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(Credit: Alamy)
Every artist usually needs to know their respective lane whenever making their own music. It’s one thing to be able to play the guitar like a god or sing like an angel, but the moment you start stepping on people’s toes is normally when egos start getting involved and people start thinking that they could do more than they are capable of. Eric Clapton may have been a jack of all trades when it came to music, but if there was one thing that people came to him for, it was for the tastiest blues licks ever conceived.
There was no corner of the blues that Clapton hadn’t covered over the years, and even when it started to garner more attention with The Yardbirds, he was far beyond anything else that the rock world had ever seen. He had made his guitar sing in a way no one could except for Jimi Hendrix, but that didn’t always make for the most stable of bands to join when Cream became the biggest band in the world.
Despite being able to play some of the greatest blues rock ever conceived, it’s also hard to keep track of what Cream was doing from one song to the next. There are moments where every member of the power trio could be soloing all at once, and while that might be interesting to listen to for a few minutes, it’s the musical equivalent of staring into the sun after a while.
Clapton needed a change of pace after they released Goodbye, but going right back into another supergroup was always going to be messy. Clapton certainly wasn’t going to have his next project be a step down, and while Ginger Baker followed him right along into Blind Faith, the first thing that people paid attention to was Traffic’s Steve Marriott having one of the best voices in the world.
‘Slowhand’ was definitely coming into his own as a vocalist at the time, but listening to his voice next to Marriott’s at the time was absolutely no contest, saying, “Steve’s so good, such an incredible singer. It’s the kind of thing where you say, ‘He’s so good that I can’t sing with him, but when we get to the night, on stage, I’ll have a go.’ And when it does come to the night, on stage … you’re even further away from him. If we had spent more time together it could have been a lot better.”
While a lot of blues rockers in England were trying to get that growl in their voice, Marriott really was the perfect package. He had the same kind of grit in his voice that you’d hear out of someone like Ray Charles, but there was also that searing quality behind everything that would pop up in nearly every hard rock band that came afterwards, once Robert Plant started copying him.
Besides, Clapton was never used to making his vocals the central part of his music. There are harmonies that he sang with Bobby Whitlock in Derek and the Dominos that sounded beautiful, but he knew that if he wanted to wow people, it was by letting his guitar do the talking rather than singing what was in his heart.
It may have been intimidating going up against anyone of Marriott’s calibre, but it was also down to both he and Clapton working with different instruments. There was a tender side to what Clapton was doing, and while the Blind Faith frontman could do tender when he wanted to, his shout was a lot more important at this stage.
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