The exact moment Eric Clapton said rock music became “self-indulgent”
Across popular music’s explosive birth and winding tapestry, guitar maestro Eric Clapton was able to witness rock’s storied unfold as fan, central pillar, and, at times, disinterested outsider.
From a boyhood devourer of the blues, Clapton found himself swiftly mastering his acoustic Hoyer by endlessly repeating the chords of his beloved bluesmen played out from his record collection while still at school. Still in his teens, a fierce reputation for his fretwork would see the young Clapton join The Yardbirds, one of the key soundtracks to the UK’s emerging swinging counterculture, but a blues purist at heart, Clapton jumped ship at barely 20 years old into John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers.
The mythos would start in earnest from here on. Wielding his psychedelic Gibson SG, Clapton lent his electric guitar chops as one third of the Cream power trio, scoring the lysergic rush among the London underground and across the Atlantic with his heavy fuzz guitar attack. Despite such countercultural stature, Cream would run out of steam by 1969, with Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominoes following.
After the latter’s Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs in 1970, a dark spell of heroin addiction, racist rants, and a pining for George Harrison’s wife Pattie Boyd would cast a dark cloud over his 1970s.
Such fantastic lapses into decadent deadends and curdled betrayals of the original hippy idyll provided grist to the mill for rock’s rude awakening. As Clapton was drunkenly celebrating the right-wing rhetoric of Enoch Powell, punk was exploding in the musical underground, a stripped-down fury of garage attack that held no reverence for the mothballed UK establishment, nor the failed promises of Woodstock’s peace and love generation. While Clapton was enjoying a moderate career resurgence with 1977’s Slowhand, he was still able to see how his musical generation had paved the way for the new wave’s fervent iconoclasm.
“I think we lost the thread then, but—and I suppose this may be a bit presumptuous—it kind of opened the door for punk, because there was no continuity from the musical pattern that evolved in the Sixties,” Clapton mused to Guitar World in 1994. “It kind of got scrambled and lost with all the drugs and opened the door for all the anarchy, bitterness, and anger”.
While punk killed prog narratives are well trodden, it can’t be overstated how irrelevant much of the 1960s’ residue had festered among the next decade’s charts. While glam provided a much-needed shot in the arm, the original noble aims of social revolution and musical vitality became lost in a bloated parody of psychedelia embodied by the likes of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, gargantuan rock groups that grew ever untethered to what made music exciting in the first place, and making no sense to a youth navigating the country’s economic malaise.
“The musicians of the Seventies didn’t really have a very clear legacy,” Clapton concluded. “The legacy got very fucked and very self-indulgent. I think that the whole thing about the Sex Pistols was that they were really pissed off at our indulgence—the indulgence and that self-righteous stance of the Sixties”.
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