The musician Eric Clapton called “the father figure I never really had”
A lot of what Eric Clapton was doing on guitar was always about translating his emotions as best he could.
He didn’t start off being that good with words, so the most that he could do to express himself was to try and channel all of his love through his licks, whether it was the furious songs that he would play with Cream or managing to make the most delicate sounds come out of a song like ‘Wonderful Tonight’. But even when working with legends, he felt that he needed the right person to truly understand what he wanted to hear.
Because when you look at the first few years of ‘Slowhand’s career, he wasn’t exactly the greatest when it came to staying in a band for too long. He was practically changing bandmates at the same rate that most of us go to the dentist, and before you could really get a handle on what he was doing in one of his bands, he had already moved on to something else, like Blind Faith or Derek and the Dominos, when he started working on his next massive undertaking.
But even if he kept changing bandmates every single time he went into the studio, that was never going to be able to replace the love that he had for the pure bluesmen that came before him. Every single one of them were drifters in some respect, and when you think about Clapton’s solo career, it was almost inevitable that he was going to end up being a journeyman just like all of them. If you see one of your contemporaries out in the wild, though, you’re not going to leave them there all alone.
After all, he had become friends with the likes of Buddy Guy and BB King, and even if he didn’t live around the same time as Robert Johnson, he could still appreciate his talent from afar whenever making some of his classics. But when it came to Muddy Waters, there was a certain guttural feeling that came from his tunes that you couldn’t manage to get anywhere else in the blues world.
Howlin’ Wolf had taught everyone how to sing with gusto whenever he opened his mouth, but Waters felt like the seasoned bluesman that everyone hoped to become one day. His licks were perfectly tasteful every time he played, and while Clapton took a long time before nailing everything down, he felt that there were so many opportunities for him to learn from Waters whenever he jammed with him.
The greatest lessons musicians can ever learn are usually the ones that happen onstage, but Clapton felt that Waters meant much more to him than being a teacher, saying, “[‘Honey Bee’] was a hook to me. And I made this as a sort of milestone for me, for my learning capabilities. If I can get that, I’m one rung up the ladder. And I did, finally, manage to do it one day, and I thought, well, you know, I think I can probably do this. [He was] the father figure I never really had.”
And when you look at what Clapton’s life was like before becoming a guitar legend, he certainly was looking for that kind of assurance as a player. It’s hard to think that someone who was being touted as a literal guitar god somehow had imposter syndrome, but even if the rest of the world was proclaiming him as the greatest guitarist of his generation, it wasn’t going to matter until he heard it from the right person.
Every one of those songs Waters played meant something to him, and when looking through all of Clapton’s work, a lot of it seems designed to impress what his heroes were doing. Then again, as long as he kept making music that was true to himself, that was all that Clapton needed to get a nod from some of his heroes.
