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on the basis of fair use in education.
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The Rolling Stone
Interview
(RS 533)
August 25, 1988

By David Fricke

Eric Clapton was
strolling down a New
York City street one day
when a guy walked up to
him and said, "You're
Eric Clapton, right?" Clapton said, yes, he was. To
which the guy replied excitedly, "You're history!"

"He meant it in the nicest possible way," Clapton
says with a bemused grin in his manager's London
office, "but he didn't realize what he was saying. Can
you imagine how it feels to be referred to as a
legend while you're still alive?" Such are the perils of
being one of rock's most enduring superstars.
Clapton's reinvention of the electric guitar with his
blues-obsessive image in the Sixties was equaled
only by that of his good friend and soul mate Jimi
Hendrix. With Cream, Clapton set new standards in
rock for free improvisational daring and electric blues
thunder. With Derek and the Dominos, he combined
stunning instrumental technique, rich melodic
invention and striking lyric portraits of romantic bliss
and trauma to create one of rock's great in-and-out
of-love song cycles,Layla and Other Assorted Love
Songs. While his subsequent solo outings have
been comparatively low-key explorations of rootsy
Americana and pop craftsmanship, Clapton has a
continuing stream of good-groove hits to his credit
(his inspired make-over of Bob Marley's "I Shot the
Sheriff," "Lay Down Sally," the recent "Forever
Man"), and in concert he is still quite capable of
setting his six strings afire.

Any remaining doubt that Eric Patrick Clapton, 43,
has a right to walk through the Portals of Immortals
has been erased by Crossroads, the Biograph-style
boxed set released this spring, which chronicles his
first quarter century in rock in exhaustive detail,
beginning with his first demo recordings with the
Yardbirds. But Crossroads -- thanks to producer Bill
Levenson's scholarly diligence and musical good
taste -- doesn't mummify Clapton's legacy. It is the
vivid portrait of a man searching for identity, physical
release and a little peace through music. It's all here
-- his ambitions, his weaknesses, his phobias --
fleshed out with a wealth of previously unissued live
recordings and studio outtakes that highlight
particularly enigmatic chapters in Clapton's life, like
Derek and the Dominos' descent into drug oblivion,
unwittingly captured in the five unfinished tracks from
the band's star-crossed second LP.

Clapton got the chills when he listened to that
material recently. It was the first time he had done
so in over fifteen years. "It got too much for me," he
says. "Old memories started coming back;
old-issues raised their head. I think of the people in
that band and what happened to them. It is strange
to know that I was part of that band."

Clapton had no part in the track selection for
Crossroads. Nor did he want any. "It would have
been an egotistical thing for me to do. I find it difficult
to see it in perspective, but it's nice that someone
feels that way about my work."

During the two extensive sessions that took place
for this interview, though, Clapton -- modestly
dressed in a black shirt and black trousers, often
stroking his beard absent-mindedly as he tried to
recall a certain anecdote -- amiably walked down
Memory Lane using Crossroads as his map, talking
with clarity and candor about every stage of his
career. Between cigarette puffs and sips of hot tea,
he discussed his blues apprenticeships with the
Yardbirds and with John Mayall, relived the glory
days of Cream, crawled through the wreckage of
Blind Faith, rued his reoccurring drug and alcohol
lapses of the Seventies, divulged his secret
preference for romantic ballads over smoking guitar
solos and admitted that being called God in the
Sixties really wasn't such a big deal.

"It was just graffiti," he says, dismissing the mythic
anxiety that supposedly dogged him after the phrase
"Clapton is God" started appearing in London
subways during his tenure with Mayall. "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."

To Clapton, Crossroads is not the entire book of his
life, just an overview of some of the most significant
chapters. The day before the first session for this
interview, he completed a new soundtrack for the
upcoming film Homeboy, starring Mickey Rourke
and Christopher Walken. In June, Clapton
temporarily joined Dire Straits for a string of reunion
shows, capped by a top-o'-the bill set at the Nelson
Mandela tribute concert at Wembley Stadium.
Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler is returning the favor
by joining Clapton's band for a U.S. concert trek,
opening September 1st in Dallas. Add to that the
usual load of guest session work and a new album
projected for 1989. "God" and his guitar aren't
exactly lying around gathering dust.

