The bands Eric Clapton called everything wrong with rock: “Incredibly detached”
Eric Clapton didn’t really need to change with the times every single time he made a record.
Even though he had grown up trying to make the most off-the-wall blues that anyone had ever heard, his music seemed to exist outside of trends, to the point where he seemed completely untouched whenever the punk movement came in or when grunge started to become one of the biggest genres in the world. He was still content being that guitar-toting troubadour, but there were more than a few bands out there that made him genuinely wonder if rock and roll had lost its edge.
Because when ‘Slowhand’ debuted with The Yardbirds, his playing was all about living on the edge to a certain degree. Everything was getting louder when the British invasion got underway, and even though Cream didn’t see themselves as anything more than a rock and roll trio, they were already paving the way for what heavy metal was going to become when they made some of their tunes.
While Clapton didn’t really have that much time for the heavier acts like Led Zeppelin, he was still on the lookout for the bands that had something to say. The Band had already changed his career trajectory more than a few times when he went solo, and even during the era when he was succumbing to his demons, he was still trying to look for the next great song as opposed to making an entire album full of half-hearted jams.
The magic of a great song is half the reason why the punk scene exploded, but when that initial wave calmed down, bands like U2 were left to pick up the pieces. The Irish quartet wanted to make music that sounded much bigger than anything else anyone had ever done, but when they started to reach their own later years in the 2000s, Clapton couldn’t help but think that bands like them were pointing towards something darker for rock.
The songs were perfectly produced, but if U2 were being thought of as the gold standard, bands like Coldplay were becoming the sanitised version of rock and roll that Clapton could never stand, saying, “Right now, the power of music sits with Simon Cowell and Coldplay and U2, who are really people who just attend awards shows. From just listening, I can’t tell the difference between Coldplay and U2. I think what it shows is how incredibly detached all the current stuff is from its roots. What worries me about what’s going on now is that people don’t know where it’s all come from, and I don’t suppose they’re that interested.”
And for all of the awful opinions that Clapton has spewed out into the world, he does have a small point. When you listen to a band like Coldplay, you’re not really hearing the roots of what rock and roll was all about in the early days. They were clearly copying from their favourite bands like Travis and Radiohead when they started, but that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t still respect where their genre came from.
Even U2 had the decency to pay lip service to people like BB King when making Rattle and Hum, and when they made a lot of their greatest works, it was still indebted to the beginnings of rock and roll, only with a heavier focus on what The Beatles brought to the table than the average Chuck Berry lick. Clapton didn’t have to like it, but that didn’t mean that it was absolutely terrible just because it wasn’t bluesy.
Blues has always been a key part of rock and roll, but it hasn’t been the only part of it, either. Bands should be free to explore as much territory as they want to, and even if they aren’t necessarily making the greatest extensions on the blues or anything, not every group needs to look back to the past to pave the way for the future.
