“Head and shoulders”: The artist Eric Clapton thought was miles above everyone
Any artist who tries to be the greatest thing that the world has ever seen is normally fighting a losing battle. Anyone can spend their time trying to hone their craft until everything sounds perfect, but there are only so many times that someone can reach perfection before they start to get bored after a while. The key to all good artists is to keep switching things up, and Eric Clapton thought that he was witnessing greatness seeing this artist push back against the norm every time he got onstage.
When looking at Clapton’s history, though, there were bound to be a few moments where he had to start working on something different as well. He had been a student of the blues ever since he first started playing guitar, but looking through his back catalogue, his best work came from where he turned those traditional Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson licks on their head to create something entirely new.
Compared to every other blues rock act that came out in the wake of The Yardbirds, Layla doesn’t sound too much like Cream’s best work, and Clapton seemed to shed all of his heavy skin when he started making his way into easy-listening music on ‘Wonderful Tonight’. But pushing back against the labels was something that Bob Dylan had turned into a full-time job by the end of the 1960s.
He had spent time being a folk singer on his first albums, but by the time he started adopting electric instruments, fans knew that they were witnessing a sea change in rock and roll. The folkies may have been turned off, but Dylan was not going to be dissuaded into doing something safe, having a lot more fun playing with his audience’s expectations whenever he got onstage.
Does that make him the best person to get along with? Probably not, but that was never the point. Dylan was meant to be a chameleon in many respects, and while his voice hasn’t gone through its fair share of changes outside of age, his approach to song-crafting certainly has, looking through his work as a born-again Christian, a member of the Traveling Wilburys, or the world-weary traveller on Time Out of Mind.
Even when he started pushing back against people’s opinions at the Grammys, Clapton knew that Dylan was staying true to himself before anything else, saying, “I saw Bob getting his Grammy, and it blew me away. What Bob said in that acceptance was so profound, it took my breath away, brought tears to my eyes. It’s one of the greatest things I ever heard anyone say on a live TV show. I don’t know if anyone really got it, but I thought it was magnificent. It proves to me that the man is head and shoulders above everyone else.”
While Dylan is uncharacteristically a man of few words during his speech, what he does say is a lot more personal than most people would have thought. Hearing him talk about his relationship with his parents and how to overcome adversity through some higher power was half the reason why those words worked so well, and considering Clapton had lost his son a few months prior, hearing one of his peers give the public that advice was enough to renew his faith in his hero.
Because what Dylan said isn’t always about the words on the page. It’s about the person who’s saying them, and even if he could come off as a little incoherent sometimes, there’s no doubt that Dylan is someone that people could put their faith in even if he could be a bit difficult to figure out.
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