“The wrong message”: the song Eric Clapton thought the world never understood
Whatever project it is he’s been working on at any given point in his career, Eric Clapton has been capable of producing some of the greatest rock songs of all time.
What’s always worked in his favour is the ease with which the meanings of his songs can be translated to the listener, and this is something that can be applied to many other notable artists of Clapton’s level. Making your music accessible to a wider audience is always going to give you the upper hand when it comes to people being able to connect to your work, and given how well-known he is across multiple different fields, he’s evidently been able to enact this philosophy within his own compositions.
Tracks like ‘Wonderful Tonight’ and ‘Change the World’ are perhaps some of his simplest songs, and they were massive hits for him, largely due to the fact that the respective messages behind them were easy to latch onto, and there was no room for misinterpretation. Especially when you’re dealing with a global audience, some of whom aren’t exposed to English as a first language, the simpler your lyrics are, the more likely it is you’ll be able to get widespread attention.
Not only were his own songs hits, but his choice of covers also worked well, rarely ever venturing into territories that felt alien to his listeners. ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ is a song frequently associated with Clapton, with him having performed the lead break on The Beatles’ original before releasing his own version as a single, while his interpretation of ‘I Shot The Sheriff’ was bound to be a success, given how the Wailers’ version had already attracted attention in certain parts of the world.
However, one song that was made famous by him, having originally been a JJ Cale composition, ended up proving to be a pretty damn controversial choice – the track in question, ‘Cocaine’, tackles themes of drug use, but given how this is often seen to be a taboo subject matter in popular music, especially at the time, people were clamouring to figure out exactly what the lyrics meant.
Was Clapton trying to glamorise the use of cocaine, or was the song meant as a warning for those thinking of trying it, and essentially speaking from his own experience of having used the drug to warn people to stay away from its addictive appeal?
He may not have written the song, but while it became one of his best-known songs, it caused a stir among listeners, so much so that he chose to remove the entire goddamn piece from his live set for many years, only going back to it in 2019.
“I thought that it might be giving the wrong message to people who were in the same boat as me,” Clapton later revealed in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, adding, “It very clearly says in the opening verse, ‘If you wanna get down, down on the ground,’ I mean, that’s, I think, the focal point of the song. That’s what the song’s about, is that, you know, there’s a price.”
It shouldn’t be too hard to grasp that the lyrics are about the positives and negatives of cocaine use, but then again, you can’t expect an audience to understand everything they’re presented with, and given that risk and the subsequent backlash he faced, he felt as though removing it from his set to avoid more misunderstanding would be for the best.
