Another great write up! Thanks Yek.
One comment on "woman tone". I've always thought of it as the post-Bluesbreakers/Cream era tone, when Clapton was playing Marshall 100w amps and was more about dialling back of the tone controls on the guitar rather than the amp. Clapton explains it in
this video.
Regarding the JTM45 on the Bluesbreaker album (one of my all time favourite albums), there's lots of material on the internet about how loud the amp was when it was recorded. Here's a quote from the excellent book "Strange Brew: Eric Clapton & The British Blues Boom 1965-1970" by Christopher Hjort (itself a quote from a Mojo article):
Gus Dudgeon, engineer "Nobody had ever come in wanting to play that loud, not even when I did the Stones audition" and from Mike Vernon, producer "I went to talk to Eric...Is this absolutely essential? Because Gus is having kittens, he doesn't know how to record it. He's never had to deal with anything like this volume in his life. Can you turn it down? And Eric said very politely, ' No, I can't, because if I turn it down, the sound changes. And I can't get the sustain I want' "
Also from the same book but this time a quote from much later (1998) interview:
Eric Clapton "When they tried to set up recording, I wouldn't let them put the microphone anywhere near my amplifier....I intuitively knew it wasn't going to sound good miked close"
One of the great things about the Axe is we can get "that" sound without "that" volume