Young Eric Clapton

My first true musical hero - my teenage idol - was Eric Clapton.

Nowadays, I find his music boring and predictable and the man himself rather unpleasant. However, for a while - starting in 1965 - I was a total Clapton fan boy. I followed everything he did through the pages of Melody Maker, listened to everything I could get hold of and soaked up every single note until, as a young guitarist, I could play along with his records and make a fair fist of it. Hell, I even tried to look like him and grew my sideburns as long as my teenage hormones would allow!

What really set me off on this adolescent idolatry was the "Beano" album - "Blues Breakers - John Mayall with Eric Clapton", to give it its official title. The "Beano" reference was to the kids' comic Clapton is reading on the front of the album cover. 

Mayall gave Clapton more or less equal billing, as the guitarist was a huge draw as far as live gigs were concerned. It's surprising to realise that Clapton's tenure with Mayall only spanned just over a year in total - April to June 1965, and then October 1965 to July 1966. The three month hiatus was down to Clapton deciding to form a band called the Glands and then go and conquer Greece - but that's another story! The Beano album was recorded in May '66 but not released until after the guitarist had quit the Blues Breakers to form Cream.

The album was a hit - reaching number 6 in the 1966 UK regular album chart. Remember, this was a hit blues album at a time when blues music was very much a minority taste!

What's always intrigued me is how a rather pedestrian guitarist with the Yardbirds blossomed so quickly - in a matter of a few months - into Mayall's right hand man and pretty much nailed the sound and style of rock guitar for the next half century or so to come. You get no clues from his autobiography, other than that he woodshedded intensively when transitioning between the Yardbirds and the Blues Breakers. Yes, you get a glimpse of his potential on less than a handful of Yardbirds tracks, but suddenly there he was, BANG! - the toast of the club circuit. Apparently, Mayall made Clapton listen to a lot of electric blues by people like Otis Rush and one can only assume that the guitarist soaked it all up. However it happened, he went from average to great very quickly indeed.

OK, so here's the deal...

This is an attempt to gather together an illustrative collection of non-Beano and pre-Cream tracks, showing what else Clapton got up to around about that time. It shifts from a few Yardbirds tracks to collaborations with Mayall, Jimmy Page and others, and hopefully adds to and illuminates the legacy of the groundbreaking Beano album and Clapton's major part in it. 

Off we go with three tracks from the Yardbirds - a single:"Good Morning Little Schoolgirl"/"I Ain't Got You" (1964) and the B-side - "Got to Hurry" (1965) - of the band's first major hit, "For Your Love". The "Schoolgirl" A-side might well be one of the most moronic blues covers ever, but Clapton's solo comes soaring through with its fat overdriven tone. You'd swear it was Jeff Beck, but it's definitely Clapton. The B-side R&B classic is far more respectfully treated, with a good solo from Clapton. "Got to Hurry" was, by all accounts, the track that made Mayall seek out Clapton for the Blues Breakers.

A one off single record deal in 1965 got Mayall and Clapton a release on the Purdah label, owned by future Beano album producer Mike Vernon. This paired a piano/guitar instrumental "Bernard Jenkins" with "Lonely Years" featuring Mayall on vocals and harp and Clapton, naturally, on guitar. Both sides are stunningly good and it's amazing to think that Clapton was just 20 at the time.

Mayall's Clapton era Bluesbreakers cut a few tracks for the Immediate label sometime in 1965, as Mayall had been dropped by Decca, although the contract was later renewed for the Beano album. These included "I'm Your Witchdoctor" - complete with a solo played using only sustained feedback...

[...it's generally acknowledged that the first purposely recorded guitar feedback was the opening note of the Beatles' "I Feel Fine" and I have no argument with that. However, when it comes to the first use of feedback in a solo, I've read people citing Hendrix, Townshend and others, but no one ever mentions the "Witchdoctor" solo - apart from The Seth Man here. Recorded some time in 1965 (a more exact date is unavailable), it's streets ahead of anything anyone played before or for quite a few years afterwards. Clapton doesn't just throw in a squeal of feedback or sustain a single note, he plays two solos using only continuous feedback. In short, no one had ever played the guitar in such a way before - not ever...]

