Wednesday, September 17, 2025

Is Clapton God?*

More like an Evangelist


When music fans hear the name Eric Clapton, their first thought would likely be “guitar virtuoso”.

Or perhaps they’ll think of the guy who was in a bunch of bands before finally accepting that he was a solo artist.+

Maybe they’ll just start singing “Layla”.

But I suspect that Eric Clapton’s most lasting musical legacy will be as a fan.  In fact, Eric Clapton might be the most influential evangelist of music in modern history.

Blues Power

In 1962, the American Folk Blues Festival brought legendary blues artists like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Howlin’ Wolf to European audiences.  The crowd at the first venue in Britain included the unknown teenagers Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Jimmy Page.  If you were to scan the audience at later shows in London you’d see future stars like Eric Burdon, Steve Winwood – and a 17-year-old Eric Clapton.

A lot of British musicians played a role in re-introducing the great American bluesmen to the wider world.  But none had the combination of prominence and dedication as Clapton.

He was in three of the most prominent – maybe the three most prominent - blues-based English bands: The Yardbirds, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and Cream. These bands covered landmark blues songs like “I’m A Man” and “Crossroads”.  The Yardbirds toured with Sonny Boy Williamson.  Clapton joined Winwood and the Stones’ rhythm section to record The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions.  

In 1995 he released From the Cradle, a blues cover album, which was Grammy-nominated for Album of the Year, and hit #1 on the U.S. charts.   To this day, he runs the Crossroads Festival that he founded.

Clapton, Muddy Waters, & Johnny Winter (1979)

But perhaps more than anything else, he never stopped talking about the power of the blues.  When Robert Johnson’s The Complete Recordings was released in 1990 – an epic moment in that glorious period of box sets – he wrote the liner notes, which included this quote, one imbued with religious awe: 

“Up until I heard his music, everything I had ever heard seemed as if it was dressed up for a shop window somewhere.  So that when I heard him for the first time, it was like he was singing only for himself, and now and then, maybe God.”

That box set, 41 songs recorded in 1936-37 by an artist that had almost never received any radio play, sold more than a million copies, and won a Grammy.  This is hard to imagine without the enthusiasm and evangelism of Eric Clapton.  

I Hope You Like Jammin’ Too

Did you know the term reggae wasn’t coined until 1968 – 6 albums into Eric Clapton’s recording career with various bands?

The 1968 single “Do the Reggay” by Toots and the Maytals was the first popular song to use the word, effectively naming the genre.  It has roots in earlier Jamaican genres like ska, but even ska only evolved in the 1950s.  One might say ska is to doo-wop what reggae is to rock and roll.

Within a few years, a bunch of newly rich white musicians started vacationing in the Caribbean, where they heard this funky music.  And they loved it.  

Paul Simon, always attuned to global sounds, recorded "Mother and Child Reunion" with Jamaican artists in Kingston in 1972.  The Stones recorded Goats Head Soup in Jamaica.  Led Zeppelin’s "D’yer Mak’er" – a double entendre pun that sounds like ‘Jamaica’ and ‘Did You Make Her’ - is reggae-inspired.

But it was Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff” that went to #1 on the Billboard charts and introduced reggae to a much larger audience.  In fact, it was his only #1 hit.

Today, the world is much more likely to play Bob Marley’s version – as they should! – but I’m not sure they would have if Eric Clapton had not fell in love with reggae.

Going Acoustic

Last year, movie audiences everywhere saw the legendary story of Bob Dylan going electric in the film “A Complete Unknown”.  Twenty years after Dylan plugged in, MTV Unplugged invited artists to unplug the electric instruments that made them famous.

The list of artists who appeared on Unplugged is long and illustrious.  Metal (Alice in Chains) and grunge bands (Nirvana) unplugged.  The show featured crooners (Tony Bennett) and divas (Mariah Carey), hip-hop artists (Lauryn Hill) and legends (Paul McCartney).  Heck, even Page & Plant did a few tunes together.  

