The punch line is not that the song blew her away; in fact, it worried her. " It was so painfully personal, so obviously about the son that he’d lost [ Would you know my name, if I saw you in heaven?]. I wondered if it would work in the movie." Several weeks later, after Clapton had recorded the ballad with a new bridge provided by songwriter Will Jennings, the guitarist himself was having doubts. “It’s awfully maudlin and I still don’t like the way some phrases end,” he told Zanuck. “It’ll never be a hit.”
So much for the theory, first advanced in the ’60s, that “Clapton is God.” “Tears In Heaven!’–all plinking harps, tinkling triangles and gentle guitars–weeps from every top-40 station in the nation. It is No. 3 on the Billboard singles chart: a success made possible by fans perhaps conceived to the tune of " Wonderful Tonight.” The song will serve as a centerpiece of a stage show that Clapton will take on a 20-city U.S. tour starting April 25.
Clapton himself is clearly up to the task. The rock icon, who turns 47 on March 30, looks shockingly fit for someone who has survived alcoholism, drug addiction, heavy-duty heartbreak, the death of friends such as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan–and, last year, the loss of his 4-year-old son, Conor. “Loss and emotional trauma are almost like everyday feelings,” he said recently on Westwood One radio. “You become … not happy with that but happy despite that.” His friend, the legendary blues guitarist Buddy Guy, calls him “the strongest man alive.” Clapton would probably laugh at that–he is not even, he knows, a good picker of hit singles. " I don’t care what the charts say," Clapton joked two weeks ago in London, where he was wrapping his annual run in Royal Albert Hall. " I still don’t believe it."
But if “Slowhand,” as he’s sometimes known, was wrong about the song’s potential, he has been remarkably wise about himself. March 20 will mark a year of grieving since Conor fell to his death from the 53d floor of the Manhattan apartment tower where he was staying with his mother, Italian actress Lori Del Santo. Clapton, whose relationship with Del Santo had ended by then, was in a nearby hotel when he got a call informing him that the boy had run through a window left open by the housekeeper. Since that day, Clapton has mourned like a man steeped in the hard-won wisdom of the baby boom: he has sought support through religion, therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous, whose meetings he has been attending, he says, for several years. The only old habit Clapton has reacquired is the rather constructive one of carrying around his acoustic guitar. " Eric takes that thing to meetings and hotel rooms," says Zanuck. “He doesn’t want to have one day when he’s not making music.”
Clapton’s new music has all the warmth and sensual appeal of just-baked bread. If it has all the permanence, too, so be it; at a time when his songwriting is, as he says, “a process of self-healing,” that may not matter. “I wouldn’t want to insult [my audience],” he said on MTV’s “Unplugged” program last week, “by not including them in my grief.” He is consistently moved, he says, “by the sympathy I get from people who come up to me.” Most of the new music is so new that it hasn’t even been recorded. But the “Rush” soundtrack album, this year’s Albert Hall extravaganza and" Unplugged" all contain hints about where he is headed.
The basic direction is inward. All of the new songs that Clapton has performed in public lately have lyrics that discuss his soils death with a minimum of metaphor; a haunting samba called “The Circus Left Town,” for example, is a meditation on a trip to the circus that turned out to be the last time he saw Conor alive. The fact that Clapton is a competent lyricist only in short spurts actually works to underscore each song’s honesty; the words break down along with the listener. “I just wanted to write sad music,” he says. “All this year, that’s all I wanted.” This may be therapeutic; the pain, he says, is no longer so keen. In any case, it makes for music with an emotional rawness that could make the blues blush.
Clapton, of course, has reached deep inside himself before. “Layla” was an obsessional love affair you could dance to–an anthem inspired by his relationship with George Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, whom he later married and divorced. “It’s almost like I’m someone in a novel who shouldn’t really have gotten this far and lived,” he said in that radio interview. Last week on MTV he sang a shuffle version of “Layla” while wearing bifocals–a graceful man with a tune, unfortunately, for every human tragedy.
With the Yardbirds (1964). Twenty perfect seconds in which Chuck Berry metamorphoses into Albert King. A great nasty last note.
With John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers (1966). On both, Clapton’s guitar is brutally distorted, stuttering out phrases as if he wanted to jump out of his skin.
With Cream (1967, 1968). The masterfully paced " Sunshine" solo was infamously cropped on the single. The swooping, twisting, shrieking second solo on “Crossroads” is the most sublime thing he ever played.
With Blind Faith (1969). A turgid song. But the wah-wah guitar solo is full of surprises and has a crazy inner logic: a guitar speaking in tongues.
From “Just One Night” (1980). “Trouble,” a slow blues, lets Clapton and Albert Lee show off every hot lick in the book. On “Further,” a boogie-down shuffle, they invent a bunch more.
