It’s impossible for any true artist to stop being creative on a whim. There will always be a different way of twisting music into a different shape, but Eric Clapton eventually felt that he had said all he wanted to say years before he made some of his true classics.
But when listening to Clapton’s greatest solos, he would gladly tell you that he wasn’t reinventing the wheel every single time he made a record. There were fine solo breaks on nearly everything he touched, but that came from him listening to the biggest names in blues and infusing them into a rock context. For a genre that was only just getting born, though, Clapton’s status as a rock god all came from him taking the blues and making it acceptable for rock and roll.
Although The Beatles were still the biggest thing in England, there was no one who could hope to touch a band like The Yardbirds in terms of raw chops. Despite the Rolling Stones being one of the reigning kings of blues rock at the time, Clapton was already playing circles around everyone else before he was even out of his teens, and listening to Five Live Yardbirds, all of the magic is already there.
When the band started venturing more towards pop, though, Clapton needed to draw the line somewhere. He was always meant to be a bluest purist in his mind, so when they started making tracks like ‘For Your Love’, there was no place for his bluesy riffs anymore. They wanted to be a pop band, and while Clapton decided to step off for a little while, he seriously considered backing out of music for a while.
In retrospect, Clapton remembered fully expecting to hang up his guitar after he left the band, saying, “I actually thought I was going to retire. I mean that was like when I was 18 years old I thought, it’s over. Because they all want the same thing. I mean every band I looked at all had the same agenda: Let’s get a hit record and recording contract. And I kind of went, and then what? That was it. It seemed to be that was the end of the road.”
If there’s one person that we can credit with saving Clapton, though, it was John Mayall. Although the Bluesbreakers hadn’t yet become the major blues rock outfit that they would become, the record Clapton made with them helped give him an artistic canopy. Here he was free to play as many blues licks as he wanted, and after honing his chops and being declared a guitar “god”, Cream was the next best place for him to go.
No one in the power trio was thinking about commercial success when they made records, and half the time their songs could extend into jams whenever they played them live. And for someone as indebted to blues as Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker helped keep him on his toes in terms of what licks he could play when working in areas like acid rock and jazz whenever a track came on.
Clapton may have been entirely fed up with the music industry by the time The Yardbirds had ended up, but the real tragedy would have been about him bowing out so soon. Because even if he thought that the music industry was going in the wrong direction in the 1960s, everyone would have been robbed had they not heard songs like ‘Steppin’ Out’ only a few months later.
