blue mist round my soul

I never really paid much attention to Eric Clapton. Classic rock radio overplayed the staples and I soon became sick of hearing Cocaine, Layla (which I’ve now actually become quite fond of (mostly due to Duane Allman’s playing though)), and Wonderful Tonight. I knew that Brits famously attested to his godliness early in his career. I knew he’d done the drug thing in the 70’s and gotten in pretty deep. I knew that he’d done time in a number of monumentally influential bands, bands that I’ve come to know and love like the Yardbirds and Cream. But it wasn’t until I saw a clip of him on a DVD that I truly recognized his gift as a musician. Watching him play with Keith Richards, Mitch Mitchell and John Lennon as the Dirty Mac in 1968 was a revelation. The recently unearthed and remastered clip, on the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus DVD, shows them run through Lennon’s Yer Blues with restrained but assured ferocity. Clapton’s nimble fingers traverse the fretboard with a familiarity that appears to show, as others before me have suggested, that he was born to play guitar. He seems isolated in his own loud world, focused solely on his instrument as he sucks his teeth and nods his head. At one point, he looks genuinely surprised, looking up and grinning at the other guys, almost astonished at either their chemistry or his own mind-blowing ability. With a Gibson ES-335 strapped to him (which everybody knows is way cooler than the stupid Stratocasters he uses these days), he plays it clean, putting together gracefully fluid runs and cementing his position as one of rock and blues’ top guitarists.