Hearing Robert Johnson (1911–38) for the first time is an unforgettable experience. Although his songs have been covered by artists in virtually every genre of contemporary music, there’s something startling about hearing Johnson himself: the desperation in his voice, the starkness of his lyrics, and the way both fit so perfectly with his guitar playing. It’s the loneliest music America has ever produced, and when it reached Eric Clapton, a 16-year-old loner in Kingston, England, the effect was profound.
“It came as something of a shock to me that there could be anything that powerful,” wrote Clapton in his notes to Johnson’s Complete Recordings. “It didn’t obey the rules of time or harmony or anything—he was just playing for himself. It was almost as if he felt things so acutely he found it almost unbearable.”
With that first experience of Johnson’s music, Clapton felt he’d stumbled onto “the bible of the blues,” and in the more than 40 years that have passed since, he’s continually returned to Johnson’s songs, recording them over and over again in a wide variety of settings and with many different musicians. Now, at the age of 59, he’s released Me and Mr Johnson (Reprise) an entire album of Johnson’s songs, which he’s recorded as more of a tribute to his “love of Robert Johnson than to Robert Johnson himself.”
“It is a remarkable thing . . . to have been driven and influenced all of my life by the work of one man,” Clapton writes in the liner notes of Me and Mr Johnson. “And even though I accept that it has always been the keystone of my musical foundation, I still would not regard it as an obsession, instead I prefer to think of it as a landmark that I navigate by, whenever I feel myself going adrift. . . . His music is like my oldest friend, always in the back of my head, and on the horizon. It is the finest music I have ever heard. I have always trusted its purity, and I always will.”
With a backing band of Doyle Bramhall II and Andy Fairweather Low on guitars, Jerry Portnoy on harmonica, Billy Preston on organ and piano, Nathan East on bass, and Steve Gadd on drums, Clapton has chosen 14 songs he’s never recorded before, with standards like “Love in Vain” and “Come On in My Kitchen” set alongside the rarely covered “Little Queen of Spades” and “They’re Red Hot.” With two exceptions, the acoustic “Come On in My Kitchen” and “Me and the Devil Blues,” all were recorded with a full band, using the original recordings as the starting point for Clapton to revisit his last 40 years of musical growth.
In 1961, when King of the Delta Blues Singers, which collected 17 of Johnson’s 1930s recordings onto long-playing vinyl, was first released, Clapton was studying to be a commercial artist but spending more time in the pubs than in the art studio. He felt like an outsider at Kingston College, but he’d felt like an outsider everywhere, ever since he found out the truth about his family: that the “parents” who were raising him were really his grandparents and the “sister” who visited on rare occasions was actually his mother.
“When I found out—from outside sources—that they weren’t my parents, I went into a kind of . . . shock, which lasted through my teens, and started to turn me into the person I am now,” said Clapton in a 1986 interview in Musician, in which he described himself as secretive, insecure, and “madly driven by the ability to impress people.” Filled with loneliness, distrust, and self-doubt, Clapton wrote that hearing Johnson “called to me in my confusion, it seemed to echo something I had always felt.”
He was doing little to build the portfolio he’d need to stay in art school, and after hearing Johnson, he started doing even less. “I was withdrawing into my own world, and [the blues] gave me a reason to do it,” Clapton said in a 2001 interview on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. “I was turning away from normal activities, going into isolation—with a cause.”
Clapton began a search for “the pure essential blues,” leading him back to Son House, Skip James, Charley Patton, and Blind Joe Reynolds, and found a passion in the pursuit of hard-to-find recordings as well as an excuse to pull away from the people around him. The more Clapton kept studying, the more he withdrew, and the more he fell in love with the legend of Robert Johnson as the rambling, hard-drinking genius who sold his soul to the devil, recorded at a handful of sessions, and died in his 20s, poisoned by a jealous woman.
Clapton began playing fingerstyle blues like Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway” and Ida Cox’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” But copying Johnson, who would simultaneously play a bass line on the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings, and lead on the treble strings, was beyond anything Clapton could attempt on his own. “A lot of what he was doing was so impossible for me to achieve,” said Clapton in a recent interview on Morning Edition, “that I just didn’t even try to go there.”
After getting kicked out of art school at 17, Clapton was “just a blues aficionado with a guitar,” with enough talent to play for drinks, a bite to eat, or a place to sleep for the night. He mixed mortar for his grandfather’s bricklaying jobs and asked his family to buy him an electric guitar. They did, spending £100 on a double-cutaway Kay. “It was quite expensive for its time, and quite exotic,” said Clapton in an interview with the BBC. “It was a copy of a Gibson ES-335, which was five times the price. It just captured my heart, and I had to have one. It wasn’t a very good guitar—most good guitars have got truss rods in the necks that will keep them straight, but this one just turned into a bow and arrow after a couple of months. And when you don’t have any other guitar, you adapt to it.”
