‘Eric Clapton is God’, the walls of London read in the mid-1960s, if you believe the hype.
Certainly, by 1974 and the release of461 Ocean Boulevard, Eric Patrick Clapton–born in Ripley, Surrey, on 30 March 1945–had made his mark as a guitar player of rare skill and attack.
‘It was just graffiti,’ Clapton toldRolling Stone in 1988. ‘It didn’t have any deep meaning. It was just a kind of accolade. They could have said anything, ‘Clapton is fantastic….’ It was nice, and I didn’t argue with it. I have never yet understood what the fuss was about.’ Eric, interviewed by Alex Coletti in 2007:
The first guitar I ever had was a gut-string Spanish guitar, and I couldn’t really get the hang of it. I was only thirteen, and I talked my grandparents into buying it for me. I tried and tried and tried but got nowhere with it. I finally gave up after a year and a half. I started getting interested in the guitar again after hearing Muddy Waters because it sounded like it was easier–wrong! I wanted an electric guitar and, again, I talked my grandparents into buying me one. And, actually, within a very short period of time, I got somewhere with it. I bumped into people who had the same interests–who liked Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Big Bill Broonzy, Robert Johnson. And those people were the original Yardbirds; we used to play together a lot at parties and ended up forming an official band.
He joined The Yardbirds in October 1963, aged eighteen, after short spells in local bands. The Yardbirds tried very hard to be authentic, even touring as the backing band for American blues wailer Sonny Boy Williamson, but had little commercial success initially.
Clapton riled against The Yardbirds’ plan to release a pop single; he abruptly left the band on 25 March 1965, the day ‘For Your Love’ was released. ‘Totally disillusioned,’ Clapton wrote later, ‘I was at that point ready to quit the music business altogether.’
The Yardbirds recruited Jeff Beck, then Jimmy Page, but despite the post- Clapton hit singles ‘Heart Full of Soul’, ‘Shapes of Things’ and ‘Over Under Sideways Down’, failed to find a strong identity. They would eventually mutate into Led Zeppelin.
But it was the B-side of ‘For Your Love’ that gave Clapton the direction he sought. ‘Got To Hurry’ is a ground-breaking, blues-based guitar instrumental. No one in the UK played guitar like this in 1965. Eric, toRolling Stone in 1988:
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.
As John Mayall said toGuitar World
