Eric Clapton names the most underrated guitarist: “There was no one better than him on this planet”
Every guitarist since Jimi Hendrix is going to want to outdo the one before them. No one’s in the business of being the third-best musician of all time, so it’s always a matter of keeping up with the competition and trying to keep a weighty bag of tricks that you can call upon at any moment. Eric Clapton had already tasted what it was like to be the greatest blues musician to walk the Earth, but he knew that he was a wedding band guitarist at best standing next to Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Because outside of strictly the blues, ‘Slowhand’ was bound to go in a million different directions. His time listening to The Band had seen him go in more melodic directions, and by the time he hit brilliant tracks like ‘Wonderful Tonight’, the soft touch of his lead playing was as important to the song as the vocal melody.
And Clapton had good reason to start switching things up. The times were already changing past the psychedelic 1960s, and after proving himself as a songwriter with Derek and the Dominoes, it was only natural for him to start focusing on other genres of music rather than repeating the same routine every day.
But while Clapton glided over the fretboard, Vaughan was pure muscle from the minute he started playing. Looking through his greatest hits, ‘Love Struck Baby’ and ‘Pride and Joy’ were some of the fiercest takes on blues rock the 1980s ever spit out, almost like he was channelling the spirit of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson with a punk-ish edge to his playing.
Like any good guitarist, though, Vaughan knew that the rhythm was just as important as any blazing lick he played. Running through every record he released, the greatest aspect of his playing was how tasteful he was with his bends or just hanging back with the rest of the group when tearing through numbers like ‘Look at Little Sister’.
While Clapton had moved on from the days of I-IV-V progressions, he admitted that Vaughan could be the one guitarist to outmatch him, saying, “The worst thing for me was that Stevie Ray had been sober for three years and was at his peak. When we played that night, he had all of us standing there with our jaws dropped. I mean, Robert Cray and Jimmie Vaughn and Buddy Guy were watching in awe. There was no one better than him on this planet. Really unbelievable.”
More than anything, Vaughan may have helped Clapton get back into learning the blues again. As much as Journeyman and Pilgrim saw the guitar icon moving into different fields, hearing him make entire albums with BB King and an entire tribute record to Robert Johnson could have come from keeping that bluesy spirit that Vaughan had alive.
Then again, blues isn’t really something that leaves a musician’s system on a whim. It’s something that exists within the bones years before you even pick up a guitar, and once it’s unlocked, there’s no real limit to where you can take it afterwards.
