“It’s a challenge”: the band that disappointed Eric Clapton live
Not every group is meant to knock it out of the park whenever they play. Even if someone gets the best virtuosos in one room to perform, it all comes down to chemistry, whether they manage to gel together on any one song. Although Eric Clapton could be a musical chameleon when working in any act, he remembered working with this touring outfit never quite worked out in his mind.
Granted, Clapton didn’t need much behind him to wow a crowd at the best of times. Looking through his discography, most of his best records centre around his guitar and his voice, and if it weren’t for him having one of the most insane rhythm sections with Cream, most people would have thought that he would be the leader behind any group that he led.
At the same time, Clapton never seemed to enjoy the idea of being purely a frontman. He could lead a band like nobody else, but the reason why an album like Layla by Derek and the Dominoes works so well is that push and pull coming from Clapton and Duane Allman trading licks or how they play off of the piano once the outro section kicks in.
Somewhere along the line, Clapton seemed to get a little tired of making the same kind of intense guitar lick whenever he walked into the studio. He was always drawn to songwriters first and foremost, and albums like Slowhand and 461 Ocean Boulevard felt like the result of him listening to The Band and trying to find that kind of songwriting magic within himself in between weaving together his blues licks.
By the late 1990s, Clapton seemed to abandon the guitar hero status he had altogether to make something a bit more cut and dry. ‘Tears in Heaven’ may have been the purest song he ever wrote, but later albums like Journeyman saw him incorporate a lot more mellow accompaniment and trade in the grit of his older tone for the clean sound of a Fender Stratocaster.
While that kind of sound translates incredibly well on record, Clapton walked away from a tour with classical accompaniment feeling a bit jaded, saying, “It’s a selfish thrill to play with an orchestra. But it hasn’t really clicked. It’s a very hit-or-miss process because they play in a different time scale. They hit the beat just slightly after the conductor’s baton comes down; they play behind the beat, in effect. I like pushing the beat, and so the marriage is very difficult. It’s a challenge to get it right. But more often than not, it’s a very painful disappointment.”
Then again, Clapton always spoke a slightly different language than classical musicians were used to. His sense of time and artistic expression relied on improvisation, and asking a bunch of violinists to follow the bandleader without any charts written out is the stuff of nightmares.
While hearing Clapton with an orchestra might sound like a good idea on paper, the fact that it didn’t work only further proved the kind of player that he was. No matter how much he tried to clean up his sound, there was still that wild animal hidden underneath, ready to break loose.