"Why can't I have another box in another twenty-five
years time?" he asks, only half-kidding. "It's a long
time, but maybe I'll make it. Of course, it would be a
pretty thin box."

You've spent much of your career trying to reconcile
musical ambition with superstardom. Doesn't
Crossroads' actually aggravate the problem? It is
certainly the ultimate compliment -- you're a certified
living legend -- but the set's emphasis on your past
implies that your best work is behind you.

The most difficult part for me to accept is to still be
coming out with product, up-to-date material, and it
won't be treated with the same kind of respect as
the stuff that is in that compilation. It's almost as if
it's two different people living with my name. I run
into people who say, "Aw, yeah, you were in Cream.
What a great band." And it's like nothing has
happened since.

I don't worry about it that much anymore. I'm
probably better off making records for people who
haven't heard me before, because they'll hear it with
fresh ears, that I am making records for people
who've heard me over all those years, constantly
comparing me to the past. You can sometimes
improve on the past, but you can't recapture it. And
there are always going to be people saying I was
better then.

Was there a time when that kind of criticism really
hurt you?

It caused me to lay off a lot in the Seventies. I lost
confidence because I thought I'd done it all. People
were really infatuated with Cream, and that, for me,
was just a passing stage. That's why I didn't play as
much lead guitar on those albums in the Seventies. I
was very, very nervous that I'd said it all.

The chronological sequencing of 'Crossroads'
highlights the contrast between your blues
obsessions in the Sixties and your later emphasis
on song and studio craftsmanship, which isn't nearly
as adventurous.

That's quite correct. But it's not as black-and-white
as that for me. I'm still really concerned with pushing
forward, but a lot slower and a lot more gradually
than I used to. And I don't see myself tied to any
particular music form anymore. I enjoy things on a
far broader spectrum. I was an intensely dedicated
musician in my early twenties. It was something I
wouldn't care to live through again, because I missed
so much of the rest of my life. And I'm enjoying that
now. Music can become an obsessive thing with
me, really obsessive. A lot of that has since dropped
away. Whether my music has suffered or not is not
the point. My life is a lot better for it.

'Crossroads' starts at a very appropriate place, your
first demo recordings with the Yardbirds in late
1963. Do you remember anything about the
session?

I remember time passing and doing some more
sessions. I remember doing "I Ain't Got You" and
thinking, "Well, this is just like falling off a log." In
the short amount of time that passed between those
sessions, we really got polished very quick.

What ambitions did you have as a guitarist at the
time?

I don't think my ambition had formed itself then. I
was in the state of mind where I didn't know what I
liked. But I knew what I didn't like. I was shy of all
pop music. I was becoming a blues purist, and I was
really working with the Yardbirds to work on my
craft, to find a way of making money through music.
But I hadn't really decided what I wanted to do.

Leaving the Yardbirds was a perfect example. I didn't
want to be part of a group that was going to be on
TV doing Tin Pan Alley songs. So when I walked out
of the band, I was suddenly slapped in the face by
myself. I walked straight out of the band into
nothing. It was about then that I started to get an
idea of what I really wanted.

What was that?

I was preempted. Before I'd even made up my mind,
I got the call from John Mayall. I had a fantasy about
a blues trio, which was what Cream was gonna be.
And I started to think of myself as being the leader
of that band. I had no qualifications whatsoever. That
proved itself when Cream was formed. The more
powerful personality of Jack [Bruce] got to the
forefront.

Did you actually play on the Yardbirds' "For Your
Love"?

There's a middle eight in there that has a little riff in
it, a little blues riff in it, which is me. That was my
concession to being in the band. It was the day after
that session that I left.

Were you aware of any gathering acclaim for you as
a guitarist during your Yardbirds days?

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.

You were number one in a field of one.

Exactly.

Yet by the time you cut the 'Bluesbreakers with Eric
Clapton' LP, John Mayall was giving you star billing,
which he never gave later guitarists like Peter Green
and Mick Taylor. Didn't you have any sense of
impending fame?

Very much so, and I used it to my advantage a lot.
The reason John acquiesced so much was the
pressure I put on him, in terms of what material we
could do. I'm not saying it was an aggressive thing
on my part. Being a bandleader for so long and
making all those decisions, it was refreshing for him
to hand it over to someone he could trust musically
to come up with something new.

