Clapton is not God just another flawed person

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Sure, not all experts have integrity. So called scientists working for big polluters say their corporate masters aren't endangering the environment, and thus all of us. Those puppets of big business are clearly being payed.
But it's equally wrong to say that all experts are on the take, and say only what those who pay them to say. In fact, most are trustworthy.
Just because you disagree with an expert hardly means all of reality has to be altered to support your opinion.
Covid's origins are still up in the air. Even if Fauci is wrong about it, I'm still going to trust him when it comes to vaccinations and safety measures.

Firstly, it was progressive "experts" who lied about the health of the Barrier Reef, as an example.
Secondly, research grants favour those supporting progressive ideology.
Thirdly, fauci emphatically denied the *possibility* of the covid pandemic being the result of a lab leak at Wuhan.
He has changed his tune, since, when the evidence doesn't only suggest the possibility, but the probability.

fauci lacks integrity. He played the political game, and got badly burnt.
And he is in part responsible for the deaths of nearly 5 million people.
I can't believe he hasn't been sacked.
Oh wait, I'm not because he was working for the progressive side of politics to prevent Trumped from being re-elected. Erm, not that I am a Trump fan.

fauci lacks integrity. He played the political game, and got badly burnt.
And he is in part responsible for the deaths of nearly 5 million people.

Not my personal favorite musician, not even in my top 50. but technically you can't take away his guitar skills. Never understood the god, crap, that's some fanboy s**t. I don't really care what his personal politics are, or how flawed a person he is. Just his musical artistic output.

Robert Cray was stunned when he first heard “Stand and Deliver.” Eric Clapton, his onetime musical hero, who became a mentor and friend, had released his first protest song in 56 years of recording. Only it wasn’t about George Floyd or global warming. Clapton’s midtempo shuffle, a collaboration with Van Morrison released in December, went full anti-lockdown, taking aim at the government for trying to control a global pandemic by temporarily shuttering restaurants, gyms and concert halls.

What grabbed Cray’s attention was the second verse.
Do you wanna be a free man

Or do you wanna be a slave?

Do you wanna be a free man

Or do you wanna be a slave?

Do you wanna wear these chains

Until you’re lying in the grave?


Cray — one of the great blues guitarists of his generation, a five-time Grammy winner and Black man born in segregated Georgia — emailed Clapton immediately. Was the 76-year-old guitar great comfortable singing Morrison’s words, which compared the lockdown to slavery?

“His reaction back to me was that he was referring to slaves from, you know, England from way back,” Cray says.

That didn’t satisfy Cray. Neither did their next email exchange. Then Cray stopped replying altogether. The next time he wrote was weeks later to politely inform Clapton that he couldn’t, in good conscience, open for him as planned on an upcoming tour.
After that, Cray watched as Clapton released two more lockdown songs, conducted a lengthy interview with vaccine skeptics, and pledged to perform only where fans would not be required to be vaccinated, or, as Clapton said in a statement, not “where there is a discriminated audience present.”

After a September show in Austin, Clapton posed backstage with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Abbott had recently signed the country’s most restrictive abortion law and a Republican-backed measure to limit who can vote in the state. Like that, a 35-year friendship was over.

“There’s this great photo [from 2013] at Madison Square Garden after the show, with B.B. King sitting in a chair, Jimmie Vaughan, myself and Eric sitting behind him,” Cray says. “And I looked at that picture of Gov. Abbott, Jimmie Vaughan and Eric Clapton in that similar pose, and I’m going, what’s wrong with this picture? Why are you doing this?”

Many of Clapton’s friends and fans are asking that same question. Before the pandemic, the guitarist and singer was one of rock’s elder untouchables, a multigenerational hitmaker with the same draw and standing as Billy Joel, James Taylor and Elton John.

He is the only artist inducted three different times into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In an increasingly polarized world, Clapton stayed out of politics. He was never one to pop up at rallies or marches. So it’s been more than a departure to hear him questioning scientists on anti-vaccine websites.

