The best guitarist in America, according to Eric Clapton
There was no limit to where Eric Clapton could go once he struck out on his own in the 1970s.
The guitar world was his oyster in a lot of ways, and he was going to spend every waking minute trying to find a way to push the blues into the public consciousness in whatever way he knew how, whether it was covering his idols or playing with them at every single opportunity. And while the biggest guitar legends were coming out of England, ‘Slowhand’ knew that the real legends were coming out of the heartland half a world away.
After all, the blues originated in the American South, and it wasn’t hard for Clapton to appreciate what people like Buddy Guy and Robert Johnson were bringing to the table. These were artists who had a genuine story to tell every single time that they performed, and when you heard their records, you weren’t only hearing a bunch of classic blues licks. You were hearing their life experience every single time they played one of their leads.
But as the British invasion grew stronger in the 1960s, some of the greatest guitarists of all time started to come out of the woodwork in England. Clapton was obviously one of the biggest blues guitarists of the time, but even when he left The Yardbirds, he left them in more than capable hands when Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck started performing. And even when he left John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, the fact that they could continue on with Peter Green was like watching a legend being born every single time that Clapton left the fold.
And it’s not like the biggest names in America were following suit all that much. There were still fantastic guitarists half a world away, but since most of the biggest names in pop were focusing on the entire production like Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, that didn’t leave room for a screaming guitar solo unless it was serving the song. That is, until Mike Bloomfield started to take things in a different direction.
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was already one of the finest blues acts on the circuit when Bloomfield started, but his biggest claim to fame was helping Bob Dylan embrace rock and roll when he first began going electric. Bloomfield was the emotional translator half the time Dylan played, and Clapton could feel that kind of hunger in his American counterpart’s playing whenever he heard him.
Compared to what Jimi Hendrix would be doing a few years later, there was nothing like Bloomfield in America as far as Clapton was concerned, saying, “I can remember meeting Mike Bloomfield, even before I met (Jimi) Hendrix. The guy in America at the time was Mike Bloomfield. There was no one else. You know why? He was serious. There was no bull involved. He was an academic musician, he knew his stuff, he knew his roots, he knew where it came from, and he knew where he belonged in it.”
And the same could be said for how Clapton approached a lot of his greatest material. He had clearly taken all the lessons from the greatest blues musicians that had come before him, so it was more of a case of applying it to whatever he was doing, whether it was throwing in a lick here and there from one of his idols or writing his own songs of heartache whenever he started calling the shots.
So while Hendrix does get a lot of the glory for being one of the definitive guitar heroes of his time, this is a reminder not to sleep on what Bloomfield did back in the day. Not everything he played needed to be the most jaw-dropping thing ever, but you could definitely hear him trying to go to places where no other blues guitarist had ever gone before.