Did the musical and emotional impact of blues icons
like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters represent
an attainable goal for you as an aspiring bluesman?

They were the real thing, and I was the imitator.
That's fine as long as you keep it like that. But as
soon as you start to do the real things yourself and
try to compare it, you see how far behind you are.
That is the difficult part. That is what made me give
up trying to be the 100 percent bluesman. Because I
realized I would always be that far behind my ideal.

Was that a contributing factor in your decision to
leave Mayall?

Don't' forget that at that point I was only turning
twenty-one. You had this dichotomy of a guy who
was a serious blues musician and was also a very
wild young man. There was the adolescent side of
me that wanted to get out and see the world. So I
was split down the middle. If it hadn't been for that, if
I'd been totally dedicated to the band, I might very
well still be with him. As it was, I was feeding on a
lot of other directions, and I started to look at the
whole Mayall thing as a dead-end street. And that's
when Cream started to be an appealing idea. It was
the complete freedom of starting something that had
no bounds.

Given that you quit the Yardbirds over "For Your
Love," it seems a little contradictory that Cream's
first single in 1966 was "Wrapping Paper," a piece of
Jack Bruce-Pete Brown pop fluff that showed none
of the group's blues or jazz prowess.

You get a recording studio, put a group in it, and
you'll never fail to be surprised by what comes out of
it. The way Jack kind of introduced it to us was a
very avant-garde, because it was so opposite to
what we would be expected to do -- "No one's going
to get this." And that was part of our attitude, that
we would cock a snoot at the world. They were
expecting heavy rock, well, we won't give 'em that.
We'll give 'em a nice little sophisticated dance-band
tune. Sure enough, it flopped. But it shocked
everybody. It was the last thing they wanted to hear.
But if they came to see us at gig, they got what they
wanted.

How much did the emerging San Francisco rock
aesthetic affect the jamming aspect of Cream?
Jack Bruce has said that playing at the Fillmore for
the first time in 1967 was a revelatory experience,
because here was an audience that just said, "Hey,
play anything!"

With Cream, any one of us could have played
unaccompanied for a good length of time. So you
put the three of us together in front of an audience
willing to dig it limitlessly, we could have gone
anywhere. And we did. Maybe we should not have
been allowed that much luxury. We probably started
burning out at that point. We were just going for the
moon every time we played, instead of confining it
and economizing.

The acclaimed live version of "Crossroads" on
'Wheels of Fire' was edited by engineer Tom Dawd
from a much longer performance. How much longer
was the original?

It may have been eleven minutes long. God knows.
And I don't understand that either. There's a couple
of big myths about me. This thing about God and
this thing about "Crossroads." I think that's a terrible
solo. I saw a thing with Joe Walsh the other day,
talking about that solo. I really appreciate that
respect for it, but I can't figure out what the hell
they're talking about.

What's so terrible about it?

It's messy! I admit it's got tons of energy, but that
alone doesn't make it. I don't like it. Isn't that funny?

How was "Sunshine of Your Love" written?

We'd been to see Hendrix about two nights before at
the Saville Theatre, in London. He'd been here for
about six months, and he played this gig that was
just blinding. I don't think Jack had really taken him
in before; I knew what the guy was capable of from
the minute I met him. It was the complete
embodiment of the different aspects of rock & roll
guitar rolled up into one. I could sense it coming off
the guy. Jack took a little longer to realize what was
happening. And when he did see it that night, after
the gig he went home and came up with the riff. It
was strictly a dedication to Jimi. And then we wrote
a song on top of it.

That riff was Jack's? Everyone identifies it with you.

No, I don't take the credit for that.

What part of the song did you write?

The turnaround in the chorus. And some of the lyrics
too.

You said you originally envisioned yourself as the
leader of a blues trio. Do you think Cream might
have survived its personality problems if you had
asserted yourself more?

It was not possible to do. I did not have, nor do I
have now, the amount of personal power or
aggression to keep the other two guys in place. And
I wouldn't want to. I wouldn't have been right to try
and exercise authority over them. Jack is a far
superior musical brain that I am, and he could argue
his way out of anything I could insist on. Ginger
[Baker] would simply not accept it. It would be too
much of a battle for me to take it on.

