Unpopular opinion... I don't think Eric Clapton is very great.

[Jud]

15 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

John Lee Hooker could barely keep time, but he was authentic which is what made him great.

 

Do you happen to have his album The Healer?

[Jud]

I've seen Clapton live and think he's a helluva guitarist. Absolutely love Van Morrison's music, too. But since the idiocy of the anti-lockdown song, combined with Clapton's drunken racist ravings in public before he kicked alcohol, I don't feel like giving either of them my money from streaming or downloads. I'll be content with the extensive collections of their music I already own if I want to hear something of theirs.

 

Now as an antidote to such thoughts, here:

 

 

[Jud]

5 hours ago, Jud said:

I've seen Clapton live and think he's a helluva guitarist. Absolutely love Van Morrison's music, too. But since the idiocy of the anti-lockdown song, combined with Clapton's drunken racist ravings in public before he kicked alcohol, I don't feel like giving either of them my money from streaming or downloads. I'll be content with the extensive collections of their music I already own if I want to hear something of theirs.

 

Now as an antidote to such thoughts, here:

 

 

 

I was a bit inaccurate in calling it an anti-lockdown song. It's quite a bit more idiotic than that. It's antimask, calls all COVID information lies, and says the US is being turned into a police state due to anti-COVID measures. Here are the full lyrics:

 

Stand and deliver
You let them put the fear on you
Stand and deliver
But not a word you heard was true
But if there's nothing you can say
There may be nothing you can do

Do you wanna be a free man
Or do you wanna be a slave?
Do you wanna be a free man
Or do you wanna be a slave?
Do you wanna wear these chains
Until you're lying in the grave?

I don't wanna be a pauper
And I don't wanna be a prince
I don't wanna be a pauper
And I don't wanna be a prince
I just wanna do my job
Playing the blues for friends

Magna Carta, Bill of Rights
The constitution, what's it worth?
You know they're gonna grind us down, ah
Until it really hurts

Is this a sovereign nation
Or just a police state?
You better look out, people
Before it gets too late

You wanna be your own driver
Or keep on flogging a dead horse?
You wanna be your own driver
Or keep on flogging a dead horse?
Do you wanna make it better
Or do you wanna make it worse?

Stand and deliver
You let them put the fear on you
Slow down the river
But not a word of it was true
If there's nothing you can say
There may be nothing you can do

Stand and deliver
Stand and deliver
Dick Turpin wore a mask too

[Jud]

1 hour ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

Let me know when they pass Porsche for Le Mans victories...  ;-)

 

Oh, you mean that curiosity of an endurance race? The commonly acknowledged apex of motor racing is of course F1.

 

😇

[Jud]

5 hours ago, AnotherSpin said:

 

My point is - why judge either? People are entitled to sing about what ever they can. Material wealth has nothing to do with it.

 

Encouraging people to think of common sense precautions to help save lives (wearing a face mask, minimizing interactions that carry a higher risk of transmission) as a police state taking away their freedom has the consequence that some of those lives are not saved. Promoting people dying gasping for breath is something artists are surely entitled to do, and something I feel entitled to judge as bad and therefore not to support financially. All quite simple, really.

[Jud]

Deleted.

[Jud]

47 minutes ago, 57gold said:

Not sure how I missed this thread until today.  As a very dedicated student of guitar since the early 1970s, I have followed EC's music.  Learned to play lead performing Sunshine of Your Love and Badge in a middle school band (used to be called junior high).  Since then, seen EC perform in every decade since that time and own most of his recordings.

 

How I understand EC develop as a performer is as one who has reinvented himself over time.  

