“It was a real shock”: The one musician Eric Clapton hated touring with
Eric Clapton was on a mission from the first time he picked up a guitar.
He knew that the blues was where he felt the most at home, but the goal of any great blues musician was to help carry on the music and help turn everyone else on to the kind of heartache that everyone could appreciate once they heard them sing their hearts out. ‘Slowhand’ has clearly grown into that kind of seasoned bluesman, but there were more than a few times when he felt a little bit uncomfortable standing next to the true legends of the genre.
Because, really, it took Clapton a long time to feel completely comfortable in his own skin. He was already bouncing from one band to the next in the late 1960s, and while everyone from Cream to Blind Faith to Derek and the Dominos would have been enough for any other musician’s career, it was only a stopgap between Clapton becoming one of the biggest names in the music industry. But in every one of those bands, you can see why he wasn’t quite ready to strike out on his own.
The Dominos were practically an emotional incubator where he could air all of his lovesickness over Patti Boyd, and while Blind Faith clearly had the chops to be a big enough band to rival Cream, they didn’t really have the same kind of staying power once the crowds started to get bigger. They had grown up way too fast, but Clapton was the last person who wanted to fall back on his old ways.
Rock and roll was only one facet of what he could do, and he wanted to be able to tell a story with his music rather than relying on the same old tropes that he had grown used to. And while you can hear a lot of that on his first solo songs like ‘After Midnight’ and ‘Let it Rain’, there was no chance that he was ever going to go back to jamming with bands like The Yardbirds ever again if he could help it.
He was happy to have contributed to their legacy, but songs like ‘For Your Love’ were the exact opposite of what he wanted to be doing. He needed to express himself in a much more articulate way, and when they got the chance to jam with real bluesmen like Sonny Boy Williamson, he was mortified every time he went out onstage. This was what a real blues legend looked like, so having to go out there and play what he considered a mockery of the blues made Clapton feel dirty every time he played.
Williamson did have a few lessons to teach, but Clapton knew that his time with the band needed to end if he was playing with people like this, saying, “I realized we weren’t being true to the music. It was a frightening experience, because this man was real and we weren’t. We didn’t know how to back him up, and he put us through some bloody hard paces. I was very young, and it was a real shock; I had to almost relearn how to play. But it taught me a lot. It taught me the value of that music, which I still feel.”
And that kind of expressiveness came out a lot more in everything that Clapton would do later. Even when he wasn’t necessarily playing the blues in Cream, you could tell that he was reaching for some different sounds whenever he played, whether it was quoting standards like ‘Blue Moon’ on ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ or doing justice to what Robert Johnson started when covering ‘Crossroads’.
Not everyone was necessarily ready for this kind of music, but Clapton knew that the best artists didn’t wait until the rest of the world was listening to what they had to say. He wanted to grab them by the throat from the moment they heard him, and when he rolled out his famous ‘woman tone’, there was no one else on this planet that could come close to what he could do.
