eric clapton

With Eric Clapton, we’re talking about a staggeringly talented guitarist who in the end turns out to have staggeringly bad taste. But it hasn’t always been this way for the man whose name used to be reverentially written on subway walls.  Clapton’s abiding love and feel for blues guitar were big parts of the initial Yardbirds sound.  But I don’t really like much of that super-bluesy early Yardbirds stuff. It’s an entirely subjective thing, but for me the Yardbirds only became great when they embraced pop and fused pop song structures with the blues.  And by the time they became more poppy, Clapton had had enough and went his own way, eventually forming Cream...

The mythology of Cream as the first great Supergroup is in many ways more imposing than the quality of the output. Fresh Cream, a record I admittedly played to death in my hescher salad days, is very much in the heavy blues vein, if you like that sort of thing. Next came Disraeli Gears, much of which is fantastic, though it’s interesting to me that Dance the Night Away is both my favorite song on the album and also its least Cream-ish sounding number, having much more in common with the Beatles, Byrds, and Hollies than it does with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band or John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers…  Then we get Wheels of Fire, a bloated mishmash of excessively heavy indulgence.  As an aside, I’ll take either one of Jack Bruce’s post-Cream masterpieces, Songs for a Tailor and Harmony Row, over just about any Cream record…

When I was a kid, the first Cream album I had, ironically, was Goodbye Cream, a terrible record except for Badge, easily one of the best songs released under the Cream moniker. Badge constitutes the apex of Clapton’s finest period of creativity, spanning from Disraeli Gears, released in late 1967, through his ghost guitar playing on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, his inspired flourishes on the Blind Faith record, Let it Rain on his otherwise ho hum first solo album (mid 1970), and, finally, Derek and the Dominoes, which came out in late 1970 and is an album/project worthy of its own dedicated discussion…All told, then, we’re talking about four years of great stuff. It’s more than most of us could ever hope to achieve, of course, but then again we’re talking about someone with off-the-charts talent.  When you take his raw abilities into account, listening to the rest of Clapton’s body of work, basically 1971 onwards, is dispiriting to say the least.  How could somebody with so much ability produce so much material ranging from blandness to schlock? Part of it is undoubtedly the result of Clapton having fought alcoholism and drug addiction for so long.  Some artists can use these demons to fuel creative fire. Clapton was apparently able to do this for Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, reportedly recorded while he was not only in love with George Harrison’s wife but also in the throes of bad heroin addiction. But what happens with most artist-addicts is that they eventually just start phoning it in.  Much of Clapton’s mid 70s stuff is just corporate rock with technically perfect but completely uninspired guitar playing. Even Slowhand, viewed at as something of a return to form when it came out in 1977, is pretty unspectacular…

So ok, we can give the guy a little leeway.  A lot of people didn’t know what to do with themselves in the aftermath of the 60s.  Perhaps Clapton was no different.  But then in the 80s, he goes from blandness to being a corporate whore.  It was truly depressing to see him morph into an Adult Contemporary type of guy, doing beer commercials, wearing those huge, tasteless suits, coiffed like a character out of Miami Vice, and, most of all, just making horrible music, culminating with Tears in Heaven. I know it’s harsh to say this about a song that was inspired by the death of his young son, but it’s hard to believe that the guy performing Tears in Heaven is the same guy playing guitar here.

When you get down to it, it’s really a matter of a guy with very bad taste, or maybe a guy who couldn’t find a way to expand outward from his creative peak and basically had to reinvent himself as something much tamer and less interesting. The Eric Clapton of the 80s and 90s is a completely different guy from the one who did such amazing things in the late 60s.  It goes without saying that he’s not alone in having changed the way he changed, but of all the rock guys who eventually sold every ounce of their souls to Rock ‘n Roll, Inc., Clapton is the one who is the most gifted with raw talent.  And this is what makes his transformation so infuriating…

On those rare occasions when my thoughts turn to Clapton anymore, I focus almost exclusively on that short window of time when he was one of the greats.  My favorite section of Badge has always been the Leslie-toned guitar break, which I’m guessing is actually George Harrison playing, since he plays on the song and was so fond of the sound created by a Leslie cabinet.  The whole song is great and still stands up. But when I hear it now, it reminds me that when a guy flies as high as Clapton flew, it often means that he just has so much farther to fall…