Cream was a shambling circus of diverse
personalities who happened to find that catalyst
together. And when it burned out, it burned out. We
couldn't save it. And probably didn't want to, until
later. We all had regrets over the years. I miss those
good times, the companionship. I have never been,
since then, with two other guys that I felt so
completely akin with. I also got hurt quite a lot in
that band, really badly hurt. And ever since, then, I
have managed to keep a certain amount of distance
between myself and the other musicians I've worked
with. I don't let anyone get that close to me
anymore.

Your next band, Blind Faith, was probably the most
aptly named combo in rock history. Were you or the
others -- Baker, Steve Winwood -- prepared for the
over expectations that greeted you?

I think Steve felt more unprepared that I did. I wasn't
that far out of Cream when we started Blind Faith. It
wasn't a big deal for me to go and play for those
kinds of audiences. And I remember being
concerned about Steve's anxiety. When we started
touring, what was wrong was that we weren't ready.
We weren't committed enough to each other to
survive it.

What do you think of the 'Blind Faith' album in
retrospect?

I think it's a lovely album. I like its looseness. It's
like a supersession record, except it's got a little
something more than that. You can't feel there's a
lot of longing in the band.

"Presence of the Lord" was your first serious stab at
songwriting. Why didn't you sing it on the 'Blind
Faith' LP instead of Winwood?

I couldn't make that key. I wrote it in C, which is
pretty high for me. Also, I was very overwhelmed by
Steve's presence as a singer. I don't think I could
have stood out in the studio and sung it while he
was there. I was totally without confidence at the
time as a singer.

Were you feeling particularly religious when you
wrote it?

It was a true statement of what was happening in my
life at the time. I had somewhere to live. I was
actually having a good time after leaving Cream,
feeling very secure. I was in a great frame of mind.

That was just a song of gratitude. I'm not a religious
person, never have been. But I've always found it
very easy to say thank you to God, or whatever you
choose to call him, for whatever happens, which is
nice to me. It's no problem for me to be grateful.

How much say did you really have in the making of
'Eric Clapton,' your first solo album? It's got your
name on it, but it's more like a Delaney and Bonnie
record in terms of sound and style.

Absolutely. In a way, it was a vehicle for Delaney's
frustrations with himself. He may have been
projecting himself on me a lot. And that comes
across a lot on the record. I don't mind it at all. I
enjoyed it and learned a lot in the process.

He was prepared to be my coach, and no one had
ever offered that to me before. He was the first
person to instill in me a sense of purpose. And he
was very serious about it. He was a very religious
person, saying things like "You've got a gift. If you
don't use it, God will take it away." It was quite
frightening when I looked at it that way.

The hit single "After Midnight" marked the beginning
of your J.J. Cale fixation. How did you first hear
about him?

Through Delaney. He was an old friend of J.J.'s. He
played me the original version of "After Midnight,"
which isn't dissimilar from the one on the Eric
Clapton record. But it wasn't until later on that I
really became an appreciator of J.J.

Did you consciously try to sing like him?

I never thought I did. His style is so difficult. It's
actually harder to sing quietly, almost whispery, like
he does and get it right. You can make a lot of
blunders. So I tried to get somewhere in the middle.
But I was definitely trying to get something out of
myself that was similar to J.J.

Your first record with Derek and the Dominos, the
original single of "Tell the Truth," produced by Phil
Spector, was killer stuff, full of screaming guitars
and wild vocal harmonies. Why was it recalled so
soon after its release?

I don't remember. I remember it didn't do well.

It wasn't out long enough to do well!

Perhaps. I've never had a handle on the business. I
just do not understand it all. Don't forget that Layla
and Other Assorted Love Songs died the first time
out. I don't understand that either. I don't even know
what made it sell later. Did it sell on merit? Or
because they found out it was me? I have no idea.
I'd rather not know.

Looking back now at the power and musical clarity
of 'Layla', it's hard to believe it was recorded amid
such heavy drug consumption. Didn't your habit get
in the way?

We were very fit. We would have saunas, go
sun-bathing and swimming during the day and then
go to the studio and get loaded. It didn't affect the
playing or the sessions. But as is the way with
drugs, it would catch up later.

