The Eric Clapton song he said was never played right: “I didn’t think it was fair”
Eric Clapton was always a stickler for perfection whenever he picked up the guitar. Whether it was playing the perfect rhythm track or getting a bend absolutely right, there was no reason why he couldn’t play guitar in the same way that his heroes did, and he knew that he always needed to make them proud whenever playing a blues song. But regardless of whether he wrote the piece or not, ‘Slowhand’ learned the hard way that there are some pieces that people are born with and some that aren’t.
Although Clapton wasn’t born in the heart of Mississippi by any stretch, he could always find time to make the greatest blues music anyone had ever heard. Looking through his first tunes, it was never about him trying to play pop music. The Yardbirds had their mainstream side, but as long as Clapton could play all of his Muddy Waters and Freddie King licks behind the scenes, that was fine. But no blues musician gets to where they are by playing the same thing as their predecessors.
Most people have already heard what the greats can do, but they really want to see what Clapton could do with those songs on his own. He was supposed to be carrying on the sounds of his heroes, so that meant trying to take the building blocks of blues and turn it into something different. And by “something different”, that meant Clapton listening to anything else he could get his hands on.
There would be some psychedelic moments thrown into the mix when working with Cream, but some of Clapton’s finest work in the 1970s included him making songwriter-based music. He had clearly studied under bands like The Band, so when working on his own music, it was easy for him to put his soloing on the back burner for a little bit and break out the kind of strum-along tunes that people could sing along to.
But once reggae started dominating the scene, Clapton felt compelled to share his version of ‘I Shot the Sheriff’, but he admitted that there was never a point in trying to outdo the Bob Marley classic, saying, “At the time, I didn’t think it should go on the album, let alone be a single. I didn’t think it was fair to Bob Marley, and I thought we’d done it with too much of a white feel or something. Shows what I know.”
It’s not like Marley couldn’t hear the differences as well. While Clapton may have been using it as a means of paying respect to his influences, his version is the more sanitised version of what Marley was trying to do, especially with the backup singers adding a bit of a cheesy layer to everything.
While Clapton was able to talk with Marley after the fact and clear everything up, the whole thing should have been a lesson for anyone remotely interested in reggae. This was clearly a watered-down version of what the genre could do, and if Clapton could have a hit with the wonderbread version of the tune, Marley’s original is like a completely different song looking back on it, even having an album of danger in the way that he sings it.
But even if Clapton wasn’t the first person who should have brought this song to American households, it was never meant to be malicious in any way. He was only following the example of carrying on music, and even if only one person immersed themselves in reggae after the fact, that would have been more than enough.
