The “masterpiece” that always knocks out Eric Clapton
When Eric Clapton first began, he was the epitome of a blues purist.
He may have started in The Yardbirds playing a bluesy take on rock and roll, but when you look at the heroes that he had back in the day, he was far more likely to go back to a Freddie King lick than play the traditional Chuck Berry shapes half the time. He was looking to bring that sound to the masses, and the more that he kept moving throughout his career, he found different ways to make the genre more palatable for a mainstream audience.
Granted, he wasn’t the first person to have this idea, either, nor was he the last. The biggest names in music like The Rolling Stones had been studying the same blues records that he was around the same time, and almost every other generation has someone else that wants to put their own take on the blues, whether that’s Stevie Ray Vaughan, Duane Allman, or Gary Clark Jr in the modern age.
But what made Clapton stand out was what he could make the blues sound like whenever he performed. The Yardbirds were only a little taste of what he could do, but when you look at his evolution from working with John Mayall to Cream to Blind Faith to Derek and the Dominos, all of them are a different flavour of the kind of tone that he was looking for whenever he played classics like ‘Layla’ or ‘Can’t Find My Way Home’.
Hell, he didn’t even need to have an electric guitar in his hand half the time when doing Unplugged, but the more things change, the more they stay the same for Clapton half the time. There would be more soft-rock albums in his arsenal like Pilgrim or Journeyman from the early 1990s, but not too far behind them would always be a traditional blues album or working with people like BB King or doing album-long tributes to Robert Johnson.
When looking through his entire discography, though, Clapton knew that nothing could compare to when he heard the classics from artists like Jimmy Rogers, saying, “Blues masterpieces have had some kind of profound effect on me, like the Jimmy Rogers song ‘Blues All Day Long.’ There’s something about that: the balance of the instruments and the way it’s recorded. The beauty and the strength of it have always taken my breath away and always will. I don’t do it quite the same way, but what I’m trying to recreate is the emotional experience that I got when I heard it.”
It’s not like the song itself is the most heartwrenching experience to listen to by any stretch, but when looking through the biggest names in blues, there’s hardly that many songs as true to the form as this. Clapton was always looking to get anywhere close to this kind of sound, but it’s strange to think of how many times he came within inches of matching what Rogers did on his own classics.
After all, all blues songs are about trying to feel the passion whenever you hear the person singing, and Clapton’s tender voice singing ‘Layla’ both in electric and acoustic form is what made it such a powerful tune back in the day. And while tunes like ‘Tears in Heaven’ are far from the blues form that most people think of, it definitely had the same spirit of a modern blues tune with the theme of pure heartache.
But whereas most people are in the business for the glory of being a bluesy badass, Clapton always knew that type of swagger wasn’t something anyone inherited from playing the right licks. It comes from years of lived experience, and all those scars on his heart were only memories that he survived long enough to see the other side of rock stardom.
