by Ian Port
Furthering Clapton’s interest in this Gibson model was a seminal blues album, Let’s Dance Away and Hide Away, by the Texan Freddy King. The cover showed a besuited, blimplike King bent over, smiling, all alone in front of an orange backdrop except for the gold-top Les Paul hanging off his shoulder. Over twelve jaunty instrumentals, King coaxed a bright, spanking voice out of that guitar that obliterated the need for a singer, filling every rise and fall in the music with nimble runs and sharp, snarling licks. For an Englishman like Eric Clapton, raised in the bleak aftermath of the Second World War, even the name “Les Paul” on King’s guitar would have seemed to belong to a different world. It would have symbolized the exotic realm of 1950s America, a place and time shrouded in the hopes of a thousand daydreams. And through Freddy King, this instrument held a link to the electric currents of the blues.
So in May 1965, as a newly furbished member of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Clapton walked into a music shop on London’s Charing Cross Road, looking for a Les Paul like the one King used. The little store was dedicated solely to guitars; it had become a haven for local players and the site of frequent jams among London session men. Clapton perused the hanging instruments, searching for the unmistakable gold paint that covered the early Les Pauls. He couldn’t find it.
All he found was a later-model Les Paul, one from 1960, a guitar made when Gibson’s cherry sunburst finishes had replaced the gold top. This wasn’t Freddy King’s instrument; it was basically the same model Keith Richards used with the Stones. But out-of-production Gibsons weren’t easy to find in England, which was part of their charm. And this Les Paul was still a genuine piece of American artisanship—even its brown case had plush pink lining like the interior of some bluesman’s Cadillac. So that spring day, Clapton walked out onto Charing Cross Road with the heavy case of the 1960 Les Paul in his hands, a boy carrying this enigma of an instrument into the future.
By then, Clapton hadn’t just memorized the licks of American bluesmen like Freddy King, B. B. King, Buddy Guy, and others, but had mastered them. With the freedom given to him by John Mayall, Clapton’s playing had evolved beyond imitation, moving into the realm of deep personal expression. Fueled by a kind of madness that had dogged him since childhood—ever since he’d learned that his actual mother had left him to be raised by others and the whole story had been concealed from him—Clapton played the blues with an intensity and energy unmatched by anyone else on the London scene. It was a young and English energy, a white energy, but a thrilling one. “It was like the Eric Clapton show,” Mayall’s drummer remembered. “It wasn’t John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.”
Central to the Clapton show was a tone that had never before been achieved by an electric guitar. It issued from Eric’s amplifier, a boutique device sold by a London drum shop owner named Jim Marshall. English guitarists like Pete Townshend of the Who had pestered Marshall for a high-powered, durable amp similar to those made in Fullerton, but available at a lower price than the imported Fenders. Marshall and his staff designed essentially a copy of the popular Fender Bassman, but made with parts that were easier to obtain in England. Due to their British tubes and speakers, the Marshalls issued a raspier, drier tone than the Fender amps. And because Jim Marshall didn’t share Leo Fender’s obsession with bell-like clarity—indeed, he’d only set out to satisfy young Turks like Townshend—the Marshall amps produced a thick, crunchy distortion, far more of it than any Fender did.
The most visible piece of Clapton’s tone, however, was the guitar Freddy King inspired him to buy. Eric had meant to emulate the thin pricks of the Texas bluesman, but with his own sunburst Les Paul and Marshall amplifier, Clapton achieved a roaring, distorted blare that came out like war in the heavens. Or so his fans thought of it. Which is why the graffiti began to appear.
It first showed up in the spring of 1965, on a wall at the Islington Underground station in North London. Just a mess of spray-painted black letters that read, “Clapton is God.” The line soon scattered over walls around the city and became a chant at shows: “Give God a solo!” “We want more God!” It became a catchword for the intellectuals, hippies, and art students who saw in Clapton’s purism and intensity a model for their own.
