Inspiration Can Be Elusive Even for a Veteran Like Clapton

You’d think Eric Clapton, the only three-time inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, would have an easy time making records.

Not that he hasn’t been productive in a career stretching 35 years. Expelled from the Kingston College of Art at age 17 for playing guitar instead of attending classes, Clapton eventually established himself as a guitarist in a class by himself, graduating from the Yardbirds (his first Hall of Fame induction) to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, followed by the seminal power trio Cream (his second induction); the first rock “supergroup,” Blind Faith; Derek and the Dominos; and a continuing solo career that netted him another induction last year.

Clapton has won myriad honors, including more than a dozen Grammys, the most recent for “Riding With the King,” his collaboration with one of his heroes, B.B. King. Next month, Clapton will be inducted into New York’s Songwriters Hall of Fame.

What’s difficult, he says, is finding the motivation, the inspiration to make meaningful albums.

“I’ve never been a great lover of making records,” Clapton says. “It’s quite a journey for me to go in each time, and I find it harder and harder to just do it because it’s required of me, because I’m still under contract. But if I’ve got something to explore in myself that is still not quite tapped out yet, then I feel like I’ve got a real good reason to be there.”

The recent “Reptile” continues the introspective, autobiographical bent of 1998’s “Pilgrim.” That album remains Clapton’s most personal work and represents his most concentrated writing in two decades; he wrote or co-wrote all but two of “Pilgrim’s” tracks. Among them: “My Father’s Eyes,” a moving elegy for the father Clapton never knew and his son, Connor, whose accidental death in 1991 inspired “Tears in Heaven.”

“Reptile” is dedicated to Clapton’s uncle, Adrian, who died last spring, the last key member of a family whose internal convolutions haunted the artist. Born out of wedlock when his mother was 16, Clapton grew up under the illusion that his grandmother and grandfather were his mother and father, that his mother was his sister and Adrian his brother (the innocent 9-year-old smiling on the “Reptile” cover is Clapton before he knew all this).

“Adrian was the black sheep of the family, in that he could not keep his mouth shut,” Clapton recalls of his early years in the village of Ripley, England. “It was one of those families where there was always skulduggery going on, where everybody was required to take part in a cover-up. And he would do his best, Adrian, but every now and then he’d have a couple of drinks and spill the beans and it would be egg all over the place.

“And I loved him for that. He was a very passionate man, and I think truth was a very big part of his philosophy.” Clapton credits Adrian for seeding his taste in music, art, cars and clothes--and mourns the fact that they gradually drifted apart.

“My inability to love him in his lifetime was a source of great pain for me, and his passing gave me the release to express that.”

Such introspection, Clapton admits, is “new territory. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to see what I’m doing as I’m doing it. Most of my realization has been done in retrospect. Even with ‘Pilgrim,’ I knew I was writing specific songs about specific relationships, but I didn’t really see it objectively until a couple of years later. Actually, this has probably been the closest I’ve come to knowing exactly what I’m writing about as I’m writing it.”

“Reptile” also marked a return to a live recording process that had been put on hold, first with 1997’s techno-edged T.D.F. project (in which Clapton appeared as “x-sample”) and, to a lesser extent, “Pilgrim,” co-produced with T.D.F. partner Simon Climie. The transition occurred while recording “Riding With the King.”

“I got as far down the high-tech road as I wanted to go with ‘Pilgrim,’ ” Clapton says. “Going back to the organic process with B.B. was so comfortable, it was like getting into a warm bath. I had no idea how much I’d missed the atmosphere of having 10 or 12 musicians on the floor, all creating at the same time, moving toward the same point, and the real energy you get from that, which is never going to be there if you’re just working with a computer, staring at the screen.”

“Reptile” didn’t jell for a while, though Clapton used the same musicians and studio as “Riding With the King.”

“Taking B.B. out of the mix left a much bigger hole than I thought it would,” Clapton says. The Grammy-winning album was a cap on a 30-year friendship and “just the fact that we were together in the studio made it an event where we could probably have done whatever came into our heads without much preparation and it still would have come off great.

“But I couldn’t do that on my own, or maybe I didn’t feel competent enough to try and go too far down that road. I still think it’s possible, mind you, to go in with a bare-bones thing, but it needed some kind of motivation.”

Motivation came from an unexpected source. When Curtis Mayfield died in December 1999, Clapton abandoned the recording sessions to attend a memorial service in Los Angeles. There he met the surviving members of Mayfield’s original group, the Impressions, and joined them on the song “I’ve Been Trying.”

“I liked them so much--and we hit it off so well--I made a mental note that it would be a great thing to do a version of that song for a record one day,” says Clapton, who invited the Impressions to the studio. “I didn’t even think then it would be good to have them doing vocal backing; I hadn’t thought ahead that far about how anything was going to be arranged. I just wanted to do that one song. And then we hit if off so well on the studio floor, I just kept pulling tracks up and asking ‘Would you like to do something on this?’

“And then we started doing live stuff, which is where it hit home for me, on an old Ray Charles song, ‘I Want a Little Girl,’ with Billy Preston on keyboards as well. That was where my hair started to stand on end and I realized that we actually had something going on worth calling an album.”

The Impressions ended up on seven of “Reptile’s” 14 tracks, including the inspirational originals “Believe in Life” and “Find Myself.” Outside of the Robert Johnson-inspired “Come Back Baby” and a raucous original, “Superman Inside,” there’s not much straight-ahead blues on the new album.

“It’s an ongoing dialogue for me,” says Clapton of the blues. “I’ve just recently started trying to find--trying to remember, first of all--all the albums that I had in my collection when I was 15 or 16. I have most of the blues, but I don’t have much of the jazz stuff--Thelonious Monk, Coltrane, Blue Mitchell. . . .

“I don’t know what it is, but when I re-explore the original momentum that I got from listening to that music, it’s almost like charging up my battery. Every time I go through it, especially with artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, I’ll hear stuff that I really didn’t hear the first time around. So it is unfinished business and always will be unfinished business.”

Clapton began with a $40 gut-string Spanish guitar that his grandmother bought for him (on layaway) when he was 13. The youngster began intently studying American masters, beginning with Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, and finally finding his deepest inspiration in the blues idiom.

Clapton was reminded of an advertisement that reportedly came with that first guitar, suggesting he could learn to “PLAY IN A DAY!”

“I remember that,” he says with a laugh. “And there are some things you can learn to play in a day. But my experience in the early days was very mundane and boring, and I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

“And then one day I got one thing right [the Muddy Waters riff from ‘Honey Bee’] and I felt like I’d mastered the entire vocabulary of the guitar. I remember that day, and I would like to promote that as something all musicians can look forward to. You just get one thing right and it makes it feel like it’s serious and it’s real.”