The guitarist Eric Clapton said “didn’t move me deep down”
Whenever Eric Clapton stepped out onstage, playing every single note right was only half the battle.
He may have had the same discipline as most other guitar heroes whenever he started making music, but the flashiness didn’t matter nearly as much as the passion that he put into every single note he played. Any of his guitar solos were meant to sound like a singer whenever they started, and it only took a couple of notes for ‘Slowhand’ to see through even the sharpest musical minds.
Then again, Clapton would be the first to say that not everything he made was perfect. There are more than a few times throughout his career where he stuck his foot in his mouth for saying the wrong thing, and the less said about the more tepid music he made throughout the 1970s, the better off most of us will be. It’s not that all of it was downright terrible, but ‘Slowhand’ even admitted that he heard the horrible state he was in whenever he listened back to some of his classic tunes.
But even if every album wasn’t a knockout, it did give everyone a good snapshot of where he was at the time. He was always meant to be the guitar-toting troubadour giving the blues to whoever was willing to listen, and if there was one thing that was for sure, he was never going to go down the same road as The Yardbirds. He needed to find his own way, and his fellow guitar alumni followed suit.
Jimmy Page learned pretty quickly that he didn’t want to spend his life being told what to play, and when listening to Led Zeppelin, it was clear that he was going to be working on every single warped idea that came into his head. If Page was using the guitar in an unconventional way, though, Jeff Beck was the one most willing to make the guitar speak whenever he took one of his solos.
While instrumental bands are usually the last ones to see hits on the charts, that never really mattered to Beck. Whenever he played his licks, his guitar was about as close to the human voice as one could possibly get when he worked on his fusion records. It was all about finding the right tone that worked for the song, but Clapton was far from impressed when he first saw his successor perform.
There was no doubt that the technical prowess was there, but Clapton didn’t feel the heart in Beck’s playing when he first laid eyes on him, saying, “I didn’t even know about… Jeff Beck, when I left The Yardbirds, I went to see him play in a club with The Tridents, I think he was with, and it was great. No doubt about it, he was – is – a pioneer. But it didn’t move me deep down. I didn’t like the way The Yardbirds went off, in that weird kind of pop thing that they did. It was another direction from where I wanted to go, that’s for sure.”
That might sound insane, but keep in mind where Clapton was coming from during this time. Since Led Zeppelin were just on the rise, hearing Truth come out with the same mentality meant that Beck needed to switch things up. But if Clapton cared to stick around for a little while longer, records like Blow By Blow and Wired are some of the best examples of a guitarist using their instrument to create feelings that most people didn’t even know they could feel.
It may not have moved Clapton the same way that BB King or Buddy Guy did when he listened to them, but there also may have been a hint of jealousy in there as well. Because for as many soulful bends that Clapton could play every single time he got onstage, Beck is the person that you go to when you want to hear sounds that most people didn’t think were possible.
