http://www.eric-clapton.co.uk/
http://whereseric.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2sfelvHAlU (Layla)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYS732zyYfU (Cocaine)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI8SUc2SV4k (Sunshine of your Love)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NmHIxGaNWM (I’m So Glad)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60Mskdg5_HA (White Room)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2I6cP5YD9I (Badge)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVu-KC6Itq4 (Crossroads)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0LzNSdA-tw (Got to Get Better in a Little While)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsge-K8ezwQ (Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpSHNW96fEQ (Key to the Highway)
Jimmy Page: Eric synthesized the les paul sound. When he was with the bluesbreakers, it was just a magic combination. He got one of the marshall amps, and away he went. It just happened. I thought he played brilliantly then, really brilliantly.
Rory Gallagher: I have respect for Eric Clapton from the early days. He seems to be the icon of all guitarists including Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.
Ritchie Blackmore: Every lead guitarist should be thankful to Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Hendrix. They really started the whole thing off. I’d listen to Eric play before all these guys who just fly up and down the neck. And he did have that vibrato and he did turn me on to the Fender Strat. He did an awful lot.
Eddie Van Halen: Clapton is the only one who moved me. The only one who made me want to play the guitar.
Brian May: His fingers are directly wired to his soul.
Ian Anderson: I can never make up my mind if I’m happy being a flute player, or if I wish I were Eric Clapton.
O Clapton στην Ελλάδα:
After a brief spell with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Clapton set off in a large American car with a group of musicians known as “The Glands” with the intention to play their way around the world.
By the time they reached Athens (August of 1965), the band had splintered with some members returning home to England. Clapton persevered for a while, filling in with a Greek band (“Juniors”).
Το όνομα των JUNIORS συνδέθηκε μ’ ένα τραγικό γεγονός. Στις 18.10.65 σκοτώνονται σε τροχαίο δυστύχημα ο μπασίστας του γκρουπ Θάνος Σογιούλ, ο μάνατζέρ τους και άλλα δύο άτομα, ενώ συγχρόνως τραυματίζεται σοβαρά στο χέρι ο κιθαρίστας τους Αλέκος Καρακαντάς. Την εποχή εκείνη οι JUNIORS εμφανίζονταν στο club Igloo της Φωκίωνος Νέγρη. Σαν support τους εμφανιζόταν μια παρέα Άγγλων μουσικών (“The Glands”). Μετά το δυστύχημα, το Igloo πήγαινε για κλείσιμο. Τότε προσφέρθηκε ο κιθαρίστας του Αγγλικού γκρουπ (Eric Clapton) να αντικαταστήσει τον Καρακαντά στις εμφανίσεις του συγκροτήματος.
Στις 25.10.65 εμφανίστηκαν σε θριαμβευτική συναυλία στη μνήμη του Θάνου Σογιούλ στο σινεμά «Τερψιθέα» του Πειραιά, όπου είχε δημιουργηθεί από νωρίς το αδιαχώρητο. Οι JUNIORS σε ένδειξη πένθους φορούσαν μαύρα περιβραχιόνια και ο Clapton μαύρο πουκάμισο.
Clapton returned to London with his guitar and rejoined the Mayall group in November of 1965.
What’s your domestic background?
CLAPTON: I was semi-adopted. I was brought up by my grandparents because my mother went away when I was very young and got married to someone. I grew up in the local schools around Ripley in Surrey and went to art school (Kingston Art College).
What sort of kid were you at school?
CLAPTON: I was the one that used to get stones thrown at me because I was so thin and couldn’t do physical training very well! One of those types. I was always the seven-stone (98-pound) weakling. I used to hang out with three or four other kids who were all on that same kind of predicament. The outcasts. They used to call us the loonies.
What effect did that have on you?
CLAPTON: It was quite nice in a way because we started up a little clique. Although we were underprivileged, we were the first ones to get Buddy Holly records and things like that. I mean, we were considered freaks because of things like that.
What happened at art school?
CLAPTON: I played records in the lunch break most of the time! That’s also where I started to play guitar and began listening to blues records all the time.
Who in particular?
CLAPTON: Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy…I could go on for hours. There’s no point. Just the blues.
How did you get to hear these records in the first place?
