The one guitarist Eric Clapton said “commanded” his respected
It was going to take a lot for Eric Clapton to be wowed by any guitar player back in the day.
‘Slowhand’ was practically a walking historian when it came to the greatest artists to ever play the instrument, and a lot of his tunes saw him flexing his chops by showing off all of the licks that he inherited from the likes of Robert Johnson and Buddy Guy. Then again, any guitarist should never stop searching for something new, and Clapton figured that the music world could change if he saw the right player throwing it down onstage.
After all, that’s what happened right when he started to get recognised as a rock and roll god. The entire British blues scene was ready to christen him as a deity among men back in the day, and yet the minute that Jimi Hendrix started performing, the entire musical vocabulary had changed. This was someone outside the realm of possibility, and Clapton was more than happy to learn a thing or two from the way he played.
But whereas most people got into the mystique behind Hendrix’s playing, Clapton always preferred to look at the human being behind everything. Hendrix was the kind of player cut from the same cloth as he was, and since both of them loved the idea of learning from the greats, ‘Slowhand’ would spend the rest of his life in pursuit of players who had done their homework. The same thing happened when he formed Derek and the Dominos, but there’s an uncomfortable middle period where he started to clock out.
It’s hard to say that about what is considered the era with the most mainstream hits, but Clapton was not in good shape when he started the 1970s. His supergroups were gone, and after quitting heroin, substituting it for drinking definitely wasn’t helping matters. But when he got out of his booze-addled fog in the 1980s, the blues had started to come all the way back around as well.
For an era all about futuristic music, the 1980s were about to be extremely nice to the 1960s for a brief period. Icons like Tina Turner, John Fogerty, and the Traveling Wilburys had second winds, but before any of them caught on, the retro sounds of people like The Stray Cats and George Thorogood had been prepping everyone for bluesy sounds. Still, there’s no way anyone was fully prepared for Stevie Ray Vaughan.
The pure sense of taste and muscle behind his playing is the true height of what blues could do, and while he was on this Earth for far too short a time, Clapton admitted that he held Vaughan in the highest esteem, saying, “I don’t think anyone has commanded my respect more. The first time I heard Stevie Ray, I thought, ‘Whoever this is, he is going to shake the world.’ I was in my car and I remember thinking, I have to find out, before the day is over, who that guitar player is. That doesn’t happen to me very often.”
But it helps that Vaughan is one of the few guitarists that were able to deliver on all those promises. Texas Flood is among the finest blues albums ever made, and while he did get overshadowed by his tragic death in a plane crash, most guitarists are still going to remember where they were the first time they heard the sound of ‘Pride and Joy’ coming through the speakers.
It was still the same bluesy sounds that Clapton was familiar with, but the touch and feel that Vaughan had was what set him apart. He was truly a one-off in that community, and it’s easy to look at Clapton’s reaction and see a piece of the same wide-eyed kid who’s jaw dropped to the floor the first time he listened to the likes of Muddy Waters.
