Carlos Santana’s opinion on Eric Clapton

Carlos Santana and Eric Clapton are two guitarists who have remained deeply devoted to their music and influences throughout their careers, sticking to what they wanted to play rather than following trends. Although their music has not always sounded similar, both are deeply rooted in the blues and have had the chance to perform together a few times. Over the years, Santana has talked a lot about the British guitarist, giving his opinion on his playing.

What is Carlos Santana’s opinion on Eric Clapton

“When we play together I don’t hear Eric Clapton or Santana. With Eric, it’s a conversation about whom we love most. ‘Oh, you got some Otis Rush? How about some Muddy Waters?’ When we play it isn’t about crossing swords and dueling, which is how some people think of jamming. It isn’t Fernando Lamas versus Errol Flynn. It’s ‘You got Robert Johnson, and I got Bola Sete.’ I think the best guitarists have the biggest boxes of heroes. Some British cats tend to limit themselves to one kind of style, but not Clapton and Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. They listen to Moroccan and African music. Recently Jeff Beck has been checking out Romanian choirs.”

“George Harrison listened to Indian sitar. I think Stevie Ray Vaughan could be fearless when it came to listening: he didn’t just check out T-Bone Walker, he also checked out Kenny Burrell and Grant Green and Wes Montgomery. It wouldn’t be fair to call Stevie a blues guitarist. You can hear it on “Riviera Paradise”: his vocabulary went far, far beyond Albert King. All these guys I mentioned are open to many influences, but they’ll always be rooted in a certain thing. Each musician to me is like an airport—there are a number of different planes coming in and landing and leaving. It’s never just one airline,” Carlos Santana said in his biography “The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light”.

Over the decades, Santana and Clapton became friends and performed together multiple times. But before they ever met, Carlos had the chance to see Cream perform live at the Fillmore East in San Francisco. As he recalled in his book, he sneaked out to see them, and the supergroup was everything he had expected.

He said

“When Eric Clapton and Cream came to town in August and played the Fillmore, I had to sneak in to see them, too. I had to, I had no choice, I still knew how to do that through the fire escape. I wanted to see if their live show would match the sound on their records, which was so different from the Chicago blues bands that they were coming from. Bigger and more bombastic. It did. Cream looked big in their platform shoes, and they sounded bigger.”

“Clapton had that double stack of Marshalls behind him, Jack Bruce sounded like a freight train, and Ginger Baker looked like some kind of weird creature with his red hair, playing those double bass drums. On tunes like ‘Spoonful’ and ‘Hey Lawdy Mama,’ it wasn’t just electric blues or blues-rock anymore. They were hitting with the energy of Buddy Rich, which made sense when I found out that Ginger and Jack had experience playing jazz. Catching those first Cream shows was like someone who had only experienced black-and-white TV seeing a CinemaScope movie for the first time,” Carlos Santana said.

The idea Carlos Santana had for differentiating his playing from Clapton’s

For Santana, guitarists like Eric Clapton shared much of the same Blues background as he did. The John Mayall album “Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton” (1966) was the first record that showed Carlos that British musicians were also listening to the same kind of music he loved. He knew they were into artists like Otis Rush, Little Walter and Freddie King.

Many famous guitar players who recall seeing legendary guitarists live for the first time, like Clapton and Hendrix, said they wanted to quit, because they felt they were far better than them. But that wasn’t the case with Santana, who said they actually made him “listen harder to something that they weren’t listening to”. His idea was to search for other influences these incredible guitarists didn’t have and he could incorporate to his style. He first had the chance to play and hang out with Eric when the British guitarist was in San Francisco with Derek and the Dominos. Clapton went to visit Santana at Wally Heider Studios.

He said:

“When Eric showed up the only problem was that I was tripping and too out of it to jam. I said to myself, ‘You better sit this one out and just learn.’ Eric had heard about us. (He) was really gracious to come over and hang. We all had a good time, and I liked Eric. I was comfortable with him. Because I could tell we were coming from the same place,” Santana recalled in his book.

Neal Schon was also present during that meeting. Clapton later invited him to join Derek and the Dominos, but Schon preferred to join Santana after receiving an invitation from Carlos. He stayed in the band from 1971 to 1972, appearing on the albums “Santana III” (1971) and “Caravanserai” (1972). During the next year he formed Journey, which became one of the most successful bands of all time.

The album about Westerns and UFOs that Santana wants to do with Clapton and Derek Trucks

Besides performing together on stage many times, Carlos Santana also invited his friend to appear on his 1999 album “Supernatural”. Clapton played on the 12-minute track “The Calling”. A few years ago, Santana said that he wanted to do an album with Eric and Derek Trucks. They wanted to make something similar to Western themes and UFOs.

“‘Eric Clapton, Derek Trucks and The Mexican,’ which is me (Santana said about the album’s title). We wanted to create music for UFOs and a Western soundtrack like ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’. Eric liked the idea, he was like ‘Oh my God, let’s do that’. No songs necessarily for radio, no songs, just moods. You know, when you listen to soundtracks of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’? Also science fiction and the flying saucers,” Carlos Santana told Australian Musician in 2022 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).

Sharing the stage they mostly performed songs that Santana had made famous with his own versions. Some of them were “Jingo” and “Black Magic Woman”. Another interesting story Santana tells in his book involves a visit to Buddy Guy. The legendary Blues guitarist told him: “I hope you didn’t make the same mistake Eric Clapton made (visiting me).” Santana asked what the mistake was, and Buddy replied: “Coming over to see me without a guitar! But you know I always bring two.”