When Eric Clapton first heard Robert Johnson's music, it became a "beacon" for him. Now, the guitarist is paying tribute to his hero.
By Associated Press
Published June 10, 2004
[AP photo]
Also close to Eric Clapton’s heart is Crossroads Centre Antigua, a drug and alcohol treatment center he founded. A guitar auction this month at Christie’s, including more than 50 from his own collection, will raise money for the center.
NEW YORK - Of course, Eric Clapton remembers the first time he heard Robert Johnson's music.
He was 15. Already an aspiring blues guitarist, he would play a limited repertoire in the corner of a pub. Clapton and a friend used to buy blues albums, unheard, simply because they were intrigued by pictures on the cover.
One day, his friend brought a copy of Johnson's King of the Delta Blues album to the pub. The friend didn't particularly like it.
"I didn't know quite what to make of it, either," said Clapton, who nearly 45 years later would record an album made up of the late Johnson's songs. The CD, Me and Mr. Johnson, was released this year.
"It was the first record I'd heard that didn't have any kind of attempt to be entertaining," he said. "It was just simply what it was. As I listened to it more and more, it got stronger each time I would go back to it. It was my first experience of music happening that way, that each time you listened to it something more would be revealed."
He heard the troubles of adolescence - low self-esteem, loneliness, sexual desire and frustration - expressed in raw form through Johnson's voice and guitar.
"It became like a beacon to me, that album," Clapton said in an interview.
It still is.
Throughout his career, Clapton has repeatedly turned to Johnson when he found himself drifting musically.
"I get in touch with the little boy, the adolescent, again and I find that very invigorating," he said.
The Mississippi-born Johnson recorded only a few dozen songs in the 1930s, but became the prototype blues legend when he died at 27 under mysterious circumstances.
Two years ago, Clapton and his band went into the studio to lay some groundwork for an album. They worked on a few original songs and some covers, including one Johnson song, Travelin' Riverside Blues.
When Clapton brought a CD of the session's highlights home, he found that all he wanted to listen to was the Johnson song.
The band returned to the studio with the intent to make a conventional album. But Clapton had a little exercise in mind. Every time the band reached an impasse, he'd suggest they play a Johnson song. For fun.
"All the time, I kind of intuitively knew that I was going to make a Robert Johnson album," he said.
For Clapton, it was almost a case of now or never for paying tribute to his childhood idol. He's turning 60 next year and, he said, "I'm not sure when I'm going to be on the decline."
One of the reasons it took him so long is that he was unsure of an approach. Do you try to stay true to Johnson's original recordings or use them as a starting point for new interpretations?
"It has taken me to this stage in my career or my life to be man enough to tackle it," he said.
His current tour, which started in Europe in March, began, he said, as a kind of warmup for the three-day guitar festival he organized in Dallas last weekend to raise money for Crossroads Centre Antigua, the drug and alcohol treatment center he founded in 1997. The festival also featured Carlos Santana, Steve Vai, Robert Cray, B.B. King, Brian May, Joe Walsh and Jimmie Vaughan. Following Dallas, he's touring the United States, including his Tampa stop on Monday, "to kind of wind down."
A guitar auction, also to raise money for Crossroads, will take place June 24 at Christie's, the New York auction house. Clapton is donating more than 50 of his own guitars, with other instruments donated by Vai and Pete Townshend.
It includes a cherry-red Gibson that Clapton bought "with my first real money from the Yardbirds."
"I've used it all through my career," he said. "It's the first proper electric guitar I ever had. That one is probably the most valuable."
He'll hold back a couple of guitars to work with, and then build up his collection again.
"You're talking about people coming out (of the treatment center) with a new life," he said. "What's a guitar?"
PREVIEW: Eric Clapton, 7:30 p.m. Monday, St. Pete Times Forum, 401 Channelside Drive, Tampa. $45-$85. 813 287-8844 or (727) 898-2100. For more information on the Crossroads Centre and the guitar auction: www.crossroadsantigua.org