“I’ve talked to other musicians, old friends of mine, these great players who, you know, will remain nameless in our conversation, who say, ‘What the f--- is he doing?’” says producer Russ Titelman, whose credits include “Unplugged” and a new Clapton album that arrives this month, “Lady in the Balcony: Lockdown Sessions.”

Among friends and collaborators, there’s hope that Clapton can repair the damage he’s done to his reputation. But their frustration is apparent.

“Nobody I’ve talked to that knows Eric has an answer,” says drummer Jim Keltner, who has known Clapton for 51 years. “We’re all in the same boat. We’re all going, ‘I can’t figure it out.’ ”

Earlier this year, when he heard Clapton complaining that his friends were abandoning him, Keltner wrote to tell him that many of them were just confused.

It’s unclear how much Clapton cares about the criticism.

Eaton did clarify that Clapton’s photo with Abbott should not be interpreted as him supporting a ban on abortion, noting that “he is a great believer in freedom of choice which drives his position on vaccinations, and his views on other matters would reflect that belief in freedom of choice.”

In the interview, Clapton talks about how he’s been attacked since he released “Stand and Deliver.”
“The minute I began to say anything about the lockdown, I was labeled as a Trump supporter in America,” he said.

A chameleon in every way, not just in his appearance and reshaping himself and redoing his persona and taking his music to another place,” says keyboardist and singer Bobby Whitlock, who wrote or co-wrote seven songs on the lone Derek and the Dominos album from 1970.

This was the era of politically conscious pop music, from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Ohio” to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” But Clapton’s worldview didn’t extend beyond his fretboard.

He really had only one cause at the time: Wooing Pattie Boyd, a model who just happened to be married to his best friend, former Beatle George Harrison. “Layla,” the centerpiece of the Derek and the Dominos record, would be a plaintive plea for her love and remains a staple of Clapton’s concert repertoire.

“There’s an obsessive part, the same thing that made him really sit down and learn to play the guitar the way he did,” says Chris O’Dell, who served as an assistant for Harrison and then Clapton during that era. “He went after Pattie maybe the same way. Maybe obsessed is the wrong word, but you’re mono focused. You have only one thing in your mind”

Eric Clapton, like so many, had a plan for 2020. He intended to do his semiregular residency at London’s Royal Albert Hall and record the performances. Then the lockdown struck, and the shows were canceled.
“Which from a selfish point of view is devastating because I’m of an age where I don’t know how long my faculties will go on,” Clapton said in the June interview.

At one point, I said, ‘Eric, how are you doing?’ ” Feldman says. “And he sounded kind of like a 17-year-old, if you will. He says, ‘I just don’t have anyone to play with.’ It was kind of real and heartfelt.”

This has emerged as the main theory as to why Clapton has responded so strongly to covid shutdowns. At 76 and with a long list of health problems — from nerve issues in his hands and legs to hearing loss — he can feel the clock ticking and is desperate to squeeze in as much playing as he can.

Clapton got vaccinated in February. But he has been skeptical of government directives and has a lifelong fear of needles. As a heroin addict in the early 1970s, he would only snort the drug.

The first shot sidelined him for a week, delaying the “Lady” project. The second shot was worse.

“My hands and feet were either frozen, numb or burning, and pretty much useless for two weeks,” he said. “I feared I would never play again.”

Hearing this, singer Bonnie Bramlett, who first worked with Clapton when she was one half of Delaney & Bonnie, says that his response to vaccine mandates makes perfect sense.

“He can’t feel his freakin’ hands anymore and he doesn’t want that to happen to anyone else,” she says. “And why is everybody all freaked out about it? I think he’s a hero for it.”

Clapton’s hands eventually recovered enough for him to play again.

Titelman flew over to produce his first Clapton album since 1994’s “From the Cradle.” The band was impeccable, with East, keyboardist Chris Stainton and drummer Steve Gadd.

Clapton did not appear diminished.

