This past summer I worked up a harmonica and foot-drums version of "Crossroad Blues"--several of you have heard it in performance--and these days I'm working on a new harp/drums arrangement of "Sunshine of Your Love." Since I began blues harmonica and blues guitar at the same age (16), and since I was a huge Clapton fan back then, this seems like something that was made to happen.
Clapton's reputation has always been immense, of course, but white/English blues players have always, at the same time, been dogged to some extent by an accusation of having--sigh--appropriated music from the black originals. If you think I'm exaggerating, read what black intellectuals said about Stevie Winwood in the late 1960s. Tom Jones--THAT Tom Jones--was also accused of ripping off soul artists.
I'm positioned very strangely vis a vis this old controversy, because I come at Clapton from various directions. I was a total fan-boy as a teen and spent hours, days, months, playing along with Cream and Dominos albums. LAYLA certainly needs no apology. Later, when I heard "From the Cradle," and especially when I heard Clapton's more overt homages to Robert Johnson, I lost some of the fan-boy gaga and began to think that EC didn't suffer the comparison particularly well.
But when I go back and listen to the live Cream stuff, there's no question in my mind that Clapton was a genius. The live versions of "Crossroads" and "Sunshine of Your Love," together, make clear that "ripoff" doesn't begin to describe the thrillingly original and completely non-deriviative music that those boys were making. I know from reading the biography that Clapton was blown away, depressed, the first time he saw Hendrix--and I'll be the first to admit that Hendrix was indeed a super-genius. But Clapton with Cream was also doing something rare and original. Yes, Albert King had the big thunderclap sound, but Clapton and Cream transformed electric blues into jazzy, long-form improvisational stuff that had no real precendent in African American blues--although it DID have a precedent, for sure, in black jazz. But that's what creativity is: creating a new sound out of materials that nobody else had thought to combine in that particular way.
In any case, the Cream songbook strikes me as ripe for harmonica exploitation, and I'm working hard at it. Stay tuned......
kudzu, Loved your 'Crossroads,' verily, unto death! Look forward to any Cream you put forward, and thank you.
Oh! But for the luxury of a new talent as powerful and fun as Clapton to come out now so the fools could accuse him of shit from their jealous, narrow souls while we revel in the pleasure of great new music. A timely new version of the Beatles (and a few others) would also be welcome.
I too rode that great wave of really timeless popular music and thought, "this can't last forever." I was, sadly correct.
The accusers might listen to luminaries like B.B. King and Buddy Guy among others who praise Clapton's deliberate efforts to boost their careers ( & sales.)
Stevie Winwood: At least a half-dozen recordings for the ages. Not too shabby.
I was a big Cream fan--and I have always loved Clapton's music.
I never got the idea that EC or other British bands were "ripping" music off--I just thought they were being heavily influenced by music they loved. Were they actually stealing music and claiming credit for it?
I know that Zep lost a court case, so technically they were guilty, but I'm still not sure that there was any underhand, deceptive intention. Blues players had been lifting whole verses from other people's songs and putting them into their own for years. It's part of the tradition. I suspect Paige and Plant actually saw it from that point of view, but got a lesson in the reality of modern music business practise the hard way. Besides, they were just performers, when it comes to acknowledging authorship and paying royalties - wasn't that the label's responsibility?
The Ginger Baker drumbeat is actually pretty natural on the foot drum. The opening riffs to "Sunshine" fall beautifully on the harp, lower and middle octave, and when it switches to the IV chord, you've got the 4 overblow. The tricky part is interspersing enough harp in with the vocal on the verses to keep the whole thing afloat. It's quite a challenge.
On "Sunshine" the story goes that Ginger was having a devil of a time trying to figure out how to play it. I think there was even some talk about scrapping the song. Then, engineer Tom Dowd, suggested trying a Native American tribal type rythym and feel. The rest is rock history.
BTW, for Cream and Ginger fans, Rolling Stone has an in depth piece on Ginger a few issues back that you might be able to pull up on their website. It's hard to capture in a few words what he's like. Let's just say that the meanest roughest edged old bluesman has nothing on Ginger. The one liner on Mick Jagger alone is priceless (and I'm a huge Stones fan).
Last Edited by on Jan 06, 2010 11:24 AM
Adam, I'm curious about the third paragraph in your opening post on this thread. That's because I feel i'm postioned strangely vis-a-vis that controversy, yet almost compltetly opposite of you as it applies to Clapton.
I grew up on hard rock and rock and roll. The Stones, The Beatles, Zep, The Who, Deep Purple etc. etc. I knew nothing of the controversy, indeed nothing of the Blues itself throughout most my adult life, and for whatever reason I never really cared for Cream that much (save "sunshine").
I became interested in the Blues as I began to read interviews with all my rock and roll heroes, who, to a man, talked about the Blues as their inspiration.
