I don't think that Eric Clapton has really ever toured with a harp player apart from when he used Jerry Portnoy on tour to promote his "From the Cradle" CD. I'd imagine that if he was gonna use a harp player again, that Jerry would be his first choice. ----------
eric said he did not care for rice miller even tho the yardbirds backed them in 1964 his favorite player from an interview was little walter but said his skills were raw EVEN HARMONICA I never understood that despite the fact that eric is my all time favorite guitar player even over jimi hendrix
I blame Clapton and his contemporary post-folk rockers in England and the US for driving the harmonica out of mainstream blues/ rock scene. The dead buried the harmonica once pigpen was gone, the Allman Brothers in their most influential live album, simply mixed out the harp.
I keep hoping he'll give me a call, but obviously he's jealous of the fact that I played with Satan for several decades rather than simply waxing homages to Robert Johnson. I'll do this one tomorrow night (Saturday July 3rd) at The Turning Point in Piermont, NY:
Eric, if you're lurking: I'll put you on the guest list! Please say Hi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Last Edited by on Jul 02, 2010 7:10 PM
hello adam I really feel you could do justice to eric as could anybody @HCH you were all awesome musicians and all there was made welcome! but if eric thought lw skills were raw he must be a perfectionist
As a 16 y/o blues guitar wannabe, I fell in love with the Clapton story: early promise, 6 months in the woodshed, amazing guitarist emerges, does all his great work with Cream by the time he's 21, then Derek and the Dominos, then disappears with a heroin addiction, then cleans up and finds himself and reemerges with EC WAS HERE, an underrated live album that I was very glad to buy and own.
Clapton was an innovator. Somehow he managed to do, between 1966 and 1969, what 10,000 other (later) white blues guitarists haven't been able to do: he mastered one of the African American greats (Freddie King, on BLUESBREAKERS), then decided to move way beyond his hero and do something genuinely innovative. He was, in my terms, a modernist, not a traditionalist. More power to him.
Of course, at this point in his life, he's done what the great majority of aging former innovators do: he's moved back towards his roots. (Miles and Trane were two rarities in that respect: they kept on moving forward.) I'm not a big fan of the "Mr. Johnson" stuff. But when I go back to the Cream live stuff, I'm even more impressed than I was then.
In his youthful prime, he was indeed worthy of the "Clapton is God" label, because he created something new. And it was damned good. He created his own blues language. He found a new way of orienting himself towards the microtones that was immediately identifiable. He was helped immensely by his bandmates, obviously.
There's nothing in Chicago blues from the West Side, circa 1965, that begins to prepare the way for what Clapton did in "Steppin' Out" in the later 60s. British blues fans have every reason to be proud of his innovations during those miracle years.
Well at least I'm not the only one who loved the E.C. Was Here live album. To me, that was the peak of his playing with emotion along with some of the Cream stuff. There actually is some decent playing on No Reason to Cry were The Band is playing on the album as well but it seemed all down hill to me after that.
walterharp makes a interesting point: 'I blame Clapton and his contemporary post-folk rockers in England and the US for driving the harmonica out of mainstream blues/ rock scene.'
Post Butterfield it is difficult to think of any, and I would not include Jagger or Van Morrison.
I got into the harp through listening to early John Mayall, Yardbirds, Paul B, and the old bluesmen.
Where were their successors throught 70's, 80's and 90's in the mainstream.
The answer is they did not exist,and the harp drifted into the backwaters, however the harmonica renaissance is happening now!
I blame Clapton and many of the 1960's and 1970's UK blues and rock musicians for the current slew of garbage so called rock blues players in the UK pub scene, especially when it comes to guitar players and drummers.
Although I'd have to say the sheer amount of abysmal singers who also call themselves harp players and who wail endless unmusical crap over everything all night long in pubs is truly shocking.
I suppose on the flipside it does make it all the more pleasant when I hear a good band in a pub though. ----------
I asked Eric if I could sit in last December at their soundcheck: he said, 'we're not really set up for harp'. I'd have felt worse if I hadn't asked - but he does stay well within his comfort zone. His loss.
Adam - I agree that strong original artists produce imitators.
Strangely of all the harp players I know in my area, none of them cites Little Walter as a major influence although they all acknowledge his greatness.
My point though is that since the British blues boom of the 60's and the blues rock of the 70's the sheer amount of UK guitarists, harp players, drummers and bass players that cite Clapton, Gallagher, Mayall, etc, as major influences is huge. The amount of them that can't really play for toffee is also in the majority at the pub level. I'm sure there are quite a few harp players in the UK that cite Little Walter, Sonny Boy, etc as major influences that can't really play as well. Although I do find generally that most players who have a wider influence in any genre than just the one or two major artists, the players who have gone deeper into the genre are significantly better on their instruments than the guys who just pick it up and blow.
