The 1964 song that made Eric Clapton want to quit music: “That was always my first reaction”
There wasn’t a thing standing in the way of Eric Clapton when he first started making the rounds with Cream.
The entire point of making the supergroup was to give everyone a taste of what rock and roll could sound like from true professionals, and it wasn’t hard to look at the band and think that there was no one else that could top them. But even in the context of the biggest rock and roll bands in the world, it didn’t take much for ‘Slowhand’ to get discouraged when he heard someone achieving perfection before him.
Then again, if he had a bruised ego about his own guitar playing, he probably made a mistake when asking Jimi Hendrix to come onstage with him. As much as he was heralded as a guitar god, Clapton never considered Hendrix to be a competitor in any sense of the word. There was no chance he was ever going to be that good, and giving the audience a taste of what the guitar wizard could do was his way of tipping his cap to one of the greatest musicians the world would ever see.
But the biggest names in rock and roll weren’t always centred around the blues at this point. Anyone who wanted to play hard rock certainty had the right blues scales under their fingers whenever they made their first riffs, but The Beatles were already breaking new ground in pop territory. No one had thought of using their strange chords in a pop context, but hearing Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys singing was enough for everyone to gawk in sheer amazement.
Wilson was already a musical genius before he had even started working on Pet Sounds, and when looking at their greatest surfing songs, some of his best work came from him working on vocal arrangements. Every single person had their place in the band, and it was only natural for Wilson to come out with a song that could flex all of their talents when he made the song ‘I Get Around’.
Compared to ‘Surfin’ USA’ and ‘Surfin’ Safari’, ‘I Get Around’ is pretty much perfect from back to front. The entire song relies on everyone hitting their notes at the exact right time, and even if Wilson wasn’t the star of the tune most of the time, he was happy to have put together the kind of track that could have stood alongside some of the greatest songs he heard out of Phil Spector.
And while Clapton was usually one to talk up his own skills, he felt that there was no reason to think he would ever make anything as good as that song, saying, “All the Beach Boys stuff. ‘I Get Around’, I was playing a gig with The Yardbirds, and the DJ had got that. He played [that], and I thought, ‘It was over’. And that was always my first reaction, which is, ‘I quit’. [Cream] would listen to that [Pet Sounds] non-stop.”
But if Cream couldn’t reach those heights, they were going to do a damn good job getting anywhere near the top of the charts again. They were firmly entrenched in jazz and blues when they started, but when you hear what they were coming up with after having listened to Wilson, you can hear them dipping their sound in acid when looking at how they structured a song like ‘Strange Brew’ or ‘Sunshine of Your Love’.
‘I Get Around’ may have made Clapton want to give up, but it was really an invitation to the rest of the world. This was what The Beach Boys could do, and if you were willing to make something that sounded that beautiful to get in the charts, you were going to have your work cut out for you trying to go toe-to-toe with anything that Wilson was creating.