CLAPTON: I think they used to play a couple of them on the radio. It’s unbelievable that things like that were getting through but they were. So I started looking around and buying them. I started out by liking Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry and people like that who were the first things I ever bought, but then I’d read things on the back of album covers like, “rock’n’roll has its roots in blues,” and stuff like that. And so I thought, what’s that all about? I’ll have to find out.
How were you performing at this point?
CLAPTON: Casually. I wasn’t professional, didn’t have a band. I was just a blues aficionado with a guitar attempting to sing.
What happened after that?
CLAPTON: I bummed around for a bit. I tried busking around Kingston and Richmond and of course it was the beat scene then so if you sat in a pub and played “San Francisco Bay Blues” and stuff like that, you’d get a drink and a sandwich and perhaps even somewhere to sleep for the night. Then my mum and dad, that’s to say my grandparents, were getting a bit pissed off because I obviously wasn’t making a name for myself in their eyes, so I went to work with my old man on the building site for a couple of months. And that was good fun. At the same time, I was playing clubs in the evenings with a band called the Roosters.
Did Casey Jones and the Engineers come next?
CLAPTON: Oh dear! Yeh. Didn’t last long though. But it got my chops together. It was all good experience. The Mersey thing was just happening and to be in a group like Casey Jones and the Engineers, I mean, you got a few good gigs just because he was a Liverpudlian.
Were you an original member of the Yardbirds?
CLAPTON: No. They’d already been going a couple of months and they’d had a lead guitarist who’d quit, or they’d chucked him out, and just by word of mouth I got the job. Then they wanted to make a hit record and I wasn’t ready for that at the time. I probably never have been unless it’s on my terms. But they thought that if they changed what they wore and did more Top 40-type material they would get a hit record, and that’s just exactly when I left them. I played on the record [“For Your Love”/“Got To Hurry”], it was OK, but I could see it was a pop tune written for the purpose of getting into the charts and nothing else. I think I left after the session. I was only out of work for a couple of weeks, though, and then John Mayall called me up and said, would I like to be in his band, and that suited me fine because it was a blues band and I was going through my purist number then. So it suited me down to the ground. For me, in those days, blues was the only kind of music and I didn’t like anything else.
Were you aware of any gathering acclaim for you as a guitarist during your Yardbirds days?
CLAPTON: You can count on one hand how many white guitar players were playing the blues at the time. I’m not going to say Keith Richards and Brian Jones weren’t doing it, but they were more into Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. I wanted to be more like Freddy King and B.B. King. So I had no competition.
You were number one in a field of one.
CLAPTON: Exactly.
By the time you cut the ‘Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton’ LP, John Mayall was giving you star billing, which he never gave later guitarists like Peter Green and Mick Taylor.
CLAPTON: The reason John acquiesced so much was the pressure I put on him, in terms of what material we could do. I’m not saying it was an aggressive thing on my part. Being a bandleader for so long and making all those decisions, it was refreshing for him to hand it over to someone he could trust musically to come up with something new.
What was the contributing factor in your decision to leave Mayall?
CLAPTON: Don’t’ forget that at that point I was only turning twenty-one. You had this dichotomy of a guy who was a serious blues musician and was also a very wild young man. There was the adolescent side of me that wanted to get out and see the world. So I was split down the middle. If it hadn’t been for that, if I’d been totally dedicated to the band, I might very well still be with him. As it was, I was feeding on a lot of other directions, and I started to look at the whole Mayall thing as a dead-end street. And that’s when Cream started to be an appealing idea. It was the complete freedom of starting something that had no bounds.
How much did the emerging San Francisco rock aesthetic affect the jamming aspect of Cream?
CLAPTON: With Cream, any one of us could have played unaccompanied for a good length of time. So you put the three of us together in front of an audience willing to dig it limitlessly, we could have gone anywhere. And we did. Maybe we should not have been allowed that much luxury. We probably started burning out at that point. We were just going for the moon every time we played, instead of confining it and economizing.
How was “Sunshine of Your Love” written?
CLAPTON: We’d been to see Hendrix about two nights before at the Saville Theatre, in London. He’d been here for about six months, and he played this gig that was just blinding. I don’t think Jack had really taken him in before; I knew what the guy was capable of from the minute I met him. It was the complete embodiment of the different aspects of rock & roll guitar rolled up into one. I could sense it coming off the guy. Jack took a little longer to realize what was happening. And when he did see it that night, after the gig he went home and came up with the riff. It was strictly a dedication to Jimi. And then we wrote a song on top of it.
