“The hardest”: Eric Clapton on the most difficult artist to cover
Part of the vocabulary of the blues is playing different covers of those that came before you. It’s one thing to put one’s own stamp on classic licks, but playing tunes like ‘Crossroads’ by Robert Johnson during jam sessions is the equivalent of jazz players having everything from The Real Book under their fingers before walking into any gig. Although Eric Clapton could rattle off the best of the blues like it was nothing, he admitted that one iconic guitar player had a style that he couldn’t touch.
That said, it’s not like what Clapton was doing was all that easy, either. Even when he was working with The Yardbirds, his dynamic way of playing was what made his shoes almost impossible to fill were it not for fellow guitar geniuses like Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck taking his place.
Even when working in the context of Cream, Clapton wanted to keep things as elastic as possible during jam sessions. They had traditional tunes in their repertoire like ‘Spoonful’, but the lion’s share of their best work came from each of them bouncing ideas off each other, which is never a walk in the park when someone like Ginger Baker is behind the drumkit.
Then again, Clapton could take any blues song and spin it into gold, whether that was the sounds of Chicago blues or the sounds of the Mississippi Delta that formed the genre’s foundation. Even when stepping up to cover ‘Crossroads’, their take on Wheels of Fire is able to match the same energy that Johnson had on his first recording, each of them having that tortured soul at the heart of the playing.
But out of all the newer blues players, Muddy Waters was a much different beast. Despite having the same musical background as every other blues player, seeing Waters make his band jump on tracks like ‘I Got My Mojo Working’ was irreplaceable, especially when he opened up his mouth and gave the world a taste of that rustic voice.
Even when Clapton had years of experience under his belt when working on the album From the Cradle, he knew that there was a lot more of a challenge trying to match him than any other musician in his arsenal, saying, “I’ve found, funnily enough, that Muddy’s songs have been the hardest. The hardest. Of all of them, I’ve chosen the hardest, which is ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, and we’ve done it dozens of times, and to most people, it probably sounds all right, but to me, it just is not good enough, and so we do it again and again and again.”
And looking at where Clapton would go during the mellow side of his career, he was still pulling from Waters’s lick library. Aside from his singing voice not coming anywhere close to Waters’s, hearing him slow things down and get introspective during his Unplugged session is taken directly from the album Folk Singer, where Waters also managed to prove he was the best in the world even with an acoustic in his hands.
But that’s the reason why all of Clapton’s licks sound the way they do. He could spend the rest of his life studying the vast intricacies of what made the perfect tune, but in Waters, he had someone to teach him that the passion behind every note was just as important as playing everything in tune.
