There is something that continues to befuddle me. It has to do with the ranking system music fans, especially quasi-blues fans, engage in as it relates to guitarists. This guitar player is better than that one. This guy is the best, and so on. I don’t think this applies to other instrumentalists or singers the way it does guitar players. I have always contended that art is not a contest. It has to do with whom you like best.

Recently a long standing friend, and one of the most amiable people I have ever met, went to a performance in Southern California by Jeff Beck. The next day my friend posted on Facebook the question asking, “Is there a better guitar player in the world than Jeff Beck?” I answered the question with a simple, “Yes!” How stupid of me. Who am I to even suggest that the sacred cow that is any British guitar royalty from the 1960’s be looked upon objectively? I of course was vilified for my heretical answer. You would have thought I called Mary Poppins a whore. Actually I always thought her relationships with the chimney sweeps were kind of…but I digress. I felt kind of bad so I skipped confession and went straight to my penance and dusted off my old Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Peter Green and John Mayall records. As it turns out they were dusty for a reason.

One of the first long playing albums I ever bought was an Eric Clapton album. It was an anthology entitled the History of Eric Clapton. It was a career retrospective that covered the years 1964 – 1970. The record came out in 1972. I was in junior high school. I thought it was tough. What did I know? I had a friend who told me Clapton was the best guitarist in the world. I found the notion of “the best guitarist in the world” intriguing.

I was a fan of John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins in those days. They were the best. That was easy for me to comprehend. The scoreboard helped a great deal in that arena. The best in music…I wasn’t smart enough to figure that out. That didn’t keep my friends of superior intellect from unlocking that riddle. It wasn’t immediately apparent to me why Clapton was the best but I went along anyway. I figured the truth would reveal itself to me in time. It did. If I was hanging around with my pals making conversation when the subject of music came up, I too could be a “know it all” and say with a great deal of authority, “Eric Clapton is the best guitarist in the world.” After all, junior high school boys do know it all.

As a kid growing up in the 1960’s we were exposed through radio to all the other candidates for the exalted throne of world’s greatest guitarist. Three of them even sounded more suited to reign supreme with first names like B.B., Albert and Freddie. Oh hang on a minute, they didn’t put these guys on the radio. They probably weren’t good enough. We did get to hear Clapton though and songs like Crossroads and Born under a Bad Sign by his band Cream over and over again on the radio. Heck we still do.

In the intervening years since those heady days of the early 70’s, a funny thing happened on the way to the fabulous Forum in Inglewood. I somehow, despite all odds, heard real blues music. I was told over and over again that I should remain grateful for Clapton, Beck and others who were from England for exposing us kids to American blues music. If not for these British people we would never have even heard of the great American players of the day.

I actually believe these British players kept us from our own music and our own musicians. The British musicians weren’t at fault of course. These were very dedicated young men who were exposed to one strain of blues music and fell in love with it. Who can blame them? They worshiped and emulated the people we were not allowed to hear on the radio in this country.

It has been my contention that if mainstream America was allowed to hear the real blues musicians we would have embraced them with even greater fervor than we did the British interpreters of the American, primarily Chicago, blues form. My fellow countrymen were not as racist as the relatively small number of folks who ran the broadcasting outlets in this country.

In 1960, Muddy Waters (an American Negro) played the Newport Folk Festival.
The Newport Folk Festival, by the way, was whiter than a hockey match, a Toby Keith concert and a Sarah Palin rally. These young people didn’t need to be told what to like. They fell in love with Muddy’s brand of “folk” music immediately. On the album Muddy Waters Live at Newport you can hear the screams from the girls in the audience. The adulation was almost startling considering it must have been the first time many in the audience heard blues music of any kind. During Muddy’s show closer “Mojo” the audience came unglued. Real blues can do that to you.

The cat was out of the bag. You couldn’t keep this music from our impressionable young people but you could keep certain musicians from them. Jim Crow was alive and well in radio and television. The British interpreters of the form were there for us to fill the void created by the blatant racism in the broadcasting industries. British invasion my ass. They were invitees.

Because of the overwhelming size of the baby boomer generation, and our surprisingly narrow comfort zones, the Eric Clapton’s and Jeff Beck’s of the world still find a large audience. I know I am risking bodily harm at the hands of my fellow middle aged caucasians by even suggesting these two guitarists are not the greatest or even among the greatest players of all time. I’ll take my chances. I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am not going to suggest anything. I am going to say it unequivocally…they are not.

As I got older I’m not sure if I got any smarter but I did come to realize a few things with the same kind of certitude a junior high school boy has about everything. Those things are: 1) Baseball is better than cricket, 2) Cold beer is better than warm beer, and 3) American blues is better than British blues.

