The guitarist who saved rock and roll guitar, according to Eric Clapton
Every few years, the musical landscape seemingly laments the death of rock ‘n’ roll, a situation which usually begins with a star of yesteryear gyrating the changing of the seasons. Then, a new messiah comes along, and the genre pops its debauched head above the parapet once more before a short-lived revival falls into place. It’s a tale as old as time itself and one which we will likely endure until the robots finally turn against us. Eric Clapton is seemingly one man who will never see the genre truly die.
Alongside countrymen Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck, Clapton played a vital role in the explosion of bands that dominated London in the 1960s and made the city the most exciting place in the world. Their groups, The Yardbirds, Cream and Led Zeppelin, would dominate Britain’s music scene and begin a rock revolution across the globe. Yet, things soon changed the decade after. Rock and roll fell to the wayside, people started seeking something new, and even bands like The Rolling Stones needed to prove their worth.
Then punk rolled along, and anyone with even a micro understanding of Clapton’s conservative political beliefs will understand that bands like The Clash hardly resonated with him. As a rule, punks detested the needless self-indulgence of classic rock. Guitar solos were kicked to the curb for three chords and a fury. Wailing singers were replaced by gobbing frontmen, and the world began to chew up the old culture and spit it out with vengeance.
Many of the bands of old resisted the notion of punk. John Bonham famously took umbraged with The Damned during one particularly hellish show. Clapton’s own resistance to punk, however, wasn’t a suggestion of rejecting modernity. He believed that rock ‘n’ roll needed resuscitating every now and then but in a completely different way from Joe Strummer and Co. He believed one man did that very act of life-saving performance, though.
Prince is a guitarist who splits opinions between musos despite his unavoidable majesty. ‘The Purple One’ was a guitarist of the highest technical proficiency, and if you disagree with that statement, then take it up with Clapton.
The veteran English musician has often cited the singer as one of the best guitarists the world has ever seen. He noted Purple Rain as the injection of energy the music scene needed to stay alive, saying, “at a time when I thought rock ‘n’ roll was dead.” His loving words weren’t done there; Clapton continued, “This is someone who is a reincarnation of Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix and James Brown in one. I thought that’s exactly what the world needed.”
When Prince prematurely passed in 2016, Clapton was beside himself in grief, and even though they weren’t close friends, the music of ‘His Royal Badness’ was like a lifeboat to he was at his lowest ebb during the pits of his battle with drug addiction. “I’m so sad about the death of Prince,” he wrote. “He was a true genius and a huge inspiration for me, in a very real way. In the eighties, I was out on the road in a massive downward spiral with drink and drugs, I saw Purple Rain in a cinema in Canada, I had no idea who he was, it was like a bolt of lightning.”
While the notion of saving rock ‘n’ roll itself is likely enough to garner widespread appreciation from Clapton, he went further to admit that Prince also lifted the guitarist out of a personal hell. Adding: “In the middle of my depression, and the dreadful state of the music culture at that time it gave me hope, he was like a light in the darkness. I went back to my hotel, and, surrounded by empty beer cans, wrote ‘Holy Mother.’ I can’t believe he’s gone.”
Clapton’s deeply personal connection to Prince is impossible to describe in words alone, and not only did he bring rock ‘n’ roll back from the dead in his eyes. More poignantly, he also helped prevent the death of Clapton too, and he won’t be the only person saved by the music of ‘The Purple One’.
