Music’s landscape changed dramatically in the late 1960s, as the electric guitar became an increasingly powerful force of expression in rock. That evolution owed as much to advances in amplification and effects as it did to the players who came to define the era, including Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix.
At the same time, guitarists like Keith Richards and George Harrison were taking a different approach, drawing on the styles that preceded the British rock boom while developing a more expressive, blues-inspired way of playing. Harrison, in particular, came to appreciate the slower, single-note lead style heard in the playing of the Band’s Robbie Robertson and his friend Eric Clapton.
But he wanted little to do with the heavier rock that followed. In his view, Clapton had already taken the electric guitar somewhere new and more forceful with his power trio Cream.
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Where the instrument went after that, however, was simply too much for his taste.
“As far as listening to it, I’d rather hear someone like Little Richard or Larry Williams,” he once recalled (via Rolling Stone). “I never liked all that stuff in the late ’60s after Cream had broken up — all those Les Paul guitars screaming and distorting.”
Clapton had been at the forefront of the British blues explosion following his departure from the Yardbirds in 1965, when he joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. But after leaving to form his own loud and energetic power trio, inspired by seeing Buddy Guy play in London, he helped push the blues into considerably more aggressive territory.
Although Cream was fundamentally a blues-rock band, with strong elements of jazz woven into its sound, the group’s musical fusion helped pave the way for the hard rock and heavy metal scenes that followed. Even Clapton came to recognize the band’s influence in the years afterward.
“I think we were one of the early heavy metal bands without knowing it,” Clapton has previously said. “After we disbanded, Led Zeppelin filled the void.”
While hard rock would go on to produce plenty of accomplished virtuosos, Harrison remained more drawn to an expressive, understated approach to guitar playing than to the excesses of the genre.
“I like subtlety, like Ry Cooder and Eric Clapton,” he said. “Eric is fantastic. He could blow all those people off the stage if he wanted to, but he’s more subtle than that.
“And personally I’d rather hear three notes hit really sweet than to hear a whole lot of notes from some guitar player whose ears are so blown out he can’t hear the difference between a flat and a sharp.”
Harrison’s praise for Clapton is particularly interesting given the complicated history between the two men. They had reportedly engaged in a guitar duel over their mutual love for Pattie Boyd, Harrison’s wife at the time. Clapton had become infatuated with Boyd around 1970, inspiring his anguished declaration of love in “Layla,” from Derek and the Dominos’ Layla & Other Assorted Love Songs (although the song has since become the subject of plagiarism claims).
Intriguingly, in his Rolling Stone interview, Harrison made no mention of the guitarist he considered responsible for the “greatest guitar solo of all time.”
