Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [15]
I saw a clip of him on TV, playing in a nightclub, lit by the light from a single lightbulb, swinging in its shade from the ceiling, creating an eerie lighting effect. The tune he was playing was called “Hey Hey,” and it knocked me out. It’s a complicated guitar piece, full of blue notes, which are what you get by splitting a major and a minor note. You usually start with the minor and then bend the note up toward the major, so it’s somewhere between the two. Indian and Gypsy music also use this kind of note bending. When I first heard Big Bill and, later, Robert Johnson, I became convinced that all rock ’n’ roll—and pop music too, for that matter—had sprung from this root.
Next I set about learning to play like Jimmy Reed, who usually plays a twelve-bar form, and whose style has been copied by countless R&B bands. I discovered that the key was to make a kind of boogie on the bottom two strings of the guitar by simply pressing down on the fifth string at the second fret and then the fourth fret to make a basic kind of walking figure, while playing the E string at the same time. Then I’d move it up to the next string to make the next part of the twelve-bar, and so on. The final step, and the hardest part really, is to feel it, to play in a relaxed rhythm so that it feels and sounds good. I am someone who can’t leave things unfinished, and if I’ve given myself a task to do in the day, then I can’t go to bed until I’ve done it. It was like this with the twelve-bar blues riff. I worked at it until it felt like it was part of my metabolism.
As I worked to improve my playing, I was meeting more and more people who had the same respect and reverence for the music I loved. One particular blues fanatic was Clive Blewchamp—we met at Hollyfield and set out together on a fantastic voyage of discovery. It was Clive who first played me the Robert Johnson album. He really enjoyed finding the hard-core stuff, the more obscure the better. We were also neck and neck in our dress sense and spent a lot of time together in and out of school. We would go to blues clubs, too, later on, and it was only when I started working full-time in bands that we stopped hanging out together. I always felt that he was a little contemptuous of what I was trying to do musically, as if it weren’t the real thing. Of course he was right, but I was unstoppable by then. He finished his term at Kingston after I was thrown out, got his diploma, and finally moved to Canada, where he ran a small R&B magazine. We stayed in touch over the years, until, sadly, he died, about ten years ago.
It was exciting to find that there existed this fellowship of like-minded souls, and this is one of the things that determined my future path toward becoming a musician. I started to meet people who knew about Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and they had older friends, record collectors who would hold club nights, which is where I was first introduced to John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and Little Walter. These guys would get together in one of their houses and spend the whole evening listening to one album, like The Best of Muddy Waters, and then have excited discussions about what they’d heard. Clive and me would often go up to London to visit record stores, like Imhoff’s on New Oxford Street, the whole of whose basement was devoted to jazz, and Dobell’s on Shaftesbury Avenue, where they had a bin devoted to Folkways, which was the major label for folk, blues, and traditional music. If you were lucky, you’d meet a working musician