Do you think Cream might have survived its personality problems if you had asserted yourself more?
CLAPTON: It was not possible to do. I did not have, nor do I have now, the amount of personal power or aggression to keep the other two guys in place. And I wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t have been right to try and exercise authority over them. Jack is a far superior musical brain that I am, and he could argue his way out of anything I could insist on. Ginger would simply not accept it. It would be too much of a battle for me to take it on. Cream was a shambling circus of diverse personalities who happened to find that catalyst together. And when it burned out, it burned out. We couldn’t save it. And probably didn’t want to, until later. We all had regrets over the years. I miss those good times, the companionship. I have never been, since then, with two other guys that I felt so completely akin with. I also got hurt quite a lot in that band, really badly hurt. And ever since, then, I have managed to keep a certain amount of distance between myself and the other musicians I’ve worked with. I don’t let anyone get that close to me anymore.
Your next band, Blind Faith, was probably the most aptly named combo in rock history. Were you or the others prepared for the over expectations that greeted you?
CLAPTON: What happened was that we didn’t rehearse enough, we didn’t get to know each other enough, we didn’t go through enough trials and tribulations before the big time came. We went straight into the big gigs and I came offstage shaking like a leaf because I felt once again that I’d let people down. There are 36,000 people waiting to there for what you’re going to do and if it’s not what you think is right - no way! And then I met Delaney and Bonnie on the second night of the '69 American tour and they were just such downhome humble cats and they were getting very litte applause, very little money, and the only reason they were on the bill was because I’d asked for them to be the second act. So I started a rapport with Delaney, which became very strong and severed my relationship with Blind Faith.
What do you think of the ‘Blind Faith’ album in retrospect?
CLAPTON: I think it’s a lovely album. I like its looseness. It’s like a supersession record, except it’s got a little something more than that. You can’t feel there’s a lot of longing in the band.
Derek and the Dominos. Looking back now at the power and musical clarity of ‘Layla’, it’s hard to believe it was recorded amid such heavy drug consumption. Didn’t your habit get in the way?
CLAPTON: We were very fit. We would have saunas, go sun-bathing and swimming during the day and then go to the studio and get loaded. It didn’t affect the playing or the sessions. But as is the way with drugs, it would catch up later.
Did touring aggravate the Dominos’ drug problem?
CLAPTON: Yes. We scored a massive amount of coke and Heroin before we left Florida and took it on tour. I don’t know how we got through it with the amount we were taking. I couldn’t do it; I would die now. Even the idea of it frightens me. But it definitely wore the band down and introduced a lot of hostility that wasn’t naturally there. It drove a wedge between each one of us - we couldn’t communicate anymore.
Did you fall out of love with the guitar in the Seventies? The emphasis on LPs like ‘461 Ocean Boulevard’ and ‘Slowhand’ was more on laid-back grooves than torrid solos.
CLAPTON: For most of the Seventies, I was content to lay back and do what I had to do with the least amount of effort. I was very grateful to be alive. I didn’t want to push it. I was also tired to gymnastic guitar playing. And not only was I tired of it in myself, it seemed the advent of Cream and Led Zeppelin had woken up a whole specter of guitar players who just wanted to burn themselves into infinity. The more I heard about that, the more I wanted to back off. I started to identify with like-minded people like J.J. Cale.
What role does the guitar play in your current sound? It’s not the primary vehicle now as it was with Cream or the Dominos.
CLAPTON: It’s still my voice. When I hear a piece of music in my head, I don’t hear a song. I hear the guitar part. So I write words to that and sing it. The guitar is first and foremost in my head. Once it’s done that in my head, I use the guitar to embellish the voice. It’ll always be there. I’ll always try to play with the most amount of soul through the guitar. I can’t do that through my voice, because I don’t have that ability as a singer. I have to shift that emphasis at some point to the guitar.
What do you do in your free time? If you weren’t a musician, what else would you be, careerwise?
CLAPTON: Well, I love to go fishing, but I don’t think I could make a - I don’t think I could actually make a living at it. But maybe I’d be a - I don’t know, a pool player. I love to play pool as well. Kind of meaningless things. I’m also a very, very journeyman designer. I like to design all kinds of things, furniture, clothes, artifacts, anything.