In the eyes of English blues fans, Eric Clapton was a prodigy carving out a new role in the bands of the day. He wasn’t some knock-around chap, not one of a group of Beatles or Stones or Yardbirds hanging with the boys. He was a solitary virtuoso, a hired gun. A king holding court, casting bolts of vengeful noise out from his electric scepter. He was a guitar hero. This template had existed before, but Clapton updated it to fit his tastes and biases. This portrayal of the mercenary guitar slinger—with fine clothes, a cold demeanor, and ruthless ability—looked omnipotent to much of Swinging London.
Being called God naturally boosted Eric Clapton’s vanity. “In a way, I thought ‘Yes, I am God, quite right,’ ” he told the writer David Mead. But the status also reinforced his overpowering loneliness. “I’m very conceited and I think I have a power,” he told an interviewer at the time. “I haven’t a girlfriend or any other relationship, so I tell myself of this power through the guitar. And I don’t need people to say how good I am. I’ve worked it out by myself . . . My guitar is simply a medium through which I can make contact with myself. It’s very, very lonely.”
Neither God nor anyone else had high expectations for the album he and his mates were working on. John Mayall and his band planned to spend only a day or two on it: just go into the studio and play basically the same set they did onstage every night, live into the microphones.
Studio 2 at Decca Records’ West Hampstead facility was a tiny room filled with near-obsolete equipment, able then to record only in monaural sound, not stereo. The four bandmates shuttled in on a March day in 1966: Mayall, the leader; Clapton, God; John McVie, the tipsy bass player who would later form Fleetwood Mac; and Hughie Flint, the thundering drummer. Producing them was a blues aficionado named Mike Vernon, who intended to run a session in which the band could record exactly as they pleased, with no pressure to appeal to the charts. Assisting Vernon was recording engineer Gus Dudgeon, a freelancer who had no idea what he was getting into.
The musicians set up while Dudgeon arranged the microphones. Eric Clapton hauled in his Marshall amplifier, a radiator-sized rectangle holding two twelve-inch speakers and producing forty-five watts of power. As was customary then, Dudgeon set up a microphone immediately in front of the amp. The prevailing practice in studios was to record with each instrument set to a low volume, screened off into its own microphone. That way, the instruments wouldn’t bleed into each other, and the engineer would have utmost control over the levels of each element when setting the final mix. In this method, sheer volume wasn’t necessary when recording. An electric guitar didn’t even have to go through an amplifier—it could be plugged straight into the mixing board for a clear, dry tone.
But Eric Clapton wasn’t going to plug his Les Paul into a mixing board. He reached down, picked up the microphone Dudgeon had left in front of his amplifier, and carried it over to the far side of the room, as far away from the amp as possible. Then he flipped the power switches on his Marshall and turned the volume knob to where he set it for a live show: Full. Ten. Maximum.
For even more power, Clapton ran his Les Paul through an effect called a Dallas Rangemaster, which amplified the trebly end of the signal before it got to the amp.
Then Eric Clapton played. And Gus Dudgeon, in the control room, began to freak out.
Hear it: a very large amplifier—not as loud as amps got, but still massively powerful—cranked to full volume, with a boost pedal also cranked, played in a tiny room. The sound careening around that cozy box, the mannered studio where Django Reinhardt once recorded, would have shaken the walls. It would have sent the hardware on Hughie Flint’s drum kit chattering with resonant frequencies. It would have exploded into feedback the moment Clapton took his hands off the guitar strings, because with so much volume in a s
mall space, there was no avoiding the ambient sound getting sent back through the amplifier. It would have hurt to be in there. For the uninitiated, it would have been terrifying.
Meanwhile, in the control room, Gus Dudgeon’s VU meters would have been buried in the red on the far side of their primitive dials, far past “way too much” and into the territory where a recording engineer could lose his job. Dudgeon must have thought: What kind of madman guitarist would think he could record like this?
So the engineer raced back into the tracking room, went to Clapton, and asked him to turn it down. Begged him, according to some accounts. Clapton refused. He said he planned to record with the guitar sound that he used onstage—a molten, billowing wail.
This wasn’t the first time Clapton had infuriated a recording engineer unused to his technique. But as John Mayall biographer Dinu Logoz writes, the situation reached a stalemate. Dudgeon could do nothing until producer Mike Vernon returned. Only he had the authority to get this guitar player to turn down the volume.
