The “beautiful” band Eric Clapton knew he belonged in: “I would go into another world”
Eric Clapton didn’t like the idea of being tied to one band for too long whenever he played.
The mark of any great bluesman is being able to get the job done all by yourself, and while ‘Slowhand’ did have a lot of friends helping him out throughout his time in the spotlight, he was much more comfortable playing the role of a drifter going from one album to the next. But even when he was in some of the biggest bands of his generation, he felt that he didn’t necessarily fit in with everyone he interacted with.
Granted, Clapton’s need to break free had already started years before he became known as a rock and roll god. The giants of the genre, like Chuck Berry, may have inspired him to pick up a guitar when he was a kid, but when you listen to the kind of songs that he was being forced to make when he was in The Yardbirds, he wasn’t as thrilled with the idea of making tunes for the pop charts.
He had outgrown that kind of music, and Cream was his excuse to break out some of the craziest licks he had ever come up with. There was no limit to where he could go with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce by his side, but shit was bound to hit the fan from the minute that the band started arguing over the direction. Bruce and Baker didn’t have one nice thing to say to each other on a good day, and while they made a hell of a noise together, Clapton was about to face serious burnout.
Not on the writing front, though. Clapton was pumping out licks quicker than most people could even digest them, but he was never interested in listening to his two bandmates fight amongst each other. Music was supposed to be about everyone expressing themselves in the greatest way possible, and after spending years with his amps cranked all the way up, Clapton was becoming interested in some mellow music.
It would be years before he picked up his acoustic and started making unplugged gems like ‘Layla’, but by the time he exited Cream, The Band was the closest thing to what he envisioned for himself. Every member of the band seemed to have a deep sense of what Americana music was supposed to sound like, and even if they were mostly Canadian, Clapton felt that they were rooted in every piece of American music that he liked.
So while Cream was his home for a long time, Clapton felt that he could fit in much better alongside people like Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm, saying, “I would put this tape on and I would go into another world. It was my kind of release, and for someone like me, who was born in England and worshipped the music from America. It was very tough to find a place to belong in all this. This band that I was listening to on this tape had it all. They were white, but they seemed to derive all they could from black music, and they combined to make a beautiful hybrid.”
Clapton didn’t really get his wish throughout The Band’s tenure, but given the fact that he joined them on The Last Waltz, it wasn’t like he didn’t have a few chances to shoehorn his way in there. He worshipped this genre of rootsy music, and when you listen to where he would be going years later, when he was well into his solo career, he seemed to take a lot of his lessons from what his Canadian friends had been doing.
‘Wonderful Tonight’ and ‘Lay Down Sally’ are fantastic songs on their own, but the way that Clapton delivered them wouldn’t have been possible without learning from what The Band had done. He didn’t get his wish to properly join the band or anything, but the rest of his catalogue was about making music that touched his heart the same way that albums like Music From Big Pink did.
