“I didn’t have the nerve”: the artist Eric Clapton was too embarrassed to sing next to
Eric Clapton usually didn’t need that much encouragement to tear through any guitar solo. The entire premise of the stoic guitar badass was more or less created by him when he stepped onstage with The Yardbirds, and while there were people like George Harrison making the rounds, no one managed to make the guitar cry quite like ‘Slowhand’ could. But being the hotshot guitar player and then becoming the frontman were two completely different animals as far as he was concerned.
Because, really, the frontman role has more baggage than most people would want to tolerate. There are always going to be people who think the person singing is the most important, and even if Clapton had some hotshot people behind him, hearing him at the front introducing the band made him look like an orchestrator rather than a member of the group trying to make every song a musical wrecking ball.
In fact, that’s probably why he found himself in a group like Cream when he left The Yardbirds. Outside of the fact that he and Jack Bruce traded vocal lines on nearly every song, it was easier to hold his own next to true masters of their craft whenever he played, especially since Bruce was known for playing his bass guitar like a lead instrument half the time they jammed on old blues covers.
But having great chops doesn’t translate to having the best professional relationships, and no matter how long Cream stayed together, they could have never gone the distance with how badly Ginger Baker and Bruce were behaving. So, if Clapton couldn’t get the right outlet in his first supergroup, why not form a completely different one underneath his feet?
Although Blind Faith always felt like more of a project than a full band half the time, their debut album does have some decent blues tunes on it. ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’ is a classic rock staple, and Baker’s massive drum solo on ‘Do What You Like’ is an adventure on its own, but when Clapton first stepped up with his original song, ‘The Presence of the Lord’, he was far too shy to turn it into something massive.
“I was embarrassed that I couldn’t sing in front of Winwood – I didn’t have the nerve.”
Eric Clapton
He was always best suited to improving other people’s songs, so when it came time for Clapton to sing it, he knew that he could have never done the tune justice, saying, “One of the first songs I ever wrote was In ‘The Presence Of The Lord’. And I was a bit embarrassed about that, to be honest with you, which is one of the reasons why I made Steve Winwood sing it when we were in Blind Faith. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t sing in front of Winwood – I didn’t have the nerve.”
And despite his massive track record, though, Clapton was 100% correct as well. As much as he had a fair amount of soul in his voice, Winwood had one of the best voices in 1970s rock at the time, and after having turned in time in Spencer Davis Group and Traffic, he had gone from being a humble blues singer to one of the greatest of his peers, to the point where he could make a soulful ballad sound as good as any other R&B artist coming out on the other side of the Atlantic.
While ‘The Presence of the Lord’ was a good song no matter who was singing it, it sounds a lot more earnest coming out of Winwood than it would have sounded with Clapton’s smoother tenor voice. If anything, though, the tune should be remembered for how Winwood seemingly did the impossible by having God bow down to him.
