Even the most famous faces tend to have their off days whenever they’re on tour. There are plenty of players who make it look easy whenever they strap on their guitar or step up to the microphone, but nobody’s perfect, and there are more than a few times where artists proved that to their audience by either missing a cue or turning in the occasional terrible guitar solo or vocal crack. Although someone like Eric Clapton usually had his technical screwups behind him by the 1970s, he was always uncomfortable with how he fumbled his way through working with The Band in The Last Waltz.
Granted, anyone Clapton approached for a collaboration at the time would likely have given an immediate “yes.” As ‘Slowhand’ was still finding his footing as a solo artist, his sound had only grown more soulful over the years. He transitioned from the caustic rocker in The Yardbirds to achieving a blues tone that most musicians would envy on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
Clapton may have loved the blues to his core, but he was still pushing for new inspiration all the time. There were still new avenues to explore, and when he heard The Band for the first time, he started to understand what it meant to be a songwriter.
After all, The Band had cut their teeth working as Bob Dylan’s backing group, so they knew as much as anyone about how to internalise a song. They had the potential to make great music on their own, though, and Music From Big Pink knocked out Clapton when he heard, eventually saying that he wanted to join the group while he was going through production hell with Cream.
By the time the guitarist started working on solo joints like 461 Ocean Boulevard, his tone was better suited to The Band’s sound. Now, if only he had known the wonders of what a guitar strap was supposed to do, perhaps he could have jammed with his favourite group for a little while longer.
When coming onstage for The Last Waltz, Clapton still got embarrassed when rewatching the footage of his performance, telling Guitar World, “I was amazed at how young everyone looks… But my strap comes off right at the beginning of the song, and so I go into some kind of automatic pilot. So I’m not particularly proud of my bit because I get the guitar solo, and I immediately have to give it away to Robbie [Robertson]!”
If anything, though, the clip actually makes you appreciate how well Robertson works within the confines of the group. He had already had years of working with Dylan under his belt, but seeing Clapton mangle his solo and Robertson picking things up almost immediately is so seamless that most wouldn’t catch it if they didn’t see the actual footage.
While that particular performance might not have been Clapton’s best, it did at least emphasise where he would be going on his own. When you look at how well he’s working off the rest of the group, it makes sense that someone like him could go from something as intense as Disraeli Gears to the softspoken sounds of Slowhand.
