[Slowhand] Eric Clapton: The Essential Interviews

[Kevin Wilson]

Looking at the preview of the book at Amazon.com, I found that it’s the Clapton related interviews, concert reviews and articles over the years that are available for download (on paid subscription) from Rock's Backpages.
http://www.rocksbackpages.com/artist.html?ArtistID=clapton_eric

On your suggestion to see some rare articles, my view is that much is lost in time, after all, who could anticipate that Clapton would be famous one day back in the early 60s.

Alternatively, there's so many ways to milk a story of a non-event like Casey Jones & the Engineers - even Eric Clapton: The Autobiography has its own version. Here's some others...


Slowhand Tourography

In September 1963, Eric Clapton joined the Liverpool band Casey Jones and the Engineers. They did a handful of gigs in the Liverpool area, playing the Northern Beat and Cabaret Circuit. They also played in Reading, Berkshire, together with The Undertakers. Clapton quit the band after the seventh gig.

 

John Pidgeon | Eric Clapton: A Biography, p.12 & 13 | Revised Edition, 1985

Clapton and [Tom] McGuinness joined Casey Jones’ Engineers. Jones was a cocky, diminutive Liverpudlian in whose lap a recording contract had landed while Merseybeat mania was addling the brains of A&R men. He’d cut a single called “One Way Ticket” as Casey Jones and the Engineers. Since there were no Engineers outside the recording studio, having only been added to the label copy to provide a group identity, an outfit had to be rapidly assembled for live performances.

As a step up the ladder for Clapton and McGuinness, backing Casey Jones was mostly snakes: Clapton quit after the seventh gig, McGuinness after the eighth. Musically unrewarding, the job paid them little more than The Roosters.

On two occasions - at Macclesfield Civic Hall and Manchester’s Oasis - the band were obliged to provide appropriate backing for Polly Perkins as well. Tom McGuinness recalls that “Eric and I attempted manfully to learn the chords, but failed totally. I can’t imagine what we played behind her, because I don’t think either of us knew too many chords. We really just wanted to boogie and play solos.”

Nevertheless, going out on the road to such distant venues did make them feel like professional musicians for the first time, and playing Chuck Berry numbers like “Talkin’ ‘Bout You” was easy work and might have been afforded some enjoyment were it not for the presence of Casey Jones, who [according to McGuinness] “tended to sing sharp most of the time, so it wasn’t much pleasure accompanying him. And he was a bit of a showbiz figure: he liked leaping around and the adulation of the crowd - all twenty of them who turned up. It was very short-lived. I turned up for some gig in town and Eric didn’t turn up for that one. I think I saw him later that night walking the streets of Soho and he said, ‘No, no, I couldn’t do it anymore.’ So I said, ‘I know what you mean, but he’s still got my amplifier.’”

Two nights later on 10 October, Casey Jones and the Engineers played the Olympia Ballroom, Reading. Ben Palmer turned up and helped McGuinness smuggle out his amplifier after the show. Ironically, on that last night, McGuinness got a raise. He made four pounds.

 

Christopher Sandford | Clapton: Edge of Darkness, p.36 | 1994

Clapton then made the first in a series of perverse career moves when at The Scene, Piccadilly, he learnt that a Liverpudlian named Brian Casser, trading as Casey Jones, was recruiting guitarists. Neither Casser’s stage persona (heavily in the mould of Screamin’ Lord Sutch and Arthur Brown) nor repertoire (Elvis hits, ballads) should have endeared itself to the blues fanatic - a man so introverted he looked ‘physically startled’ when the Roosters’ vocalist shook his hair. According to McGuinness, “Eric suddenly announced that Casser, arguably the world’s worst singer, wanted us to join … I think what appealed to him was the sense of being a professional, earning enough to throw in the bricklaying job with Jack [Clapp].”

Clapton began the strangest episode in a career not unknown for eccentricity. Over the space of four weeks he, McGuinness and two hired musicians stood in matching suits while, stage centre, Casser bounced on trampolines or swallowed fire. The end came when Clapton, with his lifelong aversion to confrontation, failed to appear one night in London. “That was typical”, says McGuinness. “There was no sense of commitment, other than onward and upward.” (Or as Clapton himself put it, “It was all good experience.”) He returned to Ripley and to Friday night sessions at the Crown, Kingston.

In a still more bizarre twist, Clapton was called on to back the cabaret singer Polly Perkins, reincarnated thirty years later as a star of the soap opera Eldorado.

 

Michael Schumacher | Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton, p.24 & 25 | 1995

Almost exactly a month after parting ways with the Roosters, Clapton was offered the opportunity to join another outfit, a Liverpool band called Casey Jones and the Engineers. As it turned out, the band was little more than a marketing setup for a young singer named Brian Casser, who had recorded a single for Columbia and needed a group of backing musicians to promote it in live performances.

