Best eric clapton songs badge
“The Beano album captures a time when the British blues scene caught fire.
When he did them he was fully committed to pushing the envelope. For a guitarist like me these were seminal albums, for him they’re just stones on the pathway. I spoke to him recently about that solo and he can’t really remember it. He’d be the first to say that he doesn’t play like that any more. The textures, the tones, the attack, it was all quite mind-blowing. He constructed solos that were like songs in themselves. I was floored when I heard I’m So Glad, and I think the solo on Spoonful, where he comes in and it goes ‘Pow!’ it’s like someone taking a sledgehammer to a huge anvil.
Stephen Dale Petit: “Once I got a guitar and it was known in the neighbourhood that I was a guitar-mad kid, friends would bring over their older brothers’ record collections, and that’s when I first heard of Clapton. and that’s our man Eric.” Cream - Spoonful (live) - Wheels Of Fire, 1968 Admittedly Robertson does seem to take his playing up a notch here, but if this was a competition there’d be only one winner. Some Clapton fans have interpreted this as an attempt to upstage Slowhand, but as any gigging musician knows, the show must go on. The Band’s Robbie Robertson leaps in and covers for Eric while the Englishman regains his composure. Stephen Lawson: “This performance at The Band’s farewell concert is famous for the moment when Clapton’s guitar falls from its strap mid-solo. The Band With Eric Clapton - Further On Up The Road (live) (The Last Waltz, 1978) They were a trio and there was a lot of activity in their playing, so that was an inspiration for Rush. I don’t know if I’ve followed him more recently, but he was a great influence on me in the days of Cream. “I loved Cream’s versions of Spoonful and Crossroads, but Sunshine Of Your Love, that was such a cool-sounding song, such a cool pattern. His playing was so lyrical, and it had a darkness to it. And then as a player, he’s so fluid, so different to what was happening at the time. There was a really interesting level of composition in their material. It was blues-based, of course, but there was other stuff going on. When he played in Cream, stylistically it was so different and fresh, and the music that Cream wrote was very unique, very hard to pinpoint. It’s just a joy to listen to.” Cream - Sunshine Of Your Love (Disraeli Gears, 1967)Īlex Lifeson: “I was certainly a fan of Clapton’s when growing up. That to me says Eric was totally caught up in the moment, in the emotion of that brilliant arpeggiated chord sequence. But check out the repeated string bend halfway through. The construction of the solo is flawless, which suggests it was composed then performed in the studio. Hyperbole? Nope, this for me is Clapton at his best. Eric’s solo is the climactic moment, and it’s written, like poetry, in the language of the soul. Stephen Lawson, former editor, Total Guitar: “ Badge is a song of two halves, a textbook example of tension and relief in music.
Fuck everybody else.” Cream - Badge (Goodbye, 1969) Like, they’ve already changed fucking history, what more do you want from the fucking guy? He just wants to play the blues. There was so much pressure on him to be ‘Eric Clapton’. “Some people are rude about Clapton’s later solo work? Really? Who’s saying that? Journalists? He doesn’t have to prove anything to any of you weenie journalists. What guitarist of my generation didn’t learn that solo note-for-note? I even played the exact solo off the record, and Jack looked over at me, like, ‘You actually learnt that?’ Well, yeah. I actually once got to play Sunshine Of Your Love with Jack and play the part of Eric Clapton – and I do stress ‘play the part of’. “Back in the day, it was harder to learn music we had to lift the needle up and painstakingly learn this stuff, and I started developing a little vibrato of my own, based on trying to sound like Eric.