The Rolling Stone Interviews by Jann S. Wenner

Author:Jann S. Wenner [WENNER, JANN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000
ISBN: 9780316023139
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2007-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

ERIC CLAPTON

by Robert Palmer

June 20, 1985

Since we’re starting at the beginning, why don’t you tell me a bit about the town of Ripley, where you grew up.

It’s only about thirty miles outside of London, but it’s very country—Ripley is not even a town, it’s a village with farms all around it. And very few people ever leave there. They usually stay, get jobs, get married.

What kind of music did you hear when you were growing up?

Pop music, first. Mostly songs that were still hanging over from wartime; “We’ll Meet Again,” that sort of thing, melodic pop music.

There was a funny Saturday-morning radio program for children, with this strange person, Uncle Mac. He was a very old man with one leg and a strange little penchant for children. He’d play things like “Mule Train,” and then every week he’d slip in something like a Buddy Holly record or a Chuck Berry record. And the first blues I ever heard was on that program; it was a song by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, with Sonny Terry howling and playing the harmonica. It blew me away. I was ten or eleven.

When was the first time you actually saw a guitar?

Hmmm . . . I remember the first rock & roll I ever saw on TV was Jerry Lee Lewis doing “Great Balls of Fire.” And that threw me; it was like seeing someone from outer space. And I realized suddenly that here I was in this village that was never going to change, yet there on TV was something out of the future. And I wanted to go there! Actually, he didn’t have a guitarist, but he had a bass player, playing a Fender Precision bass, and I said, “That’s a guitar.” I didn’t know it was a bass guitar, I just knew it was a guitar, and again I thought, “That’s the future. And that’s what I want.” After that I started to build one, tried to carve a Stratocaster out of a block of wood, but I didn’t know what to do when I got to the neck and frets and things.

I was living with my grandparents, who raised me, and since I was the only child in the family, they used to spoil me something terrible. So I badgered them until they bought me a plastic Elvis Presley guitar. Of course, it could never stay in tune, but I could put on a Gene Vincent record, look in the mirror and mime.

When I was fourteen or fifteen, they gave me a real guitar, an acoustic, but it was so hard to play, I actually didn’t even try for a while. And pretty soon the neck began to warp. But I did invent chords. I invented E, and I invented A. I thought I had discovered something incredible. And then I put it down again, in my later teens, because I started to become interested in being an artist. The bohemian existence beckoned; actually, the good-life part of it beckoned more than the work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.