“I haven’t worked it out”: The guitarist Eric Clapton couldn’t understand
As someone who regularly gets cited as one of the greatest guitarists to have ever lived, it’s hard to imagine Eric Clapton ever being flummoxed by someone else’s prowess on the six-string. Seemingly capable of producing excellence on every performance he offered his talents to, there was little that Clapton wasn’t able to master when it came to outshining all of his peers, and there is plenty of evidence to prove his prodigiousness on his instrument.
Whether it’s his rhythmic backing to Duane Allman’s iconic slide riff on Derek and the Dominos’ ‘Layla’, his impeccable lead guitar playing that he offered up for the Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, or on one of many Cream songs where his brilliance took centre stage such as ‘White Room’ and ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, there’s almost an endless glut of Clapton performances that can be used to bolster any claims that he’s worthy of being recognised as one of the best axe-wielders to have walked the earth.
Best known for his blues-influenced style, he’s always been a technically innovative player, incorporating pentatonic scales into his solos that flowed beautifully from passage to passage, and throwing in note bends to emphasise the emotive edge of his approach. The nickname ‘Slowhand’, coined by impresario Giorgio Gomelsky, wasn’t anything to do with Clapton having a relaxed style; he was in fact often so emphatic that he’d often break strings on stage, to which audiences responded by participating in a slow hand clap while he made repairs mid-performance.
While this slight hiccup was more indicative of his sheer passion rather than incompetence, Clapton wasn’t necessarily always perfect, and there’s one song in particular that has always left him stumped in terms of just how the original player managed to conjure up a lick so wondrous. After years of trying to perfect his own rendition of the song, Clapton was willing to admit that he’d finally met his match and that there was simply something untouchable about the guitar playing.
The song in question was J.J. Cale’s 1966 original recording of ‘After Midnight’, a song that Clapton says he was introduced to by Delaney Bramlett of the soul duo Delaney and Bonnie. “I was touring with Blind Faith in 1969 when I met Delaney and Bonnie. Delaney was very keen to introduce me to stuff he liked,” Clapton told Uncut many years later in 2015. After being told “you should hear this,” by Bramlett, regarding the version of the song, Clapton was left stunned by the heady mixture of folk, country and blues influences that featured in Cale’s playing style, and he immediately set about trying to figure out what was going on.
“I thought it was fantastic, and we tried to work it out,” Clapton recalled of his attempts to recreate the stunning sound of the song. “It was really elaborate, it seemed.” While Clapton would release his own version of the track in 1970, which then went on to become a massive hit for the guitarist and prompted Cale to re-record another version of the track in 1972, he claims that he’s still unsure whether he’s ever managed to play the song faithfully to how Cale originally imagined it. “I’ve listened to it again and again and again and I’m still pretty sure I haven’t worked it out.”
This doesn’t stop Clapton from being one of the greats, but it does highlight just how unsung Cale’s playing is considering how little he is spoken about in the modern day, and how floored Clapton was by his performance on the track. “He was a great musician, songwriter, singer, but he was like a lone wolf,” Clatpton would say about his guitar hero. “There was something about him that made me very curious, a real mystique.”
