The guitarist Eric Clapton didn’t want to be remembered with: “I don’t hear me at all!”
Eric Clapton tended to have a much different mission than most of the biggest guitarists in the world.
He had his fair share of lessons taught to him by the likes of Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, but he felt that he was put on the planet to make songs that carried on what people like Howlin’ Wolf and Buddy Guy had been doing well before rock and roll began. He wanted to make the kind of blues that anyone could appreciate, and he felt that certain guitarists were definitely not in his same wheelhouse.
But ‘Slowhand’ was the first to say that he didn’t consider himself better or greater than any of his heroes. He knew that some of the biggest blues players could eat him for breakfast, but when it came to rock and roll, he wasn’t called ‘God’ by accident. His solos were always perfect for whatever song he was working on, and even when he was flip-flopping between bands, he was still more than willing to put in the work whenever one of his friends’ songs needed a guitar break.
A lot of his solos were indebted to some of the tastiest players that came before, but not everyone woke up every morning trying to play the blues. It was a great place for rock guitarists to start to get something under their fingers, but Clapton wanted the chance to make songs that took that music in another direction. He was using the same blues scale on ‘Wonderful Tonight’, but even if he got one of the smoothest guitar melodies of all time, the next generation of players wanted to flex a little bit more.
And while Clapton already had a distaste for what Jimmy Page was doing in Led Zeppelin, he couldn’t stop the tides from turning, even if he tried. Some of the biggest names in music were trying to get a lot flashier, and while people like JJ Cale and Robert Cray were carrying on what he was doing, he felt that Eddie Van Halen had taken every single lesson that he had to teach and learned the wrong things.
After all, everything that Eddie did was about playing as fast as possible, and while Clapton did have his fair share of those moments, he still needed to serve the song. In Van Halen’s case, though, Eddie’s guitar was practically the entire song on every one of their albums, and there was no one showing up to one of their shows that wasn’t looking at his fingers when he started tapping.
For any other guitarist, this was like heaven, but as far as Clapton could tell, he never felt that he wanted people to look at the guitar with that kind of showmanship, saying, “Van Halen says he learned to play by listening to my music slowed down! But when I hear his music, I don’t hear me at all! So I’m afraid I can’t be held responsible for that! And as much as it may be good, I don’t feel I’m part of that.” But that’s not to say that one version of guitar playing is better than the other.
Anyone with a guitar in their hands is going to want to tell people a story whenever they take a solo, and Clapton had a different way of expressing himself. You could feel his pain in every note when he worked with Derek and the Dominos, but when Eddie strapped on his guitar, it was about flying as fast as he could whenever he played, to the point where everyone started to think that the guy must have been superhuman to pull off every single note.
Clapton didn’t see the appeal, but as much as he wanted to remove himself from that side of history, he’s still a part of that guitar lineage, whether he wants to be or not. Because with Cream, there would be no Van Halen, and some of the greatest moments throughout both of their careers have been about pushing the guitar much further than anyone would have thought about at the time.
