The guitarist Eric Clapton found the most moving: “You can do anything”
It takes a lot more than traditional rock and roll to get Eric Clapton to appreciate any guitarist.
He wrote the rulebook for what many rock stars are still studying from today, and considering how many people he has influenced, like Eddie Van Halen, there’s a good chance that the entire guitar community would be different without him reinventing himself over and over again. But no amount of crazy technique was ever going to make up for the kind of swagger that someone has in their music whenever they performed with ‘Slowhand’.
If anything, the kind of bluesy tone is something that Clapton had to take years in order to master. There’s no shortage of footage of him performing next to some of the greatest blues guitarists of all time like BB King and Buddy Guy, but compared to the massive runs of licks that Clapton was known for doing across his records, King could have managed to pack more soul and articulation into one note than Clapton could have done in about 20 or 30 notes throughout his solo.
It wasn’t about playing fast as long as you could hear someone’s soul, and when Clapton first laid ears on someone like Pops Staples, he knew that he was listening to someone who was in full command of his instrument. Which is strange, considering he wasn’t in the same wheelhouse as what Clapton was used to studying. He knew the blues, but he was far more equipped for the world of R&B.
Granted, R&B has never been that far away from what the blues were all about. Both genres have their roots in old gospel music, and when you look at the way that Staples worked alongside The Staples Singers, he was never trying to make something too over the top. The supergroups of the world, like Cream, were made for that, but Staples figured that the best way to get his point across was to pick just the right notes for every occasion.
And even in an age where some of the greatest guitarists are more niche players, Clapton felt that the community was in a good place as long as people carry on what Staples started, saying, “There is always something to listen to, to aspire to, with the guitar. It is still the most flexible instrument. You can improvise on it. You have such freedom. I don’t think there is a limit to it. Anyone who talks about [the guitar’s irrelevance] should listen to Roebuck Staples. It is so moving. And that’s in the past. So it’s not about what’s to be. It’s already there. If you can get in touch with that, you can do anything.”
Clapton was still going to be a blues guitarist for the rest of his life, but the fact that he could branch out to someone like Staples meant having a great deal of respect for the other legends in other fields. The R&B community wasn’t too far away from the kind of pain that Robert Johnson sang about, so when ‘Slowhand’ entered the 1990s, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for him to talk about the wonders of people like Babyface or pop into the studio to listen to what D’Angelo was working on.
It’s hard to really gauge what Staples’s influence is across every single modern genre of music, but there are still soulful guitar players that are carrying on what both he and Clapton were talking about. H.E.R. is the clearest example of someone still using the guitar as an extension of their personality, and even someone like Gary Clark Jr is taking that soulful edge and infusing it with the pure rock and roll muscle that you heard out of people like Stevie Ray Vaughan back in the day.
So while the guitar has had its ups and downs in the rock and roll world, Clapton needn’t worry about it becoming a relic of the past. It might not be topping the charts as much as it used to when he was in the spotlight, but that didn’t matter so long as there were people still around to make it sound dirty and mean whenever they cranked up their amplifier.
