There’s no real linear schedule for anyone in the music industry. For all of the brilliant tunes that someone wants to make, it’s anyone’s guess whether they will actually come to fruition or stay in the vault for years at a time before the artist in question decides that they want to pull them from the archives. Even though Eric Clapton got a free pass to do pretty much anything he wanted to do since the early 1970s, he admitted that the album From the Cradle was decades in the making.
But looking at Clapton’s late 1990s smash, there probably isn’t a hush falling over the crowd when I say that it’s just a bunch of damn good blues covers. ‘Slowhand’ has been forever married to the blues ever since he bent his first string, and even when he was dipping his toes into everything from reggae to fusion to singer-songwriter territory, he always was happy to throw in a Robert Johnson lick or a nod to artists like Muddy Waters.
That kind of language has to be ingrained in someone first, though, and Clapton’s work with The Yardbirds was the breeding ground for him turning into a legend. Despite barely being out of his teens when he first joined, Clapton was already becoming a god by the late 1960s, eventually turning up on Beatles records before working on psychedelic freakouts in Cream.
The language may have been the same, but listening to him play ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ was like watching rock and roll being dipped in acid, complete with a primal beat from Ginger Baker leading the charge. Even though the group was never fated to last long, Clapton used the rest of the 1970s to go in every direction imaginable.
Just looking at his output in that decade alone, seeing him go from raw emotion with Derek and the Dominoes to singer-songwriter ballads on 461 Ocean Boulevard and then into reggae for his cover of Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ is one of the stranger career paths to follow in modern music. Still, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and after getting his Unplugged album out of his system, From the Cradle brought him back to where he needed to be.
Despite having a handful of decent blues albums under his belt at that point, like Journeyman, Clapton admitted that From the Cradle was what his late-1960s career should have been, saying, “It’s what I intended to do after the Yardbirds, before John Mayall, here was a period when this was the album I would’ve made.”
And listening to him interpret songs like ‘Motherless Child’ and ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, this sounds closer to what the guitarist might have done had he taken Jeff Beck’s route to guitar god status. The playing isn’t nearly as inventive as something like Blow by Blow, but both records have the same vibe of a group getting together and capturing a jam session in real-time.
Pilgrim put him on better footing with the crowd that wanted more songs like ‘Tears In Heaven’, but From the Cradle is probably a better indicator of where Clapton wanted to be. He had soft rock covered, but nothing could take away that down-and-dirty bluesman he had buried inside his soul.