The guitarist’s disastrous personal life, rather than his music, is to the fore in Philip Norman’s new biography
“Get the wogs out! Get the coons out! Keep Britain white!” Not an exhortation from an English Defence League rally but part of a 1976 on-stage rant by Eric Clapton, who had recently scored a No 1 single with a cover of Bob Marley’s I Shot the Sheriff and whose musical raison d’etre was his love of black American blues.
The usual explanation for Clapton’s outburst is that he was drunk – but then, once he’d swapped a heroin habit for two bottles of brandy a day, around 1973, Clapton was almost always drunk until he cleaned up in the late 1980s. The profound gulf between Clapton’s outburst and his musical inspiration remains a puzzle – was Memphis blues giant Howlin’ Wolf, with whom the guitarist cut an album in 1970, also a “coon”? – but it is one unexplored in Slowhand, the latest biography from Philip Norman to document what he calls, peering through the prism of 1960s rockocracy, “music’s tiny topmost echelon”, meaning primarily the Beatles and Stones.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2r6o3kQ
0 comments:
Post a Comment