Locally (in say a 50 mile radius) I know of at least a dozen harp players that can't play a 12 bar, can barely bend a note and play over everyone all night (and often in the wrong key!). At least 15 drummers that speed up terribly and can't hold a rhythm to save their lives. Half a dozen bass players that just dribble and can't even play a walking bass line. I know at least 30 guitarists who can't play anything other than a 7th chord in blues and have only one solo that they play a different speeds. Of all the guitarists I know in my local area (I'd guess over 100) I only know of one that can truly play rhythm and only maybe 5 that can really play blues styles other than British rock blues al a Clapton (Chicago, jazz blues, West Coast, Piedmont, etc).
Of course I do know some really good players as well, but they are definitely in the minority.
When it comes to good harp players in my local area I know of three. Guitarists I know of maybe a dozen who can really play (although not all blues players). Two Bass players. Four drummers 2 Piano players 1 Saxophone player
The Fab T-Birds had a mainstream hit and they use a 'decent' harp player. Huey Lewis and the News used harp. Cold Chisel used a lot of blues harp on tunes like Khe Sanh and others. There's a guy called John Popper who plays some harp.
yeah, but the guys who are or were out there and really filling the big concerts, and play blues, have at best a tangential use of harmonica..(blues traveler excepted, Thunderbirds are not at that level as far as exposure)
SRV, Clapton, John Mayer, Derek Trucks.. those are they guys that play or did play blues and fill venues
"SRV, Clapton, John Mayer, Derek Trucks.. those are they guys that play or did play blues and fill venues "
Whilst that is undoubtedly true. I suspect it has more to do with media exposure than anything else. For the last few decades the media (especially in the music press) have given more attention to the guitar than to any other musical instrument. Piano, Saxophone, Violin, etc all have only ever been given a cursory glance.
Joe public is very easily led and will blindly believe something is good if he is told so often enough by so called learned people. You only have to look at Pop Idol, American Idol, etc to see how easily led the public at large really is. If they are told that cute looking Jack or Jill is the next big thing in the singing world, they buy into that hype in their millions. Not that I'm saying of course that those people you mentioned are not talented, because they are. I'm merely demonstrating a point.
If say Billy Gibson, Jason Ricci and Dennis Gruenling were given the same level of media exposure then they might also be filling those same venues as Derek Trucks, Eric Clapton and John Mayer in time too.
i've always prefered clapton the rock star to clapton the blues guy.
but kingley has a point about those incredibley long, seemingly endless, battan death march blues rock solos that set the standard for the present pandemic affecting generations of guitarists.
exactly kingley, clapton and his peer group made guitar wanking the thing everyone wanted to hear... for like 50 years and going strong.
it was not just clapton, it was the whole music scene when he got popular including hendrix and all the other guitar "gods"
pigpen and his harmonica were not the the dead anymore
allman brothers had a harp player on the filmore east recordings.
keyboards, sax (all horns for that matter), or any other instrument was wiped out.
beatles had a keyboard player, billy preston, but that is not what they pushed into contemporary music.
that is how good those guys were. a band became defined as 2 guitars, a bass, and drums.
the rap guys, following the studio wizards (starting with the beatles, pushed by steely dan, then on to to remixing existing sounds), busted out of that by sampling, relegating instruments to completely derivative rolls.
we harp players are better off than many... but the musical/cultural revolution dropped harmonica from the mix, for sure.
the pendulum may swing back.. but it could be trombone or whatever.
I never understood why people liked clapton that much he is a good guitar player but not great. He dosen't a chance in skill level to Bloomfield even though he now has 30 years playing experience since bloomfield died.
I've heard some truly transpiring solos from Eric Clapton in some of the live recordings and videos (bootleg and legit). The problem is that they were kinda few and far between a lot of good to very good playing.
On some of the bootleg recordings, if there is harmonica, it is Jerry Portnoy. ---------- The Iceman
Clapton is, in fact, a great blues guitarist, but I think there are many other blues rockers who are more original, more interesting, know more about the idiom. Johnny Winter comes to mind. Winter is supreme among blues rock guitarist, including the late great SRV
Will Wilde is a decent to pretty good young blues harp player in the UK. I'm surprised that you haven't mentioned him, Kingo.
Last Edited by on Oct 08, 2012 3:48 PM
UGH ! - that Cream video sums it up for me - Clapton and Baker banging away in "parallel play" - barely listening to each other. Louder is better. Mo bangs mo betta. Innovation? - I don't hear it. Dynamics -don't hear it, subtlety - don't hear it, phrasing - what's that? I wouldn't even call that a beat per-se. But yes - they inspired a but load of BLUZ-ROCK. another big UGH.