Clapton is simply not all that. He is not a God or a deity of any kind. His playing in my view is pedestrian, unoriginal and uninspiring. It is self absorbed and repetitious. It isn’t even technically all that great. He has been butchering the same Freddie King solo going on forty years now. He doesn’t play with the same color, shading, sophisticated phrasing or tonal dynamics of the great blues players of this or any other age. Let me help you out here. Clapton is to Freddie King what Pat Boone is to Little Richard. Clapton is to Albert King what Michael Bolton is to Otis Redding. He is to Otis Rush what Kenny G is to John Coltrane.

The simple reason Clapton has maintained his position of prominence has more to do with timing and pigmentation than any and all other factors combined. His career began during the sanctified, holy period of the 1960’s that is almost always viewed through purple haze colored glasses. There is simply very little objectivity when it comes to looking at musicians (or anything else for that matter) from that time period. May I suggest more people do what their hero did Eric Clapton did? Seek out the originators and the innovators. As a player, Clapton himself never fell into either of these categories.

As far as Jeff Beck is concerned I’ll give him a hall pass today. He, as far as I know, never claimed to be a blues guitarist. I had his first two solo albums (post Yardbirds).
They were entitled Truth and Beck–Ola. On these records Beck touched on several musical idioms, including blues. He did everything with a psychedelic, pyrotechnic, innovative and experimental approach to his guitar playing. While not my bag, one has to admire his creativity nonetheless. I respect innovators. Beck forged on in the 70’s with a couple of what I thought to be, at the time anyway, very mature sounding forays into jazz fusion. The records Wired and Blow by Blow were required listening for boys to graduate from high school in 1975. Of course for girls it was Carole King’s Tapestry. If girls had any album by Janis Ian they could actually graduate early.

Jeff Beck, who can’t keep his hand off his own whammy bar, style of playing, which is not unlike like a 16 year old boy watching a Jennifer Love Hewitt film festival on cable, was never my cup of tea. For me, Jeff Beck’s largest contribution to popular culture will always be his infantile temperament and the delusional, grandiose, self-absorbed image he has of himself as it relates to his place in the universe. This of course led directly to Christopher Guest’s spot on impression of him and the inspiration for the character Nigel Tufnel in the movie “This is Spinal Tap.” I will always be grateful to Jeff Beck for this.

Getting back to Clapton for a moment, I know there is more to Clapton’s career than bastardizing blues material. He is the darling of commercial classic rock radio formats throughout the U.S. The mind numbing repetitiveness of classic rock radio and Clapton have had a long and fruitful relationship. The ultra conservative and unadventurous radio programmers in this country have made it their job to keep 1960’s era guitar gods like Clapton in our face for forty five years running. This really doesn’t have anything to do with nostalgia at this point. How can you be nostalgic about something that has never left? It has to do with laziness. A radio programmer or disc jockey doesn’t need to go out and find new music and new musicians to play. They don’t have to actually listen to the submissions that come their way. They can play it safe knowing that by playing the same old thing we Americans will follow in predictable lock step fashion right behind them. We are always patriotic consumers who will march straight towards the products they are selling.

But I ask you…do we really need to hear Clapton sing J.J. Cale’s “Cocaine” for the one millionth time? Aren’t people just a little tired of hearing the same old thing over and over again? I really hope I am not the only person that feels this way.

I believe we as a group can get away from this boring monogamous relationship we have with the 1960’s British guitar gods. Live a little. I am not infatuated with the same girl I first laid eyes on in junior high school and I have moved past Clapton as well. I might suggest however you do what Clapton did. Listen to a little more of the early King/Federal sides of Freddie King. Check out Freddie’s single biggest influence, Jimmy Rogers and some of his recordings. Take a page out of Jeff Beck’s book and listen to some of Les Paul’s fine recordings. Find the new and exciting players of today like Clapton and Beck did in their day, when they sought out the music of one of their contemporaries, the young James Marshall Hendrix.

There is another generation of very talented young guitarists out there waiting for you to discover. They could use our support.

 Remember when we discuss art, it is always at best a subjective argument as to who is the best. It obviously has as much to do with our own personal preferences and taste as anything else. I however might suggest this 60’s era British Guitar God fetish played itself out a long time ago. I am also suggesting that we, as music appreciators, should be leaders. We as a group could, and I believe should, be a little more adventurous. Let’s not be afraid to discover the next real guitar hero, whichever side of the pond he (or she) may have been born. By the way, Nigel Tufnel is the BEST!

- David Mac