The “beautiful” singer that left Eric Clapton brokenhearted: “A lovely man”
It doesn’t take a rock historian to see the amount of turmoil that Eric Clapton went through throughout his life.
He was always trying to outrun some of the trauma that he was feeling every single time he stepped up to the microphone, and while it took him a while to make sense of some of his issues, he knew that he could rely on music to get him through even the darkest times… So when he found someone who collapsed underneath the pressure of everything, it was like losing a fellow troubadour.
Because while Clapton was looking to outmatch any guitarist that he ever played with, it was never about trying to leave them in the dust. To him, the music industry was all about brothers in arms to a certain degree, and while he did have his fair share of disagreements with everyone from the members of Cream or Jim Gordon from Derek and the Dominos, he still wished them nothing but peace when they went their separate ways.
Every one of his bandmates had the potential to make great things, but the one thing standing in their way was each other. Clapton didn’t want to hold back anyone willing to express themselves, but that wasn’t always the case once he entered the 1980s. ‘Slowhand’ had already been stuck on autopilot for a little while, but hearing the schlock that was coming out on MTV every single day was enough for him to lose faith over the pop sphere. Stevie Ray Vaughan gave him hope, but that was always going to be a niche compared to the manufactured side of pop.
But something magical happened when the clocks turned to the year 1991. The pop sphere was still going through its usual swing of hair metal bands and glossy pop ballads, but Nirvana kicked the door down for everyone. Kurt Cobain was already one of the finest songwriters of his generation, and while he didn’t necessarily want to be the biggest artist in the word, he didn’t really have a choice when ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was unleashed on the world.
Clapton wasn’t necessarily in the same ballpark as Nirvana around that time, but he did at least have a passing fancy with them when he began working on his acoustic material. There was a lot more to their music than what met the ear, but when he heard that Cobain took his own life in 1994, he felt that the wing had been knocked out of him.
The rest of the world had to process the idea of one of the voices of their generation not being there anymore, and Clapton felt that Cobain had so much more to offer than what he left us with, saying, “I don’t know why no one couldn’t have gotten through to him. It’s just a fucking shame, because he was very talented and a lovely man. I mean, to my eye. I did this MTV show. And for the most part, it was hype and Hollywood packaging and bullshit. And then Nirvana came on, and they blew my mind. I thought he was beautiful. You know, it broke my heart.”
And for what it’s worth, Cobain did at least seem to be respectful of what Clapton had done during that time as well. He had said that he had a great admiration for his guitar playing, even if he was in a completely different genre, and if Cobain ended up stripping things back on their MTV Unplugged appearance, maybe we could have been listening to an unplugged Nirvana album had he lived to see another project.
That kind of reality wasn’t really in the cards, but that didn’t deter Clapton from shouting the praises of Nirvana wherever he could. These were artists who raised the bar for what good rock and roll was meant to be, and even if it wasn’t indebted to the blues as much as ‘Slowhand’ was, they belonged in rock and roll history for adding something entirely different to the rock and roll sphere.