What makes EC an inovator? Being white? - playing through a Marshall stack at "11" ?
On top of that - as a harp player you'd get asked to play 'Train Time" almost as much as "Room to Move" both crapy standard bearers for harmonica IMO. I had no interest in playing either.
There is plenty of his more mature music I do like. He actually developed some good taste as he aged. But "guitar great" ? - not in my book anyway.
The plus side of the guitar god decades - There wheren't so many darn harp players showing up at every jam and gig. We're lousy with them - er - I mean us, now.
Pig was pretty funky - and bluesy in a biker kind of way - but not much of a standard bearer for harmonica either.
but can I tell you how I really feel?
Last Edited by on Oct 08, 2012 9:31 PM
@Kingly, You've really got me going. I could not agree with you more about the current pub band and jam scene in the u.k. My biggest gripe though is about "guitarists", particularly the "I play guitar, so that means that I can sing". This usally means a 48 bar intro and about 60 bars of solo over a song that is in the wrong key vocally for them but as they learnt the guitar part in that key we have to suffer off key vocals. Drummers. They think that tempo is street slang for temper or something and why oh why is that when anyone goes to play a solo the drummer contributes a cymbal solo at the same time. Stangely enough I never seem to find harp players a problem. Abilities vary of course, at a jam that is to be expected and if one does tend to overplay contructive advice seems to cure the problem. If it's a band I've gone to see and the harp overplays everyone (though I doubt he'd have the chance if there's a guitar in the band) then that's a band I don't bother with again. What about bass players who want to be lead guitarists, come accross one of those yet? As a harp player have you turned up at a jam with an amp only to be asked why can't you just play through the p.a. My answer to this is always the same "sure, as long as the guitars go through the p.a. as well". That normally does the trick. I feel a lot better for getting that off my chest and of course.....I'm perfect haha.
I simply won't play in or go and see UK blues bands for fear of exactly the issues they've mentioned.
There used to be a great blues club in Portsmouth in the early 90's at a venue called The Hornpipe. I say great. This was when I was learning guitar and harp. Everyone was better than me, so I was like a moth to a flame.
As I've gotten older, wiser and a bit better with my playing, I've come to realise that there are few real outliers when it comes to blues. I remember one band that pulled off a real Chicago kind of thing, and another band called Dr Brown, who were a psychedelic outfit, who heavily tailored their set and jammed out some incredible blues, but most of all, it was the usual twaddle starting with a few structured songs but soon descending into long jams with poor vocals tacked on.
I'm very grateful for having the opportunity to play the kind of music I do (funk / soul) and even more grateful that I'm finally getting the opportunity to play some harp, but it will be minimalist and only to augment the music. I'd rather do a little well than saturate the whole thing unnecessarily.
Another upshot with this approach is that I don't need to have too many chops up my sleeve. Ha!
Lets see now, Buddy Guy ceased using a harp player after Jr. Wells but of course he never did anything after that. B.B. King didn't use harp, neither did Magic Sam, Freddie King, Albert King, Luther Allison, Bernard Allison, or Little Milton. I guess that's all Clapton's fault.
And too bad about all those guys, not to mention Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Walter Horton, Sonny Boy Williamson, et al not getting any exposure, tours and better paying gigs as a result of the British blues boom of the 60s led by Beck, Page, the Stones, and who else....oh yeah, The Yardbirds (Clapton), John Mayall (Clapton), Cream (Clapton). I mean they weren't "real" blues bands anyway so what does it matter their influences, who they went to great pains to inform the ignorant American public of their existence, had better careers because of it. I guess BB King was talking a load of crap when he cited the British guys for putting his career as well as his contemporaries in a totally different universe.
And as for Stevie Ray Vaughn, have a look at the documentary "Antone's, Home of the Blues" and listen to what some of the the players who Clifford helped had to say about Stevie as a player, but I guess a bunch of white harmonica players jamming every Wednesday at the Do Drop Inn would know better. ---------- LSC
"i've always prefered clapton the rock star to clapton the blues guy.
but kingley has a point about those incredibley long, seemingly endless, battan death march blues rock solos that set the standard for the present pandemic affecting generations of guitarists."
Cream and, slightly later, The Allman Brothers, were both listening to John Contrane's free jazz experiments. Clapton's endless solo here simply parallels Coltrane's seemingly endless solos. Blues has always, in various ways and at specific moments, looked to jazz for an infusion of energy and ideas. Clapton's solo is jazz/blues/rock--and very original, as that. It no longer seems particularly original, but that shows how remarkable it was: it helped yank blues and rock guitar soloing in an entirely new direction, one that nobody would have imagined only a year earlier.
