ERIC CLAPTON: Return Of The Reluctant Hero

There was once a movie actor who, having made his name as a heavy, took to playing the romantic lead. But no matter how often he wore a white hat or rode into the sunset, he was always the heavy.

For many rock fans, Eric Clapton remains the guitar hero, a memory from the 60’s, not flesh and blood, almost as if he had died, not Hendrix. The role was one he played reluctantly even then, a piece of type-casting he has endeavored for years to live down.

As long ago as 1970 he told a reporter, “I don’t think guitar playing is enough. It’s very hard for me to see why anyone would laud a cat who just plays guitar. It’s really not enough somehow.” Not for him maybe, but it satisfied a legion of fetishistic fans.

Such feelings of personal dissatisfaction date from further back. He had tired of deification and abdicated for Hendrix at least two years earlier, even before his frustration within Cream’s triangular confines had been chronically intensified by his introduction to the Band and Music From Big Pink.

“It was that potent,” he explains, not for the first time, yet with the undiminished fervor of St. Paul recounting his jaunt to Damascus. “I got hold of a bootleg tape from somewhere at the end of that last Cream tour, the one before the farewell tour, and I used to take it and put it on as soon as I checked in to my hotel room and listen to it and then go and do the gig and be utterly miserable and then rush back and put the tapes on and listen to them and go to sleep fairly contented until I woke up the next morning and remembered who I was and what I was doing.”

Only hindsight enables those who were separated from rock’s elite by press enclosures and Hell’s Angels to understand the impact of an album that could hardly be said to have taken the charts by storm. “It was,” as Clapton puts it, “very much a closed shop. It wasn’t publicly exposed the same way as it was to the musicians. I had to go and see what they looked like right after I got the Big Pink album, so I went up to Woodstock and visited, and they turned out to be great people, incredibly great people, very intelligent, very tight. And I was in awe of them ever since.”

"Playing Isn’t everything."

So he forsook Cream and guitar bravura, leaving “Badge” on Goodbye as a sketch map of where he was heading. Blind Faith—his first, abortive attempt to embody his newly absorbed principles of candidness, subtlety, eclecticism and understatement—failed largely because of the crushing external pressures of an industry that assessed quality in terms of commercial potential and a press and public whose mindless anticipation imbued the group’s choice of name with ironic overtones.

“It started out so quietly,” Clapton recalls. “It went for a long time, just jamming and rehearsing, before anyone knew anything about it, and suddenly...BANG! We were faced with the ultimate dilemma: that we weren’t ready and they were.”

The group’s chances of survival were slight from the start; they died altogether when Clapton pulled the tubes out almost as soon as that first and last American tour got under way. On George Harrison’s enthusiastic recommendation Delaney and Bonnie had been hired as support act and Clapton became instantly and unshakably infatuated with both them and their music.

“I was so turned on by them,” he admits, “I thought I could somehow try and stay in Blind Faith and skip off and do that as well. But Blind Faith didn’t work like that. They wanted what I should’ve wanted too: a very tight, integral unit. But I didn’t. I was feeling quite free. So that went by the board. I don’t think Stevie’s ever forgiven me somehow.”

It’s easy to dismiss his subsequent brief dalliance with Delaney and Bonnie as a married man’s distant, inconsequential bit-on-the-side, but for Clapton it was a significant union. With them he found the will and the confidence to sing and in their backing band his future sidemen (most notably bassist Carl Radle, who he’s used ever since), while Delaney introduced him to J.J. Cale.

His recording of Cale’s “After Midnight” in 1970 marks the start of a lasting admiration that has revealed itself repeatedly in his vocal and guitar style, and he talks about Cale with the same mixture of affection and respect he shows for the Band: “The subtlest character around! When we were doing the Slowhand album, he came to town to do the New Vic. He was so good! It was just like the fucking record, except that he didn’t play it the same. It was the same intensity. We stood in the wings and watched him and whispered to each other. It was really good...And you should see his guitar—it’s unbelieuable. It’s got no back to it. It’s an old acoustic with about eight pick-ups—and they all work—and he gets the most amazing combination of sounds put of it. He can get a wah-wah without using a pedal, for instance. He’s a real genius with electronics...We brought him down to the studio to listen to ‘Cocaine,’ to see what he thought of our version of it. And he liked it...And he got us to go and play with him at the New Vic. So me and Carl, I think it was, went on and joined in and played ‘Cocaine’.”

