The singers Eric Clapton called musical lightweights
Eric Clapton’s musical foundations have always been deeply rooted in the American tradition.
Like the majority of his generation, rock and roll’s flash bang upended Clapton’s life just like any other budding guitarist growing up in the UK’s grey post-war years, beaming its alluring beckon across the Atlantic as a Technicolor window to everything exciting about the States during the 1950s.
Yet, it’s the blues that speak to Clapton’s soul the fiercest. Standing as a more serious and authentic art form in the USA’s musical DNA, Clapton would spend his life taking notes and paying attention to the blues’ raw heritage, from learning the guitar by mimicking old Delta and Chicago blues records on a tape machine as a teen, to departing from The Yardbirds’ psychedelic pop in favour of John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers purer blues rock efforts. Throughout his varied, decades-long solo career, the blues has always acted as an anchoring genre for Clapton’s creative intuitions.
The veneration for depth can lead the former Cream guitarist to some unlikely musical corners. From covering Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ reggae gem to taking a grapple of Japanese synthpop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra’s ‘Behind the Mask’, Clapton balances his love of the blues as music’s spine while not remaining trapped in a realm of creative puritanism. So long as there’s soul, he’s interested. One such example is the unlikely take on the old swing standards.
Perhaps a surprise to fans, but 2016’s I Still Do featured a cover of Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal’s ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’, initially included on 1938’s Right This Way Broadway show, but later made famous by versions from crooner Bing Crosby and Rat Pack leader Frank Sinatra. While kept close to his chest, it was revealed years later that Clapton harboured a private reverence for some of the old jazz standards of yesteryear while in Cream’s ostensibly opposite and countercultural vanguard.
“It took me all this time to understand Frank Sinatra – that’s been really difficult,” Clapton confessed to Classic Rock in 2016, admitting to a little of his contrarian streak. “And I think it might have something to do with the fact that he is so highly revered. And often my response to that idolatry is to go, ‘Nah’ – to trash it and go looking for something more obscure. Because he was so familiar and popular. And bit by bit I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that he was a genius”.
“I think about Sinatra and Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong – those guys were serious, Clapton furthered. “Dean Martin I don’t get at all, or Sammy Davis Jr, they were kind of lightweights. But Frank Sinatra could actually really do deep emotional work, but I didn’t want to admit it till the last couple of years.”
Even the layman to the old swing songbook can likely recognise Sinatra’s classics stand tall with a 20th century stature that just isn’t afforded to Martin and Davis, ‘My Way’ or ‘New York, New York’ destined for immortality in a way that ‘That’s Amore’ can’t hold a candle to. Long after the 20th century has passed from living memory, there’s no doubt that Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours will serve as the gateway LP to the Rat Pack mob as an essential document worth anyone’s time.
Such flashes of authenticity is a quality Clapton will always gun for, whether it’s his beloved blues or even the nostalgic hits of his youth.