From “Journeyman” (1989). A fat-toned, babbling solo, piecing together irregularly shaped phrases into a perfectly structured whole. Straight blues playing gets no better.
title: “His Saddest Song” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-27” author: “Sandra Voller”
The punch line is not that the song blew her away; in fact, it worried her. " It was so painfully personal, so obviously about the son that he’d lost [ Would you know my name, if I saw you in heaven?]. I wondered if it would work in the movie." Several weeks later, after Clapton had recorded the ballad with a new bridge provided by songwriter Will Jennings, the guitarist himself was having doubts. “It’s awfully maudlin and I still don’t like the way some phrases end,” he told Zanuck. “It’ll never be a hit.”
So much for the theory, first advanced in the ’60s, that “Clapton is God.” “Tears In Heaven!’–all plinking harps, tinkling triangles and gentle guitars–weeps from every top-40 station in the nation. It is No. 3 on the Billboard singles chart: a success made possible by fans perhaps conceived to the tune of " Wonderful Tonight.” The song will serve as a centerpiece of a stage show that Clapton will take on a 20-city U.S. tour starting April 25.
Clapton himself is clearly up to the task. The rock icon, who turns 47 on March 30, looks shockingly fit for someone who has survived alcoholism, drug addiction, heavy-duty heartbreak, the death of friends such as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan–and, last year, the loss of his 4-year-old son, Conor. “Loss and emotional trauma are almost like everyday feelings,” he said recently on Westwood One radio. “You become … not happy with that but happy despite that.” His friend, the legendary blues guitarist Buddy Guy, calls him “the strongest man alive.” Clapton would probably laugh at that–he is not even, he knows, a good picker of hit singles. " I don’t care what the charts say," Clapton joked two weeks ago in London, where he was wrapping his annual run in Royal Albert Hall. " I still don’t believe it."
But if “Slowhand,” as he’s sometimes known, was wrong about the song’s potential, he has been remarkably wise about himself. March 20 will mark a year of grieving since Conor fell to his death from the 53d floor of the Manhattan apartment tower where he was staying with his mother, Italian actress Lori Del Santo. Clapton, whose relationship with Del Santo had ended by then, was in a nearby hotel when he got a call informing him that the boy had run through a window left open by the housekeeper. Since that day, Clapton has mourned like a man steeped in the hard-won wisdom of the baby boom: he has sought support through religion, therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous, whose meetings he has been attending, he says, for several years. The only old habit Clapton has reacquired is the rather constructive one of carrying around his acoustic guitar. " Eric takes that thing to meetings and hotel rooms," says Zanuck. “He doesn’t want to have one day when he’s not making music.”
Clapton’s new music has all the warmth and sensual appeal of just-baked bread. If it has all the permanence, too, so be it; at a time when his songwriting is, as he says, “a process of self-healing,” that may not matter. “I wouldn’t want to insult [my audience],” he said on MTV’s “Unplugged” program last week, “by not including them in my grief.” He is consistently moved, he says, “by the sympathy I get from people who come up to me.” Most of the new music is so new that it hasn’t even been recorded. But the “Rush” soundtrack album, this year’s Albert Hall extravaganza and" Unplugged" all contain hints about where he is headed.
The basic direction is inward. All of the new songs that Clapton has performed in public lately have lyrics that discuss his soils death with a minimum of metaphor; a haunting samba called “The Circus Left Town,” for example, is a meditation on a trip to the circus that turned out to be the last time he saw Conor alive. The fact that Clapton is a competent lyricist only in short spurts actually works to underscore each song’s honesty; the words break down along with the listener. “I just wanted to write sad music,” he says. “All this year, that’s all I wanted.” This may be therapeutic; the pain, he says, is no longer so keen. In any case, it makes for music with an emotional rawness that could make the blues blush.
Clapton, of course, has reached deep inside himself before. “Layla” was an obsessional love affair you could dance to–an anthem inspired by his relationship with George Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, whom he later married and divorced. “It’s almost like I’m someone in a novel who shouldn’t really have gotten this far and lived,” he said in that radio interview. Last week on MTV he sang a shuffle version of “Layla” while wearing bifocals–a graceful man with a tune, unfortunately, for every human tragedy.
With the Yardbirds (1964). Twenty perfect seconds in which Chuck Berry metamorphoses into Albert King. A great nasty last note.
With John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers (1966). On both, Clapton’s guitar is brutally distorted, stuttering out phrases as if he wanted to jump out of his skin.
With Cream (1967, 1968). The masterfully paced " Sunshine" solo was infamously cropped on the single. The swooping, twisting, shrieking second solo on “Crossroads” is the most sublime thing he ever played.
With Blind Faith (1969). A turgid song. But the wah-wah guitar solo is full of surprises and has a crazy inner logic: a guitar speaking in tongues.
From “Just One Night” (1980). “Trouble,” a slow blues, lets Clapton and Albert Lee show off every hot lick in the book. On “Further,” a boogie-down shuffle, they invent a bunch more.
From “Journeyman” (1989). A fat-toned, babbling solo, piecing together irregularly shaped phrases into a perfectly structured whole. Straight blues playing gets no better.
