Media

...The difference with Big Eric is that he, more than any of them, took the message of the blues to heart...

...1991/92 has been Eric's year, in splendid and terrible ways...

...And, I guess, everything I'm about to say is a grudging agreement with that outrageous assessment...

...This is a man of intense dedication and intelligence trying—trying so hard—to find out what there is in a tradition not his own that can sustain and nurture his imagination...

...And that matters profoundly...

...Well, it makes sense...

...And aren't those the same thing...

...He was signed to do the score for the movie Rush, a potboiler about narcs who get hooked on dope...

...And that's what Big Eric has always known...

...The red ink side cancels out everything else, and Eric has said so...

...He looks like Howdy Doody when he smiles...

...If "Art" is the magical mystical thing we tell ourselves it's supposed to be, then somebody should erect a monument to Big Eric as one of the very few real artists of this part of the century...

...I read the novel and the only reason I'll see the movie is for the score—that's the musical score...

...What Eric Clapton does is, he plays the blues...

...No power chord, no razzledazzle, just exquisitely, excruciatingly planned and executed single-note lines, meditating on the secrets implicit in the song's changes: the Zen of the blues...

...Eric Clapton is a blues guitarist, if you've spent the last twenty years on Mars...

...See him on stage sometime...

...Listen to his playing on "White Room," when he was with the first of the "supergroups," Cream...

...It's, you see, that he knows that the blues is not his music, but also knows that it is his music—and, maybe more than that, his fate and his vocation...

...I'm going to call him "Eric" from now on, okay...

...Come on...

...In interview after interview, he seems permanently troubled about, uncertain of, his brilliant gifts...

...And maybe that's why I'm writing this...

...He wrote it after the breakup of his affair with Patti Harrison, wife of George of the Beatles, and when he was slipping into a heroin addiction...

...Miles...

...Really...

...He stands still and looks at the frets while he lays down stunning line after stunning line, and the high visual drama of a Clapton concert is when he winces at a change he thinks he's missed he usually hasn't—or smiles when it's all sounding good to him...

...Somebody—I think it was Muddy Waters—once said, "Those English guys, you know, they all want to play the blues so bad, and that's how they play the blues: so bad...

...And it's a song about loss and pain as strong as anything Mozart ever did, seven minutes of solid agony, repetitive, interminable, you ask yourself "won't this ever end...

...But with Big Eric, the music really does seem to have that saving force, almost—and he, I think, would not quarrel with this—as if it were his avenue to—well, God...

...He doesn't windmill his guitar, he doesn't do splits or feign masturbation or fall on his knees or spit at the audience...

...So Big Eric has spent thirty years trying to live the blues, which is also for him trying to be a good man...

...But it's also because that's the way jazz fans refer to the really great players, by their first names...

...He has frequently testified to his obsession with the great and doomed bluesman Robert Johnson, and his testimony is almost always about the spirit, not the form, of the music...

...He is shy...

...Let me rewrite the graffito in a way that really counts: Clapton is good...

...But do most of us really believe that...

...It is, for sure, one of the most famous graffiti in history, up there with "Kilroy was here" and "Bird Lives...

...Back when every rocker was discovering some tantric guru, Big Eric—at the time he did "Layla," and right between his heroin days and his booze days—scandalized the Rolling Stone crowd by declaring he was a Christian...

...And he's one of the most fascinating and, certainly, loved figures in rock and roll, just because he fits none of the usually grungy paradigms we associate with that art...

...So Lennon became the Beatles and Townshend became the Who and Mick became the Rolling Stones and they made millions of bucks on their rage...

...Or listen, and then listen again, to his song, "Layla...

...As losers, man: if our flaws don't get us into the kingdom, then the kingdom is just another scam...

...It may be the greatest rock and roll song ever recorded...

...A big CD collection of his "best"—a choice I sure wouldn't want to have to make—has been issued...

...Dizzy...

...FRANK McCONNELL 26: 13 March 1992 Commonweal...

...Which is another reason why Big Eric is so—sorry, no other word fits—beautiful...

...He's a "blues guitarist" in the way caviar and Dom Perignon is a "snack...

...The red ink side is that a few months ago his boy, a toddler, fell out the open window of the fiftieth floor of his mother's apartment in New York, and died...

...Rock and roll, for all its splendor, and there's a lot of that, has always had one big open secret, to wit that it's mainly a bunch of bourgeois white guys, American and English, trying to imitate black forms of expression...

...Sonny...

...Listening to the man's music is listening to the man make himself, and if that's not part of religion then I don't know what the hell is...

...We all hear, and subscribe to, and in my case teach a lot of guff about how art cures and humanizes and consoles, and razza razza...

...That's because my wife and I, who love his music almost as much as we love one another, refer to him that way around the house...

...Because the blues—bred out of slavery, work-songs, the church, and general and unremitting despair of the quotidian—is above all a music of triumph, of coming through and saying the Worst That Could Happen, and of turning the awful into the transcendent, into the James Brown-Ray Charles raw-throat shout which is, we'd better face it folks, the breath of God...

...A new generation of kids for whom the sixties are about as remote as Camelot are discovering the joy and pain of his music, and through that discovering the authentically, radiantly American art of the blues...

...Commonweal 13 March 1992: 25 That's the black ink side of the ledger...

...Let me see if I can get this right...

...He's one of those Brits, like John Lennon, Pete Townshend, and Mick Jagger, who discovered the blues in the late fifties when they were all in art school—which is where smart workingclass kids in Britain who couldn't go to Oxford or Cambridge went—and found in the blues the perfect expression of their own feelings of disenfranchisement, of marginalization, and of anger against a system that didn't seem, really, to notice them at all...

...By me, Clapton deserves to be "Eric...

...And there he is still, after a lifetime of grief, still making great music and still unsure of his own greatness...

...Well, yeah...

...So how does a man—that's a mensch, which in Yiddish is a very serious word—deal with an absurd and obscene accident, a cosmic insult, like that...

...Because if the blues is a loser's triumphant music, Christianity is a bluesman's religion: one that says the losers and the crummy people are finally worthwhile and shining like the sun...

...That's how Elvis himself was marketed back at the moment of the Big Bang itself...

...and at the same time and miraculously so melodic, so lovely, so heartbreakingly gorgeous that, by the final note, you—okay, I—don't know whether your tears are for the loss that generated the damn thing or for the human gain that is the damn thing...

...You've got a toothache, your lover has just told you he/she has found somebody more "fulfilling"—they love using that word when leaving—and the first thing you do is read or write a poem...