In the months after “Lady” was recorded, Clapton continued to create headlines with his covid chatter. He released another song with Morrison titled “The Rebels” and then “This Has Gotta Stop.” Clapton wrote the latter alone, and it had an accompanying animated video featuring a zombielike population manipulated by politicians and marching off to mindless factory jobs. “I can’t take this B.S. any longer,” he sang on the chorus. The message was not subtle

The anti-lockdown campaign has unquestionably damaged Clapton’s reputation. In October, Rolling Stone magazine, which had featured him eight times on its cover in largely glowing terms in the past, produced a searing attack that not only called him out for his pandemic behavior, but spotlighted a 45-year-old incident that remains an inescapable bruise on his career.

As #BlackLivesMatter surged last year, acclaimed songwriter Phoebe Bridgers slammed Clapton in an interview as making “extremely mediocre music” and being “a famous racist.” In 2019, Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid tweeted about his love of Clapton’s playing in Cream with the qualification that it’s “important not to sidestep the curious phenomena of Racist With The Blues”

Clapton’s defenders say it is worth noting he never said anything like those comments before or since. Albhy Galuten, who played with Clapton in the 1970s before becoming the production mastermind behind the Bee Gees, wonders whether the mess he’s in is due, in part, to the naive and unguarded way he’s always approached his career.

To many who know Clapton, tagging him as a racist seems wrong. They talk about his support of Black artists, whether giving a virtually unknown Gary Clark Jr. a prime spot at the 2010 Crossroads Guitar Festival or lending his commercial clout to collaborate on an album with an aging B.B. King.

East, who has been playing with Clapton since 1985’s “Behind the Sun,” prefers to write off the Birmingham incident as an unexplainable aberration.
“In the Olympics, they throw out the best score and the worst score,” he says. “You get the measure of a person not on the day they did the very, very best thing they did and not the day they did the very worst thing they did.”

And singer Rita Coolidge also wonders about his motivation. In 1970, she helped write the piano melody that became the coda of “Layla” with her then-boyfriend, Derek and the Dominos drummer Jim Gordon. But when the song came out, Gordon alone had taken credit for the section. Clapton’s then-manager, Robert Stigwood, brushed Coolidge off. And she found Clapton unapproachable.

Others highlight Clapton for unexpected and often uncredited acts of kindness, largely benefiting his musical collaborators. When he learned that Whitlock had sold his publishing rights for the Derek and the Dominos material, Clapton bought them back and gave them to his former bandmate. When he heard then-bandmate Albert Lee grumbling about selling one of his guitars, he came to the next rehearsal with a prized Les Paul — one he used in Cream — and gave it to him.
And then there’s his devotion to the Crossroads Centre, the drug and rehabilitation facility in Antigua that Clapton helped build in 1998 after he stopped drinking. Eaton estimates that Clapton has given the center, through donations, fundraising concerts and by auctioning off guitars, at least $20 million over the past decade.

Soul music legend Sam Moore tells of an experience he had with Clapton in 2005. Billy Preston, the keyboardist who played with the Beatles and Clapton, was dying and in a coma in an Arizona hospital. One morning, Moore looked up and saw Clapton arrive as an unannounced visitor. He asked Moore for a hair brush.

“He walked over to Billy, took the brush, brushed his hair. Took the thing and did his mustache,” Moore says. “When he had to leave, he leaned over and kissed Billy on the forehead.”

One of Clapton’s relationships does appear unfixable. That’s the one with Cray.

“I’ve told myself, I don’t need to have a conversation,” Cray says. “I’d just rather not associate with somebody who’s on the extreme and being so selfish. We started playing a music that wasn’t particularly popular to start off with at the time we started playing. We’ve gained some notoriety, and I’m fine with that, but I surely don’t need to hang out with Eric Clapton for that to continue.”

Clapton raised $2.2M for the RFK Jr. campaign last night.

I guess crazy people flock together.

When you're delusional, it's very empowering to encounter people who share your delusions instead of shaking their heads and leaving the room.