I really began to investigate the Blues and became a Clapton fan through listening to Me. and Mr. Johnson and Clapton Unplugged, which of course, is nearly 100% covers of Blues tunes. Leaving me in the awkward position of having not really liked the Rock Clapton but loving the Blues Clapton. One could say he was a conduit for me to listening to a lot of the old original blues artists.
As I read your post, it sounds like you lost respect for him as a result of the Mr. Johnson CD. Or am I reading too much into your comment? I'll stipulate ahead of time, that Mr. Johnson and Unplugged offer nothing ground breaking. Isn't there a place for an artists take on somebody elses songs? No big deal either way and i'm not picking a fight here, i'm just curious.
Last Edited by on Jan 06, 2010 5:59 AM
@kudzurunner@ said "Hendrix was indeed a super-genius" I could never get my head around his stuff I'm afraid, I found it discordant and unlikable. I believe the 40th anniversary of his death will be soon. Can't believe it was really that long ago. ----------
I'm a HUGE Hendrix fan, yet I get what your saying. I liked Jimi most when he was playing Blues (Red House) or Rock and Roll (Fire), I liked him a lot less the more psychedelic/effects dominated he went, though I'll carve out The Star Spangled Banner here because, in context, I thought it WAS genius.
I'll start by posting a video of what seems to me like Cream at their peak. What I'd have you notice is that "Sunshine" is a 12-bar blues: it's 48 beats, if you count them slowly enough, and the first 8 bars are exactly according to plan. Then it basically stays on the V chord for the last four bars, with the bIII and bVII of that chord trading off on the vocals. (After each 12-bar vocal verse, there's a 2-bar coda or prelude with the familiar riff before you head back into the next vocal verse.)
But listen to the vocals. Where did THIS version of AAB 12-bar blues come from? Very inventive songwriting. Chicago blues circa 1968 was nothing like this.
I wrote an article on the blues revival and the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and came across a lot of incredibly pissed-off writing by black intellectuals on the subject of white ripoffs of the blues. Larry Neal called for the "destruction of the white thing," and part of what he meant by that was the destruction of "white blues." Ron Welburn was one name I remember; he had an article in an important volume entitled THE BLACK AESTHETIC. Whew! There was a concert at Madison Square Garden featuring Butterfield and Janis Joplin that one white journalist said was going to crown the "king and queen of the blues." You can imagine what angry black intellectuals said about that--and for good reason.
The Black Aesthetic folks used words like "parasitic" to describe white "attempts" to play the blues. I don't know if they named Clapton by name. They certainly named Butterfield, Joplin, Tom Jones, and Steve Winwood.
Certain progressive white intellectuals very much sided with their black peers. Here is Paul Garon, one of the founders of Living Blues magazine (and somebody I call a friend; I've been on several panels with him and brought him to the Blues Today symposium), in a widely-known article, attempting to wholly undercut the validity of the bugaboo known as "white blues". He makes no bones about his position, and I'd encourage all members of this forum to read it and think about possible responses to it. His thesis is this: "I will argue that for those interested in the support and study of African-American culture, blues as purveyed by whites appears unauthentic and deeply impoverished; further, it too often represents an appropriation of black culture of a type sadly familiar. Finally, it can be economically crippling to black artists through loss of jobs and critical attention":
http://www.bluesworld.com/WHITEBLUES.html
The black intellectuals absolutely hated Jimi Hendrix, curiously, because he was playing with white boys (rather than making "black art"), was taking psychedelics, and because his audience had a lot of gyrating white girls in it. I found a handful of alarmed poems written by black poets of the time in which poor Jimi is savaged as a mutant.
Regardless of the general merits of the accusation disparaging white blues, I'm incapable of granting it any specific merit whatever when I watch Cream playing "Sunshine of Your Love" in this video. There's no minstrelsy here; no attempt to parody or simply replicate black performance style. The blues progression and blues tonality are certainly in evidence, as is a strong groove grounded to a considerable extent in African rhythmic understandings (such as stressing the upbeat).
But what's also in evidence is blazing originality of overall conception. Cream helped to invent something new. Call it heavy metal; call it blues rock. On "Bluesbreakers," Clapton was more or less parroting Freddie King's "Hideaway." But here he's letting fly in an entirely new direction, and the originality of the lyrics--which don't have any trace of black vernacular and thus don't enable any Yo-baby minstrelsy of the retro sort that we're all familiar with these days--is quite remarkable.
Last Edited by on Jan 06, 2010 8:25 AM
I'm sorry if I started this thread down another "White Blues" debate (I can see the eyes rolling on some of the MBH forum members already).
I was actually asking a much more focused and narrower question of you, which was: As an admitted admirer of Clapton and Cream's late 60's material, do you think any less of him now for having cut Me and Mr. Johnson? You gave me back much more than I asked for and it is greatly appreciated. But that is your trademark, right down to the generosity you have displayed with the ytube vids you have posted.