In fact, “Cocaine,” though Cale’s song, is less an homage to him than another track on Slowhand, “Lay Down Sally,” written by Clapton and Marcy Levy, and, as Clapton puts it, “as close as I can get, being English.” “Cocaine” itself was recorded “because he nicked the ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ riff. It was a straight lift. I told him. I said, ‘Look, man, you don’t mind me doing this, but you did nick that riff!’ And it is pretty fucking obvious.”

Released as a single, Clapton’s “After Midnight” made the American top twenty in December 1970, anticipating popular recognition of Cale’s unique talents by several years, and again in 1974 Clapton showed that he was still ahead of the pack with a No. 1 (his first) cover of the Wailers’ “I Shot The Sheriff,” when reggae, in the States at least, meant Johnny Nash.

"If l don't go out and...play, I will go broke."

In the second case, if not the first, Clapton’s success clearly helped prime public taste, as had his championing of the blues guitarists some 10 years before, yet he allows himself no bows or bouquets.

“It’s a funny stance to take. I put myself in the firing line, because the artist who I’m covering can either resent me or feel grateful, and when I met Bob it wasn’t very clear what he felt about it, if anything at all. I feel it’s a bit indulgent to sit back and feel content about it. And what do you do when you meet the man? Pat him on the head and say, didn’t I do you a good turn? You’ve got to preserve a little bit of humility. I have to allow myself to think maybe he resents it in a way.”

Ironically, this tireless paladin' of black music has an uncomfortable reputation for racist opinionizing, which dates specifically from a moment’s drunken blathering which in a barroom of other drunken blatherers would have been forgotten with the morning’s hangover, but spouted at the mike before a packed house was as generally misinterpreted as it was widely reported. His unfortunate tirade was rooted in patriotism rather than racism, spurred by indignation at England’s apparent capitulation to the oil sheiks’ shekels. But that loud-mouthed night will take a long time to live down.

“It’s terrible,” he groans. “I’ve been rehearsing at Island a little bit recently with Ginger because he wants to get an album out and I said I’d give him a hand. And all the time down at Island’s Hammersmith complex there’s lots of rasta men about, just hanging out, playing pool, having a smoke. One of them came up to me the other day and said, ‘Is it true you really don’t like black people?’ I went oh no, and it all came back to me about the night in Birmingham when I said something about Enoch Powell.

I must’ve rabbitted on about nothing... foreigners...and actually I remembered the other day what started it was the upsurge in London of Arab money—spending and their total lack of respect for other people’s property—‘How much is Hyde Park?’ and all that—and for some reason it all came pouring out of me that night and Enoch Powell was involved in it.

“And it still lives to this day. There are black West Indians and rasta men about who look at me with a very strange look. And it’s a shame because there’s nothing I can do. I keep saying, ‘No, man, it was a joke, I was drunk.’ And that doesn’t help, because they don’t like people who drink either!”

★ ★ ★

If Slowhand is part tribute to J.J. Cale, Clapton’s previous album, No Reason To Cry, was part belated acknowledgement of his debt to the Band, though their presence on the recording and the inclusion of a couple of their songs was initially unplanned.

“Tulsa musicians in L.A.,” Clapton explains, referring to his own band, “behave very strangely. They tend to get very lazy or want to knock around. The Band actually owning the ranch where it was recorded, they were there most of the time, and Rick Danko, who’s a real hustler, would be there trying to push songs or something, so you’d just have to show up there and they’d be ready to play, and my band would still be by the pool. So it just happened.”

There were other celebrated guests on the sessions: Bob Dylan, Ron Wood, Billy Preston, Van Morrison, Jesse Ed Davis...

“I think it worked out okay. I just think that it was misinterpreted by the people who reviewed it. One of the reviews said I was ‘cronying’— hanging out and getting everyone to play on the record—and actually it was true, but...it was a very, very strong time at that studio, because it had been empty and hadn’t been used, and suddenly all these people showed up from nowhere, and it was very hard to get any work done, because people kept walking in and picking up instruments and just playing. So the album’s got that on it, and if that’s wrong, well, fuck it!”