By the next year, Clapton had joined his first band, playing uptempo Chicago-style blues with Rhode Island Red and the Roosters. After a few months Clapton quit the Roosters for the poppier Casey Jones and the Engineers, then joined his art school classmate Keith Relf in the Yardbirds. In an era of two-minute pop songs, Clapton led the Yardbirds through open-ended guitar solos, turning Chicago blues standards like “Smokestack Lightning” into jams with shifting tempos, long instrumental breaks, and slow, building climaxes. With the Yardbirds, Clapton laid the foundations of British rock, but as the band grew further away from blues, he quit them too, joining John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in 1965, around the time that the famous “Clapton Is God” graffiti appeared in London’s Islington station.
In 1966, billed as Eric Clapton and the Powerhouse, a one-off band that featured Jack Bruce, Paul Jones, and Steve Winwood, Clapton recorded his first Robert Johnson song, a reworked “Cross Road Blues.” The recording, a slow blues shuffle, was dominated by Winwood and bore little resemblance to both the original recording and the version that would later become Clapton’s signature song. The next year, Clapton brought “Ramblin’ on My Mind” to the sessions for John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton, recording a lead vocal for the first time—after sending everyone else out of the studio—and giving the Johnson song a slow, respectful treatment with a restrained Chicago-style electric guitar solo that hovered around the tonic.
By the time the album was released, Clapton had moved on to his next band, the supergroup Cream, where he continued his evolution and reached his peak as a guitar shredder, incorporating heavi-er distortion, longer sustain, and even more complex, rapid-fire rock-god solos. Clapton hated the adulation, even as he kept seeking it, and though he admired the purity of Johnson’s vision—“It didn’t seem to me that he was particularly interested in being at all palatable, he didn’t seem concerned with appeal at all,” wrote Clapton in his liner notes to Johnson’s Complete Recordings—his next foray into the Johnson catalog was “From Four Until Late,” a slight, sentimental composition that Johnson probably adapted from another singer. Clocking in at only 2:10, even shorter than the original, “Four Until Late” lacks the intensity of the rest of Fresh Cream, and Clapton was never happy with the production.
Two albums later, on Cream’s live Wheels of Fire, Clapton finally made his breakthrough, taking an instrumental fill in “Terraplane Blues” and grafting it onto “Cross Road Blues,” where it became the crunching guitar riff at the center of “Crossroads.” The result, with its taut, densely layered guitar solos, is arguably the greatest blues-rock performance ever recorded, but its popularity still mystifies Clapton, who’s convinced he loses the beat in the middle of the song and never recovers. “Out of all the songs, [“Cross Road Blues”] was the easiest for me to see as a rock ’n’ roll vehicle,” he wrote in the Complete Recordings liner notes. “I singled out the ones that seem most accessible and then I tried to make them even more so to today’s market. So that people would like them, in a sense, on a somewhat shallow level, and then ask questions afterwards.”
Still restless, conflicted, and notoriously dissatisfied with his recordings, Clapton moved from Cream to the even shorter-lived Blind Faith, after which he joined his friends Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett, who shared his love for Robert Johnson and encouraged Clapton as a lead singer. He kept wrestling with alcohol, drugs, and the pressures of rock stardom, seeking anonymity again with Derek and the Dominos, whose live 1970 “Crossroads” was worlds away from the Cream version recorded just two years earlier. Showing a debt to Duane Allman—as well as the Band, whose Music from Big Pink pointed Clapton in a new direction—Clapton’s searing, muscular guitar playing is more soulful and more clearly rooted in the American South.
But a few months later, in 1971, during a time of increasing heroin dependency, he walked away from Derek and the Dominos, passing most of the next few years out of the public eye. He resurfaced in 1974 with 461 Ocean Boulevard, which marks the beginning of Clapton’s pop career with his first Number One single—a cover of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff.” Keeping one foot in the blues, Clapton included a rocking, spirited treatment of Robert Johnson’s “Steady Rollin’ Man,” which, with its strong, even, shuffle tempo and easygoing threat that “some cream puff is using my money, but that will never be,” was the perfect vehicle for Clapton’s new style.
Having survived his addictions and reached the age of 30, Clapton had outgrown his feelings of being intimidated by Johnson, and the covers he’s recorded since then have been much more relaxed, spirited, and sympathetic. For the next 15 years, as he grew more comfortable as a songwriter, Clapton continued playing Johnson’s songs in concert but didn’t record another until 1992, when he reached the peak of the third stage of his career with Unplugged and its single “Tears in Heaven,” which won Grammys for Best Male Vocal, Best Pop Vocal, Best Rock Song, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Album of the Year. Flatpicking and fingerpicking on six- and 12-string acoustic guitars, Clapton was absolutely dazzling on the album, returning to Robert Johnson with tastefully understated versions of “Walkin’ Blues” and “Malted Milk.”
