In the 1960s, London graffiti declared that Clapton is God. As he turns 70, can the guitarist lay claim to still being the best?
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On Monday, Eric Clapton turned 70. He has been acclaimed as a guitar hero since he first surfaced on the burgeoning London blues rock scene in the early Sixties with the Yardbirds and the Bluesbreakers. By 1967, an anonymous graffiti artist coined the phrase "Clapton Is God". He has been a global guitar legend for more than 50 years. But just how good is he really?
Not being a virtuoso myself, I thought I'd ask a few professionals. "His repertoire of licks and variations on the blues scale extends towards the infinite and his phrasing can be exquisite," says Reid Savage, session guitarist and music teacher.
"Clapton always brings an indefinable extra twist of fluidity to his phrasing. He's a singer too and really knows where to weave his playing into a lead vocal. He's got such fury and fire in his belly, he almost hits bum notes but his deep understanding of scales means he can play his way out of any tight corner. He's pretty sodding fantastic."
What gives Clapton a unique place in history, however, is his timing. And I'm not talking here about technique. "The album Eric did with John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers is seminal for all rock guitarists," says Steve Hackett, the virtuoso progressive rocker and former lead guitarist with Genesis.
The album was recorded in 1965, following Clapton's brief stint with the Yardbirds and while he was on the verge of forming Cream. Hackett was 16 when he first heard the album, known to fans as Beano (because of the comic Clapton is reading on the cover), and it changed his life. Clapton was already a veteran of 21.
"The guitar was really the star of the show from the opening note. It's the touch, the finger vibrato, the tone. It's also the incredible combination of a Gibson Les Paul guitar and Marshall amp combo, which Eric has said was all he could afford at the time, so there is a certain amount of serendipity.
"The hit-and-miss technique of standing near an amp to get great sustain, that was something he very quickly mastered. He did it just before everyone else, though The Who, Jeff Beck and Peter Green were all going that way. So there is something about being the right man in the right place at the right time with the right guitar and right equipment. It's an extraordinary sound, great control, masses of distortion, fabulous finger vibrato, spontaneous playing and the first time it all comes together is on that album. All my pals would sit around listening to it into the night, hanging on every note. That is the birth of the guitar hero."
There had been virtuoso electric guitarists before. In jazz, there was Les Paul himself, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass and more. Black electric blues had given the world such charismatic stylists as Muddy Waters, BB King, Albert King and Freddie King. Rock'n'roll elevated the silvery country licks of Scotty Moore, James Burton and Carl Perkins, and the charged up R'n'B of Chuck Berry, a style extended by Keith Richards in the Rolling Stones.
And then, almost simultaneously, three ground-breaking young guitar slingers from Surrey began making waves on the London scene: Clapton, Beck and Jimmy Page. But Clapton was slightly ahead of the curve, and one reason may have to do with his near fanatical blues purism. Clapton was playing guitar from 13 and the first music he fell in love with was American blues. A young middle-class boy, he had a record player, and spent his time seeking out obscure imported vinyl to learn from.
"In England we were bombarded with pop more than anything else," Clapton once told me. "You had to consciously steer a path towards black soul or blues. Most of the players in the rock framework were coming from a rockabilly stance. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck grew up listening to white guitar players like Scotty Moore and Cliff Gallup. I was obsessed with black blues guitar players, and for me the ultimate problem was trying to shift that style into a Chuck Berry rock format."
A somewhat troubled young loner, Clapton applied himself diligently to the task. "Blues is a language you have to learn, like learning French," he told me. "It's not about a feeling, it's an action. There's a lot to learn and it means going to the library and listening to just about everything that was ever done and trying to learn from that.
"And then something happens. If you do your work and do your best to carry the burden of the past and the fellowship of the blues, so you know you've done all your research and you've studied everything you can, I think if you really love the music you'll start to express it your own way. It's almost impossible not to."
"All these different guitarists would have their famous five licks, and Clapton learnt them all," says Reid Savage. "He mastered those early blueprints to perfection, so he had a dozen licks, then two dozen, and he would link them up on the pentatonic blues scale in ways that gave him almost unlimited twists and wiggles, played utterly heroically, I think.
"He was one of the first guys to really turn it up, so the amplifier started to bend toward feedback and get a really cutting tone. In rock, guitar soloing wasn't much more advanced than Chuck Berry. No one had heard this kind of extended extemporisation before. He owed a debt to the original blues guys, but everyone else was learning their chops from him."
If there is a guitarist who the rock world universally acknowledges as number one, it is not Clapton, however. Jimi Hendrix appeared on the London scene in late 1966, and by all accounts his sudden emergence shook Clapton's confidence. "You never told me he was that good!" a chain-smoking Clapton complained to Hendrix's manager Chas Chandler after the American prodigy jammed with Cream at Regent Street Polytechnic.
But Clapton recovered in an interesting way, by extending his range. He formed Cream with two jazz players, worked with Steve Winwood in the blues soul fusion of Blind Faith and left them to play acoustic guitar as a sideman to his folky blues support act, Delaney & Bonnie, moving on from them to the fierce pop rock of Derek & The Dominoes with American virtuoso Duane Allman.
In the space of a few years, he played memorable sessions with The Beatles, solo George Harrison and John Lennon, Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Guy, Frank Zappa and Leon Russell. He embraced reggae, popularising Bob Marley's I Shot the Sheriff. It is all indicative of a powerful musical curiosity.
He also developed as a singer and songwriter, with a canon of classics, including Layla, Bell Bottom Blues and Let It Grow (as well as sentimental ballads Wonderful Tonight and Tears in Heaven). He has never stopped touring and recording, with 23 solo studio albums since 1970. On the question of whether he is still a significant player, his professional admirers seem united.
"He is still the best in the world, for my money," says the contemporary blues virtuoso Joe Bonamassa. "I think a musician's ability to reinvent their playing is the most important quality they could have. Eric's playing has a depth of life in it now that wasn't there in 1966. Just listen to Groaning the Blues from the album From the Cradle (1994) and tell me if it is not one of the greatest recorded blues solos of all time? Or River of Tears from One More Car, One More Rider (2002). He's just on fire, like he is saying to all the kids - beat that!"
"He's a brave player," says Hackett. "He's got the control to risk mistakes, taking a chance on something. He's developed a fine bottle-neck style over the years, slide style and finger style as well, occasionally picking a nylon string guitar, but I think it's still as an electric guitarist that he's particularly thrilling.
"Whatever you do on rock guitar, as soon as it starts to scream and sound remotely good, you are going to sound a little bit like Eric."
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, LONDON