The 1941 song Eric Clapton will never get tired of: “An incredible thing”
Everything that Eric Clapton ever did always had to come back to the blues in one form or another.
Although he has often gone outside of the framework of the same three chords that it’s built on, there’s a good chance that he could have played on everything from a hip-hop song to a jazz standard and somehow manage to sprinkle in some blues licks into the equation. But he felt that there were some cornerstone tracks that were always going to be a part of him, no matter how long he kept playing.
Because as much as Clapton was interested in making his own music, he was ready to put every bit of shine on the names that people had forgotten back in the day. Not everyone was a household name in his record collection, and if he could manage to play half of what Robert Johnson did with some level of proficiency, he would have been completely happy to do that for the rest of his life.
But a lot of the blues comes from the personality of the player, and Clapton has been able to channel all of his influences into whatever he’s working on. There are certain times where he’ll be playing and a Buddy Guy lick will appear out of nowhere, but even when he was covering some blues tunes with Derek and the Dominos, there wasn’t a single song that they sang that didn’t feel tailor-made for what ‘Slowhand’ was doing.
It wasn’t all about soloing for him, though. It was his job to take the audience on a journey every single time he made a new album, and while he didn’t have the same storytelling talent that someone like Pete Townshend had, he did a lot of that storytelling with his guitar. ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ was already a great Beatles song before Clapton laid down the solo, but his solo is the sound of a guitar crying out in pain for half of the runtime.
Once he got to have a solo career, though, Clapton felt that there were no rules for where he could go. He did have his fair share of hits throughout his career, but when you look through some of the deeper cuts that he was making around the mid 1970s, he felt that ‘Key to the Highway’ was the kind of song that would never get old, no matter how many times he played it live.
The version that ended up on Layla is still one of the greatest jams that Clapton has ever been a part of, but he felt that the song should be a fixture of his setlist just as much as his version of ‘Crossroads’ was, saying, “When I was about 14, I saw Big Bill Broonzy on TV, and that was an incredible thing. That was it for me and then, when I went to explore his music, the song that always came back to me was an incredible version of ‘Key To The Highway’. That was the one that I thought somehow would, like ‘Crossroads’, capture the whole journey of being a musician and a travelling journeyman.”
And while Bobby Whitlock and Clapton take their own liberties with the tune, the appeal of the track usually came from Clapton stretching things out. There was a lot that you could do once you reached the middle section, and beyond playing his favourite licks in that little space of time, Clapton felt that a lot of what made the song so special was being able to cry out in pain for Patti Boyd around the time he recorded it.
Not every song needed to be about heartache by any stretch, but when you look at the kind of notes that ‘Slowhand’ was playing, it was always about much more than being one of the best guitarists of all time. He wanted to communicate every single emotion he had, and that meant trying his best to reach something deeper than the traditional rock and roll song.
