The musician Eric Clapton was honoured to meet: “My world changed”
Location plays a huge factor in our consumption of music. It’s largely why country music isn’t quite as popular in the UK as it is in America, but similarly, why a band like Oasis struggled to make the same impact stateside as they did domestically.
Whether we consciously know it or not, we use music to absorb the surroundings around us and make sense of the life we are living in. Situate yourself in a hypothetical example now and think about just how this manifests. Psychedelic-indie often feels conducive to a day spent basking in the summer sun, while lightly tinged folk is often associated with the cool autumn winds. And that’s not even dialling in on a specific location.
What about a trip spent bouncing between southern America’s dive bars? Well, sure, country music would surely feel appropriate, but so would the crunching riffs of America’s blues rock. It’s a genre that forged through the cracks of the country’s divided history and became a soundtrack to isolated pockets of communities, in different corners of the country. As each era went on, it provided the perfect soundscape for cultural lore to be told, and perhaps nowhere did it better than the Deep South.
So it’s unsurprising that the music somehow struck a chord with British legend Eric Clapton, whose own musicianship was built on the shoulders of the genre. But despite his thorough understanding of the music, he never expected to form a love for one of the country’s unlikely heroes.
“When I first started going to Texas, I would hang out, and the only thing that was on the jukeboxes in Texas was ZZ Top,” he explained. “Then I’d put the money in it and I hear it and my world changed. Then I got to meet Billy Gibbons and realized: ‘there’s another very, very serious archivist type’. You know, a musicologist type of guy. I mean, he’s a scholar. All that stuff they do is great and everything but it’s built on a really strong foundation.”
For ZZ Top, this was high praise from someone who had already become an established act by the time they started the band. Gibbons was only in a band called The Moving Sidewalks when Clapton was asserting his dominance in the music industry with Cream. While they swam in the same blues circles, glued together by an exclusive mutual friend in Jimi Hendrix, Clapton was certainly the man with a stronger spotlight. So it comes as no surprise that the admiration is reciprocated.
When ZZ Top were given the privilege of inducting Cream into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Gibbons was quick to praise his instrumental compatriot. “There is only one name that rounds out of this trio. As we all discussed this backstage, it was a group of talented musicians. Made up by three guys that expressed power. Eric Clapton being the third (besides the other two mentioned), created a sound that everybody in this room can relate to. He certainly set the stage for our outfit.”
While Clapton’s understanding of American blues rock and ZZ Top was affirmed by his time spent at Texan jukeboxes, there was no doubting that he was an innate player of bona fide blues rock.
