Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [19]
The Roosters were a tiny outfit, with virtually no equipment. Guitar, vocals, keyboard all went through one amplifier. We had no proper transport, just Robin’s Morris Oxford convertible, into which we had to pile all our equipment as well as ourselves, ownership of the car giving him a certain amount of power in the band. We met for rehearsals in a room above a pub somewhere in Surbiton. I would come up from Ripley and plug my guitar into Tom’s amplifier, and we would just learn things, mostly blues and R&B covers. We taught ourselves a couple of Chuck Berry songs, “Short Fat Fanny” by Larry Williams, and some stuff by Muddy Waters. The most significant event for me was when Tom one day brought out a record by black artist Freddy King, a 45 rpm instrumental called “Hideaway” that he was mad about. I’d never heard Freddy King before, and listening to him had an effect on me similar to what I might feel if I were to meet an alien from outer space. It simply blew my mind.
On the B side of “Hideaway” was “I Love the Woman,” which had a guitar solo in the middle of it that took my breath away. It was like listening to modern jazz, expressive and melodic, a unique kind of playing in which he bent the strings and produced sounds that gave me the shivers. It was absolutely earth-shattering for me, like a new light for me to move toward. Up until that moment I had always thought of guitar playing as being little more than an accompaniment to the singing, except in one or two rare cases that I had always noticed and wondered where the players were coming from. A good example of this was the Connie Francis number “Lipstick on Your Collar,” which has an incredible guitar solo by George Barnes; and Ricky Nelson had a guitarist, James Burton, who would play country-blues electric guitar solos. Hearing Freddy play explained where all of this had come from.
The Roosters rehearsed more than we played. Even though we did a gig every now and then, mostly in upstairs rooms in pubs, it was more about the excitement of meeting like-minded blues people. Virtually nobody in Ripley had any interest in blues. Pop was the order of the day, with the current craze being the Mersey sound. The Beatles were just starting to be popular, and once a week a radio show called Pop Go the Beatles came on, which consisted entirely of them playing their own songs and covers of other people’s. They were taking off really quickly, and everybody wanted to be like them. It was the beginnings of Beatlemania. All over the country people were dressing like them, playing like them, sounding like them, and looking like them. I thought it was despicable, probably because it showed how sheeplike people were, and how ready they were to elevate these players to the status of gods, when most of the artists I admired had died unheard of, sometimes penniless and alone. It also made it look like what we were trying to do was already a lost cause.
The gradual increase in popularity of the Mersey sound forced musicians like me to almost go underground, as if we were anarchists, plotting to overthrow the music establishment. It seemed that the “trad jazz” movement was dying, and was taking folk and blues with it. So the thing with the Roosters was that, as much as anything,