The guitarist Eric Clapton has copied all his life
It’s impossible to pinpoint every single influence that Eric Clapton stole from.
The entire blues vocabulary was about having a shared common language on the guitar, and no matter whether he was paying tribute to Robert Johnson or coming up with his own parts, every one of his solos carries on the tradition of the heroes that he had learned from since before rock and roll was a mainstream force. But while he could be honest about his favourite players, there were a few times when he felt he wore them on his sleeve a bit too closely.
But ‘Slowhand’ wasn’t looking to be a blues troubadour for his entire life. There were certainly pieces of his career where he would be pulling from his fellow legends, but there are countless other times where he is going for a completely different vibe. The Beatles didn’t need a massive extended jam for ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, and his 1970s period often has tons of singer-songwriter influences that are much more indebted to The Band than someone like Paul Butterfield.
That said, there were moments where Clapton admitted his DNA had changed. He had already been given a steady diet of blues since he was a kid, but Buddy Guy was a completely different animal. This was someone who played with the same wild abandon that Jimi Hendrix did during those initial blues gigs, and when Clapton first saw him, he had never seen someone as captivating playing guitar before.
Then again, when was the last time the blues was about putting on a show? Sure, there are many people who would gladly talk about the importance of being a showman, but it was all about the music for Clapton, and while BB King showed everyone how to play blues nice and slow, the way that Freddie King attacked the guitar always had a unique effect on how Clapton looked at the instrument.
Which isn’t all that strange given the way that Freddie used to play. It was strange enough watching Albert King play his guitar the wrong way around without restringing it, but if you listen to the way that Freddie bends the strings, there’s a direct correlation between him and Clapton when listening to some of Cream’s best records. The vibrato might be a bit different, but it wasn’t until he jammed with Freddie that ‘Slowhand’ got called out.
The entire room would have been elated to see two blues legends trading lines back and forth, but Clapton said that seeing Freddie made him realise how much of his playing was stolen from him, saying, “All I could do was to play like them, especially people like Freddie King. I copied him all my life and here he was on stage with me and what could I do? That’s when it was really hard to come up with something of my own.”
Any other guitarist would be shaking in their boots, but the reality of the blues isn’t always about playing the best music possible. It’s about quoting one’s own heart, and even if a lot of Clapton’s work didn’t come back to the traditional blues progressions, you can hear him slowly trying to twist those initial blues licks into something that could sound a bit more refreshing than the average rock and roll guitar solo.
While imitation might not always be the sincerest form of flattery, the fact that Clapton was able to admit where his licks came from was extremely important. Good artists copy and great artists steal, but the most respectable artists are the ones that are able to give back to the ones they stole from.