 

• Early with Yardbirds and Bluesbreakers he was woodshedding the electric blues tradition. 
• With Cream and Blind Faith he contributed to the creation of what some call classic rock in a major way incorporating the blues riffology  into the language of rock/pop tunes. 
• His first solo record and the Dominoes were IMO the culmination of his creativity as a player, taking the skills and influences that developed from previous bands and very importantly from his work with Americans like Bonnie & Delaney and appreciation of the work of The Band, to have a sound of his own.  Too bad that this period coincided with the spread of narcotics in the musical world that killed artists like Jimi, Janis and Jim, because it also sent EC into despair and hiding; a period from which he has never recovered as a guitar innovator.  
• All the music since Ocean Blvd has been focused on EC as a singer who plays guitar.  Not one recording since 1974 has featured the instrumental creativity of EC as a guitarist and arranger of his previous work.  You dig the songs or don't.  Nothing to emulate or learn from as a guitarist.  During live shows since that period, when he plays, it is from a rather stale vocabulary of riffs and the most insteresting guitar playing comes from his sidemen like Derek Trucks or Doyle Bramhall. Even EC's guitar tone at recent shows has kinda sucked; first with the over processed and effected Soldano SLO100 (1980s rig) Behind the Sun - Journeyman (Phil Collins) period and then later with the signature Strat with nasty Lace Sensor pick ups into a weak facsimile of a Tweed that he gets paid royalties on.  He sold a million Strats and so he figured out he should get paid by Fender for the free marketing he did for them starting with his 1970 solo record.

 

Have to say that at last couple of shows, what shined was his voice.  His tenuous Cream and 1970 solo album vocals were developed into a more confident and controlled vocal stylist. Also think it is important to listen to EC's and others' music in the context and time it was delivered to listeners.  Much of EC's late 1960s through the Dominoes playing was groundbreaking when recorded, but since then it has been appropriated and incorporated into essentially all electric rock players since.  So today, to a new listener,  it doesn't sound original (same with Jimi and Pete and Jeff).

 

Have to also comment on Jimi.  All one has to do is listen to his last WIP, which was originally released as Cry of Love, to get a glimpse of where he was taking his music.  It abounds with complex multi track guitar arrangements, funky rhythmic grooves, plays homage to a sophisticated class of electric blues and foretold of a future outburst of creativity stemming from his control of his own studio and the artistic freedom it provided.  In my heart I believe he was destined to intersect with the jazz world of folks like Miles Davis, who used to chide his Berkeley trained bop guitarists to "play it like Jimi".  His loss was a tremendous one for the instrument and the music.

 

Gonna go play my Strat.

 

 

Just wanted to note how much I enjoy and agree with this post. Could not have said it any better.

[Jud]

 

 

https://johnmartyn.com/stories/show-me-how-to-fing-play-may-you-never/

[Jud]

Someone I haven't seen mentioned in his own right (though I could have missed it in this long thread) is JJ Cale, who had a wonderful understated style, and who Clapton of course greatly admired.  My wife and I were lucky enough to see him at the Bottom Line in NYC years ago.  The guy next to us had an accent and my wife asked where he was from.  Turned out he'd flown over from Sweden just to be able to catch JJ.

[Jud]

8 hours ago, JoshM said:

I’ve thought about these personal/political/artistic divides a lot, and I don’t think there’s a good all-purpose answer. 

Van Morrison is perhaps my all-time favorite artist. But he’s also a famous curmudgeon who can be a total asshole. The anti-“lockdown” stuff is infuriating and embarrassing, but I don’t think it’ll impact my love for his music — especially given that all of my favorite Van stuff is more than 20 years old.

 

It gets harder with Clapton’s Enoch Powell comments or something like Bowie’s weird Nazi comments. Especially with the latter, it’s possible to chalk it up to drugs and poor attempts to be “provocative.” But at what point are things too much?

 

When we get into actions, things get even trickier. Miles Davis has already been mentioned. But we can bring up John Lennon or the aforementioned John Martyn, too. All were abusive to a greater or lesser extent. Do we separate that from their art? How much do the specific circumstances matter? What do we do when accusations are relatively circumscribed (arguably Martyn’s case) or contested (Jackson Browne’s case)? 
 

I’ve thought a lot about these issues, given that I plan to write TBVOs on all of the above artists. In some cases, I think I’ll address it; others I won’t. It’ll mostly depend on how important it feels in context. (I ran into this a little with the Bill Withers TBVO. There was an accusation of domestic violence with his first wife, but she didn’t press charges, the details were vague, and it’s largely forgotten. In the end, I included a link to the article but didn’t mention specifics.)

 

I think everyone has a line in the sand where it becomes impossible to separate art from artist. But I don’t think everyone has the same line. There’s also the reality that many people (famous and otherwise) we know and love have done horrible things in private that we don’t yet know about, and maybe never will. 
 

