The show Eric Clapton said John Lennon didn’t like playing: “What am I doing here?”
Eric Clapton always saw rock and roll as something more than the casual gig every now and again.
For him, this music was his calling, and even though it meant playing the blues to anyone within earshot, it was worth it for the sheer joy that came from him plugging in his guitar and hearing it ring throughout a stadium. For all the different faces that he has donned over the years, there are always going to be pieces of his career that will forever be etched in rock history.
Then again, if you look at Clapton’s track record, it’s impossible to look at him and not bring up the blues in any capacity. If he was put on this Earth to do anything, it would be to bring the genre to the masses, and even with all of the ugliness in his past that makes things more than a little bit uncomfortable, no one could blame him for speaking his mind in the same way that artists like Buddy Guy had done before he got started.
Shuffling through his discography, there’s always a piece of him that’s willing to try anything that catches his ear. While it would have been a mistake for him to lean into R&B fully like he saw in artists like D’Angelo in the late 1990s, there was still room to throw in more diverse tunes when looking at his track record in the 1970s; all of it was blues, but there were still a lot of great singer-songwriter tunes sprinkled in there as well.
If Clapton was born to dominate the guitar, though, then his friends like The Beatles were born to write brilliant melodies. Every member of the Fab Four seemed to have music flowing through their veins every time they played together, and while Clapton had the opportunity to see a lot of it up close when he first sat in with them during The White Album, he did eventually get the chance of a lifetime working with John Lennon.
Despite already being a legend, anyone playing next to a Beatle was bound to be a little bit starstruck, but Clapton understood right away when listening to what Lennon was trying to do. He was going back to the early days of rock and roll with the Plastic Ono Band, and when playing the Toronto Peace Festival in the late 1960s, Clapton felt his new bandmate would have rather been anywhere else.
Lennon wanted to deliver his message however he could, but he knew that he could have picked a better place, with Clapton saying, “John stood in the dressing room, which was admittedly rather tatty, beforehand saying, ‘What am I doing here? I could have gone to Brighton!’ After all, it was a long way to go for just one concert”. It’s easy to blame his attitude on being a little dopesick, but it also might have to do with the other people on the bill.
He wanted to spread love and peace wherever he went, and yet one of the biggest names at the festival alongside him ended up being a young upstart named Alice Cooper. It was far from a bad performance, but it was hard to take old-time rock and roll tunes seriously preaching about political awareness, while there was a guy getting blamed for murdering a chicken during his performance.
Although the band did put on a decent show and ended up raising awareness for their cause, the fact that it was over before it began had more to do with Lennon’s mindset at the time. He was looking to make music that reflected his mood, and that meant people coming and going from the lineup depending on the kind of music he wanted to make.
