{"id":125258,"date":"2025-09-07T10:04:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-07T10:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/125258\/"},"modified":"2025-09-07T10:04:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T10:04:10","slug":"the-over-the-top-musician-eric-clapton-never-loved","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/125258\/","title":{"rendered":"The “over the top” musician Eric Clapton never loved"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Eric<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Chris Hakkens)<\/p>\n

Sun 7 September 2025 4:00, UK <\/p>\n

Eric Clapton<\/a> was always about trying to get to the root of his music whenever he played. After all, he was a student of the blues in whatever band he found himself in, and his best moments came when he was honouring the best players that he found on the circuit or his idols from days gone by, but he knew when a guitarist didn\u2019t really understand what the genre was all about.<\/p>\n

Because as much as Clapton was known for his \u2018God\u2019 status every time he played the guitar, not all of it needed to be specifically fast to be memorable. \u2018Steppin\u2019 Out\u2019 was John Mayall was him kicking back with one of the meanest grooves in blues history, and when he finally got into his soft-rock period in the 1970s, it was more about letting the guitar convey the kind of emotions that he couldn\u2019t with words.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not the version of Clapton that most people grew up idolising. He was free to make whatever music he wanted in his solo career, but his work with Cream is still considered some of the finest psychedelic blues rock that Jimi Hendrix<\/a> never played. Clapton was truly on a different level, and it didn\u2019t take long for a young Eddie Van Halen to take notice when he first started playing. <\/p>\n

While Van Halen was a much different beast than anything that Cream did, the influence of Clapton is there if you\u2019re willing to look for it. The amount of taste that Eddie put into his solos wasn\u2019t that far off from what \u2018Slowhand\u2019 would be doing with his lyrical guitar pieces, and even when he did his traditional tapping licks, you can often hear him playing the blues scale up and down one string in a handful of his tunes.<\/p>\n

There was a lot more showmanship involved, but that wasn\u2019t what Clapton was looking for out of a guitar player. Every blues troubadour was about trying to express the pain in their heart and leave any kind of grandstanding at the door, and by the time that Eddie reached his heights as a guitarist, Clapton felt that the budding guitar hero completely missed the boat.<\/p>\n

Compared to the other 1980s guitar heroes like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Clapton didn\u2019t see the same appeal listening to Van Halen, saying<\/a>, \u201cIf Eddie Van Halen likes the way I play, then assumedly, he must like what I liked. But if he can recognise all of that and still do what he does, then we have to accept that he\u2019s on to something that we\u2019re not really clear about. Because he couldn\u2019t be doing what he does and recognise Robert Johnson without there being something valid going on. He is very fast, and to my ears, a lot of the time he kind of goes over the top.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then again, Clapton does have a point. A lot of guitar players of Eddie\u2019s generation would eventually take what he did and turn it into a glorified sport to play as fast as possible, but listening to Eddie, he was the one exception to the rule. He could play anything that he thought of and turn it into something beautiful, and the rest of the Los Angeles guitar scene were left either trying to keep up with him or deliberately trying to be the fastest guitarist in the world.<\/p>\n

So while Eddie might certainly be faster than Clapton in many respects, it\u2019s not like he couldn\u2019t understand where the blues that \u2018Slowhand\u2019 studied was coming from. He was willing to put in the hours, and the only way he could reach the level he was at was through those hours and playing Cream records back trying to figure out where those blues licks came from. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Chris Hakkens) Sun 7 September 2025 4:00, UK Eric Clapton was always about trying…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,87854,134,87560,136],"class_list":{"0":"post-125258","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-eddie-van-halen","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-eric-clapton","13":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}