Eric Clapton once believed that punk rock was “dangerous”
The punk movement was calling for heads by the time the back half of the 1970s rolled around. Rock music itself was still a relatively new art form, having coalesced just a decade before punk got its start. Sensing a certain malaise in the genre, punk wanted nothing to do with its elders – in fact, for most bands, “seek and destroy” was the approach to artists like Eric Clapton and Pink Floyd.
Clapton was still very much a cultural force, having released classic singles like ‘Lay Down Sally’ and ‘Cocaine’ in 1977, just as punk was reaching its peak. He was also an easy target – a 1960s survivor who took bluesy guitar licks and morphed them into schlocky reggae covers like ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ and toothless ballads like ‘Wonderful Tonight’. When faced with the ire of the punk wave, Clapton had a pretty simple reaction.
“Stick to your guns and do what you love,” Clapton told Pop Matters in 2007. “Clearly, I was one of the people targeted with ‘assassination’, along with Phil Collins and anyone else popular during that period. The thing to do was to keep going and believe I was doing the right thing. But I was fearful. I was worried about meeting some of them. There was such antagonism.”
Clapton didn’t see very many punk figures who were willing to praise or even acknowledge some of the foundations that he laid. John Lydon might have fit perfectly into the Sex Pistols thanks to his custom-designed “I Hate Pink Floyd” shirt, but it was actually Clapton’s struggles with drugs that put Lydon off of Slowhand. “I remember looking at the likes of Eric Clapton in his heroin-addiction days and being really unimpressed by him for that,” Lydon told The Guardian in 2002.
“I’m sure there were people in the middle of it all like Joe Strummer of the Clash who did like the music from before. But I never met Johnny Rotten, and I didn’t want to meet Johnny Rotten,” Clapton added. “I didn’t want to meet people in confrontation where I’m marked as dead. I was scared. And I’ve never really understood or was motivated by hatred or anger. Blues, when it was played at its most aggressive, can be about anger. But it’s a much more compassionate setting.”
“It’s always been important to me to point out where it comes from, not just music, but anything. I get a little concerned when people don’t look back far enough,” Clapton claimed. “The punk thing worried me because it was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the past, the roots of music. It was a purely political move. It’s dangerous. And I think that’s why it was so exciting to people, the kind of revolution it symbolised. Thank God certain people carried on through it and ignored it. In a way, it was necessary, but it could’ve wiped out the origin of where we come from.”
Check out ‘Cocaine’ down below.
