“Of any genre”: Eric Clapton names the best debut album ever made
Any artist usually has a massive task ahead of them when crafting their debut album. Even though many people take some time before they are legends, first impressions are still everything, and having a debut that knocks people on their asses is something that most people can only dream of. Although Eric Clapton seemed to take a few years before turning into the God-like guitar genius that he would become, he had never heard someone storm out of the gates with as much fury as this blues guitarist did.
But listening to the blues musicians of Clapton’s generation meant looking for various singles. This was before the album became known as an art form on its own, and even when they put together different collections of singles, none of them were meant to speak to each other in the same way that Clapton would do with bands like Cream.
For instance, look at Robert Johnson’s body of work. He’s still considered one of the greatest blues guitarists to ever pick up a six-string, but King of the Delta Blues Singers is the equivalent of stumbling on old recordings from the archives rather than a comprehensive album of classics put in the right order.
Then again, blues never thrived on being an album-based genre. It was a lot more about the performance, and whenever talking about the greatest guitar playing ever committed to tape, it was important to get the live albums first to see what the band sounded like playing off each other and playing off the crowd.
Although Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf could light up a stage, Buddy Guy left each of them in the dust when working on the album Folk Festival of the Blues, recorded over a handful of gigs in Chicago. While this was the moment for Guy to show his stuff, he was laying the groundwork for what a wild guitar player should be, playing with the same precision as Waters but with more youthful exuberance than anyone else on the stage.
Despite Clapton still learning from what blues greats had been doing, he knew that Guy had hit the ground running, saying, “Buddy did far more than just hold his own. In my humble opinion, he stole the show. He let everyone know that he was the new dangerous kid on the block. It is still one of the great debut albums of any artist in any genre and it started me on a relentless mission to find out just who this man was.”
And Clapton was far from the only one mesmerised by what Guy was doing. Looking back on his wild stage persona, it’s hard not to think that Jimi Hendrix was paying attention to how Guy conducted himself, eventually turning that same spirit into psychedelic blues once he crashlanded in England.
Considering how well Guy worked in a live setting, it’s also no wonder why one of Clapton’s first great albums was watching him bounce off his bandmates in Five Live Yardbirds. He could spend hours trying to get the right setting on the amplifier in the studio, but it wouldn’t do him any good if cranking everything up and wowing a crowd did the job instead.