But the unchallenged king of this latest music ‘innovation’ was Eric Clapton.  

It may not surprise you to learn that Eric Clapton Unplugged was the top selling MTV Unplugged album.  But perhaps it may surprise you to hear that, with 26 million albums sold, it is the best-selling live rock album of all time? 

Further On Up Some Other Roads

Clapton’s career as a music chameleon has other, albeit shorter, chapters.  

In 1968, Cream played some famous shows at The Fillmore, and some of that Haight-Ashbury influence arguably filtered into Cream’s sound.  

In the mid-80’s, he had a slew of hits like “She’s Waiting”, “Pretending”, and “It’s In the Way That You Use It”, that captures the over-produced power-pop sound of the era.  

And in my favorite “Eric Clapton is the greatest music fan of all time” story…when he first heard the music of The Band (arguably a genre unto themselves) he told Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker he needed to quit Cream, because he was planning to join this other band.  He drove to Woodstock where The Band was hanging and…well, he never quite got the courage to ask if he can join, but he wanted to!**

Slowhand’s Masterpiece

There is a downside to all this idolatry.  

It seems to me that Eric Clapton’s music was, at times, derivative.  He was a highly skilled guitarist, became a competent vocalist, and had enough songwriting chops to create a bunch of hits.

But, alas, some of his music feels like an homage to the people he idolized.  He was worshipping the blues artists and reggae artists and even the 80s hitmakers.  It was good music, but arguably music that was, well, dressed up for a shop window somewhere.

The one great exception to this “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs”, with his final band, Derek & The Dominos.  That album is an absolute masterpiece.  And I suspect it is because for that moment, driven by his star-crossed love for Pattie Boyd, he wrote, sang, and played from the heart.  

It wasn’t a blues album, it wasn’t a reggae song, it wasn’t trying to be the Grateful Dead or The Band or Phil Collins.  It is a great work of art by a highly skilled musician singing for himself, and maybe God.


“Clapton is God” is an early rock and roll meme.  A graffiti artist painted it on a wall in London in the early 1960s, and soon it was appearing all over town, and even crossed the ocean to New York.

I wrote about how the greatest bands are British (Beatles/Stones/Zep/Who/U2) and the greatest solo artists are American (Elvis/Dylan/Bruce/Billy Joel) here.  Clapton, the Englishman, recorded with 6 bands in the first decade of his career, before committing to a solo career

** Clapton told the story himself when he inducted The Band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (here)




Wednesday, January 1, 2025

The Johnny Bingo Awards - 2024

 My Favorite Books of this Reading Year

Once again, it is time for the least-anticipated literary awards of the year…The Johnny Bingo Awards!

These prestigious awards are awarded annually in a variety of categories that change constantly.  There is only one constant, one rule, which I've been using for nearly 20 years:

Eligible books are those I read this year (see below for full list). It could’ve been written by a blind Greek poet in the 8th century BCE or be an unpublished galley hacked from an MFA candidate’s MacBook in a Brooklyn cafe.  As long as I read the last paragraph before the ball drops in Times Square, it can be a winner.

The literarily literate among you understand that “the blind Greek poet in the 8th century BCE” refers to Homer, author of The Iliad and The Odyssey.  This week it was announced that the acclaimed director Christopher Nolan’s next project will be a movie version of The Odyssey, starring Tom Holland and Zendaya.  The social media reaction to this was filled with so much literary ignorance it made me want to strap myself to the mast…

On to this year’s awards!

Best Historian at Capturing BIG Subjects in a Single Volume

Andrew Roberts 

When it was announced that Ridley Scott would be making a film about Napoleon Bonaparte, I was nervously excited.  I knew from Gladiator that historical accuracy wasn’t exactly Scott’s strong suit, but still – the chance to see a master filmmaker put things like Austerlitz and the invasion of Russia on screen…

The film was awful but its release inspired me to brush up on my Napoleon and that’s how I came across Andrew Roberts.  His Napolean: A Life is a masterpiece.  Scott couldn’t skillfully fit 22 action-packed years into 3 hours of celluloid, but Roberts splendidly tells the entire story of Napoleon’s life and era in fewer than a thousand pages.  

