Eric Clapton on The Last Authentic Guitarist

On November 16, 2024By Littum

(Credits: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi)

Fri 15 November 2024 at 5pm, UK

Everything a musician does must be from the heart. While they may have taken inspiration from wherever they wanted, it was always important to make something that stood on its own and could be held up as a standard of what a musician looks like when they are totally uninhibited. Eric Clapton may have tried his best to emulate some of the blues greats he heard as a child, but he thought this blues icon was one of the few originals he saw out in the wild.

Looking back on Clapton’s history, however, the blues never quite left his soul. There are pieces of his sound that are still indebted to the world of psychedelia or the singer-songwriter boo that happened around the early 1970s, but even listening to his mellow material, it was not out of the question for him to turn a song into an impromptu blues jam too.

Then again the sound started to have a few diminishing returns in it as well. While there were still many parts of Clapton’s sound that worked well with the crowd, it was hard to look at his Disconnected album or his later output on Traveler and don’t think he traded everything in for toothless dad music.

And given where he went later, it seemed that Clapton was growing tired of that model as well. While albums like Pilgrim still had their sleepier moments, hearing him work with legends like BB King and pay tribute to Robert Johnson for an entire album was a way to re-establish himself as the blues icon most of us knew was always there but never really got a chance to shine.

Despite wearing his love for Johnson on his sleeve, Clapton knew there was something more interesting going on with Robert Cray. As well as being one of the newer faces on the blues scene, Cray was one of the few who seemed to go back to the old Muddy Waters and Albert King records and learn them note-for-note, with the same fire in say that ‘Slowhand’ would have recognized then.

Although the blues has fallen into its own niche in recent years, Clapton said he was certain that Cray was one of the truest blues icons of the modern era, saying“I think it’s one thing to talk about (the blues), but I don’t see it happening. The blues seems to be dying a slow and graceful death, I mean how will it survive? All players disappear. It’s really up to Robert Cray. He is the only player I know who is completely, completely authentic.”

Since then, however, there are still artists who are willing to also turn the blues in different directions. While the likes of Gary Clark Jr and Joe Bonamassa do exactly what it says on the tin in terms of dirty blues, Jack White has been one of the frontrunners in making the genre something new, whether it’s incorporating it into his solo albums or shoehorning his sound into projects with A Tribe Called Quest or Beyoncé.

So while Clapton may think the blues has fallen into obscurity, it’s not about playing something that will make the older crowd happy. Any genre thrives on innovation, and as long as people are willing to push the boundaries within the genre, going out of style will never mean anything.

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