...and a tasty slow blues - "Telephone Blues" - on the B side. A further track, again with a feedback solo, was recorded - "On Top of the World". Some bloke called Jimmy Page produced these, and also a few rough instrumental tracks with Clapton - some of which which were overdubbed a couple of years later, by some of the Stones and their roadie Ian Stewart. They're just blues jams, with Clapton soloing continuously and, at the time, served as a good way of picking up licks while I was learning guitar. 

Clapton's association with Mayall also resulted in some session work (February 1966) for Decca with producer Mike Vernon. Notably, it included some recordings with visiting blues great Champion Jack Dupree - shown below. Although only three tracks appear to have Clapton solos on, they're well worth hearing and, again, show a maturity well above that expected of a relative novice. Reading between the lines, it may have been this session that revived Decca's interest in signing Mayall again.

Clapton also cut three tracks for the Elektra label with an ad hoc studio band called "the Powerhouse" in 1966. This included Jack Bruce on bass, Steve Winwood (under the alias Steve Anglo) on vocals, Paul Jones (from Manfred Mann) on harp, Pete York (Spencer Davis Group) on drums and Ben Palmer on piano (an old musical colleague of Clapton's). "Steppin' Out" and "I Want to Know" feature some great guitar from Clapton, although "Crossroads" lacks a solo, and is but a shadow of the definitive Cream live version that would follow just a couple of years later.

While Clapton was with the Blues Breakers, the band recorded some sessions for BBC radio and quite a number of tracks are available. I've included a few, but there's more here - an excellent site that's a real treasure trove of obscure stuff. Generally, the radio recordings lack excitement and it sounds as if Clapton had trouble getting a good sound - perhaps the BBC engineers couldn't handle his Marshall combo at full chat! It's interesting to compare the radio versions of songs that also appear on the Beano album, and the BBC version of "Steppin' Out" is well worth a listen. I think I might even prefer it to the Beano album version. 

As for live recordings, very few exist. What there are were recorded at the Flamingo Club in London in April 1966 (possibly professionally for a prospective live album) with the line up of Mayall, Clapton, Jack Bruce on bass and Hughie Flint on drums. They do, however, give a good indication of how incendiary Clapton's playing could be with Mayall in a live setting.  Five of these tracks appeared as one side of a 1977 Mayall live album and the extra track cropped up on a compilation. You only have to listen to "Maudie" with Clapton's insistent riffing and scorched earth solo to imagine how dynamic the Blues Breakers could be at this time. 

[Another side note is appropriate here. In 1979, Mayall's Laurel Canyon house was totally destroyed in a fire. Not only did Mayall's vast collection of pornography end up in ashes, but also his even larger musical archive, including cine film, photos, diaries and other documents and, it has to be assumed, audio recordings which Mayall had amassed over the years. This must surely be one of the reasons for so few live Clapton/Mayall recordings.]

So, what made Clapton's playing become so compelling as he transitioned from the Yardbirds to Cream? Well, part of it was the combination of a Gibson Les Paul Standard with a Marshall amp, resulting in a thick overdriven tone that would set the sonic standard for rock guitar in the decades to come. It's hard to disassociate this from what he played, but what stands out for me, in a musical sense, is how he used stock pentatonic blues lines across the rhythm, and repeated little licks that fitted in, but then subdivided the rhythm and shifted those licks in order to create a skipping effect with real movement. He was also never afraid to leave gaps in his solos. At his best, it almost sounded as if he was flying over the accompaniment in freewheeling ecstasy - sometimes diving, sometimes soaring, or sometimes just in freefall. Hard to describe, but there we go...

So, all in all, here are 30 tracks of early Clapton - by no means definitive, as I've left off some of the BBC radio session tracks - but I reckon it's a fairly thorough overview of what he was capable of whipping out in the early stages of his career. After all this, of course, came Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominos and then a hugely successful solo career which largely left me cold - and still does, for that matter. 

As for Mayall, although he lost Clapton, their brief association and the Beano album really cemented his well-deserved place in music history as a founding father of British rock and blues. 

What staggers me above anything else is the time scale here - in barely three years, Clapton had gone from joining the Yardbirds to recording "I Feel Free" with Cream - a truly remarkable learning curve, and a stratospheric career trajectory.

To win this carefully curated collection of early Clapton, just answer this simple question as a comment below - who was your first musical hero?