I read the Garon piece. I'll utter MY whew!, here. A lot to think about, and I'm going to resist the tempatation toward a knee-jerk response. I don't think i've fully digested it, yet. It may take several more readings.
for those of you into Cream and lots of other older music, wolfgang's vault has tons of free concerts you can stream.
Stevie Ray Vaughn can get a bit overplayed, but he has a live show on this site that shows how much of himself he put into his music, he lays it all out there.
my only complaint about Clapton and the blues is that he and his contemporaries seem to have mostly driven harmonica out of blues music for the most part for a long time, they made certain that the guitar was the lead instrument first and foremost, whereas harp was a good bit more prominent up to that point. Allman Brothers had a harp player, but they sliced him out of their live and studio recordings. Pigpen had his harp edged out of the Dead, and when he died it was not replaced. Harp pops up on some other bands from the era but it is mostly used as a novelty (eg. daltry, the Who, Stones), but those guitar blues/rock bands put the stake in the heart of harmonica as a central lead instrument in popular music.
That classic Cream performance of Sunshine is indeed brilliant and original. I am a bit too young to have been a direct consumer of this late sixties rock era, but I was lucky enough to have an older brother who brought some of it home. Watching that Cream video now, and with Adam's comments above, it's easy to see "classic" rock being birthed by the blues right before our eyes.
On a similar note, I recently saw the movie "Taking Woodstock" directed by Ang Lee (recently released on DVD), about how the Woodstock concert came about (great movie, but it's not about the music per se). Anyway that movie put in mind the Woodstock documentary, which I've seen a couple of times over the years, and have now put on my list of things to watch and listen to again with my "blues ears" on. I know there were a bunch of great early blues rock bands on the bill.
Oh yah, and I just remembered another cool documentary I saw a few years ago, called "Festival Express" about a touring concert that crossed Canada in the summer of 1970. This concert had a few notables such as Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, but also a bunch of lesser known but surprising good Canadian bands of that era. I recall a lot of blues influences present, and should try to find that one to watch again too.
@Honkin: I don't think any less of him, except that in several cuts on "From the Cradle" he's straining his voice trying to sound a little badass, and I don't think that's his natural voice. I think he'll be remembered for his Cream stuff, for the LAYLA album, for some of the live Derek & the Dominos stuff like "Why Does Love Got to Be So Sad," for "I Shot the Sheriff" (total change of direction after recovering from heroin addiction, but it worked), for "Cocaine" (lightweight, but memorable), and for "Tears From Heaven."
Clapton's best blues guitar solo for me is the track 'Have you heard' off the John Mayall Bluesbreakers album with Eric reading the Beano comic on the front. My mate at school heard that and made some early period graffiti on the school wall 'CLAPTON IS GOD'
We should also include "Blind Faith" ( Once at the Chicago Bluesfest, I met up with a guitar player on a bridge, playing "Can't Find My Way Home". I happened to have a harp that fit the key he was using, prolly C to play Dm in 3rd. I joined in, and gradually a crowd built around us. We must have jammed for about 1/2 hour on just that one song, and both of us walked away with $50 each! ).
Keith Relf put the jinx on harp players being relegated to second class status in rock bands.
One could argue that The Fabulous Thunderbirds are more of, or as much as, a rock band as a Blues band. No small measure that Kim is such a phenomonal musician.
As for the ethnic rip-off part...well, the non"white" community had seen it happen before where jazz was confiscated by lame plagiarists such as NORK and ODJB, and big bands such as Paul Whiteman. It took Benny Goodman to break the barrier, and have an integrated band. Course, over time, Jazz became more colorblind.
Blues was really the original Country genre, what the common people played. Pretty much always separated by race, mostly. Lots of listening and borrowing, obviously. Then, the white folk started calling what they did "Hillbilly" music...then "Country & Western". The brown folk just called what they did "Music". Then, Elvis came along and ripped Big Mama Thornton. I'm sure that 99% of the white audience had no idea WHAT a hound dog was.
Well apparently at least two white people knew what a hound dog was, because two white teenagers, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, WROTE the song for Big Mama Thornton.
As far as I'm concerned, Claptons work on "Crossroads" (the famous live version) is one of the greatest blues-rock guitar solos of all time. If it comes on my car radio when I'm out driving, the radio immediately gets cranked up. I never get sick of it. If you try to copy it on the guitar you'll find that it's a brilliant combination of the major and minor pentatonic scale. I also enjoyed Creams reunion concert when they showed it on PBS a few years back. In case anybody missed it, here's some downloadable jam tracks of Clapton with and without Cream:
There are no merits, general or specific, to the accusations disparaging white blues for being white. "For being white" is the important clause. Any performer is subject to criticism, but not this one.
