“The music got lost”: Eric Clapton on the worst era of his career
Every artist that has been around for decades at a time normally has a certain period where everything is working. Not everything might be the surefire hit that they thought it would be, but there are occasionally those moments where things are gradually falling into place with the critics or giving them momentum to eventually become one of the biggest bands in the world. While Eric Clapton had always been on a high with the guitar community ever since his days in The Yardbirds, he wasn’t shy about the moments when the wheels were starting to fall off.
Because if someone has been making the same type of blues rock for years on end, there comes a moment where things start to either sound the same or start to erode over time. And since he had already seen things getting stale when working with The Yardbirds, Clapton made it a habit of surrounding himself with the best players in the scene no matter where he was, whether that was working with Steve Marriott in Blind Faith or putting together the best supergroup known to man with Derek and the Dominoes.
Right after confessing his love for Patti Boyd, though, things started to take a dark turn for him. He might have been able to solidify his relationship with Boyd after she separated from George Harrison, but he was still living with a chemical imbalance, constantly being strung out on drugs and even having a handful of gigs where he could barely stand up to greet the audience when he played.
Which is strange considering how mellow the music had become. Since he had stated taking cues from acts like The Band, some of his best albums from this period, like 461 Ocean Boulevard and Slowhand, are the most relaxing records in his discography, even if he does balance out some serious blues licks with romantic ballads like ‘Wonderful Tonight’.
But that was only on the surface. Even though the 1960s had already been a period of excess, Clapton seemed to be staying at the party for way too long, and while he relied on his guitar genius to get him through some of his best gigs, this was the first time he started looking at his albums and started to hear that fatigue start to creep in.
Even if he could still play, ‘Slowhand’ felt that this era was the first time he wasn’t hearing what he wanted to hear out of his playing, saying, “I used to do crazy things that people would bail me out of, and I’m just grateful that I survived. But the music got very lost; I didn’t know where I was goin,g and I didn’t really care. I was more into just having a good time, and I think it showed. I think I got fairly irresponsible, and there were some people who liked it and others who got very pissed off.”
Once he climbed out of his spiral, though, he managed to roar back to life once he started appearing at different shows in the 1980s. Guesting on albums by Roger Waters probably didn’t hurt his reputation around that time, but hearing his licks on Harrison’s Cloud Nine and hearing him revamp his acoustic chops in the 1990s with Unplugged made him sound like a more experienced bluesman than the kid who started back in the 1960s.
Then again, the fact that Clapton made it this far is half the reason why some of his music still sounds so good in the latter half of his career. Some of the best blues is built off of pain, and after going through his own bouts with personal blues, it didn’t take him that long for him to translate that feeling into his fingers.
