When rock and roll was first discovering itself,\u00a0Eric Clapton\u00a0was about making much more important music than a bunch of Chuck Berry-style tunes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was a missionary in many respects when he heard his first blues songs, and he made it his life\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/em>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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He finally had the chance to internalise everything that he had ever heard, and when he started to show his stuff in bands\u00a0like Cream\u00a0and 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because that\u2019s 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\u2019t fully learned from artists like Robert Johnson when he started dissecting his music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Crossroads\u2019 was already a staple of the blues circuit when \u2018Slowhand\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n