I agree, but with several important qualifications.
If the word "white" is understood as a way of getting a handle on a complex systemic phenomenon at a certain moment in history--the late 1960s--then the accusation is understandable. The mass black audience for blues had dissipated with remarkable speed after the early 1960s; a mass white audience had rushed in. Not just an audience, but performers, and that's the crux. The publicity apparatus--magazines, newspapers, fanzines--had rushed to crown white blues performers as the "thing" of the moment. They were getting all the big recording deals, where black artists like Muddy Waters were--well, Muddy was making "Fathers and Sons," and if you were a firebreathing black intellectual in 1968, trying to place yourself in history and conscious of all the forces that had torn the black community apart through 200 years of American history, the idea that your culture heroes, ancestrally-speaking, were claiming white boys as their aesthetic "sons," at the very moment that the book THE BLACK AESTHETIC was being drafted and the Black Nation was trying to achieve liftoff, was the worst sort of knife in the guts. Where did that leave the black family--another institution that had been preyed upon mercilessly, in ideological terms, by the Moynihan Report and everybody else?
Too, a lot of white "blues" performers during that period were NOT, in fact, very good. Some were, but there was a lot of mediocre playing. I won't name names, but it's on the records.
The derision that some intellectuals, black and white, expressed towards "white blues" has to be understood in this context: as pushback against the music that was sucking all the oxygen out of the debate. Jimmy "Fast Fingers" Dawkins, Luther Allison, Junior Wells: they were the cream of the younger black bluesmen of that generation, and they weren't getting the sorts of deals that Clapton, Butterfield, and Joplin were getting. Rock-blues stole the fire from blues blues, you might say.
But even this is only half the story, and I tried to tell much more of the story in the essay I referenced earlier, which can be found in NEW ESSAYS ON THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT.
Paul Garon's critique comes from a different and much more paradoxical direction. Remember that seven white journalists and blues researchers, including Garon, started LIVING BLUES magazine in 1970. Jim O'Neil, Paul Garon, Bruce Iglauer.....I can't remember the others. It's hard being a white intellectual who embraces a black intellectual position calling for "the destruction of the white thing," but that's pretty much where Garon was. I kid him about this. "I shouldn't exist, Paul," I say. "Mongrel art. Black-and-white blues. I'm the class enemy." Etc. He wildly overstated his case, as far as I'm concerned.
My perspective is always grounded in the working musician's perspective. When you've got a blues gig to play--rather than an intellectual position to defend--you go with the guy who a) you have fun playing with; b) carries the groove well and knows your stuff; and c) shows up on time, without too much attitude. That's the way it always worked in New York. Race is completely irrelevant--unless, of course, you're gathering players for a gig in Germany, in which case it needs to be all black guys, because that's what German promoters insist on.
Only joking. Sort of.
Last Edited by on Jan 06, 2010 7:25 PM
I too confess to being a Cream fan back in the sixties and the reason was the flat out passion that Eric Clapton brought to party. His devotion to the blues has never wavered, and he pointed me in that direction. The Living Blues crowd has always had their point of view and that's fine. Adam, you are one of the rare, rare, few Anglos to ever grace their cover. No one should care what music someone wants to play, especially if they are passionate about it--because that passion will show through and they should share it. I'm sure that Charlie Pride was told more than once that he shouldn't be singing C&W for a living. With his voice, he could have been one hell of a soul singer--but that was not his passion. If a good Polka turns your crank. Play it. Or Conjunto, or jazz, or reggae, or Cajun, or Calypso, or Mozart; without any regards as to whether its a part of your particular culture or not. That should not matter. The passion to play does. So, when Clapton channeled Albert King while playing "Strange Brew", he wasn't ripping him off, he was honoring him--passionately.
You are, of course, entirely accurate, informative and entertaining. I'm not here to refute you.
I severely edited my initial post. Probably too much. Deleted was a section that stated that the black intellectual scribblings you referenced were useful to understanding the music, culture & history in a precise context.
My reaction is about this: Today we know that anything that deliberately or recklessly divides people, all-any-and-every-people, against each other is anti-social.
Everyone's future, and that includes the comfortably boo-szwa, is at risk in the uncomfortably near future from any number of threats that will require heroic tolerance and co-operation to successfully meet.
The racism implicit in those scribblings could pass in 1970. Recently those white kids elected a black man with a foreign name president of the U.S. The Black Arts intellectuals could've never predicted that. A lot changed in 38 years. Some better, much is worse.
I'm all for freedom of speech, intellectual honesty, truth-seeking and the conflict of ideas. In real life we're in this mess together and it will eventually threaten our lives. In this contemporary context the concept of 'white blues' is a silly luxury of ignorance.
P.S.: Doctor, you are not silly, but are a luxury. Thanks for the soapbox!
Last Edited by on Jan 07, 2010 12:44 AM
