The guitarist who had “the greatest influence” on Eric Clapton
Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Eddie Van Halen are among the usual roster considered for the ultimate guitar hero. These selections are undoubtedly safe bets but don’t allow for session virtuosos or nameless jazz innovators who never rose to the same heights of global admiration.
When discussing top guitarists, we tend to hear a list consisting almost exclusively of electric rhythm and blues lead guitarists of the late 1960s and ‘70s. The finest example within this criterion is Hendrix. His ability to cover all areas of the fretboard almost instantaneously with perfect form was undeniably mindblowing.
While all guitarists can appreciate Hendrix’s jaw-dropping talent, there’s much more to guitar playing than being the most technically skilled. Reflecting the dissonance between good singing voices and iconic vocalists, guitar players can often be characterised by their distinctive tone or nuanced approach to composition; hence, one’s favourite or most inspiring player may not always be the most technically skilled.
For this reason, Eric Clapton is somewhat disillusioned with the whole “guitar hero” scramble. “I was tired of the ‘guitar hero’ thing,” Clapton wrote in his autobiography, recalling his transition to a lower-key style on his first solo album, “And I was starting to follow the example of JJ Cale.”
Flagging one of his favourite guitarists, who wrote the original version of ‘Cocaine’, Clapton added, “I was tired of gymnastic guitar playing, and when I listened to JJ Cale records, I was impressed by the subtlety, by what wasn’t being played.”
Durng an interview with Uncut in 2015, Clapton was asked if he has ever looked at other guitarists and said to himself, ‘I wish I could do that’. “Oh yeah! God, yeah,” Clapton replied. “One of my heroes is Kurt Russell. [Laughs] What!? Not Kurt Russell, Kurt Rosenwinkel. He’s a jazz guitar player. Very fluid. He’s a genius, he really is, and a lovely man.”
He continued: “[Rosenwinkel] has the ability to play directly what he hears in his head. I can’t do that. I go to the same old phraseology, or I have to work things out in advance. He’s a proper jazz musician, and I’m in awe of that. He’s got up to play with me a couple of times, we’ve played a blues, or ‘Cocaine’, and he just flies like a bird. I think, man, that’s a wonderful thing to be able to do.”
These later string masters may have incited Clapton’s envy, but tracing back to his roots, there was one guitarist whom he singles out as the most influential of all. While speaking to the BBC in 1989 for the Desert Island Discs radio feature, Clapton spared plenty of room for the blues.
Amid his selections were Robert Johnson’s ‘Crossroads Blues’, Freddie King’s ‘I Love The Woman’ and Muddy Waters’ ‘Feel Like Going Home’. Of Johnson’s dour blues standard, Clapton said: “For me, he’s the most disturbing and almost hardest to listen to of all the blues singers because it’s such emotionally charged music. Musically, it’s the most complicated.”
Clapton later revealed Waters as one of the most important guitarists and songwriters during his early road to prominence. He said the electric blues pioneer “had the greatest influence on me.”
Listen to Eric Clapton’s favourite Muddy Waters track below.