Did touring aggravate the Dominos' drug problem?

Yes. We scored a massive amount of coke and H
[heroin] before we left Florida and took it on tour. I
don't know how we got through it with the amount we
were taking. I couldn't do it; I would die now. Even
the idea of it frightens me. But it definitely wore the
band down and introduced a lot of hostility that
wasn't naturally there. It drove a wedge between
each one of us.

By the time of the Dominos' 1971 sessions for the
aborted second album, were you past the point of no
return?

Money and dope and women were getting so far
involved with our nucleus that we couldn't
communicate anymore. I remember it came to a
crunch when one day Jim [Gordon] was playing the
drums, and he heard that I'd made some remark
about a drummer in another band. I don't remember
making the remark, but he got up from behind his kit
and said, "Why don't you get so-and-so in here? He
could play it better than I could!" and walked out. Or
maybe I walked out. Somebody walked out. And we
never went back into the studio again. It was that
dramatic.

There is something very hard and haunting about
those unfinished tracks on 'Crossroads,' of
something falling apart, poisoned beyond repair.

There was a feeling of real sadness there, of futility.
The tapes stayed in the studio. I never went back.
Nor did the others. The fact that the tracks are out
now is fine. But it was a closed book. There was no
going back. It was time to move on. Or time to just
go and hide and rest.

How does it feel playing "Layla" now, almost
twenty-years later?

I'm incredibly proud of that song. To have ownership
of something that powerful is something I'll never be
able to get used to. It still knocks me out when I
play it.

It's one of the few rock songs that can truly be
described as "majestic."

You know what? That riff is a direct lift from an Albert
King song. And I don't have to pay royalties because
. . . [He hums the riff.] Hmmm, maybe I do [laughs].
It's a song off the Born Under a Bad Sign album ["As
the Years Go Passing By"]. It goes, "There is
nothing I can do/If you leave me here to cry." It's a
slow blues. We took that line and speeded it up.

I've tried to re-create the sense of that again and
again when I've done albums. And it cannot be done.
It pales in significance. I've realized it's pointless.
Just leave it be.

Did you fall out of love with the guitar in the
Seventies? The emphasis on LPs like '461 Ocean
Boulevard' and 'Slowhand' was more on laid-back
grooves than torrid solos.

For most of the Seventies, I was content to lay back
and do what I had to do with the least amount of
effort. I was very grateful to be alive. I didn't want to
push it.

I was also tired to gymnastic guitar playing. And not
only was I tired of it in myself, it seemed the advent
of Cream and Led Zeppelin had woken up a whole
specter of guitar players who just wanted to burn
themselves into infinity. The more I heard about that,
the more I wanted to back off. I started to identify
with like-minded people like J.J. Cale. When I
listened to J.J. Cale records, I was impressed by the
subtlety, by what wasn't being played.

You also showed a heretofore unknown taste for
romantic ballads -- "Let It Grow", "Wonderful
Tonight." Was this a secret passion of yours?

I think it's a big challenge to write a love song that
isn't all soppy. "Wonderful Tonight" has a little bit of
irony in it. I didn't write it in a particularly good mood.
I wrote it because my wife was late getting ready to
go out. I was in a foul temper about it.

But there was an album I had very early on by
Chuck Berry, One Dozen Berrys, and there were a
couple of songs in there that were ballads, which
almost knocked me out more than the rock & roll
stuff. Because they seemed to represent him more,
when his guard was down.

I think it's the same for a lot of musicians. When you
see them relax and they pick up a guitar, the first
thing that comes out is a really nice ballad, the
softer side, because they're so fed up with putting on
this big façade.

What do you think of those Seventies and
early-Eighties solo albums today?

I can't look at them in a nonrelative way. If it was me
now, in a fit, clear state of mind, I would have to say
that I could make them better, without a doubt. But
when I look back and see the state I was in --
emotionally, physically, the amount of substances I
was consuming -- I can't see how they could be any
better. I know people who even now go into a studio
and don't get that much done and don't consume
half of what we were consuming. So we did pretty
well [laughs]. Every one of those records has an
ingredient of some kind that can move me. And the
tracks that embarrass me I don't play.