I think the healthiest response is to never be shocked when something horrible surfaces, and to avoid defending someone’s personal behavior just because you like their art. 
 

There are also probably ways to thread ethical needles when something abhorrent comes out about an artist you love. Maybe you still enjoy someone’s work, but you don’t buy it. Or maybe you do buy it once they’re dead, since perhaps their victims were their spouse or their kids. There’s no one-size-fits-all response, IMHO.

 

Yep. Goes back to Wagner and Stravinsky's anti-Semitism (and prior I'm sure), and there's a huge through line of misogyny from the blues to rock.  ("Under My Thumb"?)

 

I try to be a bit thoughtful (e.g., not giving Clapton and Morrison more money while still enjoying the music I already own), but really I'm just muddling through.

[Jud]

59 minutes ago, AnotherSpin said:

 

By the way, Wagner's famous article is not as one-dimentional as one who has not read it might be tempted to think :-)

 

The article was originally published as a shorter piece under a pseudonym.  Explaining the pseudonymous publication in a letter to Liszt, Wagner said it was "to prevent the question being dragged down by the Jews to a purely personal level." [Emphasis added.]

 

🙄

 

[Jud]

3 hours ago, sphinxsix said:

 

 

I grew up in my early teens with their music so it has some 'nostalgic value' for me - you know - these albums which although you seldom listen to them nowadays nevertheless are also special because you remember every single not, every nuance on them, hence I would defend them. Same with eg The Beatles.

But IMO OTOH Yes and Genesis didn't pass a test of time - I cannot listen to them nowadays, but I also wasn't as huge fan of these bands as of Pink Floyd.

 

OTOH when I was a kid and I had only possibility of reading about Grateful Dead (they didn't play their music on the radio where I lived, in general the band has always been much more popular in the US) - I imagined, this must have been the greatest band of all time. Getting their first LP 'Terrapin Station' was the biggest disappointment in music in my life. The music was just bad and utterly boring. I still tend to think that Grateful Dead was actually a bad, boring and probably most overrated band ever. Many claim they were best while playing live (allmusic on 'Terrapin Station': "The theory is that the band's momentum is best experienced during the ebb and flow of a live performance rather than the somewhat clinical tedium of a recording studio.") but maybe their audience was simply usually too high to notice that apart from their ability to create a specific kind of connection with their audience they were in fact a bad, boring half amateur band..

 

I guess some are gonna hate me for this 

 

 

Terrapin is definitely a bit too smooth and boring IMO. I was lucky enough to start hearing them during the period of their two best (IMO) studio albums, Workingman's Dead and American Beauty.   The first three songs on the latter in particular are beautiful, friendly, welcoming.

 

Also from that period, the Europe '72 live album is a favorite, especially the Jack Straw through I Know You Rider sequence.

 

If you approach them as friends around the fireside playing for fun on a cold and lonely evening, I think it helps get into the proper frame of mind.

[Jud]

2 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

With due respect, I'm pretty sure this is exactly what you said to me about Bob Dylan.  You must have witnessed a LOT of intimate, live music with *big* names performing in your youth.  🙂

 

I think what I said about Dylan was slightly different - imagine someone in your home taking out a guitar and performing a song they'd composed, and it was Like A Rolling Stone or Tangled Up In Blue or any of a hundred other Dylan songs. You'd be completely blown away.

 

The "fireside on a lonely evening" image has to do with the Dead's role in providing a warm, welcoming safe harbor for intrepid explorers of cold and lonely mental shores (not necessarily pharmaceutically induced).

[Jud]

5 hours ago, AnotherSpin said:

 

There is no reason to describe the rainbow to someone who is color blind...

 

I am sure you've had the experience of turning friends on to music you like.  On the other hand, if they turn out not to like what you do, that's fine too.  "De gustibus non disputandum est" is Latin for a reason - this is a very old conversation.

[Jud]

Saw Clapton live back in the day. He was fantastic. Currently he's got some quite stupid political views (along with another favorite of mine, Van Morrison), so I won't contribute to his finances by streaming or purchasing. Fortunately I already own quite a bit of his music (and Van's), so I can listen 'til my heart's content without paying him any more.