Word: clapton
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...shouldn't dismiss the new blues cover albums by Eric Clapton and Aerosmith simply because both acts are richer, whiter and scarier to look at than Dick Cheney. Clapton's blues credentials are impeccable. He first played with Sonny Boy Williamson in 1963, and his worship of Delta legends Buddy Guy and B.B. King has been acknowledged over the years by both in their use of him as a producer and collaborator. The spandexed sybarites in Aerosmith have never been much for tradition, which makes their blues obsession more subversive and dynamic. On the surface they churn out big, dumb...
...Clapton and Aerosmith both know their blues, but playing blues classics convincingly is another matter. Clapton sets the bigger challenge for himself on Me and Mr. Johnson by covering 14 tracks by Robert Johnson, the most miserable Mississippian ever to strum a guitar. When he died, Johnson was 27 and had only 29 songs to his name. Clapton says those recordings (which are just Johnson and his Gibson L-1, no accompaniment) are the finest music ever made, which leads to a conceptual dilemma: if Clapton mimics Johnson's superior minimalism, he has added nothing; if he tinkers, he risks...
Johnson would have appreciated the double bind, but it's hard to guess what he'd make of Me and Mr. Johnson. Clapton adds a full band and as much as two minutes in length to some of Johnson's songs. The guitar playing is predictably spectacular, but in stretching the songs Clapton strips them of their intensity. His vocals don't help matters. He's ecstatic to be covering his idol, but his exuberance increases the disconnection between the music and the material. Johnson was one dark dude; when he sang, "There's a hellhound on my trail...
...cash and long on melanin, but Johnny Cash, Stevie Ray Vaughn and Charlie Musselwhite proved that you don't have to be poor and black to play the blues; you just have to be soulful and expressive. So you shouldn't dismiss the new blues cover albums by Eric Clapton and Aerosmith simply because both acts are richer, whiter and scarier to look at than Dick Cheney. Clapton's blues credentials are impeccable; he first played with Sonny Boy Williamson in 1963, and his worship of Delta legends Buddy Guy and B.B. King has been reciprocated over the years, with...
...rest of the album holds much closer to the Sex Pistols spend an evening with Eric Clapton format, which works brilliantly on the album-opener “No Regrets” but begins to sound cursory in the middle stretch of the album...