“He takes off”: Eric Clapton on the most monumental solo ever recorded
For any budding rock and roll fan, the guitarists always seem larger than life. They might not even have to say anything or sing a note of music onstage, but when looking at someone tearing through a guitar solo onstage, it’s like watching a gunslinger in some strange Western movie. While Eric Clapton may be one of the seasoned veterans of what a guitar hero is supposed to be, he knew that everything that someone needed to love guitar could be found in this fretboard legend.
Then again, Clapton still has the reputation of being one of the best examples of the silent guitar hero. While he does have some eye-rolling stances when he opens his mouth, his guitar skills across every album earned him the reputation as a guitar god second only to Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s.
For Clapton, though, the real technicians are the ones who studied the ways of the blues. ‘Slowhand’ was always willing to do his homework on his favourite artists, and everyone from Muddy Waters to BB King wrote the rulebook on how to play with feeling, whether that meant abusing their guitar until it’s screaming in pain or holding out on one note and soaking it up for all it’s worth.
Compared to every guitar player on the scene, though, Buddy Guy was in a class by himself. In a world where everyone from the Chicago blues scene was interested in jamming, Guy took absolutely no prisoners whenever he played, managing to play the guitar behind his head and pull off insanely fast runs while decked out in his signature shark skin suit.
In fact, there are a lot of pieces of Guy’s technique that ended up working much better when Hendrix started copying him a few years later. If Guy was setting the table for what the new blues scene was going to be, it took Hendrix to set everything on fire when he started setting his guitar on fire or played the guitar with his teeth halfway through his solos.
But Clapton knew that Guy was something special, even saying that he absolutely smoked legends like BB King and Howlin Wolf when working on the song ‘Wee Wee Baby’, saying, “The first song on side one was called ‘Wee Wee Baby’. And all of them singing it. They just give this guitar solo to someone, and it’s Buddy Guy just blazes, and it’s still, to this day, one of the most monumental guitar solos ever recorded. I mean, he takes off.”
And looking back on where Clapton took off from there, there are a lot more Guy influences than a lot of people realise. Despite being a walking encyclopedia of everything blues-related, some of the more furious moments that he did with Cream and even his interpretation of Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads’ are indebted to what Guy did, especially when he starts playing with a lot more fury in the back half of the latter solo.
But while Clapton took things in his own direction, he never tried to directly emulate what Guy was doing. Because no matter how much someone tried to capture that tone, that only comes from someone who has had that fire in their heart from the moment they were born.
