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. His 1992 album, “Unplugged,” remains the best-selling live release ever, with over 25 million copies sold. 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.”
“He’s the anti-Bono,” says Bill Oakes, who managed Clapton’s label throughout the 1970s. “He is the epitome of someone who is there for the music, and he’s never rubbed shoulders with world leaders and never wanted to.”
Interviews with more than 20 musicians and acquaintances who have known Clapton over the years, from his days in the Yardbirds to his most recent concerts in September, shed light on why he may have thrust himself into the covid debate. 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 something that he brought upon himself,” Keltner says. “And so I’ve been hoping and praying really, that he can figure out a way to, I don’t say get out of it, but to make it go away somehow so that it doesn’t ultimately interfere with the music.”
It’s unclear how much Clapton cares about the criticism. He declined multiple interview requests for this article, and his business manager, Michael Eaton, explained that decision in an email to The Washington Post. Eaton wrote that “given the depressingly bad standard of journalism reflected in certain recent articles, Eric Clapton has no desire at the moment to engage with the US Press. Anyone in the public eye has to expect and accept negative comment, but it should be balanced.
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.”
Clapton’s general silence has left people to interpret his views through infrequent short statements, his anti-lockdown songs and a 24-minute video interview posted in June.
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.
He called Morrison “fearless” and mentioned that he tried to reach out to his own musician friends, “but I don’t hear from anyone. My phone doesn’t ring very often. I don’t get that many texts and emails anymore. It’s quite noticeable.”
Bassist Nathan East, who remains loyal to Clapton after decades in his band and is one of the performers on “Lady in the Balcony,” said that his wife and manager urged him to talk only if he could avoid discussing politics.
“I’ve done interviews for the last 40 years, but I think this is the most volatile position that we’ve seen from the press standpoint,” East says. “For me, the beauty of music is that it really transcends language, color and politics.”
For most of Clapton’s career, that’s been true.
He emerged in 1963 as the neck-tied, Telecaster-playing lead guitarist of the blues-inspired Yardbirds. Before long, as legend had it, spray-painted messages began appearing around London with a simple message: “Clapton is God.” When Clapton felt the Yardbirds started moving in too commercial a direction, he quit.
He joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, pledging blues purity, then exited for Cream, growing an Afro and plugging in a wah-wah pedal. He formed and quit a British supergroup, Blind Faith, and then turned to Southern soul, touring as a member of Delaney & Bonnie. Obsessed with the organic sound of the Band, Clapton next formed Derek and the Dominos. They lasted for one critically acclaimed album.
“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, and that’s all you can really concentrate on.”