It was so good I read his single-volume history of WWII, The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, and I can say with confidence it is the best single-volume history of this enormous subject I’d ever read.  It might be subtitled “Hitler Could Have Won the War if He Wasn’t Such an Ideological Idiot.”

I intend to work my way through Baron Roberts’ (yes, he is a Baron) entire bibliography over the next few years.  

Best Book by Someone I Hadn’t Read Yet

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Gabrielle Zevin

It seems much of the book-loving world has read Zevin’s Tommorow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – but I went back a few years and sampled one of her earlier works.  An absolutely charming book written by, about, and for book lovers.  

Best Old-Fashioned Novel by an Underrated Novelist

The Ocean and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story

Mark Helprin

Mark Helprin has had a curious literary career.  Early on, he took the expected steps of the Next Great Writer: acclaimed short story collections, regularly published in The New Yorker, the breathlessly reviewed debut novel (A Winter’s Tale), and the breakthrough novel (A Soldier of a Great War).

Then he seemed to fade from cultural view.  Partly it’s because he had politics well out of step with the literary gatekeepers – he is a passionate supporter of Israel’s right to existence (even served in the IDF) and was revealed to be a speechwriter for Bob Dole.  But it’s also because the next few novels didn’t live up to the promise of his earlier works. Often it seemed like a powerful literary gift was being wielded in the service of unworthy plots.

The Ocean and The Stars was, for me, a return to form.  It is  an old-fashioned novel about honor and courage and love, and a welcome respite from the cynical solipsism of the modern literary novel.

Best History Book About a Subject of Which I was Shockingly Ignorant

Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia

Michael Korda

Current historical events often influence my history reading.  For example, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 inspired me to finally pluck that unread biography of Peter the Great from the shelf (and it won a Johnny Bingo that year!).

The Israel-Hamas war had me brushing up on the origins of the Middle East’s manufactured map, and made my realize how little I knew of T.E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia.

I don’t know if Korda’s 2011 work is the best biography, but it is thorough, well-written, and has the advantage of being written late enough to capture some recent history.  (and, unlike earlier biographies, late enough to be frank about Lawrence's, oh what's the right word, unusual sex life).

There is so much to Lawrence's life.  He was a critical figure - for better and worse - in the making of the modern Middle East.  And you'll learn much about the unique situation the passing of the Ottoman Empire created, and how it led to the creation of problems that plague the world today.

But it is also one of the great adventure stories of all time, and perhaps a story about the first truly global celebrity.  At the heart of it is the endlessly fascinating figure of T.E. Lawrence.  If I ever get to host one of those ‘if you could invite anyone’ dinner parties, I’d be hard-pressed to not offer a seat to Lawrence of Arabia.


Best Book by the Best Writer

The Passenger

Cormac McCarthy

As I age, and my heroes pass, this blog runs the risk of turning into an Obituaries pages.  Two of my last three posts have been tributes to Pete Rose and Dickey Betts.  And yet, I never quite got around to writing an homage to my favorite writer, Cormac McCarthy, who passed in June of 2023.

In some ways, his career arc was the opposite of Helprin’s.  His first 5 novels were praised in obscure literary journals, but found no readers.  His fifth novel, the much-acclaimed Blood Meridian, had a small press run of 5000 copies.  

But then he went on a run.  His Border trilogy found a much larger audience, and the first book (All the Pretty Horses) was turned into a Matt Damon movie.  In 2005, No Country for Old Men became an Oscar-winning Coen Brothers movie, and 2006 The Road was picked for Oprah’s book club and won The Pulitzer.  This notoriously difficult writer had, against all literary odds, become a mainstream success story.

