The one guitarist Eric Clapton “fell in love with”
Every step that Eric Clapton ever took in the music world was always in service to the blues.
He spent years trying to build up that guitar hero status, but when listening to a lot of the best riffs he ever came up with, it was clear that he always came back to those same three chords that lit a fire in him when he first started listening to music. But when looking at the kind of peers that he has crossed paths with, everyone quickly found out it was more than a blues fascination; it was a full-on love affair.
That kind of infatuation is what drove ‘Slowhand’ out of The Yardbirds in the first place. He didn’t want to be considered someone who played a watered-down version of the genre, and when listening to a lot of the licks that he threw down with John Mayall, it was like he turned the dial all the way around to pure bluesy swagger when he started playing tunes like ‘Steppin’ Out’ before testing the waters of Cream.
But even when working with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, there was a certain fire in Clapton that no one else could touch. The guitarist would be the first one to tell you that he felt out of his league playing with a rhythm section like that, but when one of your “accidents” results in that epic solo in the middle of ‘Crossroads’, it’s safe to say that you’re doing okay from a performance perspective.
Then again, all that Clapton was doing was a hodge-podge of the kind of players that had come before him. He was never going to play a song like ‘Crossroads’ without giving a casual nod to Robert Johnson, and there are even a few moments on tunes like ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ when he quotes ‘Blue Moon’. But of all the players that he worked with, Clapton remembered feeling smitten when he heard what Buddy Guy could do.
As soon as he saw him play, Clapton knew that Guy was doing everything that he wanted to hear out of his own music, saying, “When I got into Buddy Guy, there was something about the madness of his playing that I fell in love with. It was like someone jabbing you with their forefinger. It was the staccato madness of it, which you can’t do on a slide.” And that style of playing was never something Clapton took for granted, either.
When looking at the way that he played his solos, you could tell that he was stabbing at the guitar a lot like Guy used to do on his classics. It wasn’t about him trying to hurt the guitar by any means, but if he wanted to elicit the same kind of feeling that he learned from his heroes, he knew that he needed to make people feel the passion in his playing from the first bend that he played.
That was even enough for him to transform stone-cold classics inside out as well. Most people would argue that The Beatles’ ‘Taxman’ already has a perfect solo, but when George Harrison went out on the road to play Japan in the 1990s, hearing Clapton take his own solo with those signature biting techniques was what gave the song a breath of fresh air compared to what Paul McCartney did on the record.
Then again, Guy would have probably said that Clapton stealing his licks was the last thing he should have been doing. Clapton had plenty of his own tricks up his sleeve, and even if he took a lot of cues from what Guy laid down in the pre-rock and roll age, every blues player is looking for someone with their own voice whenever they step onstage.
