I don't know where to begin with Eric Clapton. I have a friend here in New York who is one of EC's closest friends. Like Clapton himself he was an addict and it was Slowhand who convinced him to get clean. I have another friend who has a beautiful dobro that Clapton used back in the day which was won at auction for the "Crossroads" foundation in Antigua. A few years ago I remember renting his old house down there and playing guitar on his couch, one of the most sublime experiences of my life, in a sense trying to channel him with no avail. For the past twenty years he has dedicated his life to helping people who have fallen into the same trappings of life he has, drugs and alcohol; it is a noble cause to say the least that he has a peninsula of Antigua where people can come (free of charge) and try to get their lives back together.
Before that there is the man who stole his best friend's wife away from him. Layla was George Harrison's wife and Clapton had a tumultuous affair with her for many years, obviously the inspiration for the legendary song. There is the man who while so hooked on the junk had his friend give a concert with all the proceeds intending to send him to rehab, he would take the money and spend it on heroin. He sat in his house for many years doing nothing but airplane models and shooting up. I think one of the most hysterical and yet chilling things I have ever hear was Clapton in an interview saying that when he finally became clean in the later years of his life he was nervous about having sex because he had no idea what it was like, the prior thirty years he was too fucked up to remember and he was basically a virgin.
Having said all that, for better or worse he is one of the premier guitarist and song writers of our lives. Like every artist the pain and suffering of a life misspent, the depression, the jones-ing, the months forgotten, has led to a brilliance in craft the likes of which few people encapsulate in this world. I will never forget, as a young guitar player, that friend who owns his dobro saying that if you want to see what a blues guitar player should look like in technique, then look no further than Clapton. His mastery of the pentatonic scale is what guitarist's wet dreams are made of, his phrasing and ability to pull out the stings of one's heart are legendary and without equal.
I don't know the background of "Old Love" though it is safe to assume it was written for one of the many dysfunctional relationships he endured throughout his life. There are so many fantastic versions of this song, the Unplugged acoustic version, 24 Nights, his live recorded show at MSG with Bob Dylan and David Sanborn...all different versions of an amazing piece of music. However his version in front of eighty thousand people in Hyde Park is probably my favorite, if not for any reason other than he appears to blow out every amp on stage with the toe flick of a pedal in the middle of a solo.
The song itself is restrained and is played mostly in a minor key giving it a slow gravitas one would associate with the topic of a love gone by the wayside. It is painful, but the type of pain you had when pulling out a baby tooth, yea it hurts but it feels so goddamn good at the same time. Like the junk itself this song is a trapping, you know it is bad for you to indulge in old loves and thoughts of what could have been but it can be terrible seductive to contemplate such affairs. The lyrics are somewhat banal, and while this isn't a blues tune necessarily it still retains the form of the genre and in keeping with such...well most blues lyrics are quite simple. But like a pure blues tune it is the guitar playing that entices and intoxicates you, and it does true as the love of which you are lamenting.
And to get a little high with you and bring me back to my old more reckless days of my youth whenever I went off the reservation and started feeling sorry for the women who have passed by in my life I would always hit up this song. Years ago I mastered the acoustic version of this song and would sit back on the couch a bottle of Cutty Sark deep with a full ounce cut on the table, a Martin on my hip and just have at it. Today, like Clapton (though by saying this I am in now way putting myself on his same holy level) I look back on those times and remember the beautiful music that once came from my strings and also the next morning of nosebleeds, shakes and a heart that felt as though it was ripping out of my chest.
This is not Cream though and this song is not a drug ditty by any means, it is the beatituderific repine of something that hurts much more than waking up in a shoddy room with stains of the mattress, it is the regret of someone who will never pass by again. Like the blues itself, even in this somewhat pop-esque form, "Old Love" comprises the hurt and sorrow of laying in bed and thinking of her not being in yours, being between the sheets spooning with someone else while you are alone. It is seeing your high school girl on the street battered up and weathered when you wanted to remember her as an annual of the spring, ripe and full of promise. If there ever was a way to capture such emotions Clapton brings them to life when he blows out a couple thousand amps with one switch of a pedal in the cold London rain.
