The Beatles songs Eric Clapton never enjoyed listening to: “Too poppy for me”
Eric Clapton didn’t sign up for rock and roll simply to have hits.
He was a brilliant guitarist and songwriter when the time called for it, but when he got the first itch to play guitar, it was more about trying to find the best blues licks that he could to put on record whenever he worked with The Yardbirds or Cream. He wanted to make the kind of music that could make his idols proud, and that meant staying far, far away from the manufactured side of popular music whenever he could.
That’s half the reason why The Yardbirds weren’t working that well for him. He acknowledged that the band had a fair bit of chops when he started jamming with them, but by the time ‘For Your Love’ came out, he realised that he needed to go in a much different direction. That was a straight pop song, and he wasn’t going to be caught dead on the charts with songs that were a bit of fluff.
That didn’t mean that the mainstream and blues couldn’t intersect anyway. The whole point of the band was to make the finest jams that anyone had ever heard, but ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ etched his place in rock history for a reason. It had all the mojo of some of those old Muddy Waters tunes, but it also had the harmonies and the energy that wouldn’t have felt out of place next to The Rolling Stones on the hit parade, either.
But that was nothing compared to what The Beatles had been doing around the same time as well. Clapton’s guitar tone sounded like a guitar if it had been dipped in acid, but the Fab Four had broken every single rule of the studio when making records like Revolver and Sgt Peppers. They were all trying to make the best music that they could while also making the most avant-garde experiments imaginable, but you wouldn’t have thought they were the same band that made tunes like ‘She Loves You’.
Sure, their later tunes were still among the catchiest rock and roll songs of all time, but if you look at the pre-Rubber Soul era of the band, a lot of their tunes do have a bit of a teenybopper flair to them. John Lennon and Paul McCartney had their puppy love songs down to a science whenever they needed a new track for a record like Beatles for Sale, and that’s not necessarily the kind of music that Clapton wanted to make when he first started touring with them, with The Yardbirds.
He was still struck by their musicianship and the chemistry they had together, but Clapton wasn’t much of a fan of their standard rock and roll tunes, saying, “I didn’t want to be like them at all. In fact, from my earliest recollections, that was too poppy for me. By the time they came around, I was deeply ensconced in hardcore blues and was becoming a purist very fast.” And when you see the final gigs they played live, there’s a good chance even The Beatles had trouble being The Beatles at that point.
The audience they had cultivated was vast, but since they were all young girls, it was hard to get their music out into the world with all of the screaming still going on. They were practically forced to become creatures of the studio, but by the time that Clapton guested on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, they had become far more complex than anyone would have expected from the same band that made tunes like ‘Hold Me Tight’ and ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’.
That era of the band was absolutely perfect in nearly everything they did, but what made people want to continue talking about them for years to come was how they dissected what a pop song could be. Anyone could have found their sound and stuck with it, but the real artists are the ones that kept evolving every time they walked into the studio.
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