And that was it.  Or so it seemed.  For the next decade and a half Cormac fans waited.  And then, in late 2022, McCarthy published not one, but two linked novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.  Six months later he was dead.

One night, not long after McCarthy's death, I sat on my deck with a bottle of Basil Hayden, a Montecristo cigar, and Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece album - and contemplated the career of Cormac McCarthy.  As the bottle emptied and the ashtray filled, my thoughts got more profound, and I was struck with an epiphany about the role of the artist, and how The Passenger and Veedon Fleece were sister works of art that encapsulated both of the careers of these Great Artists, and perhaps even explained Art.   I jotted a bunch of notes down in my phone, stream-of-consciousness style,  bursting with intellectual energy.

Apparently I didn’t save it.  Oh well.  

Hopefully my kids will remember that I have a first edition of Blood Meridian, and while I hope they pass it down through the generations, if they ever get in a tight financial bind, it might be worth something some day.


 Honorable Mention

Here’s the full list of books I read this year, along with some quick comments on other favorites…


Napoleon: A Life, Andrew Roberts

The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy

Two Nights in Lisbon, Chris Pavone

The 39 Steps, John Buchan

Running Blind (Jack Reacher #4), Lee Child

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle,Stuart Turton

Without Fail (Jack Reacher #6), Lee Child

Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy

Dave Barry Turns 50, Dave Barry

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, & Happiness, Morgan Housel

Sometimes I give out an award titled "The Book Most Likely to Make My Wife Kick My Shin Under the Table", because I go on and on about lessons learned.  This is one of those books.

The Power of the Dog: Power of the Dog Book 1, Don Winslow

The only reason I didn't honor Winslow again this year is that I gave his book The Force an award last year, and wrote about him with some length.  But this is even better than The Force.

The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton

Red Sparrow: Book 1 of Red Sparrow Trilogy, Jason Matthews

The Summer Game, Roger Angell

The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting, William Goldman

A great read about screenwriting and moviemaking - or at least, screenwriting and moviemaking in the 70s and 80s.  Particularly recommended if you loved Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, Malcolm Gladwell

The 6:20 Man (6:20 Man #1), David Baldacci

The Innocence of Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War, Andrew Roberts

Dress Her in Indigo: (Travis McGee #12), John D. MacDonald

The It Girl, Ruth Ware

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, Gabrielle Zevin

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

Daisy Jones & The Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid

A fictional oral history of a Fleetwood Mac-like band.  Excellent book, I should have given it a JB!

Swordpoint: The WWII Collection, Max Hennessey

Samuel Adams: The Revolutionary, Stacy Schiff

Adams is on the short list of Underrated Americans, and Schiff is on the short list of underrated historians.  For more on Schiff, see my previous post about the Benjamin Franklin series on Apple TV.

A Discovery of Witches (All Souls #1), Deborah Harkness

I'm two books into this series and I haven't experienced this kind of thrill around vampires since Anne Rice's heyday.

The Edge (6:20 Man #2), David Baldacci

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger

The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett

The Resurrection Walk (Lincoln Lawyer #7), Michael Connelly

The Ocean and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story, Mark Helprin

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, Noa Tishby

The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, Keith Law

Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia, Michael Korda

Flashman (The Flashman Papers 1), George MacDonald Fraser

A Wizard of Earthsea (The Earthsea Cycle #1), Ursula K. Le Guin

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King

Case Histories: Jackson Brodie 1, Kate Atkinson

In Sunlight and in Shadow, Mark Helprin

Think Twice: Myron Bolintar #12, Harlan Coben

The Lion's Game: John Corey #2 , Nelson DeMille

Not DeMille's best - it should be a few hundred pages shorter and perhaps have a more wrapped up ending.  But DeMille passed this year, and he gave me many hours of reading pleasure.  The outpouring of support on social media from the giants of thriller writers suggest he was also a beloved and generous man.  Long Island really produces some winners.

Shadow of Night (All Souls #2), Debora Harkness

The Collector (Gabriel Allon #23), Daniel Silva