcase that rarely went missing from the late 1970 set. |
| Bottle of Red Wine | Shorter, rocking relief between the extended jams on most tour recordings. |
| Let It Rain | Typical closer and remembered locally as the song that tore the War Memorial roof off. |
Clapton and Allman: twin flames, not a gimmick
By the time they hit Syracuse, Clapton and Allman already knew exactly how to talk to each other on guitar from the Miami sessions. On Layla you can hear them intertwining lines on tracks like “Key to the Highway” and “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?”; live, that chemistry got riskier, hotter and far less polite.
On the Tampa recording, those dual leads turn “Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?” into a 15 minute knife fight, with Allman’s slide screaming over Clapton’s stinging bends, only to fall back into tight unison riffs when the vocals return. Syracuse was literally the next night, with the same players and the same emotional powder keg, so it is fair to picture the War Memorial shaking under that same two guitar onslaught.
Sonically it must have been glorious chaos: Clapton probably on his “Brownie” Stratocaster with that compressed, singing tone he favored in 1970, Allman answering on a thick Gibson loaded with slide. It was Fender against Gibson, English blues rock against Southern fire, but what you hear on tapes from that week is not a contest so much as two players egging each other on to see how far the songs could stretch before they snapped.
Brilliance on the brink
Part of what makes the Syracuse show so haunting is how close it sits to the edge of collapse. Band histories of Derek & The Dominos are brutally clear about this period: Whitlock later recalled that the group were deep into hard drugs on the U.S. tour, Clapton was reeling from Jimi Hendrix’s recent death and from the slow initial sales of Layla, and within a year Duane Allman himself would die in a motorcycle crash back in Macon.
Within days of leaving Syracuse the Dominos played their last ever concert, tried and failed to make a second album, and simply disintegrated. Clapton slid into a years long heroin haze; Allman never got another chance to share a stage with him; the Layla material would not be performed with that kind of two guitar fury again for decades.
Why this forgotten night still matters
For classic rock fans, December 2, 1970 at the Onondaga County War Memorial is a reminder that the most important nights are not always the ones that get filmed and boxed up. Here you had a band at its creative peak and personal breaking point, joined by a guest who would shortly become a martyr to the same era, playing under a banner that half the audience did not even recognise as Eric Clapton.
For guitar players, it is a masterclass in how chemistry beats chops. Clapton and Allman did not dazzle with sheer speed so much as with listening, leaving space and then colliding at exactly the right moments, something you can still hear on every surviving tape from that week.
And for anyone who ever grumbled about ticket prices, it is a humbling benchmark. One modestly attended midweek show in Syracuse gave a few thousand people Derek & The Dominos with Duane Allman, plus Elton John as the middle act, for less than the cost of a modern arena parking pass.
A lost classic hiding in plain sight
No pristine soundboard has surfaced from the War Memorial, and it probably never will. Instead we are left with scraps of setlists, bootlegs from the night before and after, and the aging memories of people who walked out of that building wondering if anyone would ever believe what they had just seen.
If you want to get as close as possible today, cue up the Tampa recording, spin Layla front to back and imagine all that sound ricocheting off concrete walls in downtown Syracuse. For one night in 1970, Derek & The Dominos and Duane Allman turned a half full civic arena into the center of the rock universe, then vanished before most of the world even knew it had happened.
