“He was a master”: The most overlooked guitarist ever, according to Eric Clapton
There was a period in the 1960s when you couldn’t walk down a street in London without seeing some variation of the graffiti: Eric Clapton is God. Understandably, the daubings may be a little more critical now, but for a time, he represented the pinnacle of rock ‘n’ roll prowess. The 1950s had provided a visceral edge to the blues; now it was time to provide the virtuosity.
On that front, Clapton was King. Cream typified the rapid advancement of the genre, blending its instant appeal with the complex tenets of jazz. In fact, Ginger Baker would claim that they weren’t a rock ‘n’ roll band at all, and while the misanthropic drummer would claim a lot of things, that utterance has a grain of truth to it. However, anyone who has dared to be critical of Clapton’s playing in retrospect has often declared that while his chops are self-evident, did he have the inventiveness to back it up?
The scrappy Aussie guitarist Angus Young is one of the brave few who have voiced their criticism, with the AC/DC man commenting, “Clapton just sticks licks together that he has taken from other people – like BB King and the other old blues players -and puts them together in some mish-mashed fashion,” he argues.
He’s not alone in questioning the authenticity. ”Clapton, actually, he might’ve ended up being a better R&B singer,” Rik Emmett recently commented. “His guitar playing is a fairly narrow kind of a palette, if you think of those three guys that came out of the Yardbirds, [Jeff] Beck, Clapton, [Jimmy] Page. Eric was the narrowest of them all.”
In truth, while Clapton himself might rightfully rubbish the claim and point to an outsized lobby of stars who attest to his greatness, he was never unaware of the fact that skill also requires great subtlety and individualism to constitute fine art. On this front, he feels as though one towering pioneer has been as overlooked as a tree by the oil industry.
JJ Cale’s quirky appeal might have swerved commercialism, but his impact was almost secretly profound among the sect of great guitarists who were all looking around to see what they could nab from one another. In truth, Cale’s greatest strength was perhaps that he was one of the few avoiding this magpie method. ”People around the world are unaware to a certain extent of how important he is in the tree of the musical history of this country and the world. The effect he’s had on people in a very subtle way in the way they sing, play guitar and make records,” Clapton claimed.
That dual beauty of unique guitar playing and soulful singing resulted in gorgeous songs. That was a point that often went amiss during the scramble to be called the next God of the six-string: the need to actually write great songs. With the likes of ‘Magnolia’, Cale had songs as beautiful as any ever written. Before his debut masterpiece, Naturally, he had noodled away on a few tracks as a studio engineer in Los Angeles and caught a brief smattering of acclaim playing a regular a slot at the Whiskey a Go Go.
However, he was broke until Clapton decided to cover his track ‘After Midnight’, later commenting, “I was dirt poor, not making enough to eat and I wasn’t a young man. I was in my thirties, so I was very happy. It was nice to make some money.” But still, the former Yardbirds man figured that Cale’s influence hadn’t been celebrated as he should’ve been, so he teamed up with him for the collaborative album The Road to Escondido in 2004.
It was a chance for Clapton to honour a hero he felt had been sorely overlooked. He explained, “I thought his guitar playing in my earlier years were quirky and a little bit light, almost as if was an afterthought, it’s only in becoming older or maybe just a little bit more mature about what’s needed musically that I see that he was a master. A master of understatement to be sure but still the power.”
