The one album Eric Clapton said was painful to make: “A frustrating way to record”
It’s almost not fair how easily Eric Clapton was able to master every single piece of the record industry.
He didn’t have it easy by any stretch during his home life, but when you listen to him play guitar, you would have sworn that he poured every single ounce of his grief into those few hours onstage with the rest of his band. But while ‘Slowhand’ could make some of the tastiest blues licks as if it were no trouble at all, he did have his fair share of moments where he felt like everything was going in the wrong direction whenever he walked into the studio.
If Clapton was going to get anything done, though, he was going to have to take matters into his own hands half the time. There was no way that Cream was going to last for the rest of his life, and even if he had been one of the greatest rock and roll guitarists of all time, not everyone was going to be happy with the work they were doing in Derek and the Dominos, even with their massive string of hits.
In the tradition of every blues legend, Clapton worked better solo, but right as he started to focus on his solo career, he was already at a disadvantage. He may have been able to kick heroin after a little while, but considering how many of his vices were traded in for booze, there are certain pieces of the 1970s where the brandy was talking a lot more than he was. And nowhere was that more apparent than on There’s One In Every Crowd.
The album itself isn’t exactly terrible, but you can definitely hear that something is off during this period of his career. His tone is still fairly consistent, but after spending years trying to get into that same singer-songwriter schtick that The Band had been doing for so long, he shot himself in the foot a little bit when working with Tom Dowd. The producer had worked wonders for his friends in the Allman Brothers Band, but meticulously crafting every song wasn’t Clapton’s idea of a good time.
He was a creature of habit when it came time to jam, and going over the same part over and over again wasn’t going to work for him, saying, “The thing that bothered me about There’s One In Every Crowd was that we were contriving to make a quality record. Tom kept getting serious about ‘making a record’ when we were having a good time. Like ‘Pretty Blue Eyes’ was done in bits of something like six bars here and there, which is a frustrating way to record. I prefer to work live whenever possible.”
The album is a lot more breezy than the typical rock and roll album, but it’s not like you can’t hear Clapton’s frustration every once in a while. He was trying his best to make the finest record that he could, but if he had to keep beating one lick to death every time he walked into the studio, chances are it wasn’t going to have as much soul on the fifth or sixth take as it did when he first started working on it.
In fact, that’s one of the saving graces of an album like Slowhand. He was still going through a dark period of his life, but the beauty of listening to a song like ‘The Core’ or even the subtle guitar flourishes in ‘Wonderful Tonight’ is that you get the sense of everyone in a room playing to their heart’s content whenever they’re working.
That’s always how Clapton preferred it above all else, and while There’s One in Every Crowd isn’t typically seen as a knockout record or anything, it was at least a departure for him. Any artist will want to see what they can do outside of their comfort zone, but sometimes you need to experiment with something before you realise that it’s not a good direction for you to be going down.
