Eric Clapton on the band who made “the finest moments in music”
In the mid-1960s, the psychedelic wave began with Bob Dylan’s transitional folk-rock material and the foundational work of The Beatles and The Beach Boys in masterpieces like Revolver and Pet Sounds. By the time the 13th Floor Elevators released their seminal debut album, The Psychedelic Sounds, the wave was well on its way. Everyone from Eric Clapton to Ian Anderson had jumped on the bandwagon, ready to make their own marks on the burgeoning scene.
Though hundreds of iconic musicians paved the way to the markedly eclectic psychedelic rock sound, Eric Clapton was among the heavyweights in the London scene. After a formative spell playing with The Yardbirds, the virtuoso decided to leave. He cited the band’s gradual drift from blues rock towards contemporary pop as a major reason for his departure. “Eric is a true blues man. He likes very way out, deep music,” frontman Keith Relf once told Rave. “We are playing more understandable R&B. Overwork and a mixture of temperaments caused the trouble, but we parted quite good friends.”
Following his split from The Yardbirds, Clapton joined John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. “I’ve got very disillusioned since I entered the commercial side of show business,” Clapton told the same publication. “A lot of cattiness and cruelty goes on. I kick hard at that. Someone has to start saying what they think; if they don’t, it’s a negative way of behaving. You should give and not take all the time. Real musicians give because they want to see music improved.” Later, adding, “If I hadn’t left the Yardbirds, I wouldn’t have been able to play real blues much longer because I was destroying myself.”
Though he only plated with John Mayall for a few months, he gleaned plenty of invaluable blues knowledge from the band’s legendary frontmen, with whom he lived for a short while. After becoming friendly with Jack Bruce and later jazz drumming virtuoso Ginger Baker, Clapton founded his new band, a three-piece called Cream. The band formed in 1966 and released their debut album, Fresh Cream, before drawing up alongside The Jimi Hendrix Experience the following year.
Without a doubt, 1967 was the most emphatic year for psychedelic rock music. The album bore witness to the arrival of several seminal albums, including Cream’s Disraeli Gears, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request. Each of these albums arrived from London-based acts, consolidating the city’s status as the global capital for psychedelic rock music.
With their orchestral, anthemic approaches, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones represented the poppier end of the psychedelic spectrum. Meanwhile, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream battled it out on the less pop-conscious end with a heavy blues-rock sound. With the jazz-inspired drumming titans Mitch Mitchell and Ginger Baker and their guitar counterparts, Clapton and Hendrix, the two three-piece bands would be directly compared throughout the late 1960s.
To guitarists like Hendrix and Clapton, psychedelic rock meant pushing the limits of electric blues music with plenty of amplification and distortion. Colourful album covers, flamboyant clothing and LSD also became part and parcel of the scene, which became synonymous with the hippie movement on both sides of the Atlantic.
Though we have praised London as the epicentre of psychedelic music in the 1960s, the monumental impact of the US mustn’t be ignored; after all, they gave us Jimi Hendrix! As The Beatles, Cream and Pink Floyd laid tracks in the UK, American groups like Jefferson Airplane, The Doors and The Byrds made similar ripples on the charts and in the bedrooms of excitable Baby Boomers.
As far as Clapton saw it, one American psychedelic rock band beat all others to the mark, not for their instrumental virtuosity or songwriting attributes, but because of their seamless portrayal of the movement’s spirit. “The first thing that hit me really hard was that the Grateful Dead were playing a lot of gigs for nothing,” Clapton told Rolling Stone in 1968. “That very much moved me. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before. That really is one of the finest steps that anyone has taken in music yet, aside from musical strides.”
Led by the legendary Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead’s concerts became a thing of legend in the late 1960s. The band would tend to embrace protracted improvisational jams while their audience, almost entirely under the influence of LSD, would groan in approval. “That sums it up, what I think about San Francisco, what the Grateful Dead are doing,” Clapton finally noted. “There is this incredible thing that the musical people seem to have toward their audience: they want to give”.
