Eric Clapton avoided playing ‘White Room’ for years: “Maybe some others will come back”
Not everything that Eric Clapton has ever played was designed to meet the stage.
The whole point behind any great song is how evergreen it can be, but it’s not like every masterpiece lends itself well to a live rendition. Every now and again, the best songs deserve to remain studio creations, but ‘Slowhand’ had to take a lot of convincing to realise that he had a classic on his hands with Cream.
Because looking through Cream’s catalogue, it’s impossible to think that three musicians are capable of playing every single note on those records. The term ‘supergroup’ was practically invented to describe what they were doing half the time, and while Clapton was simply trying to keep up with what Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker were doing, he was still laying down some of the greatest licks that he would ever write.
He had been christened God only a few months before the band had formed, and when listening through albums like Disraeli Gears, he earns every bit of that title. Not everything that he played needed to be insanely fast or technically perfect, but when listening through ‘Strange Brew’ or even the slower numbers like ‘We’re Going Wrong’, he was practically channelling the greatest blues legends on the spot whenever he played off of Bruce’s operatic high voice.
When Wheels of Fire came along, people could feel those aforementioned wheels falling off as well. The band were not getting along the greatest during this time, and while it did make for a stunning studio record in many respects, songs like ‘White Room’ were going to be a tricky beast for anyone to pull off.
Baker had already written the strange 5/4 rhythm that opens up the entire thing, and while the rest of the song is fairly straightforward from there, it was going to be a deft balancing act for Clapton to go back to Cream songs after leaving the group. Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominos all had hits of their own, but once he turned towards making soft-rock, it was generally accepted that Cream was one phase of his career that he had long since left behind.
Even when working with David Letterman’s Paul Shaffer, Clapton admitted that ‘White Room’ was considered taboo when it was suggested to him, saying in 1991, “I started ‘White Room’ again, thanks to Paul Shaffer, when I sat in with him on the Letterman show. He said, ‘Let’s do ‘White Room’,’ and I said, ‘God, no.’ But it sounded good, and it’s been back ever since. Maybe some others will come back, but I don’t know. It’s tricky to predict these things.”
It does take a little bit of an adjustment to get used to Clapton’s tone of voice instead of Bruce’s, but this is one of the few instances where the music does the talking a lot better. The operatic highs that Bruce had during their glory days may be missed slightly, but Clapton would always do a great job at weaving around the notes and flexing his bluesman vocal chops a little bit more.
But since the Cream reunion wouldn’t come for a few more years after Clapton first started playing it, it was never about him claiming ownership of the tune by any means. He had a hand in bringing it to fruition, but he will always be known as a member of Cream, and this was a case of him celebrating the music that helped make him one of the biggest guitarists the world had ever known.
