The blues legend who trash talked Eric Clapton: “He was seriously disappointed”
You won’t find a bigger fan of Eric Clapton than the E Street Band’s Steve Van Zandt. He was adamant that Clapton was the best to ever pick up a six-string.
“Eric Clapton is the most important and influential guitar player that has ever lived, is still living or ever will live,” he said. When discussing why he was such a big fan, Van Zandt said that he was a master in merging the playing styles of multiple different musicians, which paved the way for a new kind of rock sound.
In justifying his adoration, Van Zandt said that Clapton embodied: Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, Scotty Moore, Carl Perkins, Cliff Gallup and George Harrison… but wait, there’s more, he also compared the bluesman to Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin, BB King, Albert King and Freddie King. It doesn’t matter what way you look at it, this is some seriously high praise.
The thing is, while Van Zandt’s clearly a massive fan, most music lovers would probably say the same. Back when Clapton was tearing it up with the Yardbirds and Cream, he was playing guitar in a way that caught people completely off guard. What we now think of as the classic rock guitarist really started with players like Clapton – musicians who weren’t shy about showing their influences and letting them shape the sound they were creating.
Of course, while these early iterations of Clapton were incredibly exciting, they were also finite. A lot of people who were big fans of Eric Clapton agreed that his quality started to dwindle as time went on. Even superfan Van Zandt said that the last time Clapton played in a way which people would consider “perfect” was on the song ‘Layla’.
“’Layla’ was, for me, the last time everything – the singing, songwriting and guitar playing – were all at the same high-intensity level,” said Van Zandt, “It’s Clapton’s most original interpretation of the blues because the hellhounds on his trail had a face: unrequited love.”
Other people weren’t as friendly with their assessments. When Eddie Van Halen was speaking about Eric Clapton and his apparent fall from grace, the tapping guitar player said that he felt Clapton was better on drugs. “I hate to say it, but when he was a heroin addict, he was good,” said Eddie, “After that, he was just trying to sound like BB King, but BB King has him beat because Clapton isn’t BB King.”
While there were a few people who felt like Eric Clapton dropped off in quality later on in his career, that time period remains pretty consistent. The majority of music lovers were in awe of Clapton’s early music, and it wasn’t until later on that they dropped off. However, there was an exception to that, as Clapton and The Yardbirds once played with Sonny Boy Williamson II, who Clapton later found out despised them. No doubt Clapton would have been saddened by this news, given he was a fan, but you can’t please everyone.
“I don’t think he was stunned by any of it. I think he was seriously disappointed,” recalled Clapton, “I found out when I sat down and talked with Robbie Robertson [later of The Band], who knew Sonny Boy very well, and he said Sonny Boy would come back to the States from working with us and say some pretty disparaging things about what we were doing and who we were. He wasn’t impressed at all.”