Clapton takes Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues” (transcribed in the print version of the magazine) at a slow, stately pace, with the resignation of someone who knows it’s finally time to leave. His singing was relaxed enough that the song’s most recognizable lines—“Some people tell me the worried blues ain’t bad / Worst old feeling I ever had”—ring true. The session is filled with the tragedy of losing his son, and Clapton’s guitar playing is some of the deepest he’s ever recorded; for the first time, he manages to capture the depth of Johnson’s pain. Then in “Malted Milk,” a novelty that Johnson wrote to approximate the smoothly commercial Lonnie Johnson, Clapton is unusually stirring, finding a dark, haunted wistfulness at the heart of a simple composition.
In the previous 30 years, Clapton had never recorded an entire Robert Johnson song unaccompanied and never learned the songs note for note. But with “Walkin’ Blues” and “Malted Milk,” it was clear he’d studied the recordings, using Johnson’s original parts to inspire settings that are smart, measured, and perfectly suited to his own vision.
The new Me and Mr Johnson builds on that experience. Work on the album began in the spring of 2003, during the recording of a new set of original songs, which Clapton expects to finish sometime in 2005. The Johnson covers provided a break from the band’s work on the originals—they would gather in the control room to hear Johnson’s original tracks before improvising one or two takes of their own.
It didn’t matter that the musicians were largely unfamiliar with Johnson; in fact, he felt that the lack of familiarity provided them with a fresh take on the music. Instead of trying to remain true to Johnson’s 1930s recordings, Clapton only asked them to “play it the way they felt it,” and though they do echo the originals, there’s much more Clapton than Johnson in these songs. Released from the pressure of songwriting, he plays the generous bandleader, giving some of the best parts to Portnoy and Preston and paying homage to heroes like Buddy Guy and B.B. King in his own relaxed solos.
With a new family, two new children, and the worst of his addictions behind him, Clapton’s playing on Me and Mr Johnson is colored with the feeling that better times have finally come. On “Traveling Riverside Blues,” his slide guitar solo shimmers with tough-guy attitude; in “Hell Hound on My Trail,” he locks into Gadd’s drum pattern, powering the song forward one second and snapping it back the next; and on “Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” his beautifully brittle, spare solo achieves the smooth grace of the Chicago bluesmen he loves.
It will be easy for blues purists to find fault with these versions—Clapton has standardized the meters, reformatted the songs as Chicago-style shuffles, and left very little of the originals intact—but he’s clear about his own limitations and always has been. “They called me the master of the cliché,” he said in a recent NPR interview, and more than 30 years after Rolling Stone panned him as “a virtuoso at performing other people’s ideas,” the criticism still stings. “I ran with that for a long time, thinking, ‘Well, that’s what I am.’ I have a limited vocabulary, I will probably do the same thing over and over again, and try to disguise it. But I’ve found a way to accept that.”
Accepting that means not trying to outdo Robert Johnson—steering clear of passages and solos that he can’t duplicate and taking care to avoid charges that he’s trying to sound like someone else. Because Clapton understands that it can’t be done. “His best songs have never been covered by anyone else, at least not very successfully—because how are you going to do them?” Clapton wrote in the Complete Recordings liner notes. “To have tried to mimic Robert, vocally or musically, wouldn’t have made him accessible at all to people who are listening today.”
At its best, Me and Mr Johnson is pure Clapton autobiography. He’s still searching to find himself, expressing regret for his past and surprise that he’s survived so long. On “When You Got a Good Friend,” he can’t imagine why he’s treated his lover so badly; on “Love in Vain,” he carries her suitcase to make it easier for her to leave him; and on the thunderous “Milkcow’s Calf Blues,” the last song Johnson ever recorded and the most difficult for Clapton, he says goodbye to his mother in a mixture of anger, betrayal, and sadness.
“That’s been the hingepin of most of my conflict, just accepting how I came to blues,” Clapton told NPR in 2001, talking about both his childhood and his love for Johnson. He’s still mystified that “a person like me, born in a place like England, could have made a career out of music that on the face of it, doesn’t really have much connection to my cultural upbringing. And yet there is a connection, in terms of the spiritu-al side of it, the emotional side of it, the psychological side of it. I began the road of going into the dark and coming out into the light. And I’ve now done a bit of work on it and actually accept who I am.”
Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar Magazine, September 2004, No.141
