The one guitarist Eric Clapton said was impossible to duplicate
There’s nothing that Eric Clapton ever played that didn’t trace back to the blues in some capacity.
He certainly had his rock and roll influences from Chuck Berry and worshipped what bands like The Band were doing, but there was nothing that they were doing that could replace what he heard whenever he put on a record from someone like Muddy Waters or BB King back in the day. But even in the realm of blues guitarists, there are more than a few musicians that he knew better not to touch for a while.
Granted, a lot of Clapton’s fight in the early days was to get anywhere close to sounding like some of the blues legends. The fact that The Yardbirds wanted to make more mainstream music didn’t suit him at all, and while he did manage to break free from them at the right time, it’s not like Cream was the perfect outlet for him to make pure blues music. He could solo all he wanted, but there would always be a jazzy spin based on what Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker were doing.
So when he finally managed to set off on his own, he was finally able to make the music that he felt worked best for him. Not all of the songs needed the kind of guitar freakouts that he would do with Derek and the Dominos, but that was never the point when his heroes played, either. Beyond the great licks, all of them were songwriters, and it was easy to feel every single lyric that someone like King was singing about when listening to ‘The Thrill is Gone’.
But long before Clapton’s heroes were cutting their teeth, Robert Johnson was one of the most unique guitarists that the world had ever seen. The electric guitar may have been out of reach for him, but even with a cheap microphone and one acoustic guitar in his hand, he was making the kind of music that had all the pain that all great blues songs have, only this time he sounded like two guitar players at the same time.
His way of playing fingerstyle was enough to throw Clapton for a loop when he first listened to him, and when approaching his solos later in life, he was still trying to decipher what he was doing, saying, “If you’re going to emulate this stuff, you reach a point where you say, ‘shall I do an approximation or is it necessary to sit down and completely copy it?’ And I think to do that would be a life’s work. To do those things at the same time, I can’t do it completely right. But when you listen to it, it sounds so relaxed, and yet when you come to try it, it’s virtually impossible.”
Which probably explains why Clapton ended up going in a much different direction when working up Cream’s version of ‘Crossroads’. And even then, he managed to get distracted from the timing of the rest of the band and found himself completely offbeat. That did end up leading to one of the most accidental classic solos of all time, but Clapton’s time learning that music did come in handy later down the line.
Me and Mr Johnson was still an ordeal for him to get through as a guitarist, but that kind of relaxation feels much smoother this time around. It’s not exactly perfect to Johnson’s style when going over tracks like ‘Me and the Devil Blues’, but it does get as close as anyone has ever come to emulating what Johnson did so naturally.
But the fact that Clapton had to discipline himself after years of being a living legend should really tell you all you need to know about the kind of player Johnson was. Here was someone that was the bluesy version of Jimi Hendrix before Hendrix came along, and since he had no effects to hide behind, many people realised that the magic was all in his hands whenever he played.
