Eric Clapton Quotes

You never told me he was that fucking good.

the thing about pessimism is that in most cases it's nothing more than a front behind which a body can hide its most sweetful yet painful hopes. please forgive mine.

What I would do was use the bridge pickup with all of the bass turned up, so the sound was very thick and on the edge of distortion. I also always used amps that would overload. I would have the amp on full, with the volume on the guitar also turned up full, so everything was on full volume and overloading. I would hit a note, hold it, and give it some vibrato with my fingers, until it sustained, and then the distortion would turn into feedback. It was all of these things, plus the distortion, that created what I suppose you could call my sound.

We managed to persuade Giorgio Armani to let us do the music for one of his fashion shows, and took that and turned it into an album called Retail Therapy. We called ourselves T.D.F., for Totally Dysfunctional Family, and

I never set myself too high a goal. It was always tone and feeling, for me.

Music became a healer for me, and I learned to listen with all my being. I found that it could wipe away all the emotions of fear and confusion relating to my family.

The only prewritten songs I had ready were “Circus” and “My Father’s Eyes,” neither of which seemed to have found their right incarnation yet. For almost a year we worked day and night, sometimes just perfecting little guitar motifs, or honing and reshaping tracks with the Pro Tools system that Simon is a master of. The result was one of my favorite albums; I poured my soul into this one, and I believe you can hear that.

Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. [...] Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded, and Enoch [Powell] will stop it and send them all back. The black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans and fucking ... don't belong here, we don't want them here. This is England, this is a white country, we don't want any black wogs and coons living here. We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man. We are a white country. I don’t want fucking wogs living next to me with their standards. This is Great Britain, a white country. What is happening to us, for fuck's sake?

Though I didn’t meet Bob Marley till much later, he did call me up when the single came out and seemed pretty happy with it. I tried to ask him what the song was all about, but couldn’t understand much of his reply. I was just relieved that he liked what we had done.

the same thing happened when I first heard Big Bill Broonzy. I saw a clip of him on TV, playing in a nightclub, lit by the light from a single lightbulb, swinging in its shade from the ceiling, creating an eerie lighting effect. The tune he was playing was called “Hey Hey,” and it knocked me out. It’s a complicated guitar piece, full of blue notes, which are what you get by splitting a major and a minor note. You usually start with the minor and then bend the note up toward the major, so it’s somewhere between the two. Indian and Gypsy music also use this kind of note bending. When I first heard Big Bill and, later, Robert Johnson, I became convinced that all rock ’n’ roll — and pop music too, for that matter — had sprung from this root.

When we arrived in Toronto it was raining, and we were standing around waiting for the luggage when a huge limo rolled up, and John and Yoko jumped into it and drove away, leaving the rest of us standing there without a clue as to what to do next. “Well, that’s nice,” I thought. In the end we got in the van with the luggage, which I deemed a bit sad, as I felt we deserved a little more respect than that.

I had no idea how to do that, because I was either above or below everybody. I was either towering above as Clapton the guitar virtuoso, or cringing on the floor, because if you took away my guitar and my musical career, then I was nothing.

Did you plan your leads, or, for that matter, do you plan them now?

It's been up to me to inspire me.

Would you know my name
If I saw you in heaven
Will it be the same
If I saw you in heaven
I must be strong, and carry on
Cause I know I don't belong
Here in heaven

Would you hold my hand
If I saw you in heaven
Would you help me stand
If I saw you in heaven
I'll find my way, through night and day
Cause I know I just can't stay
Here in heaven