[Slowhand] Re: Slowhand Digest, Vol 7, Issue 307

Robert bluez4u2 at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 18 12:32:15 EDT 2006


Buddy Guy was doing many of these things before Clapton. Buddy was way before his time and an influence to Jimi Hendrix.

slowhand-request at planet-torque.com wrote:


>"Eric Clapton is the most important and influential guitar player that has

>ever lived, is still living or ever will live. Do yourself a favor, and

>don't debate me on this. Before Clapton, rock guitar was the Chuck Berry

>method, modernized by Keith Richards, and the rockabilly sound -- Scotty

>Moore, Carl Perkins, Cliff Gallup -- popularized by George Harrison.

>Clapton absorbed that, then introduced the essence of black electric blues

>-- the power and vocabulary of Buddy Guy, Hubert Sumlin and the three

>Kings, B.B., Albert and Freddy -- to create an attack that defined the

>fundamentals of rock & roll lead guitar . Maybe most important of all, he

>turned the amp up -- to eleven. That alone blew everybody's mind in the

>mid-Sixties. In the studio, he moved the mike across the room from the amp,

>which added ambience; everybody else was still close-miking. Then he

>cranked the fucking thing. Sustain happened; feedback happened. The guitar

>player suddenly became the most important guy in the band . When he soloed,

>he wrote wonderful symphonies from classic blues licks in that fantastic

>tone, with all of the resonance that comes from distortion. You could sing

>his solos like songs in themselves . The thing is, he had seven years of

>the most extraordinary, historic guitar playing ever -- and thirty-five

>years of doing good work. Being the best has got to wear you out. So he

>pulled back, like Dylan and Lennon did . Anyone who plays lead guitar owes

>him a debt of gratitude. He wrote the fundamental language, the binary

>code, that everyone uses to this day in every form of popular music . The

>day may come, if you're a young rocker, when you'll hear one of Clapton's

>mellow, contemporary ballads on the radio and think, "What's the big deal?

>. Put on "Steppin' Out." And bow down" (Little Steven, "The Immortals: The

>100 Greatest Artists Of All Time-53) Eric Clapton," "Rolling Stone," 21

>April 2005 (#972), p. 52.

>

>

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