Though they contain music recorded 30 years apart by two men from vastly different worlds, the passions that are played out in ”Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings” (Columbia) and Eric Clapton`s ”The Layla Sessions”
(Polygram) are virtually indistinguishable. Separated by the color of their skin, the peculiarities of their cultures and years of technological advances, Johnson and Clapton nonetheless inhabit the same world of psychic, spiritual and sexual torment on these historic recordings.
Robert Johnson was an itinerant blues singer whose fame was confined primarily to the South during the Depression, and he longed to make records like his mentors Son House and Charlie Patton. When he finally got the chance, over five days in 1936-37, he poured out his travels and experiences into 29 songs (and 12 alternate takes) that stand as the bedrock of modern blues. All are collected on the recently released two-CD ”Complete Recordings.”
Johnson`s songs have become standards, and the staggering emotion that he brought to those performances has never been equaled.
But during a 12-day stretch 33 years later, Eric Clapton took one long run at that Everest of American music. By the time he was ready to record under the moniker of Derek and the Dominos in August 1970, the guitarist was culminating an obsession with the blues of Johnson, who died seven years before Clapton was born, and with Patti Boyd Harrison, then the wife of ex-Beatle George Harrison.
Those twin passions fired one of the greatest works of the rock era,
”Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.”
Polygram`s ”The Layla Sessions” commemorates the 20th anniversary of that recording with a three-CD set that includes a remixed version of the 77- minute double album, plus 10 outtakes and five lengthy guitar jams, many featuring the twin leads of Clapton and slide guitarist Duane Allman, who was then in his prime.
Coincidentally, both Johnson`s ”Complete Recordings” and ”The Layla Sessions” were released in the same week recently.
Together, the Johnson and Clapton recordings reaffirm that the blues is the common language of 20th Century American popular music. It has defined or influenced everything from be-bop and Broadway show tunes to rock `n` roll and rap, and has served as a template for songwriters as diverse as George Gershwin, Bob Dylan and Ice-T.
To the musicians themselves, it is a bond that spans generations, a
”spirit” that survives long after the players have passed on.
How else to explain what brought Clapton, an English lad with an art school background, to the music of Johnson, a skinny Mississippi Delta blues singer with almost no education at all?
”It was as if I had been prepared to receive Robert Johnson, almost like a religious experience,” Clapton recalls of his blues baptism as a teenager, in the liner notes to the Johnson boxed set.
”Even then I wasn`t quite ready. It was still too powerful, and very frustrating for me, too, because I realized I couldn`t play his music. . . . It was just too deep for me to be able to deal with.”
Johnson died ignominiously at age 27 in 1938. After Johnson flirted with a woman in a Mississippi juke joint, a jealous husband poisoned a bottle of whiskey from which he drank. He survived the strychnine, but in his weakened condition contracted pneumonia and died a few days later. He was buried near Mississippi Highway 7 in a wooden coffin furnished by the county.
His key recordings first were reissued three decades ago as the two-volume ”King of the Delta Blues Singers” on Columbia Records. The 29 tracks were almost otherworldly in their intensity, the sound of one man wailing at fate while thrashing his guitar with the virtuoso dexterity of a four-handed freak of nature.
”When I first heard it, it called to me in my confusion, it seemed to echo something that I had always felt,” Clapton says. ”. . . . At first it was almost too painful, but then after about six months I started listening, and then I didn`t listen to anything else.”
Johnson`s solo recordings entranced not only Clapton but also an entire generation of young British musicians, including Keith Richards and Brian Jones, future members of the Rolling Stones. But it was Clapton who introduced the rock `n` roll generation to Johnson with a hit 1969 version of ”Cross Road Blues” that Clapton recorded with the supergroup Cream, drastically picking up the tempo and renaming it ”Crossroads.”
With its doom-ridden imagery and skeletal melody, ”Cross Road Blues”
was archetypal Robert Johnson.
As a rural black skipping from town to town in search of a gig, he often confronted racism, degradation, poverty and superstition. He frequently drank, often was hounded by gun-toting whites, befriended myriad female strangers and often was beaten up for his troubles by jealous husbands and boyfriends. But his greatest and most perplexing enemy was his own mind:
”I mistreated my baby/and I can`t see no reason why,” he wails on
”When You Got a Good Friend.”
In song after song, Johnson`s yearning is palpable, heard in his raw, high voice and stinging slide guitar. He usually expressed his burning sense of deprivation through elaborately crafted similes, metaphors and symbols:
”Got a short in this connection/hoo-well, babe, it`s way down below”
(from ”Terraplane Blues”); ”But boys, my needles have got rusty/and it will not play a-t`all” (”Phonograph Blues”); and ”Hole where I used to fish/you got me posted out” (”Dead Shrimp Blues”).
The later recording sessions yielded Johnson`s most intense music, including ”Stones in My Passway,” ”If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day” and the epochal ”Love in Vain,” in which he was losing more than his woman: When the train, it left the station
with two lights on behind
Well, the blue light was my blues
and the red light was my mind.
Love, lust and need were driving Robert Johnson crazy, and it was no accident that he was killed because he couldn`t resist messing around with another man`s woman.
It was that tragic thread of human frailty that bound Eric Clapton during the ”Layla” sessions.
Clapton by then was widely acknowledged as one of the greatest blues-rock guitarists in the world. His commitment to the blues was so great that he quit his first major band, the Yardbirds, when they began to turn away from it.
But by the time of ”Layla,” Clapton`s life was becoming increasingly troubled. Even a deepening heroin habit couldn`t quench his unrequited thirst for Patti Boyd Harrison. But, as with Robert Johnson, his private passions didn`t detract from his art as much as inflame it.
”The Story of Layla and Majnun,” by the Persian poet Nizami, deeply moved Clapton. In it, the moon-princess Layla was married off by her father to someone else, leaving Majnun to contemplate life without his beloved. He runs off to the desert and begins singing to the trees and birds in his madness.
”Layla” documents that descent, from the singer`s intoning ”It`s all wrong/but it`s all right” on ”Bell Bottom Blues” to the sound of birds chirping, as simulated by Allman`s slide guitar, on the title track.
Allman, a fan of Clapton`s, was invited to the sessions at the last minute and proved to be its galvanizing force.
Prodded by a guitarist whose skill was the equal of his own, Clapton sang with ragged, raw emotion, frequently leaping into falsetto, and played with breathtaking fluidity and fire on such demonic guitar workouts as ”Tell the Truth,” Big Bill Broonzy`s ”Key to the Highway” and Jimi Hendrix`s ”Little Wing.”
When Clapton finished the session, he was spent. His drug addiction turned him into a recluse for the next three years, and when he returned to recording in the mid-`70s, he was a changed man, never again playing with the untethered conviction he brought to ”Layla.”
In an interview a few years ago, Clapton acknowledged that he long ago had given up bearing the Robert Johnson torch and that it was up to someone else now. Implied was the belief that the emotional weight of ”Cross Road Blues” was more powerful than any one man could bear for a lifetime.
Not even Robert Johnson made it very far. Only ”The Layla Sessions” and ”Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings” survive, monuments of 20th Century music that will rarely, if ever, be equaled.
