Why is Eric Clapton so roundly disliked among guitarists?

Anyway, I guess the only point I was trying to make is that success changes people. Your perception is your reality, and what is your reality when people all but worship you everywhere you go? Who are you once you’ve achieved all your dreams, have millions of dollars, the adulation of millions, and you’re flying around in private jets, being driving around in limousines, and staying in 5 star hotels where you’re brushing elbows with other famous people who all adore you? You’re not going to making the same music you did when you were young and hungry. How could a millionaire do that?

David Gilmour, of Pink Floyd, recently announced a new album, and one of the things he’s talked about was the producer he’s working with, Charlie Andrew. Of Andrew, Gilmour said, “He has a wonderful lack of knowledge or respect for this past of mine. He’s very direct and not in any way overawed, and I love that. That is just so good for me because the last thing you want is people just deferring to you.”

Which bring us back to Clapton. Eric Clapton had that arc. He reached that point where no one was telling him “no”. He was so famous and iconic that all he had to was walk out on a stage and people were grateful for the experience. So I think he stopped trying. I mean, if people get excited over every little note you play, does it really matter after a while what notes you play? I remember hearing this one live recording of Clapton in the 1990s or, and he had played this really cool Bluesy lead that had some of the fire of his younger days, and then he played this one note which he sort of bent into a sustained it with just some vibrato. You know, just sort of shaking the note and the beat of the band. And THAT was when the crowd went wild. When Clapton played the most simple thing he’d played in the entire solo. One sustained note with vibrato.

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We often forget that these iconic artists are people. Eric Clapton is a person. When you go around for years (or decades) with people fawning over your influence and your genius, and you’re rich and successful, you simply don’t have to try as hard. Not to mention, you essentially have no one to bounce ideas off of anymore because everybody has become a “yes man” and no one says “no” to you anymore.

Simple. It’s fashionable to hate on Clapton. Just like there’s a performative “me too” on hating on bands like Nickelback, a lot of folks try to prove their discerning bona fides by following popular narratives, and one popular narrative is “Clapton sucks”, or however that’s expressed. But really, all that happened to Clapton was, essentially, that he ran out of fire. It happens to most creative people. I mean, think about it (no one ever does, though). Think of all the artists who’ve put out great music for years, and then suddenly that have that one runaway smash success that is essentially a high-water mark in their career. That changes who you are as an artist, because there’s before, and there’s after.

All artists reach a point where it’s no longer their moment in the sun, when they’re just an old lion resting its tired bones in the sun. And that’s when the jackals come for you.

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When you’re as famous as Gilmour, or Clapton, people defer to you. As an artist who works within a certain ecosystem, I’m sure it’s exhausting to always have people following your lead. And after a while it doesn’t matter what shite you come up with; people are like “Brilliant!”. Fans are the same. How many artists have you heard put out substandard shite, only to have the public be like, “Take my money!” That’s because most people follow the pack, and if the pack agrees that this person or that person is an icon and a genius, these folks go along with the pack. At that point it’s a product being marketed, because what you’re selling is a brand more so that good music. The music is almost secondary at that point, because you can literally release almost anything and it’ll sell. At least for a while.

And as with everything, once you start losing your mojo, creatively or culturally, there are plenty of people eager to just tear you down. Younger generations come along, and at some point you’re just seen as a dinosaur, a relic of an age that has passed. That’s when the demonstrative, participatory hate comes in, when people begin to prove their edgy independent bona fides by flinging invectives at the dinosaurs that the pack has now defined as irrelevant. Clapton isn’t the only artist to suffer this fate. Most massively successful artists do eventually. The run out of gas creatively, and then they get trashed by popular culture for running out of gas. It doesn’t matter what your past work was, you’re defined as a has-been who can no longer “bring it”, even if on your worst day you could easily run circles around your detractors.