“You weren’t on the same planet as me”: The record that Eric Clapton is most proud of
Eric Clapton has always taken pride in being somewhat of a musical troubadour. Anyone could have stayed trying their hand at making the greatest music of all time with one band throughout their career. But it wasn’t beyond scope for Clapton to form a group with his favourite musicians, go back to his solo career, or even throw in a couple of guitar solos for other legends like Roger Waters along the way. But after years of being a blues-rock journeyman, some of the greatest albums stand out above the rest.
But that means looking at the different facets of what ‘Slowhand’ could do. He had already made some of the most technical solos that anyone could have thought of with Cream and released the ultimate guitar record with Derek and the Dominoes, but his solo career was his opportunity to start working in a new medium. He could still play, but his heroes felt closer to artists like The Band than Robert Johnson.
Even into the late 1970s, some guitar enthusiasts started to get confused when he traded in his Gibson SG for a Fender Stratocaster. Both of them were certainly worthy guitars to craft songs around, but listening to ‘Wonderful Tonight’ right after going through ‘Layla’ and ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ feels like listening to a completely different guitar half the time, especially considering how minimal his playing could get.
Then again, that’s always been the measure of a good guitarist. If anyone is caught playing too many notes, that’s generally because they aren’t listening to the rest of the band around them. So when Clapton scaled things back, it gave everyone around the chance to see him as a songwriter on the guitar rather than an Olympian athlete behind the fretboard. But that’s not to say that he couldn’t put everyone to shame when he wanted to.
From day one, he had always been a student of the blues, and many of his classic records featured him playing the kind of runs that put him second only to Jimi Hendrix in terms of blues rock virtuosity. He already had a training ground for it during his time in The Yardbirds, but as soon as they veered in a different direction, the only way for him to reconnect with the essence of the blues was working with John Mayall.
While Clapton admits to being proud of all of his musical children, he admitted that Bluesbreakers was its own unique animal in his body of work, noting, “I think the John Mayall album is very powerful, because I had a definite rebel stance about the whole thing. I was on top of my craft, and I was completely confident, and I didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought. We made that record in two days, and I told the engineer where to put the microphone, and that’s how it went. If you didn’t like what I was doing, you weren’t on the same planet as me.”
Those last qualifiers would have made any musician look like one of the biggest assholes in the world, but Clapton had hit that point where he wasn’t wrong in his assessment, either. He was quickly becoming a god among men, and listening to his work across the entire record, it was clear that he wanted to prove to everyone that no one in England could hold a candle to the technical prowess he had.
That kind of self-confidence may have taken a bit of a dip once Hendrix came along, but for those brief few months, there was no one who could touch him. He had ascended to a higher level of playing, and despite people taking umbrage with him being considered a god, it did at least feel like he had some higher power watching over him.