On your stronger efforts, the ratio of your musical
success seems directly related to the quality of the
players pushing you from behind, like the Albert
Lee-Ry Cooder band on 'Money and Cigarettes' and
Phil Collins on 'Behind the Sun.' What do you look
for in collaborators?

I'm a very passive reactor. I there is a forceful
character in the mix, I will let it come out rather than
try to alter the direction of things so I'm in the front. I
don't like to compete musically. If you put me
onstage with another guitar player and he starts
showing off, I won't compete. I'll let him go. When it's
my turn, I'll play what I'm going to play anyway.

That's how it is in the studio. At the end of the day,
people will say that Behind the Sun and August are
really Phil Collins records. Fine, if that's all they can
hear, they're not listening properly. I'm in there with
as much as I got, but not in a competitive way. If I
did, it would be a mess. It works pretty good for me
to allow people to be themselves rather than trying
to lay down the law.

How did it feel touring with Robert Cray last year?
Not only is he a genuine rarity -- a young black
blues guitarist -- but he takes as much inspiration
from your early work as he does from that of the
great black players like Albert and B.B. King.

The hardest thing for me to come to terms with was
that Robert Cray was an intelligent young black man
who wasn't interested in making contemporary black
music. He was more interested in preserving the
blues form and enlarging on it. Once I accepted that,
it was pretty easy for me to accept the rest. And it
was fantastic to find out that he did know about my
work and liked it as well as Hendrix and the Kings.
The sides to that guy are phenomenal. You should
hear his Howlin' Wolf impersonation; he can make
your hair stand on end. I've heard people say he
sounds just like Albert King or so-and-so. Well, if
you really heard him do those people, he really does
sound like them. If he wants to impersonate
someone, he's got it down. But when he gets
onstage, that's Robert Cray.

What's left for you to learn as a blues guitarist?

Simplicity. Roughing it up, cruding it up. That's why I
like to go without playing for a while. If you're
actually physically incapacitated a bit, it can make it
sound nice and rough. Or you go for the more
obvious things. And if you play a lot, you tend to
avoid the obvious, and that's when sophistication
creeps in. The last thing I want to be is
sophisticated.

What role does the guitar play in your current
sound? It's not the primary vehicle now as it was with
Cream or the Dominos.

It's still my voice. When I hear a piece of music in
my head, I don't hear a song. I hear the guitar part.
So I write words to that and sing it. The guitar is first
and foremost in my head.

Once it's done that in my head, I use the guitar to
embellish the voice. It'll always be there. I'll always
try to play with the most amount of soul through the
guitar. I can't do that through my voice, because I
don't have that ability as a singer. I have to shift that
emphasis at some point to the guitar.

The one jarring thing about 'Crossroads' is that it
ends with the remake of "After Midnight," which you
did for a Michelob beer commercial. Didn't you see
anything contradictory in a former alcoholic doing a
beer ad?

You can say that again. Listen, man, I was a
practicing alcoholic when I made that commercial.
By the time it came out, I was in treatment. This
was December of '87. I was actually in treatment in
Minnesota when that came on the T.V. I was in a
room full of recovering alcoholics, myself being one
of them, and everybody went, "is that you?" I said,
"Yep." What was I going to say? It was me when I
was drinking.

I don't know if it was offered to me now whether I
would do it. But then again, I'm not a preacher. I'm
not one to say whether people should be drinking or
not. Otherwise, I'd have to come down on all my
mates, like Phil, who does it as well. I can only
speak for myself. I don't drink anymore, and I'd
rather not drink ever again.

'Crossroads' is an exhaustive summary of your entire
career, the valleys as well as the peaks. What have
you ultimately learned about yourself from it?

The biggest thing I've found is I've gotten near to
what I wanted a lot of times, but I've never done it.
That isn't necessarily a good advert for the record
[laughs]. I know what I'm capable of, but I don't think
I've ever done it.

I was reading an interview with Chet Atkins, and he
said that he'd been trying all his life to get the sound
right and he hadn't yet. That blew my mind. And I
found it very encouraging that someone that
proficient was still discontent with the way he
sounded. For me, it's the same thing with this boxed
set. If I go through and listen to each track, I still
would find some way to say, "Well, it could have
been better".