The artist Eric Clapton refused to talk about for years: “I would turn away”
It was going to take a lot of chops for anyone to keep up with Eric Clapton.
The idea of messing with one of the first guitar gods was bound to be a challenge, and even if someone had the guts to pull it off, Clapton knew that there were some guitarists who needed to be treated with a lot more reverence than what they had been afforded in the past.
Because Clapton always looked at music as a much different thing than what everyone else did. As much as he loved the idea of playing for hours on end and making his guitar sing, this wasn’t something that he liked to do. It was a higher calling for people like him, and when he heard the sounds of people like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters back in the day, he made it his life’s goal to become that troubadour just so he could get anywhere close to their musical phrasing.
For a little while, it seemed to work whenever he played the London clubs. The idea of anyone having the same kind of chops as the greatest blues guitarists on Earth was bound to be a spectacle, but when he dipped the whole thing in acid with Cream, people started to hear rock and roll in a different way. This was heavy but always had a strong backbeat behind it, yet nothing was going to compare to listening to Jimi Hendrix.
Although some guitarists might see Hendrix as not doing anything particularly new compared to our standards, the fact that he made all of his material work in the late 1960s is mind-melting. No one could comprehend the kind of noises that he pushed out of his guitar, and whenever he cranked things up and played tracks like ‘Voodoo Child’ and ‘Purple Haze’, he wasn’t simply playing his instrument. He was in a deep romantic relationship with it, and this was him finally being able to express himself.
Clapton may have still held the crown in England, but he figured that he was dethroned when he saw Hendrix play with Cream during his first go-around in the UK. Most people had never seen a guy playing with his teeth and behind his head, but when that light was quickly burnt out in the early 1970s, Clapton knew that it was better to preserve Hendrix’s legacy than to focus on his demise.
Even though many people still wanted to shout his praises, he figured it was the wrong time for him to mention anything after his friend’s demise, saying, “I got very jealous of Jimi. I was very possessive about him when he was alive, and when he died, I was very angry and got even more possessive. If people talked to me about Hendrix, I would just turn away; I wasn’t interested in their perception of Hendrix because I felt like they were talking about an ex-girlfriend or a brother who had died. I just thought, I’m not talking to you about it.”
But it was about more than a brotherly sense of love for Clapton as well. For someone who had been there on the ground floor, seeing Hendrix become a phenomenon, watching him pass away so quickly after he’d become a legend meant that we would never hear what he could do on his own. He was only beginning to scratch the surface of his potential on Electric Ladyland, and despite being an all-time classic, a track like ‘All Along the Watchtower’ painted a future that was wide open for him.
Clapton had long since moved on to playing more singer-songwriter material in his solo career, but it’s hard to think that didn’t come out of respect for what Hendrix had done. ‘Slowhand’ had tried to make something fantastic with Cream, but why try to write another distorted rock and roll masterpiece when the master had written a tune that’s ten times better?