“Is this absolutely essential?” Vernon finally asked the twenty-one-year-old Clapton. “Because Gus is having kittens, he doesn’t know how to record it. He’s never had to deal with anything like this volume in his life. Can’t you turn it down?”
Vernon remembered Clapton responding with utmost politeness. “No, I can’t, because if I turn it down, the sound changes. And I can’t get the sustain I want. He’s the engineer, you’re the producer; tell him to engineer it and you produce it. But I’m not turning it down.”
As the stalemate continued, Mayall decided to step in. He knew how important Clapton’s sound was—he heard it onstage every night. He shouted at Vernon and Dudgeon the seemingly inevitable admonition: “Give God what he wants!” And that was that.
Much of Clapton’s amplifier would end up bleeding into Hughie Flint’s drum microphone, which was fine with him. As a guitarist, he didn’t care which mic he went into as long as the right sound ended up on shellac. “I was on top of my craft, and I was completely confident, and I didn’t give a shit about what anyone thought,” Clapton said later. “If you didn’t like what I was doing, then you weren’t on the same planet as me.”
But when the results of those three or four days in the studio were released, it became clear that no one was on the same planet as Eric Clapton.
No white person had ever played blues guitar so aggressively and with such emotional intensity—had ever played as if their life hung on every note. Here was the blues, unmistakable, laid out in all its soulfulness and splendor. Songs from greats like Freddy King, Little Walter, Otis Rush, and Robert Johnson, along with Mayall’s own worthy compositions. The real thing. And since the wider world was then basically ignorant of these black American masters from whom Eric Clapton learned, his summoning of such immense feeling came across as a revelation. Many listeners would experience the terrifying power of the American blues for the first time through Clapton and Mayall.
But what was new, truly new—to England and the United States, to both white and black listeners everywhere—was the sound that Eric Clapton had discovered and that Mike Vernon and Gus Dudgeon had begrudgingly captured over those few days.
It hit in the first few seconds of the resulting album, Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton, on a minor-key tune called “All Your Love”: a sonic arc that was half wail and half snarl, a few gleaming notes that just hung there, seemingly forever, as Clapton’s fingers bent their pitch up and then down. He held a single note on the Les Paul for three full seconds, and he wasn’t even soloing; this was Clapton playing rhythm. In the next minute he found a couple of simple phrases, outlining the chords, that set off a sublime cascade: solar highs that just floated, and as they decayed transformed into waves of abrasive distortion, then ghostly feedback. His guitar attained the fluidity of water, the notes pouring over one another, pooling together, then hitting some rocky shoal that revealed a coruscating darkness underneath. Each note sustained so long that the next one punched it out of existence. Electric guitar, as most humans played it, had been a pinprick, thin and sharp. Here it was a hydraulic press, every note three feet thick, yet somehow also singing and buoyant.
It was a sound you could not turn away from.
37.
“IT IS A GIANT STEP”
LONDON AND THE UNITED STATES, SUMMER–FALL 1966
When it was released in July 1966, Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton stunned listeners and critics on both sides of the Atlantic. The recording put electric guitar at the forefront of a revamp of the electric blues, recasting it into something heavier and more percussive than any of the American records that inspired Clapton. The album spent ten weeks in the top ten of the British charts, peaking at no. 6 and far exceeding anyone’s expectations. “No British musicians have ever sounded like this before on record,” Melody Maker wrote at the time in one of the dozens of raving reviews. “It is a giant step.”
Naturally, Eric Clapton’s playing and his name in big letters on the cover had much to do with that success—though Clapton himself treated the effort, like so many others, as perfunctory. He was so indifferent during a photo shoot for the album cover that instead of looking into the camera, he glared into a copy of a Beano comic, hating to have his picture taken. To him, the album was simply a record of the shows he performed almost nightly, nothing more, nothing less. And by the time it was released—in fact, the month before—word hit Melody Maker that Eric Clapton had already left Mayall’s band to found a new group, a trio called Cream.
But as the Blues Breakers album spread around England and the US, it began to acquire a near-mystical influence over guitar players. Clapton was pictured on the back of the album cover holding his 1960 Les Paul, and though the guitar was only shown from the back, careful observers would not have missed its outline. The sounds on the album were incredible, and the shape of that guitar on the back cover was a major clue about how to achieve them.
