“The one player”: Eric Clapton on the last authentic guitarist
Everything that a musician does has to be from the heart. Even though they might take inspiration from wherever they want, it was always important to make something that stood on its own and could be held up as a standard for what a musician looks like when they are totally uninhibited. Eric Clapton may have tried his best to emulate some of the blues greats that he heard as a child, but he thought this blues icon was one of the few originals that he saw out in the wild.
When looking back on Clapton’s history, though, the blues never fully left his soul. There are pieces of his sound that are still indebted to the world of psychedelia or the singer-songwriter boo that was happening around the early 1970s, but even when listening to his mellow material, it wasn’t out of the question for him to turn a song into an impromptu blues jam as well.
Then again, that sound started to have a few diminishing returns in it as well. Although there were still many parts of Clapton’s sound that worked well with audiences, it was hard to look at his Unplugged album or his later output on Journeyman and not think that he was trading everything in for toothless dad music.
And considering where he went later, it seemed Clapton was getting tired of that model as well. While albums like Pilgrim did still have their sleepier moments, hearing him work with legends like BB King and pay tribute to Robert Johnson for an entire album was a way of re-establishing himself as the blues icon that most of us knew was always there but never truly got the chance to shine.
Despite wearing his love of Johnson on his sleeve, Clapton knew that there was something more interesting going on with Robert Cray. Outside of being one of the newer faces on the blues scene, Cray was one of the few who seemed to go back to those old Muddy Waters and Albert King records and learn them note-for-note, having that same fire in him that ‘Slowhand’ would have recognised back in the day.
Although the blues has fallen into its own niche in recent years, Clapton said that he was sure that Cray was one of the most genuine blues icons of the modern era, saying, “I think talking about [the blues] is one thing, but I don’t see it happening. The blues seems to be dying a slow and graceful death, I mean, how will it survive? All the players are disappearing. It’s really down to Robert Cray. He’s the one player I know who is absolutely, totally authentic.”
Since then, though, there are still artists willing to twist the blues in different directions as well. While people like Gary Clark Jr and Joe Bonamassa do exactly what it says on the tin in terms of dirty blues, Jack White has been one of the frontrunners in turning the genre into something new, whether that’s incorporating that into his solo albums or shoehorning his sound into projects with A Tribe Called Quest or Beyoncé.
So, while Clapton might think that the blues has fallen into obscurity, it’s not about playing something that will make the older audiences happy. Any genre thrives on innovating, and as long as people are willing to push the envelope within the genre, going out of style will never matter.
