Blues Breakers

John Mayall

Eric Clapton

album cover

Truth, at Age Twenty-one

Eric Clapton was twenty-one years old when he made these recordings with British blues titan John Mayall. Think about that: Though there are exceptions (Janis Ian famously sang about learning the truth at seventeen), most people spend their late teens and early twenties groping and moping, or chasing the next buzz, not knowing much about the ways of the world. As Goethe said: "Every one believes in his youth that the world really began with him, and that all merely exists for his sake."

At least with the guitar in his hands, Clapton was different. When he leans into one of the disciplined guitar solos on this disc, he's not a headstrong kid with something to prove, or a student parroting back received blues wisdom. He is a new iteration of the blues, a harbinger of the next level. He brings a working knowledge of the form's guitar masters, but also a language of his own, a feeling and a way of moving through rhythm that didn't exist quite this way before him.

Clapton's appearance with Mayall (his recording debut came several years before, with the Yardbirds) is a key document of British blues-rock. It's also one of the most significant titles in his extensive discography, a succession of crying leads and brilliantly snarled bunches of ideas over unshakable Chicago blues backbeats. In terms of melodic invention, none of the blues music Clapton made later, as an elder statesman, touches it. For proof, compare any of Clapton's 1990s blues homages with the coruscating solo at the center of "Have You Heard" and his equally assured turn on "Ramblin' on My Mind," a laid-back blues that features his first recorded vocal.

Subsequently, Clapton has returned to the blues as a touchstone, or, perhaps, a means of recovering his lost youth. The only person to be inducted three times into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he might be yearning for the sparks-flying energy that marks this record, a moment when, just by playing what he was feeling, Clapton changed things.

Genre: Blues, Rock
Released: 1966, Decca (Reissued 2001, Deram)
Key Tracks: "Ramblin' on My Mind," "Little Girl," "All Your Love," "It Ain't Right"
Catalog Choice: Blues from Laurel Canyon
Next Stop: The Yardbirds: Over Under Sideways Down
After That: John Lee Hooker/Canned Heat: Hooker 'n' Heat
Book Pages: 484–485