Clapton’s playing had already made the old Gibson model into a precious commodity in England. His replacement in the Yardbirds, a young hotshot named Jeff Beck, had gotten a Les Paul. The Bluesbreakers had recorded some earlier tracks with a twentysomething studio guitarist and producer named Jimmy Page, and working with Clapton seems to have given him a few ideas. The Blues Breakers album’s “Double Crossing Time” was a searing slow blues arrangement that foregrounded two major elements: a heaving, monolithic drumbeat, and the throaty wail of Clapton’s Les Paul guitar. Both of these sounds would become key elements of a band Page would soon form, a vehicle for his own guitar-hero ambitions, called Led Zeppelin.
“Everybody started using the Les Paul Standard when Eric Clapton was using them with the Bluesbreakers,” remembered guitarist Kim Simmonds, a London blues guitarist who’d find fame with the group Savoy Brown. “I would go and see all of Eric’s shows . . . and I’d be standing in an audience filled with nothing but future guitar players. Robert Fripp would be on one side of you, and Jimmy Page would be on the other side.”
In the States, Mike Bloomfield, the sideman who’d played with Bob Dylan at Newport, already wielded a 1956 gold-top Les Paul. After hearing the Blues Breakers album, he switched to a sunburst 1959 model, luring his American followers to do the same. With its sustain and tone, the Gibson Les Paul “was better than any other possible rock ’n’ roll guitar at the time,” Bloomfield insisted.
• • •
BY 1966, LES PAUL himself was languishing in New Jersey obscurity, his last bit of fame having withered away shortly after his divorce from Mary Ford became final. He’d tried to find a singer to replace her, but within a year had given up and all but retired from public performance. Beer and inactivity were adding girth to his waistline, and even at the relatively young age of fifty-one, arthritis was creeping into his fingers. Les Paul’s recording innovations had come to rule the industry—multitracking, or, as he called it, sound-on-sound, was becoming a common technique—but the influence of his music had long since been forgotte
n. His signature guitar seemed to have met a similar fate.
Then something started to happen. Still playing and tinkering at his mountainside New Jersey home, conducting a few little experiments, Les would sometimes find his solitary work interrupted by a banging on the front door. He’d open it up to find some whippersnapper longhair asking if indeed this was the home of Les Paul—wow, Les Paul really is a person!—and asking if they could buy one of the Gibson models with his signature curling in gold across the headstock.
Gibson, of course, no longer made such a guitar. Starting in 1961, the original Les Paul Model had been replaced by the thinner, lighter SG. And while SGs and Les Pauls sounded similar, they didn’t sound the same. Gibson had produced only 434 of the cherry sunburst Les Paul “Standards” in 1958, 643 in 1959, and 635 in 1960, according to researcher A. R. Duchossoir, plus a couple of hundred more of the black “Custom” models every year. Thus there were only about 2,400 examples of this guitar ever made, and with demand for them spiking virtually overnight starting in 1966, prices rocketed upward. One immediate effect of the Les Paul Model’s resurgence was the adoption by electric guitar players of a belief long shared by collectors of cars, furniture, watches, and other fine goods: that items made in the past are superior to those produced in the present. It was in these years that the obsession over vintage guitars, which would eventually become a mania, took root.
Les witnessed the guitar’s resurgence at gathering places for guitarists like Manny’s Music in midtown Manhattan. “I’m going down 48th Street, seeing youngsters like Steve Miller, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, all these hot young guns looking for Les Paul guitars and paying huge prices when they can find one because they’re out of production and getting harder and harder to find,” Les recalled in his autobiography. It made him deeply proud to know that the model he’d helped create—the physical incarnation of his legacy as a guitar player—had so suddenly returned to favor. By 1966, the Les Paul Model guitar was becoming the must-have instrument among the heavy rock vanguard, who wanted to sound like Eric Clapton and Mike Bloomfield. Les didn’t love hard rock music or the roar of a super-distorted electric guitar, but he did love the idea of being ahead of his time.