A master of self-promotion, Casser had taken his marginal talents a long way, first in leading a band called Cass and the Casanovas, and then in fronting an outfit known as Casey Jones and the Governors. Casser, whose repertoire included everything from Mersey-beat pop to blues standards, managed to build a following in Hamburg as well as in England, and this success, coupled with the music industry’s obsession with any band coming out of Liverpool, led to a recording contract with Columbia. When Casser recorded his single, “One Way Ticket”, his “Engineers” were sessions musicians, not his own touring band. With the release of the record came the sudden need to find musicians to help promote it.

When Clapton heard that Casser was looking for two guitarists for his band, he talked to Tom McGuinness and the two signed on. Clapton later admitted that he was enticed by the prospects of touring England and making a little money - and maybe, eventually, cutting an album - but he soon grew bored with backing a singer who specialized in stage acrobatics and music he had no interest in. “It was a very heavy pop show and I couldn’t stand it for long,” he remarked years later. “I was such a purist, and the band was Top Twenty, which at the time was disastrous.”

Clapton stayed with the band for a month, performing a total of seven gigs in London, Manchester, Macclesfield, and Reading. He had decided, early in his brief tenure with Casey and the Engineers, that he would be leaving the group as soon as he found an opening somewhere else.

 

Chris Welch | Cream: The Legendary Sixties Supergroup, p.17 & 18 | 2000

Casey Jones & the Engineers was run by Brian Casser, the former singer with Liverpool group Cass & the Casanovas. Cass had left Liverpool to seek his fortune in London, where at the height of Beatlemania anybody with a Liverpool accent was guaranteed an audience and a record contract. In October 1962 he briefly formed a backing group called The Nightsound, which included Albert Lee. His drummer, Ray Stock met Clapton at The Scene club in London’s Soho. Clapton told Stock that he was an unemployed guitarist, and Stock revealed that Casey Jones was looking for musicians to form a backing band. Clapton said he’d join if he could bring along his ex-Roosters pal Tom McGuinness.

It transpired that Casey had taken unsuitable bookings all over the country, from Reading to Manchester. McGuinness and Clapton enjoyed their first taste of life on the road, away from home. But the music was getting on their nerves and one day Clapton decided to quit, without telling McGuinness. Clapton didn’t turn up for the next gig and McGuinness went looking for him. He was informed by Clapton’s pal Guy Stevens that the guitarist wasn’t going to do the Casey Jones gig any more. McGuinness remembers thinking: “Well sod that, I’m not doing it either. Clapton recalled later: “Casey Jones & the Engineers was a heavy pop show, and I couldn’t stand that for very long. At that time I was such a purist, and they were playing real Top-20 stuff, which was disastrous”.

It seems that The Engineers were expected to back a female pop singer on the night of their first gig in Macclesfield, Cheshire. The group drove all the way from London expecting to play the blues. Neither McGuinness nor Clapton knew the chords to the lady’s cabaret songs and they were highly embarrassed by the experience.

Ben Palmer loyally went to see Clapton with The Engineers and feels in retrospect that they weren’t quite as bad as reports have suggested. “They were a bit like Jackie Lomax and the Undertakers. It was that sort of band: quite exciting and professional, and they played well together.” 

 

John Collis | Record Collector #359, p.35 & 36 | February 2009 | “Can Blue Men Sing the Whites: A History of British Blues”

Tom McGuinness: So Eric and I joined Case Jones and the Engineers. One day I turned up and Eric wasn’t there. He couldn’t take it anymore. I took that as my cue.


Kevin

-----Original Message-----
From: deltanick at comcast.net [mailto:deltanick at comcast.net] 
Sent: 11 January 2010 18:40
To: Digest, Slowhand
Subject: Re: [Slowhand] Eric Clapton: The Essential Interviews

The interviews begin, chronologically, with EC's time in Cream. Clapton's career from Cream on is very well documented already. Therefore, I expect these interviews to be "re-runs" and contain nothing new. 

I'd prefer more info from the parts of EC's life and career that are NOT well documented at all: his early music life when he sometimes performed as a solo act, a duo with Dave Brock (later of Hawkwind), the Roosters, Casey Jones & The Engineers, the Yardbirds, John Mayall And The Bluesbreakers, Eric Clapton & The Powerhouse, the stuff that's NOT so easy to find.

I will probably skip this book, as I think I've probably seen much more than will be included. I'm guessing this book will be amateurish for many of us here on the Slowhand Digest, but maybe I'm wrong.

At this point, looks like the author didn't really have to do much work at all: just re-publish a whole bunch of previously-published interviews. It's a shame.

                DeltaNick