Musical Heroes with Kal – Eric Clapton

November 13th, 2009 | By Kal

The long awaited fifth episode in the series of Kal’s Music Heroes.  So far, I’ve counted Scott Joplin, John Legend, Bill Withers and Chas ‘n’ Dave among my musical heroes – who next in this somewhat random list?  Yep, you guessed it, Eric Clapton

You may not know, but I didn’t pick up a guitar properly until I was 17,  but before then, I was very much into downloading music and at some stage I stumbled upon a site that let you download midi* versions of songs.  Somehow among the popular TV themes and poor quality hip hop samples, I managed to accidentally download ‘Eric Clapton – Layla Unplugged’.  Don’t ask me why I spent so much time on that site, to the extent where I was accidentally downloading tracks, but I’ve always felt that midi versions of songs have a jovial feel to them - they always make me laugh.  On a slight tangent, listen to a decent midi of Rocking All Over The World and tell me you don’t at least smile when you hear the first note.

With “Layla Unplugged” firmly planted at the back of  my mind, once I’d mastered the basics of playing chords terribly on a cheap school acoustic guitar, I happened to stumble upon a video of “Slow Hand” (clapton’s nickname) himself playing a picked version of the song on Windows Media Player.  I feel like a Grandad explaining this, but this all happened during the dark ages, BS**, after the original version of Napster had been halted, but before a one stop shop for downloadable music or even Youtube existed.  Windows Media Player let you search for an artist or song you liked and play audio/video for free without downloading them to keep, and this is how I rediscovered the song.

I set about learning this version of Layla, by which point I had found a decent audio of Eric performing it, before which he would say “See if you can spot this one” to rapturous applause.  For me, the things that stood out about the song, and still do, were his solos and after hours of practice, I could play something that sounded a bit like Clapton’s MTV performance.  This was the first ever solo I learnt, and I think the the lessons I learnt from that solo taught me more than any other piece of music I’ve ever played.

I’ve never had any formal training on any musical instrument.  Mr Norris used to come in once a week when we were seven and teach us the recorder, but apart from that, it’s been more about what I’ve learnt along the way.  Eric Clapton and “Layla Unplugged” taught me more about soloing, scales and rhythm than any book that I could have looked at, and have influenced how I play Guitar, Bass and even Piano.

When Rob and I had our first gig just before we left school for uni, in the legendary one night only band Next Edition, this was the first song that I chose for us to play.  And having played rhythm guitar most of the night, I got to play the lead!

I also went through a long phase, (from which I am only just starting to recover?), of songs centred around the chord D minor – the same key as Layla unplugged.  In fact, have a listen to I Wanna Know, as this is a song that I came up with the initial idea for during this obsession!  It doesn’t sound too bad.

Such has been the competitive nature of our friendship, when I heard Rob playing “Change The World”, another of Clapton’s classics, I made sure I learnt it, and could play it quicker than he could (even if that took away from the song itself)!  I also recall pre-empting Rob and learning Tears in Heaven in one night, a song I still enjoy hearing Clapton sing.

On the subject of Eric Clapton himself, his personal life is well documented, and if you’d like an in depth account of this, then just google his name and you’ll find more information than you can read.  To me however, the reason I like Eric Clapton (enough to write a blog about him) and the reason I like most musicians is simply for their music, and I think Eric might just feel the same judging by his founding of the legendary Crossroads guitar festival.

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* midi, as far as any one really cares, is a way of storing/composing music electronically.  A lot of synthesisers, keyboards, old computer games and so on, use it. In fact, if you’ve ever sung to a backing track at t’Karaoke, the chances are, it was a Midi file.  If you’re interested, check this out.

**Before Spotify