The one chord Eric Clapton could never get away with playing: “Drives me crazy”
Eric Clapton didn’t claim to cover much ground every single time he picked up an electric guitar.
He was the kind of musician who was meant to carry on the blues to the next generation, and half of his job was about trying to find the exact right middle ground between all of his influences whenever he performed live. A lot of his music was a virtual encyclopedia of what the blues could sound like, but he knew that there was no way that he could get away with some of the tricks his friends were pulling off.
That said, it’s not like Clapton didn’t give it a fair shot whenever he worked on one of his tunes – no one would have thought that he would suddenly turn to reggae when he made one of his records, and while the guitarists in the audience were a bit underwhelmed by his songwriter-style records, it’s not like he wasn’t trying to push himself. The Band had opened his eyes to new sounds, and he wanted to explore everything he could.
And while his time as a pop star was a lot more subdued than what he was known for, it’s not like he didn’t have the right people surrounding him most of the time – Phil Collins was the kind of guy you would want on your team if you were entering the 1980s, and even when Clapton was throwing in a few guitar licks on some of his friends’ records, he could still prove to everyone why he was still considered an almighty god of guitar.
But whereas ‘Slowhand’ could usually get the job done by playing the best licks in his arsenal, that’s not how George Harrison thought about soloing. His best guitar breaks were the ones that managed to tell a story in the space of a song, and while he could have kept playing the blues like everyone else, Harrison wanted the chance to explore his instrument the same way that a songwriter would.
Which probably explains why a lot of his songs have a bunch of strange chords. The Beatles had gone through more than their fair share of musical theory lessons before they had even had their first major hits, but when Clapton began working with Harrison, he felt that there was no way that he would have ever thought to have written a song that had the chords like the ones in ‘Run So Far’.
This was around the time that Harrison felt inspired again, but the ‘naughty chords’ that he used in his songs were too alien for Clapton to wrap his head around, saying, “He came in for a week, and we did five of his songs – some of his spare songs and some he’d written especially for the album – and ended up using just one ballad, ‘Run So Far.’ That was the only one of all of his songs that didn’t have his augmented chord in it, which drives me crazy. It’s lovely when it’s with him – you know the one I’m talking about – but when I do it, it’s a little bit wrong for me.”
It shouldn’t appear that hard because all someone would need to do is change one note, but for the blues, the whole thing does sound a lot more obscure. Any blues musician knows how to play over the blues turnarounds that everyone was familiar with, but when you start throwing in some new chords into the mix, the scales that everyone knows as loves are practically obsolete the minute they start playing.
It’s not the end of the world to change a few chords within the span of a song, but Clapton felt much more at home playing the licks that he knew by heart. He didn’t need to be thought of as some songwriting genius that knew a million chords, because if the blues had taught him anything, it was that some of the best musicians of all time only needed three chords and the truth to get their point across.
