“BB King’s got him beat”: Eddie Van Halen on the last time Eric Clapton was good
There comes a point where an artist starts to hang around long past their due date. Even though someone can try to mix things up and keep their audience on their toes for as long as they can, there are only so many times that someone can sell the same thing to the crowd and hope to God that they are going to fawn over it like they always do. Eddie Van Halen certainly knew how to mix things up, but he felt that one of his idols only had a certain period where everything worked.
Then again, it’s hard to really pinpoint a true inspiration for someone like Eddie. Through every Van Halen release, he was always looking to find something that no one had tapped into before, and compared to half of the guitar community, there was hardly anyone who could touch him in terms of where the instrument could go, especially when he started playing his tapping licks or started using different percussive techniques on the guitar.
But for any guitar player who dared to look closer, there was a lot of blues in Eddie’s delivery. There were pieces that seemed to be channelled from a different place entirely, like on ‘Eruption’, but even when playing the occasional tapped note, you can hear him going through the blues scale on some of his classic songs from the David Lee Roth era.
Because for the longest time, Eddie studied everything that Eric Clapton had ever done. From the minute that he heard Cream when he was a kid, he was transfixed looking at what ‘Slowhand’ could do, whether that was the blistering solo on ‘Crossroads’ or hearing the shimmering work on ‘Badge’.
But Clapton did have some vices that came with being one of the greatest musicians to ever pick up an instrument. Music was already an outlet for him to profess his love for Patti Boyd with Derek and the Dominoes, but his dependence on heroin also made him a walking disaster half the time before finally settling down in his older age and turning towards the clean sounds of a Stratocaster when working on his later records.
It was nice to see Clapton in a healthier place, but Eddie readily admits that everything that he made since he cleaned up wasn’t worth listening to, saying, “I hate to say it, but when he was a heroin addict, he was good. [Now] he’s trying to do BB King, and BB King’s got him beat because he’s not [that].”
That might not be entirely fair, though. Clapton certainly had gone for a more soulful approach to the blues in recent years, but hearing him adopt the acoustic when working on songs like ‘Tears in Heaven’ and hearing him interpret legends like Robert Johnson were still strange detours for him compared to what he had been known for when he was working off Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.
It all comes down to what people like to hear, though, and for Eddie, he was drawn to that chaotic nature that coated every one of Clapton’s late 1960s albums. It may not have been the best lifestyle for anyone to lead, but the minute that Clapton went off on a tangent, there was no one else who could possibly touch him.
