Eric Clapton didn’t get into the business to be a songwriter.
There were a lot of roads he could have gone down as a guitarist, and even if he stood by and played the occasional solo in Cream, he would have still been regarded as one of the finest players that the world had ever seen. But the biggest rule of any great musician is to continue exploring, and Clapton wasn’t going to rest until he covered all the bases that he wanted whenever he got back to the studio.
But if we’re talking about Clapton, all roads lead back to the blues. The minute that he heard the old blues records coming over from the US, he made it his life’s goal to spread the word of that music to the next generation. The Yardbirds may have been a great way for him to hone his chops, but it only took a couple of years before he figured that the pop direction wasn’t working out. He wanted to live and breathe the blues in every sense, and ‘For Your Love’ was far from the road he wanted to go down.
Clapton may have started off with the blues, there was always going to be room for him to grow. When he first struck out on his own, his period as a laid-back soft-rocker is actually a lot better than most people give it credit for. There are a handful of albums that would disappoint anyone looking to hear the same guy who turned up on ‘Strange Brew’ and ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, but his love of artists like The Band bleeds through in every track he made on records like Slowhand.
It was a far cry from the bluesy freakouts that he played with Cream, but the two genres weren’t mutually exclusive for Clapton, either. All the great bluesmen knew how to tell a story just as well as any great songwriter like James Taylor or Robbie Robertson, and when Clapton first started cutting his teeth in the world of soft rock, there were always bound to be tunes like ‘Cocaine’ that took cues from blues legends.
Whereas JJ Cale may have helped Clapton in that respect, Robert Cray was a bold new talent when he first laid eyes on him. Despite getting his start in the 1970s, Clapton knew that Cray was speaking the same language he was whenever he cut one of his tunes. But if Clapton had his songwriter side and his blues side, Cray somehow found a way to put them all under one roof whenever he performed.
And when looking at his technique, Clapton would have given anything to have that kind of talent, saying, “It’s the most difficult thing to write, a modern blues. The only person I know who can do it well is Robert Cray. It comes straight out of him. I saw him recently this year, and he’s still doing it. He’s on fire, the real thing. I wish I could be like that. Really, I’m a musician. I try to be a singer and songwriter, and it’s interesting to me. But I would never think of myself as that.”
Which probably explains why some of Clapton’s bluesiest songs are often covered. He certainly knows how to dress up a guitar part like ‘Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out’, but the key to those songs were always about letting the music do the talking instead of relying on him pouring his heart out like everyone else.
So while ‘Tears in Heaven’ could be counted as a blues with a lot more bells and whistles, Clapton knew that he would never attempt to reach Cray’s level of songwriting. ‘Slowhand’ had his fair share of hardship in his life to write something like that, but having that much attention to detail in one’s songwriting is a talent that can’t be taught.
