The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [101]
I haven’t worked with a lot of big-name directors, but I came up during an era when they were all beginning to retire. I never worked with Hitchcock or Wyler or Stevens or Capra or Hawks or Walsh. I missed all that.
I suppose the most expensive director I’ve worked with is Don Siegel. I think I learned more about directing from him than from anybody else. He taught me to put myself on the line. He shoots lean, and he shoots what he wants. He knew when he had it, and he doesn’t need to cover his ass with a dozen different angles.
I learned that you have to trust your instincts. There’s a moment when an actor has it, and he knows it. Behind the camera you can feel that moment even more clearly. And once you’ve got it, once you feel it, you can’t second-guess yourself. If I would go around and ask everyone on the set how it looked, eventually someone would say, “Well, gee, I don’t know, there was a fly 600 feet back.” Somebody’s always going to find a flaw, and pretty soon that flaw gets magnified and you’re all back to another take. Meanwhile, everyone’s forgotten that there’s certain focus on things, and no one’s going to see that fly, because you’re using a 100-mm lens. But that’s what you can do. You can talk yourself in or out of anything. You can find a million reasons why something didn’t work. But if it feels right, and it looks right, it works.
Without sounding like a pseudointellectual dipshit, it’s my responsibility to be true to myself. If it works for me, it’s right. When I start choosing wrong, I’ll step back and let someone else do it for me.
ERIC CLAPTON
by Robert Palmer
June 20, 1985
Since we’re starting at the beginning, why don’t you tell me a bit about the town of Ripley, where you grew up.
It’s only about thirty miles outside of London, but it’s very country—Ripley is not even a town, it’s a village with farms all around it. And very few people ever leave there. They usually stay, get jobs, get married.
What kind of music did you hear when you were growing up?
Pop music, first. Mostly songs that were still hanging over from wartime; “We’ll Meet Again,” that sort of thing, melodic pop music.
There was a funny Saturday-morning radio program for children, with this strange person, Uncle Mac. He was a very old man with one leg and a strange little penchant for children. He’d play things like “Mule Train,” and then every week he’d slip in something like a Buddy Holly record or a Chuck Berry record. And the first blues I ever heard was on that program; it was a song by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, with Sonny Terry howling and playing the harmonica. It blew me away. I was ten or eleven.
When was the first time you actually saw a guitar?
Hmmm . . . I remember the first rock & roll I ever saw on TV was Jerry Lee Lewis doing “Great Balls of Fire.” And that threw me; it was like seeing someone from outer space. And I realized suddenly that here I was in this village that was never going to change, yet there on TV was something out of the future. And I wanted to go there! Actually, he didn’t have a guitarist, but he had a bass player, playing a Fender Precision bass, and I said, “That’s a guitar.” I didn’t know it was a bass guitar, I just knew it was a guitar, and again I thought, “That’s the future. And that’s what I want.” After that I started to build one, tried to carve a Stratocaster out of a block of wood, but I didn’t know what to do when I got to the neck and frets and things.
I was living with my grandparents, who raised me, and since I was the only child in the family, they used to spoil me something terrible. So I badgered them until they bought me a plastic Elvis Presley guitar. Of course, it could never stay in tune, but I could put on a Gene Vincent record, look in the mirror and mime.
When I was fourteen or fifteen, they gave me a real guitar, an acoustic, but it was so hard to play, I actually didn’t even try for a while. And pretty soon the neck began to warp. But I did invent chords. I invented