Eric Clapton

RY: If you could collaborate with one person in music that you haven't already, who would it be and why?

JM: Nobody. I’m absolutely done. I got to spend some really good time playing, writing and recording with Clapton and that’s it. Clapton would've been my answer to you previously. Now my answer is nobody. Im done collaborating for a while.

There is a lot of guitar playing on it because the songs are written well enough so that more guitar makes sense. Eric Clapton is the greatest guitar player to me because he writes songs that lift the guitar playing to greater heights. He understands that if you want to be more than a guitar player’s guitar player, a people’s guitar player, you need to understand the lyric. I want to understand the lyric more.

I defend that. And I’m really so thankful that my heroes haven’t snubbed me, because it would have broken my heart. I didn’t want to meet Clapton for a long time because I didn’t want him to not like me.

RS: Did you have this theory that he’d think you were a hack or something?

JM: I don’t know. Sure. Or, “That boy rubs me wrong.” But we get along great. Not to exploit a relationship, because we don’t talk all the time, we keep in touch. But I need it. I need it in the sense that there’s not a huge community, and I don’t have a lot of people to relate to in what I’m doing. Eric was the first person that I’d ever met who loved blues and had a bunch of money. I’d never met anybody who loved blues and had a bunch of money!

Q: When you were playing with Eric Clapton the other day, what was going through your mind to be singing and playing with such an icon?

JM: Well you know I've played with Eric several times, and it's an interesting balance that you have to strike when your friends are people you've admired your whole life. So I never want to get into, Oh my god, because then you stop having dinner together. When you turn into like, "Oh my god guy."

[Laughter]

So it's an interesting thing. So as I'm playing I'm trying to hold the whole thing together because I'm observing the fact that this is obvious something that I really love doing, and it's always as impactful as the last time or the next time.

So I'm trying to both appreciate what it means but also keep my head down musically because if I were to observe too much then I would stop doing what I was supposed to be doing on the guitar. So it's a little dance that I have to do to enjoy it and forget it while I'm playing.

RT: Did you grow up playing to Eric Clapton CDs?

JM: I'm sorry, what? She was introducing me to her daughter. What else is new?

[Laughter]

RT: Did you grow up playing along to Clapton discs? The record goes on and you just pull up the guitar and sit on the bed for an hour? 

JM: Yeah, yeah. I would just keep playing the CDs over and over again. And for years I would pretend that guys like, Buddy Guy, or like anybody playing guitar, I would pretend—and I think the other guitar players up here would tell you that we had an amazing ability to forget there was a guitar track on the record we were listening to, and pretending that what we were doing was the only guitar on there.  

RT: We were watching your performance at Bryant Park and I think you took the first solo when you and Eric played together. And we both said almost at the same time, If I turned and looked next to me and said, Hey Eric Clapton is playing rhythm guitar for my solo, that would be it. 

JM: [Laughs] Well you know we tried it in rehearsal both ways. I originally said, You go first. I don't know, it didn't work out that way. We tried it and I went, You know what, the fun of playing with you is coming in and crushing what I started. So it's like I start the solo and it's like, Well here's my version of how it's done. And then Eric comes in and goes, Eric smash! And shows you actually how it's done.

Which is more exciting than like he does his thing and I go, And I have something to add!

SS: Speaking of good artists you played with legends. B.B. King, Eric Clapton. When you handle these guys, is there ever a thought in your mind of, "I'm a student, I'm gonna learn from these guys. Or is there a comfort of, "I can hang?"

JM: No, the only comfort that I have in those moments is knowing that I've at least spent enough time in what I call the Simulator. At home playing to B.B. King albums for years is being in a simulator. I tell myself, that I at least have put in enough time in the simulator to deserve an actual flight. But you have to at least tell yourself that you're not an accident that you're up there. Because from there you're just gonna lose all your confidence and not really be able to swing the bat.

“He treated our days together as work,” says Clapton, “and I tried to point out to him the importance of music being the truth – and to get him to come out of the bedroom. There are a lot of bedroom guitar players. And John was in and out of that. I wasn’t sure if John was aware of the power of playing with other people, though I think he is now.” He goes on, “I think he becomes too caught up in being clever. It seems to me his gift happens in spite of him. He’s a prime saboteur. And he will do himself in, if everyone lets him. But his gift is in good shape.”

Because he wanted the song to feel like a pick-up band was playing it, Mayer sought to retain small imperfections that would give it a kind of slackened shuffle. “It’s supposed to be like a worn-in pair of jeans,” he notes. “It reminds me of JJ Cale or Eric Clapton, and those unsung great records like Clapton’s ‘Promises,’ which sounds like it’s performed in a reclining chair, with a cigarette burning in the headstock of the guitar.”

JM: There's Eric Clapton the friend and then there's that Clapton thing you can talk to anyone about. There's two separate things. There's the person and there's what they've done. There's their style, there's their technique, you can talk about their catalogue or their contribution. But then you need to learn how to know both and navigate both. So it's a combination of saying, How amazing is this, this is incredible I can't believe I'm here. And also like, Yeah this makes sense.

You mentioned that ''Last Train Home" is the one song where the influences are more overt. What are we hearing on that one?

That's a good question. And I have a deep dislike of dishonesty when it comes to creating, so I'll tell you: I always wished that I could have a song that was on Eric Clapton's Journeyman album. I loved him so much that I'm not afraid to go, "I just want to feel what that's like..." Like, the experience of plugging a Strat with noiseless pickups into a Soldano with a chorus pedal. And to hear that back on your own song is funny, poignant, touching, exciting, titillating. I mean, it feels a little bit wrong. But the reason I'm okay telling you this is because Eric has always been someone who turned his test around and showed you his notes.

At Guitar World, we talk to a lot of players that cop to wanting to sound like Eric Clapton. But this may be the first time someone has said they wanted to sound like Eric Clapton playing "Pretending.''

Oh, well, this is a great conversation. This speaks to what matters to you based on your age, right? This is the whole genesis of Van Halen discussions. It all has to do with how old you were when it hit you. And when I was in high school, it was "Pretending." It was "Bad Love." It was "Running on Faith." If you liked guitar and you liked Eric Clapton, that's what he was playing if you went to go see him at the New Haven Coliseum. I remember seeing kids in school on a Monday showing off their Eric Clapton T-shirts — that was a cool thing. You can't expect someone who's 16 years old in 1990 to understand Cream. Not yet. So what finds you if you first pick up a guitar at that time? It's that record. That record has such a deep place in my heart.

One of my favorite Eric Clapton eras is the Journeyman era, which saw me pretty much as, like, a freshman in high school. To me, this just doesn't get cooler. It's "Pretending" by Eric Clapton. It's a wonderful way to kind of put the reggae thing in there without you really knowing it's reggae. Because as we all know: tough one to pull off, when you blend the reggae with anything else. But there's just something — there was something cool happening at the verge of the late 80s and early 90s, that was a blend of 80s recording sonic aesthetic and, like, just going into something really ambitious musically.