If we turn out to be brilliant, world-historical musicians, of the sort Clapton turned out to be--a brilliance and influence quite evident in the 1966 video above--then we just MIGHT turn into a baneful influence on the entire blues/rock world. Most of us aren't that good, or that lucky. We do our best, briefly, before being swept into the void.
Buddy Guy and Hendrix were both finding their way towards this sort of extended, rocked-out soloing. Great minds think alike. Those three are equals, in my book, in terms of historical importance: the impact they had on the music. I'd put Duane Allman and B. B. King in the same category.
Last Edited by on Oct 09, 2012 10:57 AM
I saw the allman bros open for BJ Thomas with duane allman before his death....will never forget his performance blazing away on that slide...they used thom doucette on harp on tour...wonder if he still plays????
Lol, this is how I feel about most harmonica players..."My biggest gripe though is about "guitarists", particularly the "I play guitar, so that means that I can sing". This usally means a 48 bar intro and about 60 bars of solo over a song that is in the wrong key vocally for them but as they learnt the guitar part in that key we have to suffer off key vocals."
Regarding the over the top jamming, I would argue that has been done to death. What is missing, in almost all instances are the original motivations by those players.
Those guys jammed like that for the spiritual release, whether it was drug induced or not. Nowadays, it is totally Ego driven and contrived in many instances. I would say Derek Trucks does a great job of capturing the vibe guys like Coltrane, Harrison, and Duane Allman tried to articulate.
Eric Clapton is a guitar player, in my opinion the best blues guitarist in the world today. Harp players with their own bands dominate their band's repertoire with their songs, and guitar players with theirs. In bands with guitar player leaders, harp players always play a secondary or even a minor role. More so with Clapton, whose music spans country, rock, and the blues. It would be a limited gig anyway for any harp player. We all know this, I am not saying anything new.
But with all due respect to Jerry Portnoy and anyone else who has played in Clapton's band, they were not and are not exciting enough to warrant a continued presence. Now for example, if there were a Big Walter, Little Walter, James Cotton, Billy Branch, Charlie Musselwhite etc. (I exclude non-traditional blues harp players because their style would not fit) in availability, I believe that the harp would play a bigger role within Clapton's blues sets. And many very good guitar-led acts out today do not employ harmonica regularly, just as Ronnie Baker Brooks, Tommy Castro, Jimmy Thackery, the list goes on. It is more a personal choice, I believe, with the artists not to include harp in their music.
Ok. I'll bite, even though BluesJacketman has been trolling through this forum stirring the blues pot. In all due respect, Jerry Portnoy IS exciting enough to warrant a continued presence. He was tapped for the "From The Cradle" album and subsequent tour because of his impeccable harmonica skills an "on hands" experience at playing Chi-town blues. Few could fill the harp chair in Muddy Waters' bands, but Portnoy could and did. Clapton's blues moved on to paying tribute to Robert Johnson with a series of outstanding recordings. No harp needed in that scenario. Jimmy Thackery played with one of the best harmonica players in the biz, Mark Wenner. They produced some danged memorable albums together in The Nighthawks. Thackery just moved on to being a front man with the focus on his stuff, as did Jimmy Vaughan. Still like his T-Bird era better, though. Clapton a chameleon and moves seemlessly from blues, to pop, to scorching rock...employing the best bands to get that sound across. And, yeah, Bluesjacketman, he's one of the greatest guitarist to ever walk the planet. So, there. I bit. ---------- Ricky B http://www.bushdogblues.blogspot.com RIVER BOTTOM BLUES--crime novel for blues fans available at Amazon/B&N and my blog THE DEVIL'S BLUES--coming Fall of 2012
i am intrigued by the comment second- and third-rate imitators,
there was only one little walter is james cotton a 2 nd rate lw imitator? jerry portnoy? rod piazza? lester butler william clarke?
would they be consider first rate imitators? for me, anyone who can play with tone and proper intonation it does not matter much to me if they are playing little walter or bob marley.
clapton is a great guitar player and still alive as is jeff beck,jimmie page.....but to those who think he is not great...just dont get it.....jimi hendrix had the most skill and continues to win first place...this thread is about claptons harp player...who is not there....after jrwells passing,dont know of a strong guitar/harp combo but maybe there is...hope so....
I'm in the camp of "EC is not great at playing blues". He was great when he played in Cream, and also in Blind Faith, but I don't like his "mainstream" blues playing at all.
But I don't like BB King either, nor SRV, nor Johnny Winter, nor Joe Bonammassa (heurk !)...
I never listened to Freddy King, but I'm curious about it : everybody saying he was the biggest influence on Clapton, while I thought it was Albert King.
