It was the year 2000. Unlike most 9-year-olds, I was already big into blues and classic rock. When my mom played ’90s pop in the car, I’d put on headphones and instead listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Allman Brothers on my portable CD player. When the late B.B. King and Eric Clapton released their music video for “Riding with the King,” she called me into the family room to watch on MTV. This was my powerful introduction to both King and Clapton. I eagerly bought their CD.
It was well past time the two longtime friends teamed up on an album. “I admire the man,” King said of Clapton. “I think he’s No. 1 in rock ‘n’ roll as a guitarist and No. 1 as a great person.” Here was King — a black man born in 1925 on a Mississippi plantation who had experienced real, Jim Crow racism — calling Clapton “No. 1 as a great person.” Yet, in attacks such as the one recently leveled by Los Angeles Times contributor Virginia Heffernan, blasting Clapton for supposedly being an “anti-vaxxer,” he’s been viciously accused of being “racist.”
While Heffernan is factually correct about comments Clapton made in 1968 regarding Jimi Hendrix and a drunken, onstage rant laced with “racist slurs” in 1976 (for which he’s repeatedly apologized), those decades-old examples are not at all representative of Clapton today or his attitude toward people of color.
How is it that Heffernan and other outside Clapton detractors can see into his heart and soul, concluding he’s racist — yet he could somehow fool the King of the Blues himself, not to mention Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, and many other black bluesmen and women who’ve worked with Clapton and formed close friendships with him? Watch one video of Clapton onstage with or interviewed alongside any black blues great. The respect and admiration are plain as day and mutual.
Yet Heffernan’s cries of “racist” Clapton are a non sequitur to her accusation that he’s an “anti-vaxxer.” What do two racial remarks in the 1960s and 1970s have to do with Clapton’s views on vaccines in the 2020s? Even so, accusing Clapton of being “anti-vaxxer” and “anti-science” is silly. Unlike Clapton, everyone I know who refuses to get a COVID-19 shot refuses because … they are “anti-vaxxers.” As critics concede, Clapton has been vaccinated. How can you get the shots yet oppose vaccination?
Critics answer: Clapton says he won’t play venues requiring attendees to be vaccinated!
He is Eric Clapton. Any music legend is entitled to set his own terms for where he does and doesn’t perform. Big-time rock stars do this all the time. Moreover, it’s entirely reasonable to insist venues don’t force fans to get vaccinated or to prove they have been. Truthfully, the discussion around vaccines requires some nuance; there’s a huge difference between opposing vaccines and trying to strike a balance between safety and freedom.
Critics condemn Clapton for discussing his own adverse vaccine reaction. So what? Get five vaccinated people in the room and ask about their COVID-19 vaccine reactions. As with my family, you’ll get five different accounts. Isn’t he entitled to talk about his own experience?
Heffernan doesn’t stop at the Clapton attacks, though. She derides his loyal fans, too: “In Clapton’s case, the music and the man are one and the same — arrogant performances of ‘iconoclasm’ that appeal chiefly to young, self-doubting minds eager for outlaw heroes. The Clapton package hit the spot at a certain hormonal stage of life. But then you grow out of it.”
Tell that to 85-year-old blues icon Buddy Guy, who holds Clapton’s skill in such esteem that he once remarked, “If Eric says that I am the greatest guitar player ever, then maybe I am.”
What’s striking about Heffernan’s argument is its utter incongruence with today’s young Clapton fans. Millennials look at him and see not an “outlaw hero” but a rock pioneer, music legend, and powerhouse guitarist who paved the way for others. As a blues aficionado and harmonica player, I relish his emotional solos. Ask any rock or blues musician, young and old, about their influences. I guarantee you, most will include Clapton. “Iconoclasm” has nothing to do with it. Just ask B.B. and Buddy.
Heffernan is right about one thing: Clapton is “not God.” But he’s not the devil, either.
Jimmy Sengenberger is the host of Jimmy at the Crossroads, a webshow in partnership with The Washington Examiner that focuses on the intersection of politics and economics, as well as The Jimmy Sengenberger Show on Denver’s News/Talk 710 KNUS.
