If Clapton Is God, Then Son House Is a Bad Mother Indeed
The night before my visa was up and I had to leave Mexico, I went over to see Ray Vicente, who ran the instituto where I taught English. He was born in Mexico but his father, a truck driver, had emigrated to the U.S. and Ray had grown up in L.A., where he'd become a high school gym teacher. He was a black belt in karate and a boxer. Living in Highland Park, you either beat the cholos or joined them, so he beat them. And though he'd returned to the country of his birth, he would always be more American at heart than Mexican: couldn't live without his Hawaiian Punch (which he had to buy in bulk in Guadalajara), loathed Mexican cookies and donuts, loved the Buffalo Bills, Burger King, and Eric Clapton. Whenever I went over to his haciendita on Calle de Los Flores for a few beers, we'd talk about all things American and he'd play Eric Clapton songs for me on his portable Yamaha keyboard.
Ray had seen Clapton sixteen times, always making his way to the front where Clapton would look over at him several times and wink. This was because they were parallel beings with parallel lives. They wore the same clothes. They had gone through a divorce at the exact same time, had evolved through Christianity and drug problems at the same time. Weeks after Ray quit teaching high school and was traveling the country calling himself "Pilgrim," Clapton came out with an album entitled Pilgrim. Ray left a sticker once on his ex-wife's windshield: "Miss You?" A play on words. Days later Clapton released a song called "Miss You." Clapton was never on the back of his albums, only on the front—but one day Ray was holding a brand-new Clapton album in his hands and Clapton was on the back in the same suit that Ray was wearing! Ray felt as if he were looking into a mirror. He knew and could play every Clapton song that had ever been written.
The next day, Ray gave me a ride to the Terminal de Camiones downtown, shook my hand, and wished me luck. My back had gone out the week before and a Spanish-speaking Russian doctor had given me three syringes of lumbar epidural steroids, one of which I had just injected myself with an hour before, so I was feeling better than usual, not only able to walk upright but ready to contend for the major-league home-run crown.
I rode to Nuevo Laredo, an eighteen-hour bus trip, then crossed the border at Laredo, Texas, where I bought a thirty-day Greyhound pass. Keeneland, the horse track in Kentucky was running at the time, and I thought I'd catch a few cards and while I was up there pick up some boxes of that Gethsemani butter walnut bourbon fudge at the abbey where the Catholic writer Thomas Merton spent the latter part of his life. I bitch a lot about America, but I was happy to see Popeyes chicken, to think of butter bourbon fudge, to speak my native tongue, to not worry about narcotraficantes with automatic weapons, and to smoke American cigarettes.
As the bus headed up through Mississippi, it was night and a vapor was lifting from the highway, and it seemed like every ten miles we passed a cemetery. Sleepless from the steroids and some asthma pills I had taken because I don't do well in humid climes anymore, I looked out the window at the misty little towns and the Coca-Cola signs and the cows with their forlorn heads hanging over the fences, and as my fellow passengers snored and lightly babbled on, I considered Ray Vicente and his idol, Eric Clapton.
I saw Eric Clapton only once, in Pittsburgh. Someone threw something at him and he stopped the show and began to rant. "You fucking Americans. You disgusting Americans." He went on in this fashion for a time. One person out of twelve thousand had launched something at him and we were all disgusting Americans. Which made me recall his famous drunken rant in 1976 where he went off about "the black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans" and so on who were overrunning his beloved white England. He thought they should all be thrown out. I felt no pull to ever see Eric Clapton again.
I said before that Ray Vicente and I would get together and talk about things American. Clapton, of course, is British. Stylistically, however, he was born in America, the vast majority of his influences—Albert King (b. Indianola), B.B. King (b. Indianola), Hubert Sumlin (b. Greenwood), and Sonny Boy Williamson (b. Tallahatchie County)—hailing from Mississippi. It is said that Clapton purchased the tombstone of Howlin' Wolf (b. White Station). About his chief influence, Robert Johnson (b. Hazlehurst), Clapton said, "He is the most important blues singer who ever lived." I can't think of one seminal Clapton single ("After Midnight," "Cocaine," "Strange Brew," "Parchman Farm," "I Shot the Sheriff," "I'm So Glad," "Crossroads") that didn't sprout from the black loam of the Reconstructed South.
And it doesn't matter if I think that Clapton is a cad, that most of his solo work is tantamount to lounge singing, that his success had an abnormal dependence upon the labor of others, that his ignorant harangues on stage against the very people who supported and sustained him ("I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man.") were nothing short of contemptible. It doesn't matter that he stole his friend's wife and then had a secret child outside of that arrangement or that he was proclaimed God by his myriad followers. It doesn't matter that he vacillated his entire life between sot and sorry savior. That is a blues standard. This is what we expect and even demand from our pop-cult heroes.
And if you care to worship a guitarist or connect cosmically or confuse him with the Creator of the Universe, that's your business. If you want to worship a coconut or a Japanese shower sandal, that's your business. In fairness, however, if Clapton is God, a little room should be made on the altar for those who showed the way: Skip James (b. Bentonia), Charlie Patton (b. Edwards), Willie Brown (b. Clarksdale), and especially Robert Johnson, who practiced in graveyards, reputedly sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads—a story more likely attributable to Tommy Johnson (b. Terry)—and died in obscurity from poisoned whiskey at age twenty-seven.
As it stands now, Clapton ranks fourth on Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time." Robert Johnson, about whose records Keith Richards, the first time he heard them, wanted to know who was playing the "other guitar" (there was no other guitar), is fifth. I can't resist flipping history for perspective's sake, to wit: If Robert Johnson had grown up white in the postwar affluence of the last half of the twentieth century with a Fender Telecaster, a Marshall amp, and the benefit of a Delta Blues catalog on vinyl, and Clapton had grown up black in Plantation Mississippi under the thumb of Jim Crow laws, busking in jukes and colored-only cafes for nickels and dimes, and constantly on the run from police until he died virtually unknown at the age of twenty-seven, where would the rankings stand today? Would Johnson be the greatest guitarist ever? Would this black Clapton American fellow have even made the list?
Long ago, rattling around the South with my Arkansas chef friend, Rocky Haynes, a blues enthusiast who makes regular pilgrimages to Memphis and Clarksdale, Mississippi (home of Sam Cooke, Ike Turner, and many others), we went looking for the gravesite of Robert Johnson. There were at least three official sites at the time, but like a good legend, Rocky cheerfully proposed, he was probably in none of them.
Rocky also told me on that trip that ended up in Tunica not to make too much out of Robert Johnson, for he was no more a god than Clapton and had learned his craft and taken his style (as did Muddy Waters) from Son House (b. Riverton), who liked his corn whiskey, killed a man at a house frolic in Lyon, did a prison stretch at Parchman Farm, made a few recordings on Paramount, and then, like so many of the Delta Blues masters, vanished from the face of the musical planet. For some reason, that sounded good to me: the freedom of doing what you love and then drifting into obscurity.
