Who cares about E.C. Was Here and There’s One In Every Crowd? I don’t care enough about em to know them very well to start with, though I do remember being immensely disappointed with There’s One In Every Crowd. Remember, this was PRE PUNK and it still sucked, live albums are live albums and there is nothing to be done about it. After those last two albums, it was all downhill for Eric Clapton. His glory days anywhere but live on stage were all behind him, though I have heard good things about 1994’s From the Cradle.
There’s One In Every crowd and E.C. Was here plus outtakes, more live stuff, and a superb jam session with one Freddy King are a huge part of Give Me Strength – The ’74 ’75 recordings but they aren’t why we are here.
We are here because of 461 Ocean Boulevard.
After years of heroin addiction, Clapton kicked it and came back. This was his first recording in four years and it was killer. Not that Clapton sounded compliant as such, but he did sound like a man with a monkey off his back and a man with a sort of laid back business. Blame it on the reggae, obviously a huge influence on 461, or the gang, or maybe just the realization that there was a life without addiction.
Me? I was 17 years old when the album came out and dating a really cute Australian girl named Josephine Baily. Within a year we had a pretty bad break up and I remember hearing how she was in a very serious car accident a couple of years later and lost her looks completely. You might think that’s a digression and I guess it is, though it might set me in a certain mindset to listen and appreciate 461 Ocean Boulevard.
Eric has never been more laid back or sexier than somewhere on Miami Beach, there is a languor to the album, aided and abetted by session guitarist George Terry who was also working on Bob Marley’s Burnin’ around the same time, and between the two you get stuff like the modified dub and intertwining rhythm and lead guitars of the old rocker “Willie And The Handjive”. This isn’t electric guitar pyrotechnics, it is a mellow smoothness accentuated by Clapton’s silky singing. By the the time the reaches its conclusion it is just one guitar playing a riff and the other guitar answering with a lick and the tandem guitars lead you to the end.
This is a song Clapton repeats over and over here, this is where sobriety and reggae lead him to a collective groove on track after track after track. And here, on Disc One of this four CD set, it is all one song, or at least all one rhythm. The claim that Clapton’s “I Shot The Sheriff” owed to much to Marley’s origin is blatant nonsense. Clapton isn’t doing anger, it isn’t an angry take, Marley’s anger is at injustice but Clapton’s is a fallow thing saved by a true grooviness; oh, and lest we forget, Clapton was doing a huge favor to Marley: Eric introduced him to the West.
Over the 17 tracks on CD One, it doesn’t deviate, it is a gorgeous, melodic, warm summer evening of an album, too hot to bother fussin’, Clapton lays back and plays the blues . The ten tracks that make up the original album are not better played than the additional 7, but they are better songs.
There’s One In Every Crowd takes up CD 2, and EC Was Here, CDs Three and Four, and both have aged as well as can be expected. Crowd picks up where 461 leaves off but it is both busier and more boring, and the extended version is more of the same. I hope to never hear it again. Rge very much so extended EC Was Here has some real gems, a 1974 “Can’t Find My Way Home” with a Steve Winwood (or soundalike?) is a real beauty, and any time he sings “Rambling Man” I pay attention.
The set concludes with a half hour of Freddie King and if anybody is gonna kick you in the ass, that someone might be Freddie. Two years before his untimely passing, Freddie puts some hot guitar licks on top of Claptons groove and on “Sugar Sweet” Clapton is electrifying once again. Best of all is a 20 minute slippery when wet blues on “Gambling Woman Blues”. Enough to remind you there was once three Kings.
CD One – A+
CD Two – C-
CD Three And Four – B
CD Five – A-