When rock and roll was first discovering itself, Eric Clapton was about making much more important music than a bunch of Chuck Berry-style tunes.
He was a missionary in many respects when he heard his first blues songs, and he made it his life’s goal to share his love of the blues with anyone who ever paid good money for a ticket whenever he put on a show. He wanted the chance to make all of his heroes proud, but a lot of that involved him trying to find his own voice rather than trying to copy everyone he ever listened to.
Granted, that was always bound to happen when he first got the gig playing with The Yardbirds. Every member of the band still had a lot of things to learn about the blues, but you can tell that Clapton was at least heading in the right direction when he started making waves on Five Live Yardbirds. He was someone everyone was keeping their eyes on, but by the time he started playing with John Mayall, you would have sworn he had been replaced with an old blues virtuoso in the span of a few years.
He finally had the chance to internalise everything that he had ever heard, and when he started to show his stuff in bands like Cream and Derek and the Dominos, his playing was a lot more fluid than it would become later. A lot of his 1970s work may have done just fine on the charts, but if you wanted to know the reason why he was considered one of the best of his generation, it was all about those few years when he was flying by the seat of his pants on every single record.
Because that’s what an old bluesman of his ilk was supposed to do. He was never meant to be in one place for any length of time, and while he had a lot of fun performing with people like Delaney and Bonnie and The Band, there was something missing from his sound for a long time. He was still playing as great as any guitarist could possibly be, but there were also lessons that he hadn’t fully learned from artists like Robert Johnson when he started dissecting his music.
‘Crossroads’ was already a staple of the blues circuit when ‘Slowhand’ performed it with Cream, but a lot of what Johnson was doing had nothing to do with the average blues vamp. A lot of what he was doing only required one guitar, and since all of his stuff was recorded primarily on acoustic, Clapton was intrigued and somewhat terrified at trying to capture the same kind of feeling when he started playing.
He had the chops to pull it off, but Clapton felt that what Johnson did came more from the passion in his playing than the actual notes, saying, “I was definitely overwhelmed, but I was also a bit repelled by the intensity of it. I kind of got hooked on it because it was so much more powerful than anything else I had heard or was listening to. Amongst all of his peers I felt he was the one that was talking from his soul without really compromising for anybody.” And if you listen to King of the Delta Blues Singers, you can hear a lot of what he’s talking about.
The vulnerability of the recording is almost unpleasant to listen to in some areas, but whenever Johnson opens his mouth, he means every single word he’s singing. Whether or not he actually went down to a crossroads and bargained with the devil for his talent, the sounds that he got out of his guitar was unlike anything when he started jumping into tunes like ‘Me and the Devil Blues’.
And since Clapton himself faced a lot of turmoil in his life, what he was doing was practically the inverse of what Johnson’s legend looked like. He had made a deal with Satan for his talent, but given all the darkness in Clapton’s history, he could practically rely on the blues as the one thing that would always bring him back home.
