In “Standin’ Round Crying” he sounds a reborn child (“yew-aynt-nuthin-LAAIKE you used to be!” “When I was DEEP in LOVE with ya!”). Clapton’s solo at the climax of “Someday After A While” is strangely exuberant but sounds liberated note the throat-clearing coda. “I WON’T STAND TO SEE YOU PUSHED AROUND!” roars Clapton, telling that Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and G Love & Special Sauce who’s blues-at-one-remove boss. “Motherless Child,” a Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks) song, not the old spiritual, is a surprisingly successful acoustic jug band exercise in the manner of McGuinness Flint – not that far-fetched a comparison, since the drummer on Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton was Hughie Flint – but “It Hurts Me Too” is startlingly modern, with near-atonal punk guitars from both Clapton and Andy Fairweather Low and piano from Chris Stainton which in places recalls John Cage. From the patient launchpad of “Lord have mercy…Lord have mercy on me,” he leaps up like an abruptly-aroused jaguar – “if I’ve done somebody wro-HONG, LORD!,” “I used to HA-HA-HA-HA-HAVE plenty money,” sung as though slashing his chest with barbed wire, or laughing at his own damnation. He maybe remembers what attracted him to the blues in the first place. Something in Clapton wakes up, realises that the blues are not all about textbook reproductions but about pouring one’s self into the music, letting whatever “everything” is come out.
It all starts to get a little samey, a little so-what-this-is-1994-for-heaven’s-sake.īut then, on “Sinner’s Prayer,” something happens. With Clapton’s “Hoochie Coochie Man,” one is slightly reminded of Craig Douglas essaying Sam Cooke. Nothing here is terrible, but too much of it is too damned reverent. Things otherwise become a little too comfortable. “She had the nerve,” he attests four times in “Five Long Years” – four rhetorical bangs of the judge’s gavel, the fourth deliberately slower-paced – before proceeding to the blindly outraged payoff: “…TO PUT ME OUT!” We have to recall that this may all be symptomatic of premature parental bereavement – though there is too much unclenched anger here for something like “Tears In Heaven” to feel comfortable.
But there are also subtle jazz guitar chordalities out of Jim Hall. “Bad luck is killing me,” he intones, as though about to consume his last packet of prawn cocktail crisps on Death Row. The invention carries on throughout the lengthy “Third Degree,” in which Clapton attempts to justify his protagonist being a 100% shit. And yes, he is perhaps trying to be Elmore James vocally, and that may be unnerving for people familiarised with the placid stupor of “Wonderful Tonight,” but this is unavoidably vital music. The anthology includes nothing from From The Cradle, but starting with the ferocious Hubert Sumlin roar which announces “Blues Before Sunrise,” one realises that this represents Clapton back in his element for the first time in nearly thirty years. It is such a great record because, while faithful to the concept of the blues, it doesn’t forget to be a pop record too, and perhaps also an experimental jazz record on the side – the young Alan Skidmore pops up now and then to make some rather barbed, stern comments on tenor.
Look at Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: Eric Clapton, a perfectly decent 2003 anthology which doesn’t go beyond 1970, though does reference John Mayall’s Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton album from 1966, a great album which I didn’t realise was great until I unknowingly heard it through the speakers at Ray’s Jazz Shop. It acknowledges and underlines the absolutist importance of modernism. I think his focus on electric blues far outstrips his overly polite forays into “classic” blues. It’s quite fitting that Clapton’s only solo UK number one album is his most determinedly purist, even though the record thrives on strands of impudent impurity.