And the outtakes sound like a bootlegger’s wet dream: “I had a magnificent birthday party right in the middle of the sessions and we decided to record everything and everybody that came into the studio. There’s Billy singing a couple of Ray Charles songs with the Band backing him. Superb stuff. Jesse Ed Davis, me, Robbie and Woody on guitars. Amazing stuff! And he [Dylan] showed up about eight o’clock in the morning and it just went on from there. New songs— he was making them up. And arguments going on about this and that, and lots of gossip about other musicians... We dissected the Beatles one by one. Most of it was Bob talking. He’s a very funny character, all he needs is a word to spark him off and he’ll get really intense and won’t give a shit what he’s saying. You just sit there amazed that this guy’s being so outrageous, and then he’ll just flip into a song and it’s all forgotten and you carry on...The only way I’ve ever been able to communicate with him is on a very jovial level. I can’t imagine talking seriously to him about anything. He’s got too much humor. He’s all wit.”

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★★★

Wit? I’ll say! Did you hear the one about...“the time he Came down and we were trying to work and he goes in there and swans around for a little while in a black leather suit he’s just got, and he managed to steal my percussionist’s chick, who had one leg in a cast because she’d broken it. Not only that, but he stole all the clothes off Woody’s bed, took the chick out through the window and shagged her in the tent in the garden outside the studio he had there ready for the occasion. With a cast on her leg! Outrageous fellow!”

★★★

Since Clapton returned from the dead or, more precisely, the walking wounded, almost four years ago, he has (discounting one or two inevitable changes) kept the same band together. That’s longer than he stuck with Cream, Derek and the Dominos, Mayall, the Yardbirds, you name it. And yet this longest lasting line-up remains persistently less well-known than almost any other. Whenever people ask him what he’s up to and who he’s playing with, he has to run through the names: George Terry, Carl Radle, Dick Sims, Jamie Oldaker, Marcy Levy, (Yvonne Elliman having quit to work solo last year). And it’s not just the punters who don’t know who’s who, only have eyes and ears for Eric.

“It even comes down to the lighting crew,” he sighs. “They sometimes don’t know and I’ll just be playing chords with George playing a solo, and they’ll keep the spotlight on me. And I have to keep gesturing: over there, over there. I don’t know what that means.”

That enforced anonymity is hard on a band that plays so right, where every note and everyone counts, where the girls have meant much much more than the usuaT supporting “chicks.” Clapton agrees: “In every sense they’re real people, musicians too, that’s the thing. They were very strong, very, very strong Indeed. It was a great temptation for me to walk off the stage and let them have half an hour each, cos they could’ve done it—multi-instruments and what have you...But I can’t ever approach anyone as being anything other than a musician. For instance, I could never work with a vocalist, the idea of backing up a vocalist who can’t play anything...”

Leaves him speechless.

★★★

So what now? The longest tour since the one that tore Cream apart 10 years ago; a live album, most likely because “they’re very much of the opinion here [at RSO] that that is my forte—live albums—not in terms of artistry, but financial success.” And then?

“I’d like to just cruise on at a very steady speed for a long time, rather than go up in flames, I could survive, I imagine, on the royalties that I’ve... but that’s such a hypothetical question, because the company could fold and I’d go with it. There are so many different ways of looking at it.

“But in actual fact I get more money going on the road than I do from records. By miles. Twenty times as much. And that’s always the incentive. The minute I stop thinking—how’s the money coming in?—it’s just too easy then. I’ve got to force myself into a position where I think, well if I don’t go out and fucking play, I will go broke.

“Cos playing isn’t everything. You’ve got a home life. You build up a little kind of empire: your house and a woman and people that depend on you. You can’t just lie back. So you’ve got to pretend that you’re actually on the verge of bankrupey, so that you can go out and graft. Otherwise you just sit back and get fat and do fuck all.

“The real dilemma is that you have to face up to management trying to convince you all the time that you never have to do another thing in your life if you don’t want to. That’s what I get from Robert [Stigwood] every time I see him: if you want to pack it in, you can pack it in now, you don’t have to do another thing, you’re secure for the rest of your life. And that’s the last thing you want to fucking hear! It’s like you’re out to pasture.

“I don’t ever want to be broke again, nobody wants that, but I’ve got to keep myself in preparation for it mentally and spiritually somehow, even if it means creating a fantasy.”